Kelsey The Butterfly

Depending on whom you ask, the birth of yours truly was an enigma of life’s greatest blessing and worst nightmare scenario, in a quicker time span than humans are meant to process. Certainly, a situation that’s taken a lifetime for my dad and me, to try to process.

Since the fate of our 3-man tribe was felt so differently by each of us, the only option to keep our teepee standing in my formative years, was to soar together in a united front by remaining stoic in the presence of each other.

We operated as if one of us acknowledging our collective fear could be the breeze that takes out the only stick left holding up our teepee; but my mom and dad shouldered the impending trainwreck so well, that I spent my childhood thinking we were normal.

I had 2 parents that proved soulmates existed and a band of neighborhood friends who migrated together in larger bikes to bigger schools before landing at our respective collegiate wigwams.

And my mom never missed a morning or night telling me that when she figures out how to explain the depths of love that her only child brings her every minute between now and the last time, she mentioned this, she will let me know.

As the only child in my parent’s equation, I had the extra burden of serving as Chief Barometer of Collective Wellbeing for the people outside our family that knew about the benign but inoperable tumor on my mom's brainstem and guessed how all of us were by how I looked.

The same rules applied for the people inside our family because there was pretty much a 1:1 correlation between how I was and how we all were, and I was the only one in control of that dial.

***

For all the critical questions and decisions waiting for my parents as they welcomed me to the world, they were spared wondering what the spheres of nature VS nurture’s influences had in mind for my future. Even I was 100% sure by age 3, that my path forward would be through creation of words on a page.

All the grownups around me were always reading or writing or sharing what they’ve read or written with each other all the time. And I loved it.

My dad Poppy was a former journalist who turned freelance desktop publisher in the Qwark Xpress era of the 1990’s, which I assumed was to spend more time with us. I was never there to see the actual impetus behind Poppy's home-office set up was flexibility to spend day long visits with Mommy and the neurosurgeons at the University of Chicago.

Poppy's writing business philosophy was no matter the medium, audience, content…the shortest distance between author and reader is humor. This helped him when he volunteered to be the dad reporter to the local newspaper, for our famously undefeated junior high girls' basketball team since he had to figure out what to say about the only girl who sat the bench all game – his own daughter.

My mom wouldn’t have needed a cell phone if she made it past 2000, because if she wasn’t on our porch reading a book, she was at the Downers Grove public library asking the staff if she could please exceed the checkout limit. Again. Then she’d call our house to ask Poppy if he could please pick her up because she accidentally checked out too many heavy books to walk home, and Poppy’s secretary would remind her that she just did this last week, while Poppy rolled his eyes and grabbed his keys. When she didn't require minivan assistance for her books though, Poppy was the first to say the love she had for literature was one of his favorite things about her.

She was always on hand to help with English class homework, or reading me excerpts from ‘Life in these United States’ from Readers Digest while we waited in Dr Keenan’s dentist lobby; and never missed the chance to remind me that for her, it was one essay one time, that won her the single scholarship, that got her to Florida State University, that sent her on the path to meet Poppy, that gave them me.

Completing the trifecta of literary influencers raising me, was my dad’s mom, Gma, the literary hero of the family and my 80 years older, BFF and muse. Gma’s legacy came from teaming up with the Surgeon General to coauthor a set of children’s health/science textbooks which were, for a comfortable while, the only health/science textbooks available to K-6 schools nationally.

Poppy said Gma hit the lucky jackpot when every school in the nation bought textbooks for every kid in every class, through Scott Foresman publishing. Grandma corrected him saying, we all hit the lucky jackpot, when Scott Foresman granted her lifetime royalties.

One of the first full phrases Gma taught me to speak was: “Write now - rich later!”

Poppy said ‘easy mother you’re going to ruin our girl with false expectations.’

‘Our girl will be just fine.’ Gma said back.

***

The last gift my mom was able to deliver to me with her own hands was a custom painted hard cover journal, with 3 monkeys mimicking the 3 of us on the cover. It was my 16th birthday, and my priorities were a bit more driver's license and inherited minivans than channeling the thoughts from my already terrifying innermost thoughts, onto a source of record anywhere.

Since the journal was too special to use for any single thought a 16-year-old would write down in an unchained, unlocked, out of FBI-secured reach; I saved it for 18-year-old, mature, college Courtney, to write our first bestselling novel in.

***

On the first night of my first day of college, I stared at the real photos of us she’d covered the monkey faces with before opening to write. She’d painted our favorite outfits, still obvious 2 years later. Me with an Abercrombie hoodie over a track uniform. Poppy in his Sunday Bears football vest. Mommy’s monkey was wearing the family’s least favorite ‘Give Peas a Chance’ shirt. It had dual purpose of wearing and delivering an open invitation to the general public to approach us and ask Mommy if she had any spare room in her heart to befriend another fellow hippy, which of course she did every time. Which of course, was the cue for Poppy and I to bolt in the other direction.

On the inside cover, it said: Little Monkey – Your dreams are as reachable as the pages in this book are to those precious little fingertips that made me the happiest mother in the world. Always trust your roots.

Doing my best to honor my promise, I penned my first journal entry from my dormitory bunkbed.

8-24-2000

Poppy and I made it to Mt Pleasant, MI this morning around 10 AM. His insistence that we leave Chicago at zero dark thirty was because he was more excited than me, for freshman orientation. I was proud of his metamorphosis to the optimistic, sociable parent.

Everything changed as soon as we arrived. Poppy has already turned around for home.

Sometime, during the 5-hour drive from our driveway in Downers Grove, IL and the campus of Central Michigan University, Mommy died. We found out as soon as walked in my new dorm room with our first load of stuff.

Everyone back home says I should come home. To what home? To what?

The only thing I do know now, is I’m not leaving until there is an English Literature degree in these little fingertips Mommy gave me.

-Me

***

That one singular entry remains the only time on record anywhere that I tried expressing my own thoughts, to my own self. It’s the tangible evidence of a broken writer, who literally can’t write.

That’s why the rest of the empty 3 Little Monkey Journal held a literal spot next to my CMU English Degree, serving as the time-stamped proof of the exact moment I lost my sense of self. Its the last time I even tried to express my own thoughts, to my own self, in writing, for 24 years.

***

Its 2024, and the only folks growing professionally are the Ai bots speaking to the other Ai bots about how great it is to be alive.

The global pandemic and sudden mass layoffs and quarantines and loneliness; were the first life events I went through alone, with others, where I didn’t feel totally alone. I’d chosen isolation, on purpose, so often prior to Covid and was comfortable that way. Now everyone was forced to live like I do, normalizing the cause for alarm behind the roots of my behavior, for once.

For me personally, the past few years have been the first time ‘normal’ people can relate to the ‘abnormal’ feelings that sent me to self-imposed isolation on and off for the past 24 years. The shame and embarrassment of not wanting to be alive, for me, have been as difficult to control as the unexplainable and sudden loss of control of one’s whole self, that suicidal ideations guarantee in the arrival package.

When mass layoff #5 in 4 years had me back on the job boards I never left to begin with, I stopped stressing about the application responses I couldn't control and took that break everyone told me to do on my first day of college 24 years ago, digging out the empty 3 Little Monkey Journal, instead.

I stared writing again as if it were my actual second day of college, writing the 8-25-2000 journal entry based on my actual memories and didn't stop feeling what I forgot to, the first time; until I'd written everything I can remember experiencing from 2000 to 2024.

Once everything was out there and I was a lifetime of repressed pain, lighter, I had 2 goals:

1- Reach out to the list of kindred spirits that changed my life when I couldn’t really feel enough life, to reciprocate.

2- Figure out how to channel everything I've ever wanted to say now that my brain is no longer holding my emotions hostage, to present in written form.

***

Kelsey was the first person who brought Mommy back to me in the form of a butterfly summoned from the heavens. We were in New Zealand and I was too scared to confront grief, to be in our hometown that summer...

Kelsey had no idea how I felt. He just knew it was time for me to feel her.

That first summer after college I was afraid to spend in our hometown while in the throes of suicidal depression. I felt like I was the direct reflection of Mommy now...which was a terrible disservice to her.

That was one of the first things that came vividly back to me in 2024 as I wrote about my life since 2000...and even though it took several months to find the actual picture of the ‘Kelsey and the Butterfly' moment, waiting to share with Kelsey how much that moment meant to me, didn’t worry me at all.

After a decade of hiding the true pain in my soul from those that I believed could never understand mental health anguish, what harm lay in waiting a few more months?

***

I was a fluttering lifetime too late.

Kelsey and I missed each other by the distance of a butterfly wing, as he suddenly, recently this Thanksgiving, flew up to heaven.

His soul, it turns out, had the same unexplainably dark pain as mine had as we wrestled alone for all these years.

***

Kelsey and a butterfly showed me in a memory, that the voice I thought I lost 24 years ago - has been here, the whole time...it only works when you summon the strength to use it.

Kelsey as a butterfly, showed me in my lifetime, they are counting on us, up there, to write about the unspoken plight of the butterflies.

My purpose has been here the whole time, it just took about 42 years of on the job, field-training in order to qualify.