Before you go #15: Chase some waterfalls!

 

Dear Sam,

I recently learned the word “pentimento” and it instantly became one of my favorites.  (If you don’t collect favorite words, you really should start).  Pentimento is defined as:

1.       An underlying image in a painting, especially one that has become visible when the top layer of paint has turned transparent with age, providing evidence of revision by the artist.

2.   An alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his or her mind as to the composition during the process of painting.

3.   The reappearance in a painting of an underlying image that had been painted over (usually when the later painting becomes transparent with age)

I was initially drawn to it as it related to my current personal journey as I crest the curve from adulthood into middle age.  Between my two significant joint surgeries in the last 5 years, your sister heading into college and you following right behind her, and the social and personal impacts of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I have found myself quite introspectively trying to understand my life and my relationships. 

I once read that motherhood is a one-way street—there is just no going back to the person you were before that bone deep transition from woman to mother.  And yet, having been immersed in the living of a life populated by so many little people, emerging to a place where you all not only bathe and dress and feed yourselves completely independently, but actually drive and earn money and eventually live entirely without my daily assistance is a bit disorienting.  So a pentimento appealed to me.  What strokes and colors from my former life will emerge as time passes and my role as mother to many gradually ebbs?  How will the two converge into something altogether different and, hopefully, coherent and beautiful all the same?

Not that I believe my role as your mom is over—far from it.  I now understand that it will never really end.  You and your siblings always carry a huge part of my soul in your careless hands.  But the specifics of the day to day will fade and recede, indeed are already fading and receding—the diapers and pacifiers giving way to action figures and legos being replaced by smartphones and sleepovers becoming drivers licenses and prom dates making way for dorm rooms and internships.  Layer upon layer of brush strokes creating a life all bound up in the pentimento that is girl, woman, wife, mother, child, children.

During vacation, it occurred to me that the pentimento metaphor (my sentimental pentimento, if you will) could even more vividly applied to you.  Another snapshot that I carry from our recent spring break is the image of you sailing over a waterfall on a rope swing.  In moments like that, it is impossible for me not to see the adventurous boy you were lurking just beneath the more reserved man you have become.   The layers of cynicism and teenage angst fade away, and your unabashed smile lights sparks of joy in my heart.

So, before you go, remember the boy buried within the man and let him chase some waterfalls.  It is impossible not to continually paint over every iteration of yourself as your life progresses.  Every phase and experience and relationship adds color and depth to the portrait of your life, and this is both inevitable and good.  Before you go, chase the waterfalls that will give your years color, depth, and meaning across the vistas of your life.  I am certain I will always be able to see the determined little boy inside the truculent middle schooler underneath the thriving high schooler inside the full grown man.  Before you go, chase some waterfalls!