I aligned myself with all men—I aligned myself with none. As a young adult, I entered and exited relationships. I had a child out of wedlock. I lived with two men, each of them, for a year. None of my love affairs ever rooted. I was left a couple times, but generally I was the one who made a rapid retreat.
Four for me was the ideal number of children to bring a lot of amazing people into the world without being dragged down to the bottom of a pit of overwhelm. I never expected that having only two children would have been too much.
Now the trees moving in hard gusts fill my hollow heart with longing for my cape-wearing, puddle diving boy, lost to me in a storm that ruined those sounds forever.
I see a picture of Dyson lying there. Head resting on a white towel, eyes blank and devoid of that teasing joy that he gets when he sees my granny’s face. White fur blending into the sandy brown coat. I can’t believe he is gone, but…but… wait! Why in the world am I looking at a picture of a dead dog?
It didn’t occur to me then that my anxiety was a bad thing, or that it even was anxiety. I only knew that getting up super early to shower, or sleeping in my school uniform were things that worked like a soothing balm to my churning insomniac-worry. The only way to calm my rapidly beating heart = to be extra early prepared.
Love the mothers of the violent and the mothers of the victims. Love the mothers who are martyrs, warriors, saviors, and enablers. Love the mother of the boy who asked your daughter for naked pictures.
“Which one is it?”
“I don’t know the difference. It’s the one with the scope. What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”
She had found the twenty-two, which meant Don had the shotgun. My life as I knew it was over.
When my parents sat me down at our kitchen table in the summer of 1982 to say that their marriage was over, there was major upside to the news — the next day, I was going to the Magic Kingdom. I knew something "bad" was happening, but a trip to Disney World? Come on! What could be better than that?
For the first twelve years of my life, I went to bed afraid. As a child I was always squinting at shadows, searching for something sinister in the dark, feeling certain that soon I would be hurt, irreparably and forever.
He was a dragon. I didn’t know it at the time, but he really was; charming, elusive, deceptive, and dangerous. Perhaps he had half a conscience, or more likely he derived pleasure from toying with women; either way, he warned me that he was a “bad guy.” He said that he was “a kind of a monster,” and that if I hung out with him, I “might get hurt.”
She told me it stopped growing the day before, that it had a small cyst on the chest, that this, the end, was inevitable. She stopped to look at my face. Is this too much information? She asked, gently.
No, I said. This is helpful.
This is just a random defect. A failure of mitosis, she told me. It happens in sixty percent of all miscarriages.
If I had nothing to obsess over I might have to discover if I am good at other things. I would not have any excuse for failure. And if I am purely joyful I might not be ready when everything is taken away from me.
