Letters from Grenada

This morning I watched Joaquin dress himself. He started to put his shirt on backwards. I almost jumped in and fixed it. But I resisted the urge to do it for him and instead told him he should turn it around, which he did. All by himself. Like a big boy.

Looking at him it hit me how much he’s grown in the last few months, both physically and mentally. I said out loud something I often think but very rarely verbalize: I wish Daddy could see you right now. To which my son replied: Yes, Mommy. He would be so proud of me.

I’ve never heard him use the word “proud”, and I’ve never heard him use the conditional mood. It put a lump in my throat.

I miss Grenada. A lot. I’m still certain that I did the right thing by leaving. I might be happy if I were still there, but I wouldn’t be “doing anything with my life”. My son wouldn’t be getting the kind of education I want him to have and he’d be growing up surrounded my soul-numbing poverty. I tell myself that I did the right thing.

I did the right thing. I know that. But it’s getting harder and harder to stomach the idea that my son is going to grow up hardly knowing his father. It’s also getting harder and harder to accept the reality that I don’t know when we’ll see Lyndon again. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Lyndon. There are things he thinks and says and does that I feel would contaminate Joaquin, turn him into a kind of man I don’t want him to be.

There are two problems with that though. Lyndon *is* his father, and he’s fundamentally a fantastic person, full of love and life and beautiful energy. And it’s painfully obvious that Joaquin sorely misses him. Who am I to keep the two of them apart?

The second problem is that *I* miss Lyndon. That photo at the top of this page? I had completely forgotten I had taken it until I stumbled across it last night. There aren’t many like it because Lyndon always resisted posing. It’s simultaneously beautiful and terrible to see the two of them together like that…

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. Just that the whole situation makes me sad. I wonder if I should do something about it. I wonder if I’ve traded one set of potential future regrets for another. And I wonder how I possibly could have imagined I wouldn’t miss the father of my child, simply because I was the one who decided to leave. Silly, silly me.

(Originally posted on my Tumblr.)

Posted on July 12th, 2009 under Grenada • Tags: caribbean, expat, family, fatherhood, Grenada, joaquin the illustrious bean, leaving Grenada, love, motherhood, PHOTOS. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback