Hi Friends,
First off, I turned in my book proposal on May 1st! Thanks for all your support. Hopefully, I’ll hear back this week about next steps. But no matter the feedback from the agent, I feel relieved to have reached this milestone. Reading over it, I felt proud of what I pulled together and grateful to have my say. Whatever project you’re working on—even if it’s been in and out of the drawer for 25 years—keep going, get it into shareable form. You’ll be so happy.
I wrote a whole letter about Mother’s Day to send you, but I deleted it. Instead, I’m writing this one. Sharing about parenting is hard for me. Being Noah’s mom is the heart of my life, and because of that and because of how difficult the terrain has been, it’s the most overwhelming. So I’m going to slow down and share as I can, and today that means telling you about the gold cord. It’s the most valuable discovery I’ve made so far as a person and in my vocation.
Remember COVID? Total nightmare. Necessity became the mother of invention yet again in human history. During lockdown, I organized a small group of local single moms into a weekly support group called SMASH - single moms are superheroes. We were each other’s lifelines, navigating the stress of working and schooling from home, often dealing with absent or destructive exes, yet making time to encourage each other, send meals, and laugh our faces off. Our remote nest of mother cluckers held our families together to weather the unimaginable.
My relationship with Noah became strained during this time, for many reasons, and I would not have survived without these women. I was constantly worried about our mother-son bond and our broader social-emotional health. I worried that, given how much we’d already been through in the aftermath of the divorce, the pandemic would break us. I don’t know how many afternoons in that weird and scary time we bounced a giant blue ball back and forth in our living room, not knowing how to pass the time.
When we all woke up from social hibernation and saw the first signs of spring—schools opening, restaurants allowing indoor seating—a sigh was heard throughout the land. Young and old praised the lord and demanded to know, “Wtf was that?” We entered the twilight era of damage assessment and regained muscle to navigate an altered landscape.
Getting back into the structure of school was good for Noah and our relationship. My work at USC was getting back to in-person gatherings (though I’d been awestruck by how meaningful connections can be even through Zoom.) I finally felt like the worst was over. Noah and I were ok, and now I could push the gas on my career momentum to better provide for us.
The night before boarding a plane for my biggest speaking engagement, the doorbell rang. I’m the landlady of a 28-unit apartment complex, so this isn’t unusual. But it wasn’t a tenant with a broken garbage disposal. It was a process server. He handed me a 76-page document… that I could not process. My ex-husband was suing me for full custody of Noah and trying to take him to live in Ohio with unstable people from a breakoff religious group.
I had two weeks to find a lawyer and prepare a response to what amounted to a full assault on my character, competence, and parenting rights.
Over the following months of court processes, there were mornings where the tension inside of me reached such a pitch— the tension I couldn’t let Noah see— that my bones felt ready to shatter. There were afternoons when I felt so raw, I couldn’t reach out to people and instead put my beach chair in the cemetery amidst a flock of wild geese who just let me exist among them. There were nights when I was in so much pain, all I could do was crawl under my bed and look for God on the ground among the dust bunnies.
And there were other mornings, afternoons, and evenings, too. Ones where my family and friends and even strangers made me laugh. They put me back in touch with my fierce love for Noah. They gave me hope that justice would prevail. One of my friends, a whole ocean away, is a brilliant writer who edited my entire legal document. One of my friends, a whole block away, walked with me every week and kept saying, ‘One step at a time, and we will get to the other side.” My parents always answered the phone from Pennsylvania, sent cookies, and held me up when I couldn’t stand.
Instead of writing my book, I wrote the most important thing I ever could: a legal demand to continue being Noah’s mom. I had only a few weeks to dig back through twelve years of the most distressing emails and journal entries to piece together an argument, alert the courts to the dangers at play, while remaining calm and unemotional. My heart and nervous system flashed and buzzed like a casino, and I had to act like a bureaucrat on the page. My lawyer was a gift, a very, very, very expensive gift, who was as empathetic as he was vicious to protect us. I don’t think he even billed me right, knowing I could barely work a job during the process.
The trial day came. My brother and sister-in-law drove up from San Diego to go into the courtroom with me. There were more twists and turns than an intestine, but the gavel came down, and Noah came home. Justice had won. Love had won. There was no guarantee that it would—sometimes the reality of justice is far-off or exists only in the form of a prayer. But that day, the good stuff won.
In the nights of uncertainty leading up to the trial, I was watching a movie to pass the time. It was set in Ireland, and a mom was dealing with the possible death of her sick child. She was talking to a visiting neighbor and said something that changed my life. “In life or in death, I will be his mom, tied together by a gold cord of love that nothing can break.” I must have replayed that line ten times to let it sink in. It gave me so much comfort and strength that there was a connection between me and my son that no set of false accusations or judge rulings could break.
I came to understand that the gold cord exists wherever love exists. It exists first between mother and child, but it forms again and again throughout life whenever we cast our soul out in goodness towards others, and whenever we let ourselves be caught by it. The gold cord existed and formed a nest in my SMASH group of single moms. The gold cord wove through my Zoom class for CLICK at college during the pandemic. The gold cord spanned countries and states, and cities, when my social safety net of friends and family FaceTimed. The gold cord unspooled among the wild geese and me in the cemetery. It even found an anchor under the fluorescent lights of a gray courthouse, between me and my lawyer. The gold cord found me under my bed among the dust bunnies, a direct line straight from the other side, from where Love gushes.
Relationships are not perfect. Life is hard. People come into and exit our lives. But the gold cords of love remain. The cord that reaches out to us and enables us to unspool towards others is determined, unbreakable, and never-ending. How lucky are we to live in a world where we are never beyond its reach? And where no one and nothing can stop us from loving.
Take Care, Friends,
Cat
P.S. - I’m experimenting with creating social media content over the next several months, honestly in the hopes of not having to get a traditional job that would straightjacket the work. I would love to find you on Instagram, and see what can happen in that medium. I’m @cat_moore_.
Oh, and go see Marvel’s THUNDERBOLTS…it’s the best art I’ve ever seen depicting loneliness and how underdogs can overcome the odds together.