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.

I found out I was pregnant at three in the morning after the Spring Equinox Witches’ Market. Spring still felt very far away, I was still in my big Canadian coat, still wearing rubber gloves under my winter cycling gloves to break the wind, which the man in the Leith Walk bike shop taught me to do. Before I accepted the new job in Edinburgh, my husband and I talked endlessly about the weather. Was it really as bad as we imagined? Could we really live up there?

Four days after the passing of my father-in-law, my wife and I welcomed our foster son. He came to us at five months old, barely sitting up on his own, and deliciously full of baby rolls. Twenty months later, he left our home and went to live with his biological mother for the first time in his life. We were parents for almost two years, but that title was taken from us.

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.

I wonder about the metamorphosis of a butterfly as it is stored away in cocoon-darkness until its evolution is complete, and it begins to fly brilliantly.

The cicadas are here again, hanging from branches, clinging to the crimson tips of sunlight that tendril forth from deep green canopies. Like ghosts, they leave their bodies behind.

 The first time I saw a circus, I was fascinated by the clowns. They roared into the ring in a tiny car then jumped out one after another after another, falling over each other and leaping up to perform juggling and feats of magic. One white-faced clown in a top hat came up to me and pulled a coin from my ear. That did it. I told my mom I was going to run off with them and become a clown. But, the next day, when we drove past the lot where the circus had been, I saw my dream had been betrayed. They were gone.

My nose crinkled as I opened the door to the dance studio. A mixture of stale sweat, stinky feet, and vanilla body spray mingled to create this unique scent. Blindfold me, tell me to take a whiff, and I would know exactly where I was. It was the first time in months since I had stepped inside.

There is a cabin in the woods of Nisswa, Minnesota that smells like lake water and wet dog. The odor seeps into everything it touches: the well-worn carpet, littered with stray crumbs; the padded porch swing, streaked with dog hair; the tiny hand towels, damp and limp in the narrow kitchen and miniature bathroom. Held together by faded yellow siding and cobweb-covered windows, the stooped building hovers above Lake Hubert, where every August six families gather for three days of outdoors, heavy carbs, and shared identity.

“Okay, I’m going to lift up your breast and place it here,” the technician announces, firmly lifting up what remains of my poor right breast – having endured two lumpectomies and radiation - and stretching it over the arm of the mammography machine. She cranks the machine – bzzz, bzzz, bzzz - and it compresses my breast, flattening it. I close my eyes, refusing to look at my poor stretched and smashed breast. It hurts. I wince. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“Have you thought about going on a diet,” he asks me. “You’re not fat, but you’re not exactly thin.”

I am fourteen, standing in my father’s kitchen. I will grow another two inches over the next three years. 

I am not fat, but I’m not thin. 

I was so earnest and naïve, maybe about thirteen, when I became the champion of my body. Indoctrinated into a cookie cutter world of women’s ideals, my parents remained stubbornly silent in the face of my changing body and sudden need for industrial grade pads. They trusted in the ‘wisdom’ that was Catholic chastity education. 

In fifth grade, our lunch periods were at different times. My best friend Samantha—Sam—ate while I had Social Studies. One day, I slipped out of class on a bathroom pass and into the cafeteria, where sound and color collided. I scanned the crowded room until the blur resolved into Sam—her thick black braid ending in a baby-pink scrunchie at the small of her back, a whole head shorter than everyone else at the long table. She squealed when she saw me, as if it had been years, not hours, since we’d last been together. Sam nudged the girl beside her, who slid over without question. I squeezed in, the other kids at the table shielding me from the lunchroom monitor as Sam and I whispered, knees pressed together. Having different lunch periods once felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Appreciators of Sex and the City deep cuts might recognize Suffern, New York, as the fictional setting for Aidan’s country house, where bonafide city-girl Carrie Bradshaw sees a squirrel and declares she is “suffering in Suffern.” Why Carrie—written to originally be from Connecticut—was so distraught over a squirrel, I’m not sure. But the sentiment of Suffering in Suffern was one I understood immediately.

I am sixteen. He is thirty-four, tall and thin, a dynamic instructor who has been known to jump on his desk when acting out the murder of Polonius in Hamlet, a man whose narrow ties against his starched white shirts look like stained-glass windows. A man who just this year returned from teaching English in Orleans (which, until he says it, I don’t know is pronounced without the s), France and Frankfurt, Germany. A man who drives a two-seater with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. My high school English teacher.

A few months after my mom’s cancer diagnosis, I was having trouble inserting a tampon. I had never really used them, since I was still pretty young and unfamiliar with exploring that area of my body. I had gotten my period earlier than most in my grade, around the age of nine. An avid pad user at fourteen, I figured the real way to become a woman was to use a tampon. Unfortunately, when I finally mustered up the courage to try, I couldn’t figure out how to insert it in a way that wasn’t painful. I talked to my mom about it through the bathroom door, as she laid in bed after her most recent chemotherapy. The stairs had become difficult for her, and she rarely left her room. Days when I came home from school and found her on the living room couch were good days.

Yet my mom’s soft voice floated under the door: I want to help. She was crying.

I used to believe risk would announce itself with fanfare—a cliff edge, a trembling ultimatum, something you could point to as the hinge on which your life turned.

In childhood I imagined risk as a sort of mythic test: a figure standing in the threshold, asking if I was brave enough to continue. I thought it would feel loud. Definite. Something that glowed red at the edges and warned me, Pay attention—this is important.

Being a mother is difficult. I have always believed with enough unconditional love everything would turn out great for my own kids. So, when Lou, my youngest child, called and told us about their upcoming surgery, I felt honoured when they asked me to come and help them through their recovery. The long drive to Vancouver from Canmore gave me time alone to consider what was about to happen to my beloved child. That’s when the negative thoughts began to creep in about the risks of major surgery. I pushed them back, reminding myself this is Lou’s decision and I loved them enough to help them through no matter what.

It took seven years of therapy for me to recognize that the gaping wound in my heart is not the child of grief or exhaustion, but of a life un-lived. I have made no great mistakes or spoken the silent, shamed words of “I should not have done that.” I have not done anything. My emotional destruction has been predicated on loss, trauma, and frustration. I wish it was the result of having my heart broken by someone I was in love with, or being stuck in a cycle of taking drugs that will damage my brain by thirty, or spending money under the false notion that I have a six-figure salary. At least I would have proof I could endure risk and confront it with confident uncertainty.

I thought I’d finished coming out. I will be forty this year, and I spent my young adulthood struggling with my queer sexuality. There were the days of hiding and hoping no one would notice the desires that sometimes felt unnatural and unwanted, and the days of reveling in queer culture. There was the era in which I identified as bisexual, then lesbian, then bisexual again, until I eventually adopted “queer” a broad, fluid term applicable to anyone who isn’t straight. Coming out is a continuous process, but for the most part I felt like I was finished with slapping a label on my identity and presenting it to the world.