Take, for example, Joanna Gaines’ perfectly appointed farm house sink, tiny bean sprouts perched prettily all in a row on the ledge behind it. Planted by her daughter. My girls, they planted seedlings once. They mildewed and drowned in their own Dixie cups. The seedlings. Not my daughters. I did manage to keep them alive. So there’s that. And they are currently beautiful and independent and flourishing, even if their little bean sprouts never made it. So, yeah -- there’s that.
If something happens, maybe you will be believed the first time you tell your story. Maybe your words will be all the proof they need. Maybe your voice will not ever be muffled, or bought. Maybe your body will not be consumed, or judged, or hurt, or caught.
Settling down into the couch for another episode of Black Mirror, I put the first bite into my mouth and tears began to well up in my eyes. Something about the way the food was stirred all together like that, the staleness of the reheated sauce, the slightly cold film that had already started forming on the top due to my futzing around and not eating it while it was hot, and I was immediately transported to my mother’s dining room table.
I also taught my Mom to not freak out when her two-year-old granddaughter says fuck in the produce department at Safeway because it will just give the kid the reaction she was looking for and make her say it again and again and again.
We all know what it’s like to lose Damon. But we don’t know how that feels to one another. We don’t know what that accident caused in one another, what has happened since that time.
You are the embodiment of hope, happily wriggling around in your safe cocoon for the past 38 weeks. It is different on the other side, and I will do my best to be different for you. I don't want to be controlled by fear anymore. I want to find a way to heal, for you. Perhaps you, along with your brothers, can help me with that.
Four decades ago, I was the last third-grader standing on the street corner staring down the bungalow-lined street on that cloudless-sky Saturday, the day before Father’s Day. Dad had told Mom that he’d pick me up from choir practice, since she couldn’t leave her second job, handing the dentist his sterilized tools. I hoped he hadn’t stopped at Foley’s for a boilermaker—downing a shot and chasing it with an Old Style. Pacing in front of the church, I must have straightened out my pink sleeveless dress with its white Peter Pan collar and sash around my waist a hundred times. I didn’t want to sit on the pavement and get it dirty. Dad didn’t pay child support, so Mom could only afford to buy me one new frock each year.
I can feel the breath of anxiety on the back of my neck, so often. It tries to sneak up but I can feel it coming. It starts with a little alertness, a heightened awareness of my surroundings, of every sound and motion. It’s a quickening of the pulse, a fleeting feeling that I need to go — but where? to do what?
Out of the island and into the fire. Deep and scorching. Barren, yet with brains tightly coiled with unrest, ideas, brimming with creativity. She won’t blow them out with a shot gun like great aunt Lorraine. No, it won’t be anything like that, don’t worry.
It dawned on me as I told her that I was going to skip dinner tonight that Ana was back. It was a comforting moment in my life, a calming moment in my life and an exciting moment in my life. My best friend was back.
Of course bad things will happen, in large or infinitesimal degrees. I don’t want anything to happen to my daughter, but if it does, what I want most is that she can rely on that sense of dignity that has escaped me. I want her story, whatever it is, to be taken seriously, whatever that means.
