Post-Notes and Watering Love

I hadn’t really done it before, but my mom taught me how. She left me love notes.
In my book, I come out to my parents. You’ll read that I came out three days before I left for Peace Corps. I sat down with my parents on a weekday night and told them I’m gay. It did not go well. For the next couple of days, we didn’t know how to be together. What I thought might be ripples in the water, maybe even big waves, was actually a tsunami, and we went about the days trying to be normal while wave after wave of so many emotions slammed us again and again.
On Instagram I shared a reading of a few lines from the book about what I did the night before I left for Armenia after those tumultuous days of coming out. I couldn’t sleep.

When I’d packed the last of everything I’d take across the world into my bags, I had just an hour left before I would leave for the airport. I walked back through the house again, touching the walls, running my fingers over the pictures of my family all together. My parents’ light was off. So was my sister’s.

I felt a roiling in my chest. An anxiety I couldn’t name, like a yell that hardened into an immovable lump in my throat. I wanted to do something, anything, to feel better, to calm myself. In the same way that you might say things just like your family without realizing it, I thought of what to do. It is what my mom had done for me so many time, in lunchboxes, in books she’d know I’d later read, in my top drawer when I moved into my freshman college dorm. I went to the kitchen I found a stack of pink post-it notes and a pen. I put notes everywhere.

“I love you. Love, Brent” in the silverware drawer.

“Are you thinking of me?” in the refrigerator’s vegetable crisper.

“I miss you so much!” rolled up and tucked into the bottle of ibuprofen.

“You are so, so special!” wrapped around the base of my sister’s toothbrush.

“Pick up the phone and call me!” into the inside pocket of my mother’s purse.

I put notes everywhere, all over the house, in places I knew they’d see tomorrow and other’s I knew they might not find for a long time.

Maybe they wouldn’t find them for years. And where would I be then?

I didn’t quite learn note-leaving from my mother. And by that I mean, she didn’t teach me. She just did it. She left notes everywhere all the time. Sometimes, like at elementary school lunch, she left me little quippy mom-style messages. “You are so special!” and “We love you so much!”
As I got older, she left longer messages. I’d find a note in my band bag on the way to a high school marching band competition about how proud she was of my musical abilities. She’d leave a note in a book I was reading, knowing that later I’d be alone in my bed, holding the book above my face and a small piece of paper would fall out, slicing through the air like a falling leaf and landing near my face. And at the end, always something like, “I love you much more than you’ll ever know.”
I’ve never asked my mom why she does this. I don’t know when she got this idea or if anyone has ever done anything like that for her. (I’ll save that for the podcast I want to make to accompany this book!)
But I believe that, in a way, this is one of her tricks for watering. And I, like a plant, have never really said ‘thank you’. I have simply grown, tried to find the light, tried to make way for my growing roots.
Unlike a plant though, I learned from her. I learned that I could leave these notes, and that the people I love might find them.
That night, before I left, I did imagine my family finding them. I did try to hide them in places I knew they wouldn’t find easily. Places like medicine bottles they might use in a few weeks. Places like the box of Christmas ornaments in the garage opened only once a year. I imagined them finding those notes, thinking of me, my love traveling in that paper, the paper a time machine.
And I do it now for my own children. I write down words like my mom wrote – “You are so special,” and, “I love being around you!” And because neither of them can read yet, and because I have no idea if their teachers read their notes to them, I draw them pictures. Whatever comes to mind. A frog. A penguin. Smiling, goofy monsters I make up on the spot.
From my mother, I’ve learned that it does not take much to water love except time and intention. A note, a small note, might mean something small. But the night before I left for Peace Corps, in the wake of the tsunami of my coming out, I hoped that many notes, hidden so they’d spread out over time, might water love, might keep it alive. I wanted it to. I wanted it to so very, very much.
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I know there are a lot of question from this book quote you might have. Feel free to leave them in the comments! And I’m guessing many of them might just be answered in the book itself. Thank you for reading.