Summers lingered, with pancakes for breakfast and sometimes for lunch, too. Mom peeled carrots and left them in a Pyrex bowl of water on the kitchen table. I’d grab one for a snack, running through the house and out to the backyard, where the fun happened.
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I hear the retching vomit and feel my breasts seize up. Even the mechanical waves of my pump can’t drown out the sick splattering on the linoleum floor under fluorescent lights. I’ve never understood fluorescent lights in schools. Research says they stress and strain, and yet they populate our buildings as if the sun might disappear one day.
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“If that’s what you’ve decided to do, then go do it. But if you leave, you better know you can’t come back.”
I sat on the edge of the dining room chair as my mother stood over me, gripping the remote control in her hand, eyes blazing.
“I’m only moving to Astoria,” I said. Although my words came out smoothly, glibly even, my stomach turned over in knots.
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I’m lucky. I came out as a lesbian in the wake of Stonewall. First to myself, a recent Harvard dropout cleaning houses in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1970. Then to friends, my women’s consciousness-raising group, other feminists, potential roommates and lovers, and finally, after several years, my family.
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When she died, I didn’t miss her, which did not seem right or fair or even biologically possible. All it seemed was true.
I remember the feeling of weightlessness after the funeral, once I was home—in my home, the one that took decades to build by scratch and sweat.
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When my daughter asked if her boyfriend could spend the night, I said yes.
He and his mom had a blowout argument and she ended up telling him to get out of the car they were sleeping in. Each night, they'd park at the Walmart up the road.
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In early March 2020, my children begged me for a pet.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered their request; our lives were too busy. But the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, and the departure of regular school, work, or sleep schedules impaired my better judgement. My children sensed my vulnerability.
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I should have seen the signs, long before she fell so far and so hard. Instead, I just kept pushing. “You can do this, sweetie, just focus and try harder.” Seemingly innocuous words, I thought. Encouraging words, right? Wrong.
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I’m a mother. And yet, I’m not.
My dream, years in the making, has and yet hasn’t come true. And even if I could ignore this and live as if my life is the way I want it to be, there are daily reminders everywhere I go that women the world over keep getting my dream for themselves while I am still left grasping for it.
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I answered no to all the key questions. No implants, no tattoos, no permanent makeup, no prosthetic knees, hips, or shoulders, no aneurysm clips. They told me it was okay to keep my underwire bra on, and the snap and zipper on my pants didn’t present a problem.
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Dear Sophie,
I wish I could tell you that things get better. I’m not really in a place to tell you that, though. I know you’re sitting behind the desk answering calls and filling out paperwork. I know you tell people you’re “just a receptionist” while applying to grad schools and going to prenatal classes. You’ve got big plans for yourself and your little one whose tiny heart sounds like big wings through the speaker at the obstetrician’s office.
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Home birth sounds so
Homey! Sweet! Safe from fear!
What a welcome, to bouncing baby
Who will arrive through legs, in arms, home
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I am the keeper of the dreams and the memories, the matrix where the generations converge, the record-book held between familial bookends. I am responsible for passing her life on to him that she may continue to live and that he may understand the consequences of history and culture.
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I heard the words, but they had never really registered. “Remember, no sleep for two year!” my boss warned when I shared the news of my second pregnancy with him.
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Rage enveloped me in my mother’s womb. It bathed me in amniotic fluid that permeated my cells, and developed who I was about to become. The origin of this rage could have evolved from my mother’s life events. My mother from Japan, who immigrated to America a decade after WWII ended. Whose legs carried her as she and her family ran from their house after it was bombed and burned to the ground, barely making it out alive.
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My firstborn was a seven pound preemie. He was born at thirty-five and a half weeks, barely qualifying for the moniker. I only use it in air quotes, out of respect for the mothers of what I call real preemies.
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My Facebook feed brings me an Orca carrying her dead baby, her tears spouting upwards, salting the already salty ocean. I am like that Orca, carrying my bundled grief, attached to my heaving chest, refusing to let go. The sudden loss of marriage, child, parent, even as I came back from the brink of death, has become my bundled grief. I clutch it, like that bundle of celebratory, baby shaped rice Japanese mothers handle with so much care, as it is supposed to hold the child’s future.
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Every now and then, old memories appear when you least expect them.
Fastidious footsteps on the pavement leading to Painter Hall on the historic campus of Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi. You’re late. As you take the brick steps and walk towards the door, your mind falls back to a time when Santa Clause was a real man who slid down chimneys with tons of gifts, and life was centered around nursery rhymes, coloring sheets, and recess.
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My hubby is stronger than me—I have no doubt about it—but he still likes to prove it to me. Now and then, he closes the lid of a jar tight, tight enough that I can’t open it again. In his defense, he is absent minded, but it still causes me a lot of stress.
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At seventeen, I was unsure of myself as a young woman who had just graduated high school, realizing that it was time to be a grown up and to add insult to injury, becoming a mother in a time when the internet was just jumping on the chastise-mothers-for-everything bandwagon.
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