I am a mother and a daughter. But I was not mothered—at least not in any traditional sense. Five months after they met, my parents were married: She’d just turned twenty-one; he was six months younger. They bought a house with red stairs, a half-block from the beach in Santa Monica. Five years later, in 1970, they had me. But in March 1973 my mother divorced my father, and a few months later, she called to tell him that she was leaving me at her parents’ house in Berkeley. The next day, my maternal grandmother met my father at the Oakland airport with me in her arms. My mother cut off all communication with her family and friends.

Not all transitions come with clarity.
Some arrive as quiet unraveling.

The day he left for graduate school, the air in the house felt different.
Not heavy. Not sad. Just…suspended. Like everything was still waiting for something to happen, even though it already had.

The insertion of my daughter’s feeding tube was sold as a simple procedure- up the nose and down the throat, swallow, swallow, swallow, the nurse explained. Like threading a piece of spaghetti through your face!

I expected to like being a mother. 

I expected to be good at being a mother.

I expected to raise children who would appreciate that I wasn’t an embarrassment, not obese or out of style, or driving an old beat up Buick.

On the first day of preschool, my son gripped my hand. He peered into the classroom, his eyes wide. “Go ahead,” I said, squeezing my fingers out of his and nudging him forward. The teacher approached and crouched to his level, saying his name with a smile.

Suspended above the Delaware River, I can no longer time my contractions. The fierce waves of pain sweep up my facility to do anything but breathe. Breathe I do, with an equally fierce grip on the vinyl door handle of my husband’s pickup truck—never more thankful for its heated leather seats. As my insides constrict, my fingers squeeze the handle tighter. When my muscles release their grip, I release mine, measuring my breath with a will resolute.

I stare into the camera, waiting for my cue. In the background, a shelf displays the brightly colored toys of my childhood, rendered in the fuzzy technicolor of a 1990s video recording. Next to me, a stuffed King Kong gazes off-screen.