Third Place: Why I Took a Mother Shape

Because a Salvadoran muralist fled the violence of civil war and the US government granted him political asylum, and the alleyways of San Francisco bloomed with colors from his palette.

Because my sister—young, her heart uncaged—loved the muralist and mystery seeded in her.

Because my sister—young, her heart bruised—sent the muralist away after he told her how to be a woman and mentioned his wife and three children.

Because I held my sister’s hand in a delivery room of hard surfaces and sharp sounds, and I witnessed mystery—soft, bloody, and alive—rush from her body into this world.

Because not everyone can be a mother.

Because, through to my bones, I loved that child.

Because that child, as a young teenager ready to jump the fence, asked to live with me and I welcomed her, carrying her through those years.

Because I felt protective when she asked to meet her father, the refugee muralist. I read her as a basket of questions, and him as water, and I wondered what would hold between them.

Because he knocked on our door on a tempest night, uninvited, and stood dripping on the doormat, not much changed by the years, but my niece was not at home.

Because I didn’t know his young son waited, like a future foretold, in a car parked down the block.

Because my niece and her father met another day, in sunlight, wearing the shy smiles of related strangers.

Because several years later ICE agents came for the muralist in the night, I don’t know why, took him to detention in Arizona, then deported him to El Salvador.

Because in El Salvador his heart seized and he died and my niece lost the father she had found, but had not had, and his youngest child became a boy without a father.

Because a dozen years later my niece had fire inside her, burned words like kindling, and phoned on a Sunday from New York to say that trouble had found the boy. A Child Protective Services hearing was scheduled for him on Tuesday in San Francisco.

Because I lived nearby in Oakland, she asked me to show up to the hearing on her behalf, as support for her half-brother, whom she loved, whom I had never met.

Because I said, “Yes.”

Because the boy’s mother insisted that he remain a child, closed tight as rose bud, but he had begun to blossom into a person, rich in color and scented with promise, and thorns had come between them.

Because the family court judge decided the boy should not return to his mother’s home.

Because I believed you show up for others when you can, and I saw in the boy a plain-faced need in the guise of an innocent.

Because I was no longer alone—the man I married had raised two children, had patience wide as a six-lane highway, and kindness flowed through all his meaty parts. Together we made a home for the boy.

Because I was old enough to be the boy’s grandmother and I understood at last that mothering takes many shapes.

-Nancy Austin

When she was seven, Nancy Austin stole a book from the school library. That petty crime foreshadowed a lifelong passion for books—as stories, as objects, as worlds to explore, as time out of time. She now lives on an old farmstead in southern Oregon where she writes, reads, and re-wilds a few rough acres.