Eighteen: Passages, limbo, and some big mom wishes
Dear Declan,
We’re here. It’s your 18th birthday. Holy crap!
There are 18 chapters in the Bhagavad Gita — one of 18 books of the Mahābhārata — in which 18 armies fight for 18 days. It’s a spiritual number in Judaism; the Hebrew word for life or “alive” — chai — has a numerical value of 18. Group 18 of the periodic table is the noble gases, and 18 is the atomic number of argon, which glows blue-lilac within an electric field. It’s “lazy” and doesn’t react to other elements, heat, or water — it just hangs out lightbulbs and neon signs and glow sticks, being its inert self.
And of course, the age of 18 has been constructed as a passage into adulthood, as though you’re a boat in a canal, waiting for the last lock to open with a surge to send you out into the wide-open sea.
You have to register for selective service, which I find existentially terrifying, but know that if ever there was a person who could qualify as a conscientious objector — as a longtime Buddhist and vegan who can’t stand to kill a bug — you would be it. You get to start voting. There are a lot of places in the world where you can legally drink. You can’t do that here, but you can smoke and get married.
This threshold of adulthood feels arbitrary — how well you and I know that the brain’s management system is still evolving and doesn’t fully arrive until age 25 or so. It’s like all the times you opened a can of chickpeas before school and answered my confused expression with “breakfast foods are a social construct, mom.” You were correct — and such is adulthood. The other day, I asked you if this should be the last of my letters to you (being the constructed end of childhood and all). “If you want it to be,” you told me, holding my hand. “But you don’t have to stop.” Since these letters have always been as much or more about my challenges as a mom as a record of what I’ve witnessed in you, we’ll just take what’s next one year at a time.
Looking back at this little annual tradition I began when you were four, I’m mostly happy you have this record, and happy that it’s allowed other loved ones who live far away to stay connected with the person I love, through my witnessing of his becoming. That’s no substitute for the real thing, of course. I hope some of these folks get a chance to connect more directly with adult you, who continues to become someone very much worth knowing on his own terms.
I can also see the ways I’ve always focused on the growth that came out of challenges in these letters, often sidestepping writing too directly about the challenges themselves out of respect for your privacy. But my sweet, neurodivergent boy, nothing has marked your last tour around the sun so much as your being in direct, often very painful, reckoning with your highly unusual brain. And I’ve been challenged to figure out the best ways to love you through this.
We’ve learned that we have to say the word disability in tandem with ADHD out loud, over and over, in order to get the attention of educators who somehow still don’t see it as such, or don’t recognize that brilliance and disability coexist. I’m so proud of you for using these words so openly and learning to speak your truth, which you will have to keep doing over and over in your life to get what you need.
The intensity that has been required for me to make sure you have the equity you deserve this last year has been difficult and exhausting. I have become a pain in the neck to some of the powers that be — sometimes doing too much of the advocacy you should do for yourself, and sometimes not enough. But we have kept talking about it and giving each other grace and space to learn.
I think our culture, with its increasingly black-and-white impulses, lacks the patience to pause and really see all the stuff science understands about the brain that it didn’t 20–30 years ago. It’s like the difference between our understanding of astrophysics before the Hubble Telescope and after — without nearly as many scientist ambassadors explaining it clearly on cool shows with fabulous CGI effects. The most disappointing thing about public education — which I 100 percent support — is how pedantic it can be and how often it treats a ravenous learner like you as though you can’t be possible. And that thing with making teenagers like you start school earlier in the morning this year for the sake of fiscal/bus route efficiency, when all the science says teenage brains should start the day later because sleep matters so much? Infuriating.
You’ve been going at the world full bore since you left for your first tour with Phantom Regiment in the summer of 2021, with hardly a break. From the outside, I think I must look like a person who has pushed and pushed you, but you’ve planned your own massive academic load and brought home the forms for me to sign year after year. On your 17th birthday, you left to train hard and tour again for 12 full weeks, overlapping the school year on both ends. You got COVID for the first time while you were hundreds of miles away from me. It took weeks for you to recover as I stewed in resentments toward the corps, which ignored my request to let you rest deeply in a hotel bed the way every other member who got sick (and wasn’t a minor) was allowed to. We sent you to urgent care in Oklahoma as you struggled to fight your way back to the Olympian levels of fitness required for your drum corps show. By the time you rounded the corner to the finals, you were back in form. I have never done anything like that and can’t even begin to imagine it, honestly.
Then we were launched into the world of college applications and music school auditions with limited options for campus visits — first, because of COVID and then because you used up so many of your excused absence days at school because of your tour. As a senior, you’ve been in four college-level classes, three school bands, an internship teaching music to middle schoolers, and still taking piano lessons on the side (I think because it helps you understand music more deeply and challenges your brain). You’ve studied ADHD and brain development so much on your own that it might as well have been another college-level course. You have certainly been teaching me all about it all year… teaching me all about you (and me, and probably so many other people close to us). You’ve taught your teachers and friends and surely lightened a burden or two for the next person they encounter like you who struggles to be understood.
I’ve seen you be a loving, supportive friend to some people who clearly need a loving, supportive friend. You get visibly upset when the girls you know tear themselves down about their bodies. When my insecurity about my aging face spikes, you’ll patiently take a thousand pictures with me to get one I like, and blame the world’s stupid standards for it, not your mom. You keep your arms around your loving stepdad with you as you walk — two men who know, like the social justice kitten postcard on our fridge says, that “toxic masculinity spoils the party.” You are unabashedly the son and grandson of feminists, and stunningly comfortable in your moral and political views (“the study of economics is maliciously stupid,” being one of my favorites this year).
You make friends easily with people in their 80s and 90s at your grandmother’s senior community because you’re interested in what they know and their life experience. You always seem to be listening deeply, even when I think you aren’t. And as low-key as your demeanor may appear to be, your humor is deep, lightning-quick, and very well timed.
Here, on the cusp of your high school graduation, things haven’t turned out as you might have hoped. You were waitlisted at a top 10 school and accepted at several small liberal arts college that offered eye-popping amounts of merit scholarships yet came nowhere near making themselves affordable without plunging us into deep debt (and you know firsthand from our family how precarious student loan debt can be). You are uncompromising in your desire to study both music and physics as much as you possibly can, and I don’t know how well appreciated that combination is anywhere, even though tons of famous physicists are also musicians.
For all the extraordinary work you have put in, through all of your challenges, there is no obvious choice before you now. Wait on that waitlist? Take a gap year and hope there is less of a flood of post-COVID gap year students applying places next year? As your mom, I really freaking hate that you don’t have the clear thing to celebrate, but my first response once we knew the full measure of your options still feels true: “Doesn’t every person you admire in the world — scientist or musician — have a story just like this?”
You’re luckier than plenty of people — you can go to school right here, where you grandfather and stepfather did, where your stepdad and I both work, and finish your undergraduate degree with no debt. But a big state school also undoubtedly has a lot of the bureaucratic features and demands that have been known to weigh you down like learning kryptonite. You have long been the guy who throws his body and soul into understanding the universe but forgets where he put his lunchbox — and that’s a real thing that comes with your disability, not a joke.
Here are some things I know about you: You have put thousands of hours into playing your instrument in ensembles, enjoying the esprit de corps more than any solitary contribution. On the morning I drove you to take your final shot at the SAT (after tutoring students from around the world who wanted to do better on the SAT), you were preoccupied with listening to the umpteenth in a series of Richard Feynman lectures in the car. You spent much of our road trip on spring break devouring a textbook about famous physicists that had nothing to do with what you’re studying in school — you were just enjoying the insights it gave you into how the minds of people who have made lasting discoveries worked. You shushed me as you finished a paragraph from Galileo’s journals, which you picked up to “remind myself how much I enjoy reading.”
In your last week of high school, post-all these AP exams, you’ve been up late studying math that you have no foreseeable test for — you’re just trying to figure out how far along the continuum of math you can grow into before you end up wherever it is you end up in college. I know I am your mom and everything, but I can’t help but think that whatever institution that gets to claim you as an alumnus is going to be lucky indeed — especially if they do right by you.
What I hope for you now is the same thing every mom I know hopes for: Whatever is next, may more and more people see you, truly, as the remarkable person that you are. I hope the learning and social environments you enter are places where you feel safe revealing your essential goodness and where the myriad possibilities within you feel welcome. I hope you have the luck of finding and attracting good mentors all along the way.
You may be launching into some yet-to-be-determined great big sea, but for as long as I’m breathing — and surely after if I can — I know I’ll still be here, witnessing you, continuing to reflect all the goodness I see in one way or another.
I love you infinity (still),
Mom
Past letters:
Sweet Seventeen • No Routine Sixteen • Fifteen and Quarantined
More past letters on Tinymantras.com
