Tales of My Cubawan, II: A Profound Cosmic Coincidence
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Coming in late? Here are the previous installments of the story:
Part I
Welcome to the tale of me and my adoptive son! In part I, I reminisced about meeting my cub, who quickly became my adoptive son, emotionally, if not on paper (I never had the chance to adopt him officially). It’s more or less the story of random coincidence, of two people who needed one another finding each other. However, it’s sort of obvious why he needed me, but to really get why I needed him, you have to understand me to know why this relationship was so profound to me.
You see, I had accidentally laid a challenge at the foot of the universe, and it decided to throw down and see if I was really up to it.
Fun aside: The song below came out on November 4th, 2020, just 5 days before he responded to my first message reaching out for an interview. As such, the first day he came over to hang out, I bought a lemon and drew a face with sunglasses and a beard on it. He was quite delighted when he saw it. I think, to him, it felt like fan art.
I am a romantic at heart and I love the idea of love, but everything I’ve ever read or heard (in music) about love has seldom been in-keeping with my experience. Ergo, I long for love—any sort of love, really, be it friendly, romantic, familial… I don’t care, I just think love is great.
I also have a perhaps unpopular opinion that love, on the whole, is an uncomplicated feeling, but society, shame culture, gatekeeping, judgment, and other such things prevent us from loving as thoroughly as we could. While there are different types of love insofar as what we do with one another, I have the perhaps unusual opinion that love is always the same, it’s just different in how we express it.
The first thing of note is that I am insatiably curious, I’m willing to learn anything about anything, given my instructor is enthusiastic enough about the subject, and I find people more fascinating than most things. I love hearing life stories of failure and success, as well as the times that make us who we are as a people but also as individuals. I also think that judging others is a blanket waste of time because it never amounts to anything worthwhile. I genuinely believe that open hearts and open minds are the cure to our fucked up world.
Now, more directly relevant: I have always ping-ponged across the spectrum when it comes to the idea of having kids. On one hand, I know it’s one of the most deeply meaningful experiences a person can have, to create life and act as its steward until it is ready to face the world on its own.
However, I also have certain ambitions and in 2021 when all of this began, I was far too busy with trying to sort out my relationship with music journalism and creativity—after having merged my music media, Musicalypse, with Tuonela Magazine—to really want to put any thought into kids. I needed to figure out my relationship with my art (creative writing) and reality, and music journalism was a waning interest at the time.
Way back in the day when I was still a schoolchild, I wanted to have kids when I was young, like early 20s. That probably would have been the time for me to do it, too, energy-wise. Then, by college, I was rather over the idea of kids—I remember a particularly annoying (male) friend who told me that I was morally obliged to have children because I was a good person and ergo it is my duty to pass that along, and I was pretty thoroughly offended. If that was the attitude of people towards me having children, good fucking grief, no thanks.
I think I toyed with the idea of kids again in my early 20s, but on the whole, I found myself quite ambivalent to the subject. I figured I’d leave it up to my partner and go with whatever they’d want.
Now, I’ve been with my partner for nearly as long as I’ve lived in Finland (over a decade and a half, to say the least), and he’d always said that he wanted children. So, I assumed that we’d have kids at some point when we felt stable enough to do so, but perhaps that time never arrived. And by the time I came home from an extended trip to Canada in 2020 (right before the pandemic, to get NUCCA treatments for my old whiplash injury), he took kids off the table.
That was a rather confusing time for me, I fully admit. This was a choice that I had more or less opted out of making myself, and suddenly I found myself having to think about what I actually wanted, on a subject that I found myself thoroughly uninterested in.
Part of my whole deal as a person is that I don’t want to live the same life everyone else does. I am allergic to basic-ness. I appreciate genericness for what it is—things I can live vicariously through with ease, lessons I don’t need to learn because everyone else learns them—which is exactly I try to be aggressively myself and have as many unique experiences as I can, to better broaden my horizons.
That’s why I live in Finland, not Canada, and why I chose to suffer and be a music journalist and writer, instead of getting a job that pays money, like a normal person. That’s why I sit how I want, talk how I want, and live my life in a way that interests me, even if it seems weird, abnormal, and lacking in security on paper. And when it comes down to it, if I want to experience being a parent, I don’t need to look far to find people who would be willing to dump their kids on me for a while. If I don’t feel inclined towards generic experiences, few things are more generic than having kids. It’s sort of the biological imperative in us all.
There’s also a world wherein I believe that I’d be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life if I were to get pregnant. My bones are shifty as hell and we don’t trust one another enough for this sort of thing. If I can throw out my back by simply walking across the room, just imagine the problems I might invoke if I were to grow a person inside me.
But the desire to love and care for someone—a longing for family of any sort—that much still lingered, leaving me thoroughly confused as to what I wanted. We considered fostering kids, or adopting, but never really landed on anything concrete. It all seemed like an awful lot of work and sacrifice that neither of us were willing to commit to.
Fun Fact: I was at the show in the video below (in Bulgaria!) when it was recorde
In part I, I said it was a song that changed everything. For this part of the story, it was a TV series, or more accurately, the final episode of the second season of a Dungeons ‘N’ Dragons actual play series. I am referring, of course, to Dimension 20’s Fantasy High: Sophomore Year (from Dropout.tv (once known as College Humor), which you should totally check out because D20 has some of the best storytelling EVER). I love it so much that I have a character from it tattooed on my forearm.
I really don’t know how to explain this without telling you the whole arc between two characters, but suffice to say, a bond forms between one of the PC adventuring academy students and an NPC fellow who’s trying to turn his life around. He ends up giving her a place to stay after her extremely emotionally abusive parents abandon her at the end of the first season, and at the end of the second season, he offers to adopt her, with the words, “You’re easy to love.”
This story arc hit me bullseye in the feels, because it showed me the thing that I was genuinely interested in: there are a lot of really great kids out there who have absolutely terrible parents. There are tons of examples, but the ones that came to mind were religious parents who reject their children based on gender identity or sexuality. Perfectly nice kids who have plenty to offer, but get rejected for reasons I could never understand, being an apostate myself.
I would love to give a safe space to good kids who’ve got bad parents. There are plenty of children in the world already and the way this world is going, I feel a bit like Sophie from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—I love my unborn children so much that I don’t want them to live in this world. If others so dare, power be to them. I have plenty of lovely nieces and nephews, some of whom might be old enough to come visit me one of these summers, and a local nephew who is fairly fresh out of the oven, with a sibling currently baking as we speak. As I said before, there is no shortage of kids out there. I think I’d have a lot more stamina, a lot more patience, and a lot more to give if it’s not every day. Kids will get a lot more of my best if they don’t have to deal with my worst.
It’s also worth saying that, as a creator, my stories are as meaningful to me as children would be, because they share a lot in common. They’re both something that you put as much of yourself into as you can, and send out into the world to live on after you in however it is received by others. So in the sense of legacy, I’m happy to put myself into books and other endeavors.
But there you have it. I was a 34-year-old immigrant music journalist who was really in need of a shake-up. I had a lot of love to give but wasn’t interested in pointing it in the usual directions, so I challenged the universe to give me a kid who needs me.
This is perhaps a lingering ideology from my religious days, but I figured that if it was meant to be, the universe would deliver. If not… oh well.
I didn’t really expect the universe to answer. I sure as hell didn’t expect it to answer within 3 months. And I definitely super didn’t expect it to toss me a kid who would be so much of a handful. When I threw that out into the cosmos, I was thinking of the sweet, timid high elf from Dimension 20, not the tangled knot of traumas and addictions that my cub started out as.
But hey, they say we don’t get to pick our families, right? Well, at least I’d had the good fortune of spending 6 weeks with a cousin who was also an addict in 2020, whom I bonded well with. He primed me on a lot of what to expect and how to deal with it, coincidentally enough, before he ultimately passed away himself.
The next installment will be about our early days together. Thanks again for hearing his story.
Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
