Yes, this is the feelings woodchipper du jour. Yes, I have fed myself to it. Yes, I am now emotional mulch. No, I am not answering any questions at this time.

"You guys go ahead. Mother's Day is for kids who got moms. I'll just stay here."

Chuckie: "I wish I could remember stuff like that."
Lil: "Don't you remember ever having a mom?"
Chuckie: "Nope. Sometimes I dream about having a mom, though."

Tommy: "Chuckie, are you OK?"
Chuckie: "I'M FINE."

Chuckie: "I'll do anything if you'll be my mommy!"

This episode is brutal. Chuckie goes from feeling settled in motherlessness to desperately seeking the maternal from any source because his friends, well-intentioned as they were, lead him to feel like he doesn't have enough.

"This is my fault. I don't deserve to have a mom."

To everyone out there who has ever felt this way, I see you.

Tommy: "Well, I guess your dad can be your mom!"
Chuckie: "Sure! He's the bestest mom ever!"

Chuckie: "Look, everybody! It's the lady I told you about! From my dreams!"

Chas is such a good dad, but he's also a bereaved widower, and the honesty and gentleness with which the writers show him processing his grief even as he's trying to protect Chuckie from grieving, and faltering momentarily as a parent because of it, is so beautifully handled.

Didi: "Chas, I think it's time you shared these things with Chuckie."
Chas: "Well, I'm just afraid he'll miss her." Didi: "Then you can miss her together."
Chas: "Chucky? This is your mommy."

The tenderness here, on all counts, is shatteringly beautiful. Whew. Who needs a drink?

Chas: "This is her diary. She started keeping it when—uh, when sh-, when she was in the hospital. The last thing she wrote in it was a poem, for you."

@e_vb_ reminded me of this poem when we shuttered @thedotandline and, yes, of course it makes me cry. https://dotandline.net/remember-us-with-this-poem/

Revisiting writing by those you mourn has a liminal quality. Both uses of the word apply: it feels like you're on two sides of the boundary between holding and losing at once, and also like you're again about to step into a new stage of the grieving process, even when you're not.

I think about this often. My biological mother died ten days before I turned five. She wrote me a letter on each of my birthdays she was alive. I have five—my birth through age four. Ten days more and I would have had six. Each time I read them feels different, and yet the same.

My dad gave me the letters when I was 18. I didn't read them until I was 20. The first time I read the first one, saw the words "John, you are so wanted and so loved," I cried for hours. I couldn't finish reading it. I was worried I'd soak it and ruin it.

"My sweet little Chuckie, though I must leave you behind me, / this poem will tell you where you always can find me. / When a gentle wind blows, that’s my hand on your face. /
And when the tree gives you shade, that’s my sheltering embrace."

"When the sun gives you freckles, that’s me tickling my boy. / When the rain wets your hair, those are my tears of joy. / When the long grass enfolds you, that’s me holding you tight. / When the whippoorwill sings, that’s me whispering, 'Night, night.'"

None of this—the idea that love might be eternal, even when we are not, and that just because someone is absent from our lives permanently does not mean they do not love us—is easy to understand! For adults, let alone for children!

I remember pulling the book 'I Love You Forever' by Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw off a shelf years after it was read to me and thinking, "How could you? You're gone." How wrong I was to think dead ever meant gone.

Chuckie: "See, guys? I do have a mom. She's in the flowers, and in the clouds, and in the grass, too! And the sun, and the wind."

And in the diary, and the letters, and every moment of love you share with anyone in your life. And in you, always, even when you can't see it.