Writing this memoir unstitched me. The idea that I would have to be—not just the participant, but the agent of—launching my children and sending them off into their future AWAY from me—it pulled me apart at the threads. I kept writing anyway, even as I unraveled.
It had always been built in that my life as an active mother would come to a hard stop. Parenting is an act of love and grief, they say. Only there is the delusion. The delusion that that day won’t come. I call the agent of this “the barrage of the mundane.” It calls you to be so present to parenting that you think there will always be just this.
Just this. Be present for the love. When you are washing dishes, wash dishes. When you are folding sweet-smelling baby onesies, fold laundry. You have 18 years in between where you can try to make yourself forget that the grief is coming.
The fragility of life
I knew the grief. It announced itself early. At 18 months old, the twins came to the brink of death on one fell swoop of a day, it was always baked into me that our lives were precarious, Boundless opens with my babies in my arms, in an ambulance, as we race down Interstate 25 to a hospital that I hope will know how to get the poison out them.
So I knew early, maybe earlier than most moms, that I would need to be present for every moment, even as the moments raced by.
After two miscarriages when my babies almost didn’t ever get here. After a divorce that left a big red question mark on how they would fare, as the children of two parents who had many unresolved issues, no matter that a judge had stamped and signed a divorce document that was proclaimed the final decree on everything.
The hardest of the hard stops
As a single mother, this was always coming to a hard stop. We had been a tight little emotional unit of three, but now, standing, eight weeks and counting, at the brink of college decisions that would send the twins 500+ miles away, I had to confront this: Two-thirds of my family was leaving.
And I—as a journalist who is resourceful and savvy; as a fiction writer who is imaginative and can spin narratives with spirited protagonists who have agency and say what they want and get what they want; as a spiritual seeker and longtime meditator who is student of the unbridled soul—I was petering out… I was becoming invisible to my own self.
Three weeks to college decision day, and I was experiencing a colossal failure of the imagination. I could tell you what might happen next for the beautiful souls I loved.
But ask me? I could only stutter through what would happen next for me and it would just be sad. [link to What Happens Next in Under the Gum Tree]
A love letter
Boundless is my love letter to the twins.
(Even though the 17-year-old version of my son doesn’t exactly look good in these pages. For this, I apologize.)
What I absolutely love about him is that he was so fiercely engaged in trying to figure it out how to become an autonomous adult (right now!) that very often the only thing he could tell me was that I was “fucking stupid.”
I was toxic. And I could not disagree.
I was toxic to him because anything tethered to me was not adulthood and not autonomy—nowhere close to the sheer magnificent joy of living on his own terms.
(I can take it—I can see that the 24-year-old man who is now finishing up a Ph.D., in artificial intelligence so wanted it, and I can see he felt so safe with me that he could toss all of this emotional shrapnel up in my face. I am so grateful I gave that to him, even when it made no sense.)
Why I call it a becoming-of-age memoir
That year, my daughter’s path to the future was actually less clear, and the thing about her that astonishes me still now is how she patiently and fiercely worked through the confusion to define who she authentically was—and not what everyone else was telling her to be. This is what I most wanted for her and her twin brother, that they would see their future beyond their parents [and their #OKBoomer friends] and define themselves beyond us.
This is why I call Boundless a becoming-of-age memoir. As the twins are having their coming-of-age moment, with all of its tropes and all the ordinary narratives so familiar to us, I’m stalling out on my own narrative. Yet right before my eyes was the answer: All of their becoming was teaching me how to be agile again—how to hurt when it hurts, how to take risks, how to be resilient.
Their old, tired but necessary and inherited narrative is classic narrative of bursting through the limiting beliefs of your parents. In our case, after a fractious divorce and a rocky financial path, their story remains a narrative of the underdog overcoming because someone believed in you. I’m the one here whispering, “I believe in you.”
But can I let go?
The triumph of that is true everywhere. When I think about what path there might be for me, and how theirs will show me mine, I think of Father Richard Rohr’s teachings about perennial wisdom: “If it is true, it is true everywhere.”
Nor is their coming-of-age moment a happy tale where “college acceptance letter” sits in for “the glass slipper fits” and everyone lives happily ever after.
Their narrative—which by necessity, must come before mine—is a trapeze-walk through uncertainty of a future you must define for yourself and a college application board ahead of living your actual, real and happy life.
As the twins engage in creating their future, I kind of tremble about what’s before them, and it makes me realize how innocent I was of the twists and turns ahead in my own adulting narrative. Should I send them out? Can I let go?
All that becoming
My future will always take a back seat to theirs. Yet I know I must craft one, too. I know this as I serve as editor on many a college essay. They seem so certain when they talk to people on college admissions committees—that’s my job, to make them sound confident on paper, but they’re already adept at it.
And here am I: I have absolutely no idea how to create my future beyond them.
I used to know certain paths: College, marriage, children, wealth accumulation, late summer nights under a Tuscan moon, a store of wisdom you hope you can bank on.
There must be something more then. Only why would we keep living?
And that’s why I wrote Boundless.
Boundless is available for pre-order!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the mailing list here.
Order it here!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Come on over to carolynflynn.com and sign up for the mailing list to get news about Living Boundlessly, Story Catalyst writing craft classes and Uncommon Hours productivity for creatives. Get a free downloadable book club discussion guide for Boundless at carolynflynn.com.
Boundless on Spotify
There is a soundtrack to Boundless. The first two songs have been uploaded to a public Spotify playlist here, from Chapter One: Dead on Arrival.
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