I’ll never forget the way he cringed and the overwhelming feeling of needing to save him, but having to remain in my seat. Maybe it was both of us, but maybe it was just me. His love hurt.
Probably because it was so true. I digress. I dissect.
The day my mother left, she left me also with an absence, a space, a thing that would always be mine. She left, and in her place was a gift of yawning want that I carry with me like a precious stone. This is my story. The day my mother left is a story. It is every story I’ve ever written. I can write 500 stories, but they will all begin with the day my mother left. It is the only story. It is everyone I’ve ever loved. It is everyone I’ve ever lost. It is everyone I’ve ever left.
Our lives are our stories and our stories are our lives. We rise each morning and put pieces of them on before venturing out into the wide, wild world, gauging the impact of our footsteps, our walks, and our shadows. On our way home after a full day of becoming, we glance at the reflections of others in the subway windows and assure ourselves that we know the stories they wear as well.
I picked up the thermometer by the bedside table and shook it. Every day I took my temperature and recorded it on grid paper, trying to determine when I was ovulating. Sam and I lived in a Victorian split long ago into an apartment on each floor. Our bedroom was off the kitchen, with a tall, gated window covered by a curtain I’d sewn.
. I think it turns out that the only way I can make peace with this dead woman is to make sure that I don’t repeat her mistakes while I’m still alive
When I was five years old, I saw my mother for the last time. She walked out the door, leaving my father, brother, sister and I in her wake. When I say my mother walked out on me, I mean she quite literally shut the door as I was looking in her eyes, pleading her to stay.
I always wanted to be a mother. When I was a little girl, when the guy on TV asked, “It’s 7pm, have your hugged your child today?“ I would hug my belly because my mother told me we are born with all of our eggs. Straddling my infant son five times a day, holding his body down as I pulled his neck from side to side to reteach his muscles, having to find just the right time to balance his hysteria, not too close to a feeding or a nap, so he won’t vomit, so he won’t miss sleep. The guy on TV didn’t say anything about that.
Sex therapists sometimes counsel struggling couples to focus not on orgasms or intercourse, but on reconnecting first through simple, nonsexual touch. I am trying my own version of this.
This time I’m forced to choose a chair directly across from this complete stranger who knows nothing about me or my life or what I’ve been through, and yet is about to size me up based on a few canned questions. There’s no hiding now. I may as well be sitting there naked.
The summer after twelfth grade was all red light, green light. We both took jobs as swim instructors at our school’s day camp, teaching three year olds to “swim” by blowing bubbles in the too cold mornings and too sweaty afternoons. You told me we should carpool, you know, you said, to help the environment.
