reveries after pasta
I’ve just returned from dinner with friends. At our little party of four were me, my cousin, her best friend and my ex-boyfriend from decades ago. Back in the 90s, the three of them were living in New York, and forged a friendship that survived our breakup. After 9/11, the women returned home to Singapore, and he stayed. They had not seen each other in decades, until this evening.
They reminisced about their time together, the girls’ apartment in Murray Hill, the dinners my cousin would make, their mutual dislike for my cousin’s then-boyfriend, how they’d explore the city together. They shared stories about their kids and the unfathomable linguistic world of Gen Alphas. They talked about psilocybin and ayahuasca, and how the woo-woo world of ancient spirituality has now become part of our deeper search for meaning. They talked about their work and congratulated each other on the successes they had. Comedians. Culture. A little politics, because what’s a dinner party without some discussion on that? We were the most raucous group in the smart Italian restaurant, recounting days of youth and lamenting our ageing bodies as each of us headed to the bathroom way too many times.
And there was non-stop laughter. The kind of spit-your-drink-out, fall-to-floor, pee-in-your-pants type of laughter. Mirth so intense, your body shook, your eyes squinted, tears ran down your face, and no sound came from your mouth.
As the person who did not live in New York when they did, I wasn’t an active part of the reveries. I was the reason they met all those years ago, but after that introduction, an entire life was lived that I was not a part of. Unlike them, I was not a successful professional. One ran a multi-million dollar business, one a successful investment banker, and one was a highly awarded ad-man. I was just a former stay-at-home mom. A choice I made. It was interesting to experience the thoughts that floated across my mind and the emotions that stirred in my body. I felt like a voyeur, spying into a world that could have been. A glimpse into the life I didn’t live because I made a different choice.
Roy T. Bennett wrote, “Every life’s choice is the giving up of other lives”. Could this explain my creeping melancholia? That all choices have the consequence of giving up other possibilities, and sometimes what was forgone has to be acknowledged and mourned, even if those other lives may never fully be known to us. How do we grieve for something we never knew?
In his book, On Not Being Someone Else, Andrew Miller explores these existential feelings of self and longing.
“I’m only one person. When I’m with others, or perhaps just thinking of them, this singularity can feel like separation: I’m one person apart from others…we’re all traveling down one path among many possibilities, and we can’t go back. We’re all exceptional and anybody.”
The singularity of separateness is either mitigated or compounded by the company we keep. There is strength in community. It helps us feel connected, that we belong somewhere to someone, our collective memories tying us to a shared reality and a shared life. It helps us make sense of who we have chosen to be, reflected in the company we keep and the conversations we have. It helps assure us of the right-ness and clarity of our choices.
As an expatriate for most of my adult life, this sense of belonging was always fleeting, and the clarity of one’s identity equally ephemeral. It wasn’t that I didn’t know myself, but a realisation that there were, in fact, several versions of me, each an adaptation of the original. In a sense, the various geographical moves allowed for donning of different skins to see which might be the real thing. I’d thought having this privilege to get a glimpse, no, to live different lives would quiet the rumination of “what ifs”. But it doesn’t. Not tonight.
Will the road not taken always haunt us, even if we have taken many roads? Would it have been better to never have tasted the possibility of other lives? Is not knowing, not even having the encouragement to imagine it, the remedy for restlessness? Why am I having these existential musings now?
Tonight I pose more questions than I have answers to. Perhaps I muse because I am swept up by this feeling of separateness that I can’t explain. An inexplicable sense of loss. Mine has been a world of temporary connections, deep yes, but many times softened by eventual distance. I should be used to it by now. I think of the wonderful friends I made when home was ‘here’’, but have since moved to ‘there’, scattered across the world like autumn leaves blown across the sky. Valencia. Chicago. Hong Kong. Taipei. Bali. Chiang Mai. Amsterdam. Brussels. Berlin. Lisbon. Las Vegas. Los Angeles. Malaga. Singapore. Abu Dhabi. Vecsés. London. Wilmslow. Southend-on-Sea. Johannesburg. Melbourne. Athens. Neom. Is there ever enough money or time to connect again in person? To breathe the same air they do. Sit in the same space. Do these friendships get relegated into the deep recesses of fond memories? Do they lovingly remember a life when I was a presence in it, and release?
Is that what I’m feeling now — this infernal conflict over the lives we didn’t live, or get to keep, because of the lives we or someone else chose instead?
Overthinking. That’s not suppose to be a good trait. I think. It stops us from living and being in the moment. But I have savoured every infinitesimal moment, and hunger to taste them again. Hunger for the versions of me and the lives I’d lived.
As I type this, I watch my only child, working on his grad school submission. Very soon he will be heading off to Shanghai to begin a life with his girlfriend. In order to be together, he made a significant life choice — giving up the security of his job in New York to embrace the uncertainty of a city whose language he isn’t yet fluent. But love. It’s a choice. And my 22-year old is making it. I feel a constriction at the back of my throat. My heart is so full I am overwhelmed . He looks up at me, his eyes wide with alarm.
“Mom?” he says gently. “What’s wrong?”
With that I have an epiphany. I am not imagining with regret the lives I didn’t live. I am grieving the most fulfilling one I have. The one I chose to have. And must now let go.
Memories of it flood my consciousness like a Photos’ compilation of the best years of my life — one filled with love and joy I’d never known until he came along; the depth of which taught me I knew nothing of love before him. I will always be his mother, I know that. But never in the same way again; when it was just us, a little tree-fort of two.
My beautiful child and I - talking and reading into the dead of night, taking turns to make up hilarious, fantastical stories, his innocent laughter, endless questions (because he was such a curious child), listening to music, breaking out into spontaneous dancing in our living room, endless chats at bedtime about equality, civil rights movement, art and artists, the existence of God (maybe), where heaven was (a real place or a metaphor, mom?), civil disobedience, poetry, quarks, space, why we poop and the natural painkillers found in tears.
We explored cities far away. Segway rides in Madrid. Food tours in Venice. Museum visits in London and Paris. Architectural tours in Rome, Chicago, and New York. Wandering the back alleys of Bangkok. Watching the revelry during San Fermín from the safety of a balcony. Discussing the Basque Separatists and Animal Rights protests. Flying falcons and hawks in Doddington. Swimming with dolphins in Hawai’i. Kayaking in mangrove swamps, exploring bat caves, watching a flamenco show, touring the EUR in Rome, taking GoT pilgrimages to Seville, Ireland, Iceland, Dubrovnik and Split.
Him, supporting his mother when her heart was broken, recommending she reads Timothy Leary before her psilocybin therapy, supporting her in the aftermath of a bad trip with thoughtful questions and insights, that even a trained therapist did not, to help make sense of the experience.
Him, encouraging me two years before he was headed to college to start building a life that wasn’t about him, because he understood how crushing his absence would be. “Don’t worry about me now — I can take care of myself, make my own meals. Please spend time on yourself now,” he’d said.
Him reminding me, when I’m reminding him he’s still a minor, that “maturity is not a threshold you cross into”. Saying funny things like “I’m trained in the art of an enraged liberal” and motivating me to “dare to fail in a different way, at something new.” Daring me to continue being strong enough, brave enough, daring enough to keep trying, keep risking failure, keep going.
For over two decades it had always been him.
Countless memories of every single moment with my child, my best friend, my wisest counsel, my one true love. I now understand I am grieving the life we shared as I prepare to parent him from afar, watching him build a life with someone else. And I realise that was the life I chose. A life with someone I will never be ready to let go, but am destined to have to.
As my son and I gently disengage from the loving hug he’d come over to give me, my mother’s voice rings in my ears: “Your job as a parent is to love them and let them go.”
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I love you with everything I am, my soulful boy. Then, now and always. There are no regrets here, only gratitude for this life, this choice, with you in it.