Dear...

Yes, I know what I said was a taboo word. Yes, it was my fault, I was thinking another word when that word came out by mistake. I apologized for saying it and for the next couple days afterwards. You wanna know something, I worried so much from it that I made myself sick.

But now, you won't even talk to me. I can't sit with my other friends that you are also friends with, because I am still scared of you. I'm afraid that you will stare angrily at me until you make me cry. Most of the time I sit and eat by myself, because I can sense your presence in the cafeteria and that the negativity that your pushing out is directed at me. I wish you would stop and tell me that you don't care what I said and to come sit with you and my other friends. But, as I mentioned before you always seem so angry when I walk by.

I am sorry again!

Graduation is a time we acknowledge that every I has a we; a life support system. So I am surprised to discover I am relieved I have another engagement, I won't make it to yours.

I graduated a year behind. That first year I was at college, my mother was dying. A week before exams that year I had to fly home, to take her to the Mayo Clinic. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

In my entire life, I had never, ever seen or heard my mother cry.

At my graduation, three years later, my older sister kept my father from coming. She took the plane tickets away from him. He was drinking, and she was afraid he would be an embarrassment to me. I graduated alone.

One of the first things your grandma told me was that her father was an alcoholic. I was at our sink, washing dishes, after our first meal together, I remember she was wearing a green shawl, and she did what women do, to make a bond, a connection. She let me in on a secret, she told me about herself.

I'm from a different generation, so I see alcoholism as an illness, an illness of the emotions, not a moral failing.

To be there, at your graduation, happy to see you take that scroll of achievement, knowing that you've worked hard for it would be sweet. Happy, this time, that I have someone, a hand to hold, happy that your life is free of the shadows I knew at twenty two.

I read your graduate school essay about your search for faith. I was impressed by your excellent prose, an engaging personal focus.

I remember that once you called me an unbeliever.

Your dad reminded me recently, as I juggled whether to change my plans, that I believe in education. I do. I believe mostly in the power of reading and writing. Both are a kind of seeking. A way of hold the skin of the self up to the candle of the World.

Two years ago, when I made a contribution to your tuition, your Dad wanted you to thank me, and you told him you didn't have to acknowledge it because I didn't give it to YOU.

To be thanked wasn't on my radar. What you said is true, though. I gave it to your Dad. I gave it to him, because he asked me to help out. I gave it to him because I fear your rejection.

My hope for you is that you find your way, stay true to yourself, even if that means risking everything else.

I hope you use your imagination, which is your greatest strength.
I hope you find a way use your abilities in service to the world's pain.

I believe that meaning does exist a priori. We aren't making it all up. We experience it, it touches us, here and there. That's the paradox.

Rumi called it "the Guest", James Joyce, an epiphany. Others call it God. Lakota people call it the Great Mystery.

I believe, in the face of the Almighty, we're like Gulliver's tiny hosts, trying to pin something down that escapes all of our explications, our texts, our doubts, our faith.

I believe that we must believe, and we must question.

At your coming of age ceremony at your church, it was moving to hear young people each struggling with the big questions. What is it that I believe in? Is there a greater Purpose? Does God exist, a priori? If God is love, then why do we suffer?

I encountered those questions in a profound way when my mother died. And yes, it's partly because of that I cannot be reconcile myself to the usual answers.

No one wants pain or suffering. Still, I've come to learn that the gift that suffering gives is compassion. Deep, abiding love.

Maybe some day you will understand and forgive your parents, their hasty connection to new partners, the errors of judgement that had led them to try and hold their failing marriage together past the point of the possible.

Maybe someday you'll understand what it means to make a new family out of the ashes of the old.

Maybe at that point, you will genuinely, truly forgive me.
For loving your father. For taking you to my heart as I would my own child.


-the "Other" Woman