Un-Mother's Day

 

Logan digging for marine fossils at Somis, CA 

Mother's Day weekend 2010

 Logan's selfie when I took over digging so he could catch & name bugs and lizards.

I’m bitter today. I’ve been anxiously anticipating how I would have to maturely handle my first Mother’s Day as a post-mother. I will always have been his mom, but in order to not be trapped in my grief I have to accept and incorporate into my identity that I am not anymore.  Instead of following every instinct that says I should run away from my feelings, I am dealing with them head-on today because I don't want to be defined by my loss.

Some of this below is going to be surprising to people- but it is all naked, raw truth. If anything, I've underplayed how challenging it was to maintain my relationship with Logan.

Logan and I didn’t spend that many Mother’s Days together and I was usually denied getting to talk to him on this day by his dad (one of his simple pleasures in life was making mine miserable.) Mother’s Day has been a bitter holiday for me for many years. In 2010, I did get to spend Mother’s Day weekend with him and we had a wonderful time. We dug for fossils with the Ventura Gem and Mineral Society at Somis, went to the Port Hueneme Maritime Museum, went ghost hunting at a purported haunted stream but ended up with a bucket of frogs instead, and visited Mission San Gabriel. It was a pretty typical range of activities for a weekend for us with the added bonus of Mother's Day together.

I’m at the point in the process of grieving that I have to examine who I’m going to be because I had structured and planned my life around making Logan my priority. Mother’s Day is a reminder of the feelings I have that I “set my star” on something that will not be. It is also a searingly painful reminder of my feelings of having failed to do what we do as moms- protect our children and keep them safe. I know I couldn’t have physically prevented him from stepping in front of that train that day. My sense of failure comes from all of the moments leading up to that day where I gave him my best and it wasn’t enough to save him.

I planned our visits so carefully to make sure we were “connected” and that I was both someone he felt he could talk to and someone he knew would give him a carefully-thought and honest response.  It was a hard role to balance at times, but it was deeply important to me that I was a resource for him. Logan and I had deep conversations about our innermost thoughts all of the time. I knew things no one else did about his true heart.

I have run the snipplets in my memory of our last weekend together hundreds of times, looking for something I missed that should have clued me in to his inner turmoil (I would’ve made so much more effort to remember things better if I had know at the time these would be our “lasts.”) The sad thing I have to admit is I didn’t miss them—I heard his frustration and sadness. I failed to understand where his mind was going with the feelings he was having. I didn’t draw the connection that his inner conflicts had become unbearable and he was being sucked into a vortex of despair.

He told me during heart-to-hearts in the last several weekends we had together how he didn’t "care about people" and there were only a few people he did feel anything for. One of those was his girlfriend and he was animated when he talked about her- it was his first time truly feeling romantic love that was more than a crush.  I was so excited to hear his deep caring for her and see he was making mature decisions about the relationship. I didn't believe he really didn't care about people- he was irritated by how people continued to disappoint him and talked about his frustrations with his family and friends. We talked about him feeling disconnected and I never made a connection that his feelings had sucked the hope out of him. 

 I tried to give him coping skills and offer solutions many times when he talked about how unhappy he was at home. He felt a great sense of responsibility for his siblings and towards his friends. He hated the living situation, his home environment, and that his dad didn’t spend enough quality time with just him. To be fair, his dad had two other children whereas Logan never had to share me. He felt he was never accepted as an equal member of the family by his stepmom and her family. He felt rejected for things completely out of his control.

At 13 and 14, he had talked seriously about running away several times (even doing research on his own to find shelters where he could stay) and I was able to talk him out of it rationally. He had told all of us multiple times over the last two years he felt he had something to do there in California and that once it was done he would be able to come live with us. It was a very strange thing for a kid to say, but I took it as wisdom beyond his years.

One of the last conversations we had was about his plans for the future. Logan had decided he wanted to be a fighter pilot at 9 and was going to the Air Force Academy to get there. His plan was to do well in football and keep going with his AP classes so he could get into the Academy. We discussed how essential it was to keep his GPA as high as possible in challenging Advanced or AP classes, do well in extracurricular activities, and most importantly to make wise choices to avoid getting in trouble. This is what he told me of graduating high school: on the day of his graduation, he knew his dad and stepmom would have a big party. He planned to stand up at it to speak and tell them they got no credit for his success and he didn’t want to see them again. From that conversation, I understood he felt very alone and needed out of that environment. I thought I saw a grit and resolve to follow through on his plans for the future, not that this would be one of the last things he ever told me.

His dad and I had no relationship in trying to work together for Logan; almost every encounter with him was adversarial, so I couldn’t just approach him to try and get Logan help. His dad tried to cut me out of Logan’s life at every turn and gave me less than the minimum he was supposed to. Sometimes we fought back but it inevitably resulted in trouble for us with little results. Any time I made a request it resulted in hostility and making things more difficult for my child. 

In September, Logan asked to spend more time with me and his dad not only denied the request but then took some of our scheduled time away as a punishment for asking. This was the most recent in a long string of attempts to alienate me, which included moving Logan and changing their phone numbers multiple times without telling me. Logan and I made a plan: who he would need to talk to and let them know what was going on at home so we could start the process of trying to get custody back.

Because he was so insightful and smart, I allocated coping skills to him he didn’t actually possess. I’m guilty of what many parents do: we magnify how amazing our kids are in our mind. This can be great for pushing kids to succeed and building their self-esteem. But for a kid who is struggling with depression it is dangerous. For my son, it was deadly.