I lost my affinity for writing when I lost my mom.  For two years, I toiled over and judged myself for having lost – it.  I distracted myself while aimlessly and sometimes frantically looking everywhere for the intangible.

I summoned up some patience, waiting for the writing to return.  But it didn’t return.  

I looked before, behind and around me for how the writing and my mother were connected but couldn’t find a single thread to follow.

I tried to write.  I tried to reunite myself with the love for it.  But the “trying” was tedious and the labor of it bore an imposter.  A stranger with a pen in her hand.  I was like a kid writing an essay and carefully choosing senseless words that sounded “smart”.  I was trying to prove something to someone, I just didn’t know who. 

I couldn’t find myself anywhere on this small but impenetrable landscape of the blank page.

The vacuum left by the loss of my mom, by the one who’d held onto me the tightest was filled with a void  that anchored itself behind my sternum and around my voice.  This muteness moved in, unabashed.  And I ignored it.

I accepted that I wouldn’t be writing anymore.  I replaced it with scattered distraction.

I took guitar lessons instead.

And…I read and I read and I read – the heart shattering, mouth watering, viscera shifting words of other, real writers.  All while gracefully hosting my own platitudes.

Twenty five months after I lost my mom – and my writing,  my youngest boy left for college.  This sweet, tender, freckled faced, funny, energetic, vibrant gift of a son.   The morning he left for the road trip to Montana, standing in the doorway, I watched the car pull away from our cul de sac and I felt my insides being pulled down the road with him, until the anchor behind my sternum had no choice but to dislodge and travel through my heart and out of my throat.

The biology that tethers us to our babies became palpable and undeniable.  I felt it.  The physical separation of it.  I spent the next few days bathing in a grief that surprised me.  I had to let Marco go.  I had to let him go.  I also had to let my mom go.  

So, I let them both go.

Now, I feel like I want to write again.  I think it’s back.  In fact, I know it’s back.  It made its quiet return,  riding bare on the back of vulnerability and pure love.  I just had to make room for it.