Happy Birthday, Joshua

My first-born son was hit by a car on December 13, 1989. He was walking home from school. He was seven years old. Here is a musing on his birthday 21 years later.

June 21, 2011
Written in Venice, Italy

Happy Birthday, Joshua.

Today is your birthday. You would have been 29 today. I can't imagine what you would look like. Well, a little, bit. I think you would look mostly like your dad. Brown eyes, light hair, stocky. I don't spend much time thinking about you. I feel guilty when I write that. I felt tears and pain in my chest when I write that today is your birthday. I look forward to re-connecting when I have passed to the spirit world. i am relieved that you moved to the spirit world so early because life was difficult for you here and you were showing this in symptoms of difficulty learning at school, and behaviour with peers as well as a few other things. I regret having not had the ability to be there for you in the way that you needed. I regret allowing Chakib to treat you the way he did (and I can't even be specific, it is too painful to mention) I regret even being with him for you and me. And yet as I write that, I had another son with him and he has done well. Because Chakib was affectionate and showed him lots of love in the early years and I had some support and relief from being a single parent which made me a better mother. I wish you could have had the same advantage. I also regret yelling at you in the doorway on Westcott Street when you were three and you replied, "But, mommy, do you still love me?" I regret being short with you at all and I know it is because I was stressed most of the time and I tend to be short of patience even in the best o times. But you deserved to be loved well. And now you are in a place where you are fully loved and have  been spared from a life of being deprived. But just know that I love you and I regret the way I treated you and have had to find the way to forgive myself. And now I ask forgiveness of you. On your 29th birthday.

Anyway my birthday present to you this year is that I have made contact to you in this letter, communicating my love for you and my regret at being an inadequate parent. Perhaps now I could make regular contact with you. Would you like that? We could re-establish an energetic bond across this physical/spiritual sphere.

Happy Birthday, Joshua
Love Mom