The First Sign
Note to reader: This is part of an ongoing series about the life of my youngest son, Charlie, who died in July 2022. It’s a love letter to the unspoken places of mothering, parenting, divorce, and grieving. Most of this series is behind a paid paywall for now. If you are new here, you can start at the beginning.
Early childhood is a critical time for the development of the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that regulates emotions, attention, and self-control. In Charlie’s case, the first three years of his life was filled with a lot of love and it was also filled with a lot of chaos as the state of the family around him began to disappear—and as his mother, it began with me.
On the outside we looked good as a family and Butch and I looked good as a couple. Just like the national morning radio show he co-hosted, our marriage looked like a popular show, too. To me it was more like I was the co-host of our family unit. We were collaborators, but he got all the credit. We were partners, we were never best friends.
Butch was busy, always working on projects outside the show. Comedy projects, album projects, concert projects, fundraising projects. If you ever reached him on his phone, he’d tell you he can’t talk long because he was working on a project. That was fine with me because I was busy being a mother of four young children. I quit my work in radio and TV to become a full-time mother.
Our social life revolved around concerts and comedy shows, both things that were a part of his work. Both of us were the fourth child in our families. He was one of four and I was one of five. I’ve read that the youngest children in families have the characteristics of being charming and often do things to get attention. Butch was definitely charming and he loved attention.
I didn’t see until it was too late that as his career got bigger, our marriage got smaller. I got smaller. This photo from the end of 1996 is hard for me to look at. I’m holding Charlie in my lap and Lucy is next to me, but what I see is that I’d lost weight and my eyes look vacant. As much as I loved being a mother, I’m afraid I may not have been a consistent safe and happy place for my children because I was beginning to drown into depression. It was one of those moments when you don’t know you are sinking until it’s nearly too later.
