One snowy night we were out having a snowball fight. He was wet and tired and had been pummeled one too many times. He got angry and hurled a ball of ice at my head with just a bit too much intent. He missed, but it came close enough to make me really angry and I marched him home into the temporary custody of a makeshift jail that I constructed out of two chairs.
Should I even bother trying for the good stuff? This is the part where I’m supposed to reverse all that, right? Tell myself I am actually successful. Tell myself I am actually on ‘the right path’?
I was 20 when I first traveled abroad to France. While most of my peers were in their junior year, I was a senior. Shy and uncertain, I had listened to friends talk about their study abroad trips in a way that made me feel not only like I could do it, but like I had to do it. It was the first time I’d associated risk with reward.
As I look out at the black water, I think of my mother, whose ashes I have not yet scattered. I still dream of her, still awaken screaming her name. “It’s okay,” Carl murmurs to me in the middle of the night, even though we both know it will never be okay that she is gone. At 25, I have no parents to speak of, not even in the divine sense, the way Christians I interview on my religion beat talk about God as everyone’s father.
Then came Sunday, I had found a tiny country place that would take reservations for all of us that afternoon but I still hadn't purchased a gift nor even a card for "the mothers." Not a big surprise as some days I was actually proud of myself for just brushing my teeth let alone leaving the house. Sad, but true.
I can go on social media right now and find countless mom-shamers with thousands of followers, you know…the ones who only let their children play with wooden toys, wouldn’t even speak the words “formula fed,” and have a PhD in being a perfect fucking parent.
Abuse is insidious. It doesn’t spring full blown. It begins with moments that you want to understand, that you want to overlook, that you want to see as momentary, excusable aberrations.
That morning, my brother stole the chapter book I was reading and wouldn’t give it back. I grabbed his worn out teddy bear and positioned my left hand like a claw over the bear’s head to rip it off. It was a hostage situation and we negotiated it like the villains we were.
At present, I am still on good terms with them, at a surface level. Underneath, though, there is a build-up of feelings I've never experienced before, so much anger and pain.
. To put it even more simply: I'm a mutant and my guts are evil. If I don't agree to the surgical removal of the remaining colon and undergo a total hysterectomy then my own cells are going to kill me. In my estimation this is not as cool as being one of The X-Men.
You can't fail at Nothing, where I was deposited. No, Nothing is the arms of the Great Mother, where those suffering in labor must turn. It is there waiting with all your failures past and future, and they crumble at Nothing's feet, like burnt toast.
‘You know, I waited outside St. Vincent's hospital for days.’ My dad would say. He often liked to recount where he was when Dylan Thomas died. ‘I only left to go to the White Horse, because that was the only place to go that made sense... I stood outside and waited, and waited, until they finally declared him dead. And then I went home.’
