A Love Letter to My Son on the Occasion of His 23rd Birth Anniversary
There have been now 23 days in my life, where I am reminded, so completely, that I can create. The creation of you had, for me, many lessons I needed to learn about that most fundamental vital energy of existence - Love - with the big L.
By the time I was the age you are now, my body had been ravaged by disease, a dis-ease of my physical self, that had, every month, from age 13, tried to grow nourishment for a baby in places no baby would ever want to grow.
Endometrial cells can't actually tell if they are in a woman's uterus, or in say, her kidney, or brain, so, every moon, when the hormones kicked in to signal that it was time to lay down some food, they would gratefully do so inside me, in my heart-shaped uterus (…the doctor called it a bicornuate uterus…) but also, all along the surfaces of my intestines, stomach, and fallopian tubes. This unnecessary fetus food grew inside me as an additive, and with every cycle, would grow and grow, like interest in a bank account, except, that the money could never be used, could never be useful. So, this growth pushed against everything else in my abdominal region, and this inner pressure would build, as balls of endometrium called from within, "SEE US, FEEL US"! But no one, no doctor, could translate this cellular cry. And so it continued, for a decade of pain.
After ten years, the endometrial balls grew, at their largest, to the size of a small watermelon. Ironically, I looked as if I was going to have a baby. I kept all the pain inside. My doctor cried on my behalf. I didn’t know that was an option. It was at this point, age 23, where I could no longer stand the agony of this life. Your father put me in the car and drove me to the emergency room. This event reminds me now of so many joyful partners driving their pregnant and in-labor soon-to-be-mothers wildly to the ER, except in our case, there was no baby with all that labor, just a small endometrial watermelon. This was the antithesis of pointless labor, fused with an experience of being tortured from the inside. In the car, the pain crescendoed to the point where I did beg God to end my life. There wasn't too much bargaining that went along with that plea - such pain reduces one to their most basic, animal self. The plea deal with God was this:
“This has to end, so please take my life, the suffering is too great, so just send me a knife, and I will take care of the rest, I am certainly strong enough to do that. And God, you need to know —
life should be better than this.”
It was in that nexus point of surrender, married to a belief in a life free of suffering, that I became the Buddhist I had not yet become. It was a moment of Conversion, of belief in something both greater than myself, and something greater for myself. It was the cracking of the egg, from the inside. And in that cracking, I was born anew. You, my son, would be born, from this insight too. For it followed from there that we discovered what had been going on inside of my body, and its cure - to become pregnant. So, your father and I set to work on that…which is a story for another birthday, or perhaps not.
For this birthday, Love, dearest Connor reborn as Quinn, I want you to know that you were my cure. Not just from the endometriosis, but from a life of suffering. You were the seed, before conception, of knowing that life should be more. Life should be the thing that makes it worth living. And that we must demand such a life for ourselves, from the aspect of us that can grace us with the knowing that we are far greater than we believe ourselves to be.
I wish you the most amazing life Quinn, filled with laughter, joy, wonder, and the courage to be the unique fractal of Love that was created to end my suffering.