First: my child.  My precious child. 

My precious child is in Los Angeles, thrilled to be clear of the whirring helicopter blades of his hovering mother.  The mother is thrilled that a healthy teenage balance has been restored, after a few years of developmentally staccato clinging codependent enmeshment, about which we had no choice because…move + pandemic.

Now: the Aunts.

My son has two unmarried Uncles, and I am an only child.
My son has the Aunts I have chosen for him. 

Since he was a baby, two women have held him and been with him and loved him and been his Aunts.  One is my oldest friend – I’ve known her and her brother since I was 2.  They are my siblings.  Aunt Alli visited LA every Christmas for the first half of his childhood.  She sends gifts, chats on FaceTime…not enough, we should call her more, but she is there like a mighty oak and he takes for granted that she is family.  This is what family is to us.

His other Aunt is my Mimi.  She has been my AA sponsor for almost 24 years.  When I first saw her she had a 6-week-old baby in a carseat, and years later when I finally birthed my own baby, my husband held one of my hands while she held the other. 

She gave my boy two wonderful cousins – brilliant girls who love him fiercely and joyously and extravagantly. One of them was once that luscious 6-week-old baby in a carseat. The other was a fairy cherub of a toddler, with the name of an Irish queen and a crown of curls framing the gaze of a thousand-year-old soul.  Now they are both women, witches, wonders.

When I met Mimi, I had another sponsor.  Her name was Bev, and she was beautiful, and I loved her, and she got me sober, but I was starting to realize that she was a little…intense.  I had had a beautiful intense alcoholic mother whom I had loved deeply, and whom I had lost.  She had both held me and hurt me, and getting sober started my journey of understanding how I could have relationships with women that didn’t involve the threat of harm.  I didn’t know how to love women who weren’t (if I may be frank) at least a little mentally ill.

Then I saw Mimi, and more crucially…I heard her.  She had just moved to LA from Chicago and her accent, not so different from a Buffalo accent, reached into my heart and teased a little knot open.  She spoke warmly and honestly, and she was a little intense, and when her words struck me like a tidal wave of spiced honey my bones sang out: “yes, we want this.” 

Perhaps I will always long to be loved by a blisteringly competent, no-nonsense midwestern female intellectual, who is endlessly compassionate and yet does not brook your bullshit for a single second. Perhaps the same launch sequence will always activate my sleeper cells.  Perhaps that is why I currently live in Minnesota.  I cannot say.

I can say that when I was 28 years old, having just landed in Los Angeles, wobbling on my newly sober legs like a bedraggled fawn…I heard the siren call of Mimi’s voice and scrambled toward it with all the desire and passion I had ever mustered for drugs. 

At this time, I had a sober friend.  She was a thin brown scythe of a person, clean and angular and elegant, while soft and warm and female too.  She was the other half of the thing I wanted – an artist to her core, constantly making and giving gifts.  Hot sweet cakes, or moths and violins sculpted sharp from melted metal. 

Her name is Kari. She was a vibrating wire, and to connect with her was to be electrocuted by love.  “Yes, we want this.”  We were both a little intense, but my nervous system vibed with hers like two instruments in a magnificent symphony, during which at any point a cymbal could crash. 

I was not “too much” for this woman.  She was not dangerous to me.  I wrote her poetry and spun words around her, trying to cocoon her in my affection and admiration and give her the gift of how I saw her.  She gave me a metal leaf with a moth on it, a table, a lunchbox with my initial, a life in her art.

All those years ago we sat in her backyard, surrounded by power tools and metal scraps, flowers real and imagined, cups filmed with the last drops of strong Italian coffee, and I told her I had a secret.

“I really wish Mimi were my sponsor”.

Kari lunged forward and said “then you should ask her!”

I said “I can’t, I have Bev.” 
Kari said “Bev can handle it.”
I said “I don’t think *I* can handle it.”

At this point, I was a cliché of transference: Bev was my mother.  I had left my mother once, as 18-year-olds do, and then she had died and left me forever.  I could not leave another mother.  I could not be left again.

In retrospect I see that Bev, who died this year, was almost nothing at all like my mother.  She was just a drunk, like me, and I loved her and I needed her, and she gazed at me lovingly and cared for me, and for a time she raised me into someone I wanted to be.  She was a very intense woman to whom I will forever be grateful, and now she is dead.

It took me two weeks to get up the nerve to ask Mimi to sponsor me.  We were in her home, she was holding a baby, and she said yes.  I was nauseous with relief and blurted that the first thing I needed help with was “firing” Bev, who had done nothing wrong.  I couldn’t bear the thought of betraying her and losing her love.

Mimi jiggled her baby and looked at me with a mixture of great patience and impatience, which I have since learned is unique to her, and said “that’s nuts, you won’t lose her, this happens all the time.”

I cannot explain why I hear Mimi, and why she can say things to me that I find objectionable coming from anyone else.  But she sees me, she knows things, and she speaks the truth.  She holds her authority but never tries to overpower anyone.  It’s a magical gift she has.  I trust her.  She is not my mother.

And so I believed her, like I always have, and she was right, like she always is.  I talked to Bev, and Bev laughed and said she loved me and it was fine…and then Mimi proceeded to save my life one day at a time, and Bev DID love me without ceasing for over 20 more years.

It was Kari who told me Bev had died, just this past April.  I cried so much harder than I thought I would.  She loved me, and I lost her, but it didn’t look anything like I had imagined.

And so now, the waves of love and time and life having deposited me on the shores of yesterday…back to my boy, in Los Angeles without me.

That boy was picked up from his friend’s house by his Aunt Mimi, whom he adores.  He has eaten countless holiday meals in her home, spent the night being cared for by her daughters.  He has soaked in her priceless love and it still staggers me back on my heels that I was able to give him that gift.

Aunt Mimi took him to Kari.  Kari had made a new backyard, back in LA, after a journey through unimaginable pain and loss.  Men she loved had died. She had gone to Hawaii, to Italy.  She had lost her sobriety and found it again, and here she was filling another little slice of southern California with hummingbirds and arc welders and strong coffee and explosions of blinding beauty and controlled fire.

My boy, my beautiful boy, put on a helmet and picked up a plasma cutter and made a sword, with Kari’s help, with Mimi watching.  I was far away yet certain he would be safe, making something dangerous and glorious.

Mimi and Kari talked.  They’ve known each other 25 years.  My boy made sparks and apparently did not interrupt: another miracle.  I can hear all the sounds – my boy’s sweet voice, the whine of the machines, Mimi’s warm midwestern honey and Kari’s sharp bubbling laughter.

If Kari had not emboldened me to ask Mimi to sponsor me, I cannot imagine any scenario in which Milo would exist, much less exist in that particular yesterday.  And yet there they all were, together, in a garden of safety and joy and the spiky sparks of creation, where I had gotten the news that Bev had died, down the road from where I first told Kari my secret.

And where was I?

For once, I was not steeped in longing.  Because while this was happening I was at a “writers’ happy hour” here in the midwest. 

I met people.  They drank, but it was not required.  I got high anyway, from the feeling of being somewhere new again, meeting artists who are interesting and smart and kind.  I sent little tendrils of connection out toward foreign familiar people, through previously empty space.

While the sparks were flying in LA around my deepest richest loves, I was facing the surface of one of my very favorite writers, who happens to live here.  I love her mind already, having never been in the presence of her flesh, because that’s the gift we get from artists.  She is, of course, a blisteringly competent, no-nonsense midwestern female intellectual, whose work reveals her as endlessly compassionate while not brooking bullshit for a single second.  

I do not need her to love me, but she laughed at my jokes and said it was OK for the man who organized the event to give me her contact information.  That’s all the love I need these days, because I have so much already.

I had been brought there by another warm, brilliant writer, whose energy is calm and sharp and beautiful to me.  She has a boy too. That’s why I know her – our boys met at school.

So there was my boy, who can be a little intense, back in LA with beautiful women who love me and love him and will hold him and never think he’s too much.

And there was I, in Minneapolis, chattering away, electrically awake, unfurling my full self in its current battered form, to people who seemed moderately interested and thoroughly unfazed.  I was there because my boy goes to school in the Twin Cities, because I made him with a man who got a job here. 

My boy was fully himself away from me, still in all the light of the place and people that made him. I was fully myself away from him, being made new in a different light.

All alone, all twined together, sharp and soft, and no one was afraid.