I’ve been calling him Saint Noah in a mixture of scorn and admiration for a long time. People started telling me that he was a saint not long after we got married. Obviously someone must be a saint to put up with me. He wrote a lot about how challenging it was for me that people would hear me talk about him and think I was so lucky to have him but also he would talk about me and people think I was so lucky to have him. People didn’t, by and large, think he was lucky to have me. People pitied him for putting up with me. It’s been a hard thing for me.

In the past few days I’ve had chats with my kids about their grief. We are all on different roads. We don’t have to perceive people in the same way.

One of the reasons I felt deeply compelled to have a third child was because we fell into habits of Team Virgo vs Team Gemini. When there were only two children we divided them as being more like me and more like him. This was manifested in ways big and small. My kid is still dealing with the results of this. I wish they had been given a chance to have a more mature relationship with their dad but life isn’t fair. As it stands, what they remember is they had a dad who didn’t like them very much. They remember having a dad who was constantly impatient with them and scornful about their challenges. They remember that when it was their turn to go to a programming conference with dad after years of waiting… he took their brother again because that was going to be more fun for him.

The patience that Noah gave me was all he had. He didn’t leave any in reserve for the kid who has a huge percentage of my challenges. My experience of raising this kid has been “Holy shit. A huge chunk of the stuff I’ve blamed on trauma was really just me being autistic because here is my mirror copy having the same struggles with an entirely different origin story.” Noah didn’t have the patience to help this one sort through food struggles after helping me. I have done it instead. I helped this one sort their feelings and learn how to have physical self control when it feels impossible. I helped this one feel normal and not broken.

My son still has a hero worship thing going on with his dad. Noah was the best parent possible for that child. The two of them had a lot in common. It’s interesting that my son keeps commenting on all the ways he is finding that we are actually super alike in a shocking variety of ways and he never noticed while his dad was alive. I feel like this is good. We are leaning into each other and discovering new levels of closeness. I fucking love having him be my adult child. We get along so well. We are so deeply compatible. This is great.

I am having a lot of mixed feelings every time one of the kids volunteers that if one parent had to die early, they are really grateful I am the one who is left because no one thinks Noah would have done well without me. This feels like a sharp contrast with my belief that he was the functional one and I am the failure. He was the designated grown up and I was the chaos. Enh, in some ways.

I have been holding on to a lot of guilt and shame for Noah’s death. I feel responsible. There are aspects of the story I can’t write yet and that is eating me alive. I feel like a liar. I can’t tell the whole story until the kids are grown. They all understand that someday I will write it all down eventually but they get to grow up first. They get to have their own story first.

I was talking to MC yesterday about my feelings of guilt. They told me that he didn’t die because he was sacrificing himself for me. He did something selfish and impulsive that I told him not to do and there were consequences. That isn’t my fault. My therapist and my boyfriend have both been telling me similar things for a long while. It hits different coming from my kid. It hits differently when my baby, who lived with both Noah and I and watched our relationship, says that their dad wasn’t a saint. He was a flawed human.

I don’t spend a lot of time shit talking Noah in front of the kids. That’s a no go topic. I will say that we had struggles sometimes but I don’t get into the nitty gritty much. Maybe I will as they get older. I’m certainly answering my son’s questions more honestly now.

My kid was telling me that they feel very guilty because people around the world have mourned for their father harder than they have. It sits heavy in my belly that part of the reason all of those people felt so connected to Noah was because he gave his time and his focus to them instead of to MC. MC is the one who lost out on the best parts of him because Noah didn’t make MC a priority.

A long time ago a therapist told me that when you want to evaluate a human, don’t ask their friends or coworkers; ask their children. Children see the best and the worst of their parents. They suffer from the failures and they benefit from the successes that come through their parents lives.

My child feels like their dad didn’t like them very much and never put much effort into seeing them. They feel bad about feeling like that. They feel like they should create a narrative that puts a better light on Noah since everyone else liked him so much. That’s a terrible kind of pressure to put on yourself. They have told me a number of times throughout their life that they are grateful to have me as a mom. I never make them feel bad about themself. When they struggle I help them feel like it is a speed bump and not a dead end. I am their biggest fan. I make them feel like they are a wonderful and deeply valued human.

My son has told me the same thing.

My daughter is young enough that I can be a self depricating dickhead and I can still write off her opinion as being developmental.

All three of them have said that if they had to lose a parent they are glad to still have me because they don’t think their dad would have coped very well. He was too dependent on me. Even my fucking 8 year old has said this. They all feel like their father would have abandoned them if I hadn’t been around to kick him in the ass and tell him to be a good father. I am so sad they saw him that way. I don’t know that I agree with them totally. I think he would have tried.

I can’t really say they are wrong though. Noah didn’t want kids on his own. He wanted me and this was the price. He was able to feel close to the children when they reflected him back at himself, when they were good at math, when they were precociously verbal, when they were very far on the stoic end of emotional expression.

I love MC to the moon and back but stoic is not a word that can be used to describe them. They are now a very controlled kind of volatile. They have the feelings and they express them without inflicting destruction at this point. We don’t quit. We complain. When I watch them clear the room before they start working because they will stomp and curse and shout and if they are alone they don’t have to deal with anyone getting butthurt about it. They learned that it is ok to do this watching how I put together Ikea furniture. Leave me the fuck alone. I will come back and not be angry when I am done with this task. This task is fraught with frustrating moments and my fingers will hurt and I will cry and scream. Don’t worry about it. That will happen and I will then move on without it being a big deal as long as no one around me makes it a big deal.

Noah made it a really big deal when MC needed this space too. It was hard to watch.

I miss Noah so much that sometimes I struggle to take in breath. I don’t think I will ever stop missing him. He was my companion at a soul level. We were so enmeshed we weren’t really separate people anymore, not completely. My son misses his father a lot. He is sad not to have that relationship. He cries about it on a regular basis.

I have told MC and YC that it is ok that they aren’t crying. There is nothing wrong with them. Everyone has their own path through grief. Even though all three of us are people who cry easily for many reasons that doesn’t mean they are obliged to cry over losing their dad. They are allowed to cry about the things that move them to tears. No one gets to judge what goes on that list.

I am grateful that my children are affirming for me that I am nailing the landing on this job. It is the most important thing I will ever do. I wanted to be a parent for selfish reasons. I wanted to be part of changing the dynamics of my family. I was going to make people who didn’t hate themselves for having needs. I was going to create a happy family that doesn’t have to lie and fake the happiness.

I have done that. We are a happy family. We love spending time together. We love going on adventures together. We love sharing care and support. We feel supported and encouraged together.

I am sad to know that pieces of this will be easier without Noah. Lots of other pieces are much harder. I am sad to know that my baby experiences less stress in their home without their father around. I never wanted that feeling for them. I wanted him to be as good of a daddy for them as he was for me. That’s the thing–he was also hurting me. He hated lots of things about me and he absolutely did his best to make me feel bad about myself for existing in ways that didn’t serve him. He also built me up. He was very blunt about his attempts to break me so he could build me back better. I think of him as being like a harsh Old Testament patriarch. Sure, sometimes he was a fucking asshole but he was an asshole because he was doing what was good for me….. right?

Right?

He wasn’t always good for our baby. Sometimes he was just an asshole. They feel bad about being relieved at not having to live with an asshole anymore. I knew he was an asshole. That was explicitly ok with me. My child didn’t get a choice in that agreement.

No, baby, you don’t have to cry.

I will cry but I cry over my mother and my father and Noah and Vicki and Andrew and Michael and and and. I am one who cries a lot. That doesn’t mean anyone else has to match my efforts. That would be a weird thing to push for.

You don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t owe people a performance. It’s been so cool talking to them about masking and acting and how the two are similar but different. It’s been really fun talking to them about the difference between the masking that I see and I can also see them drop the mask. They feel uncertain about their “true” personality because they mask so much. I feel really good about the fact that I can rattle off all the things that come out when they are under the most stress and they have the least cope. I have memorised you, muthafucker.

(Yeah it was funny at dinner when one of the big kids made a joke about Gentleman being the only motherfucker at the table. Yikes. The jokes fly hard and fast.)

I love that I can tell my children about themselves in tiny minute detail. I have been staring at you intently trying to learn how to understand your needs since you were created. I have read books and consulted experts and sought out evaluation over and over. I exist to streamline your jagged entrance to the world because people of our bloodline are going to have jagged entrances no matter what.

I have this overwhelming waterfall of acceptance for the challenges that come from existing in the world in the bodies they have. I get it. I help them feel like they are part of the range of human normal even when they are on the edge of a bell curve. They tell me that I make them feel important. This is good since I have devoted 28 years to study for taking care of them at this point. It is very good to hear that the only people who get to evaluate me think I am extremely good at my job.

I think Noah could have learned to communicate better with MC as an adult. I am sad they didn’t get that chance. I’m sad that Noah needed MC to come more than halfway to understanding him before he could understand them. That is truly unfortunate. I can’t change that. Noah did what he did as a father. Now we all get to live with the consequences.

I am still grateful to have had him. Marrying him was the best decision of my life. He really did make all of my dreams come true. He also made me safe for the rest of my life. He gave me the ability to be the mother that I am. I have about as low stress of a life as a human can have in this day and age. (My therapist would strenuously disagree with that statement and give me a very intense “give me a break” look.) Fine, I don’t have to earn money. At this point I am paying people to play with my money so I can have more money. My life is unreal. I read about shit like this in books as a child. I couldn’t imagine it being my future. Noah didn’t hand me this. Noah handed me a decent Silicon Valley paycheck. I scrimped and saved and gave me this. I created this future by denying myself lot of things for many years. This is yet another thing that Noah would have failed on without me. He would not have been able to scale back and live on less. He would have kept working to fund him being impulsive and selfish and careless.

I shudder to think what would have happened to the kids. He did not have my backbone of rigidity when it comes to serving the children first.

I didn’t wish him gone. I wanted to cling to him until I died. But he is gone now. I can fuck up my life now by not recognising the ways he created harm or I can help to heal that damage. I can insist on better going forward.

I am grateful for being the kind of mother who is safe to talk to about these hard things.