Dear Angel,

I am afraid you are going to come here like a drunk man fumbling in the dark for the small silver zipper of his button-fly jeans. I’m afraid you are going to come here and see the stream of hot piss on the wall that is how I feel about our history.

Hearing your voice after over two years, how strange and sad. I told myself I would not romanticize you again. I would not guilt-trip my way into a relationship of suppose to be balanced need that always ended up lopsided, a pile of shit dumped in my lap. I’m still angry with you. It seems.

I just wish I could articulate what I am so angry about without sounding like an ungrateful bitch who stole a baby from your womb and made a run for it.

It is complicated when you are around, when your name pops up in an e-mail box. It is like being back in that hospital room, watching from behind the glass window of the door, as you read to him from the book I left on the nightstand.

I hated you at that moment. I hated myself.

I took me a long time to find forgiveness for the jealousy I felt watching you soft-palm his tiny head in your hand ever so gently, all the while knowing your decision was still shaky sure. It took a long time for me to find forgiveness for my self, forgiveness enough to hold my son in the dark of a home I denied you entrance to. There were too many nights I could not help but break down and sob.

You gave me everything I am, and I took. I took. I took. I took from you. Do not pretend for a moment that you did not take from me too.

I do not know who you are. I thought I once did. Still, I look for you in him.

Is that you,the way he rubs his chin when he is deep in thought, the sound of his laughter when a silly joke is told? I do not deny you have a presence. The stranger that you are is the familiar that is my son.  Loving him is that way I know you without every really having to discover the truth of who you are. Sometimes I think that it is safer to hold you at this distance.

Still, I felt compelled to call you. I felt compelled to know that I did not wreck you by walking out of that hospital room with Bug resting in my arms. I want to believe that you have found love, that you have grown strong, that you have born your life against the wreckage of hospital scrubs, placenta, and umbilical cord.

I need to believe like I did that cottage day you showed up wearing flip flops the exact replica of mine. I try and remember how we sat in a garden and we talked about your plans for the future. I try and remember the way the air smelled like gardenia, but all I can think about are your lies.

I want to believe that when you write me an e-mail about your peanut you are trying to remind me of the first time we met, the Christmas lights on the snowy December drive, and the hoof-beat sound of his heart on the doppler machine we all heard together. You remind me three times of how hard it was for you to pick a family for your child and I get the distinct impression that you still view this as a competition.

I will not compete with you. You will always be his first mother. But, you chose to stand aside and allow me to be the mother who would be forever, now.  

I do not know how to move out of this spot I have been riveted to, one part painful recollection, two parts future fear. I do not know how to move towards you after so long spent in recoil.

I am certain that I no longer envy you your pregnancy the way I once did. I remember the huge plaster cast you made of your belly. You gave it to me the day we left the hospital. I had to hide my repulsion when you offered it to me as a gift. I did not want a reminder of your belly staring me flat in the face, mocking the places of my own body that were hollow. Back then, I wanted to erase the nine months you had spent with him. When we packed up all our things to leave the hotel room, I left your swollen pregnant belly behind for the maid to find. I was shaking off the imprint of you then.

Having given birth to a daughter who I love no less or more than Bug, to hold both of my children close, I know that biology does not dictate or determine the way that love can shape us. I no longer fear that silly plaster belly you painted the blue of your sky. I only have quiet sorrow over how much fear it once evoked in me, and the way I was so quick to discard it.

I do not want to be so quick in discarding you. I know I will never wash off, nor would I want to wash off, the imprint you have left upon my son. I am just not sure I have come to terms with my suspicions and my fear about your motives. I have to be certain that I can trust you enough to know that you will not use manipulation or deceit to ever hurt the people that I love. Most importantly, I have to make sure that the decisions we make now are in the best interest of my son.

I am so grateful that you carried him inside your belly, that you loved him enough to give him life. It just may take some time for me to know for sure, if you can respect the way he is now living it with me.

I want things; to lose 10 pounds, to have more babies, to own our own home instead of leasing. I want spring, so I can take my children outdoors to the local park with the sandy beach. I want to feed seagulls at the marina while we watch sailboats forever launching into the blue of the bay that stretches across to the barrier island. I want to buy a beach house, and write novels in an office that catches a salty breeze while my children run barefoot and shirtless along the shoreline, cupping the smooth pink underbellies of shells with their tiny hands.

I am all stretched out with this wanting.

My husband just found out that he has been accepted into a program that will secure him another degree, new credentials, and the potential for a six figure salary. We celebrate in the kitchen with Dixie cup champagne that is really apple cider.

We can buy our own house, fill it with more children. You wouldn’t have to work. You could focus on your writing. We could rent that summer house right on the beach.

His words are pretty promises.

I wonder if all the longing would go away if I was safely ensconced in a high-ranch home with custom hardwood floors? If my uterus could be filled up without my ass spreading, and my tits heading south, would I finally be happy? Will it take a book deal firmly in place before I learn to have belief in myself as a writer?

Maybe you shouldn’t do it. We would have to give up having our summers off together. The children would miss you. I would miss you. Maybe, this program is not for us.

I am gripped by the fear that we are getting this life all wrong. Have we become addicted to wanting? We wanted children and it was hard. We spent five years defining ourselves around the ache of my empty damaged uterus. We found purpose in adoption paperwork before our prepared parenthood. Then, we wanted Bug to have a sibling. We risked bringing our daughter safely into this world. It was this risk that gave us purpose, solidarity in the trials pregnancy forced us to endure.

Kel, all I want is for you and the children to be happy.

The children scamper roughly under our feet, jostling each other across the cheap linoleum of our kitchen floor. They beg for Goldfish with hands outstretched. We fill their pockets to overflowing. They leave the room satisfied.

What are you afraid of?

Bug not behaving in pre-school, the economy not re-bounding in time to save my job, being a sorta-single-stay-at-home-mom all summer long, cellulite, and the silent creep of cancer on my freckled skin, I mentally tick off the list of worries that keep me restless in the night. I know it is not any of these things that tie my tongue, and make it impossible for me to answer.

Bug comes running back into the kitchen, legs pumping, unrestrained.

More Momma More!

I stand speechless with a family-size box of Goldfish in my hands, trying to decide how much I should give him, wondering if enough will ever really be enough.

I am ashamed that I have baptized my children in the Roman Catholic Church. 

I stood on an ornately carved altar in the church I was raised in, with my family at my side, and I vowed as a mother to give my two children over to God.

Why did I do this?

I remember being in the 8th grade and going to meet with a nun before my confirmation. Shrouded in black habit, authoritarian and grizzled, Sister Katherine informed me that confirmation would make me a women in the eyes of the church. She then went on to tell me that my mother was most likely going to hell for having gotten her tubes tied.

I walked away from the church at 18 without a backward glance. I went to college where I found Eastern Philosophy and fell in love with a Jewish boy who liked to go on long walks and talk about the Tao Te Ching.  God was not an organized construct then. He, she, the energy of creation was everywhere for me. I found God in the shake of a tree limb, and the roll of a wave against a shoreline I would barefoot and explore.

How did I get from that barefoot college girl to the high-heeled mother making a vow to raise her children in the church?

Miscarriage. My three miscarriages made me angry and vulnerable. I laid in bed and cursed at God. I stood at my Grandfather’s gravesite carrying in my pocket the St. Christopher’s medal he gave me as a gift for my confirmation. I dipped myself  grief stricken against the cold marble of his headstone. I needed to believe that there was a force out there greater than myself, my broken body; something or someone that could bring me the thing I longed for the most. I sat in sturdy church pews at Christmas time and made a vow to give myself back to organized religion if only I would be granted forgiveness in the form of motherhood.

When my daughter was born, I went back.

We baptized the children on a Saturday afternoon. My Irish Catholic grandparents made the trip up from Virgina. I remember how proud my Grandmother was to pass on the heirloom baptismal dress the  17 grandchildren of our family had all worn. My daughter would be the first great-granddaughter bestowed with this honor.

I remember my former altar boy father expressing relief that his two grandchildren would not end up in the void of wingless purgatory. Carried on the back of nostalgia for the way I was raised, all those Sunday afternoons of sitting side by side with my parents signing church hymns with hands entertwined, I felt full and complete in the moment the priest blessed my babies with holy water. My children cried out in protest.

What about my own protest?

I kept trying to tell myself that I could be like my mother, who is pro-choice but goes faithfully to church and, as she tells it, prays in her own way. I held fast to the shaky belief that I could be a part of something even though I was adamantly opposed to the way priests walked clean after  multiple counts of molestation, and the church still would not accept and love the parts of their congregation who are gay.

I kept force feeding myself the lie I was raised on,  the lie that the church is about love, faith, and extended arms.

I can not continue on with that lie.

Recently, the Vatican has chosen to excommunicate a Brazilian woman and her nine year old daughter. The church has turned their back on this family because the mother allowed her daughter to abort her twin pregnancy.  Actually, the church has not turned their back on the entire family. Just the daughter and the mother. The church still has those arms wide open for the step-father.  That would be the same step-father who had been raping the little girl, who weighs in at only 80 pounds,  since she was 6 years old. That bastard is still welcome to take communion.

My stomach turns as I type this post.

There is no amount of  childhood nostalgia that will permit me to continue belief in an organization that grants forgiveness for a heinous rapist while shunning a victimized little girl.

I made the mistake of baptizing my children based on the nostalgia for the way I was raised in a loving family, and my overwhelming gratefulness that I was able to be a mother after many years of trying and three times loss. But as a mother, I owe it to my children to protect them from hate and lies. I owe it to my children to teach them the truth about a compassionate God, something I’m certain the Vatican knows nothing about.

We do not hold hands. We do not press our tongues together as the house lights dim. Our bodies keep their boundaries in these side by side seats. Your side popcorn and Diet Coke. My side Junior mints and water. When you ask for me to share, I do it begrudgingly. I like my candy all my own.

During the film, you lean over into my territory and you whisper,

Hey, why don’t you squeeze me some fresh juice in the mornings like this here Kate?

I am all straight-faced when I reply,

Be happy to, dear, just as soon as you look as hot as Leo.

I do not have to check your profile to know that you are laughing.

Later on in the car we analyze the characters’ motivations. Who was more sympathetic? Her need for something other than babies and tin-can trash in straight as narrow lines, against his need to believe the lie she mimes as he draws her a sketch on the cloth linen napkin of their morning after, this is all heavily debated.  

We both agree that it is a draw. Both heroes and villains.

Your hand shakes itself across the console. It finds the waiting warmth of mine. 

We are driving another road. Now, the kids are tucked tight in their car seats, asleep.

If we never achieved anything more than this, would it be enough? 

You have seen me struggle the past few weeks with my voice. I beg you day after day to take the kids out into the yard while I try to find the thread of this story. I am desparate to claim ownership of this slice of past and it makes me frustrated and short with the present. 

I need to write it down. I need someone to hear it. I need this to truly matter.

This is the mantra I repeat, even in my sleep.

There is not always room for you in this dreaming. But, there you always are.

 Even when I push you off to the periphery you are always at its core.

Would this be enough for me?  Daughter. Wife. Mother. Sister. Lover. Your Best Friend.  

My answer to your question is simple.

Everything that has ever mattered to me is right here in this car.

You smile and shake your head.

When we get home, you better get that fine ass of yours up to that computer and write it down.

This is me becoming. This is a testament to what we are, not a revolution baby, an evolution, quiet and more powerful by far.  

I have always been prone to aimless wandering, lazy-centric circles in spiral notebooks that should have held the sum of mathematical equations all lined up in ram-rod straight rows. I could never get my mind around the rigidity of numbers, pretending instead that the shape of all those open-curved twos in my algebra textbooks were leaping frogs. Eight times all those hump-backed amphibians let loose across the landscape of my page, squared, only amounted to a failing grade on my report card. What good does this imagining do me when in the real world I still can’t figure out how much less the shirt in my hand is going to cost me minus 25 percent?

I have no head for numbers. I tell this to the man who marries me. This is my way of begging his forgiveness for the impracticality of my degree in literature, the one that we will have to spend the next 10 years paying off in small increments.  What do I have to show for my knowledge of the functions of an arc, except for a proclivity towards sun-splayed floral comforters on king size beds and long days spent making love to literature?

Poetry?

There was a moment lost somewhere before this, a moment I am trying to recapture.  

I am going to be a writer

I tell this to my college advisor. I emphasize each word, as if just saying them aloud could suddenly transport me to my Manhattan rent-controlled apartment, a cramped loft I would share with four other women. We would sit around all hairy-legged, angst, drinking cheap wine out of a box, empty plastic glasses with sugar-encrusted rims toppling against the makeshift egg crate table. I would lean my spiral notebook against the wobbling frame as I penned the great American novel with a pencil that had no eraser. I would gladly put my trust in the number 2 if and when. All it would have taken was a second person to believe in me at that moment.

Do you know how many people actually make a living off of their writing? Do you know how talented you would actually have to be?

Actually?

 The nineteen year-old girl with the sweaty-palmed poem in her back pocket, tight-fisted her writing, and went into hiding. I used that number 2 pencil to bubble in the answers on the state certification exam. I became a teacher in the suburbs instead.

Regret?

It all depends on what you do with it. And so, I write it down.

This blogging becomes the practical, the bastion to protect the dream.  

I share with you the choices we make each day: one pigtail or two in my daughter’s reckless hair. Should I have that extra slice of pizza? How many times can I hit snooze? Where will we place our naked bodies when we come together this way we pray in side by side skin? Which hand is mine to hold? There is frugality and excess both in these dream as yet unraveling.

Nothing is inconsequential.

Anything worth believing will not be spared in verse.  

When I was having the first of three miscarriages, sitting on the couch stuffing ice cream in my mouth, and sobbing at all the EPT commercials on television, a bloody maxi pad tucked between my legs, I got a phone call from someone close to me. She was pregnant, young, scared, and about to have an abortion. She wanted me to console her. She wanted me to wrap my arms around her and rock away the regret. I remember wanting to slap her. Instead, I spoke calmly through clenched teeth. I told her it was going to be okay, assured her that I loved her, even as I felt the soft spots of my heart, that once she had claimed, hardening against the impact. It was not fair of her, of me, of circumstance. But, this is how it was.

Two miscarriages, an oncologist office, and a handful of “experts” later, they told me I would never be a mother, not in the traditional sense that I had always imagined when I was young and reckless with the way I used my body. Instead, I pinned my hopes to adoption, on an 18 year-old girl. She wore a tiny bikini the weekend that we met, and swam beside me in the hotel pool. She just knew she could never have an abortion, not with all those couples eager and waiting. She wanted, instead, to give a gift. I thought about her capacity for bravery, and all I could do was hug her, go back to my hotel room, and cry.

When my son was born, and the nurses called me Mommy, the woman who carried him for nine months and pushed him out into this world, lay weary in her bed beside us. The beginnings of her loss were already creeping across the hospital room. I just could not see it. I did not think her choice was anything but noble, me being on the receiving end of it. We celebrated with popsicles sticks that left our fingers sticky and blue, and I tried not to see the way her mother had to hold her up, her unsure legs too shaky for the long walk to the parking lot, unassisted. In the months that went by, her grief only grew. It became something large and imposing, threatening the fragile bonds that we had established all those months that she had been convinced the choice would be an easy one, but turned out never to be. My son is a gift she gave me, but at what cost to herself? That is the question left unanswered between us.

I did not want to acknowledge the loss. I just wanted the simple celebration that I thought should be my right as a new mother. For a long time, I was so thankful for my son’s birthmother’s decision that every time I heard the word abortion I considered it a slight against the blonde-haired child that I held in my arms, and sang lullabies to against the backdrop of silence, in the nursery with the walls I had painted in blue. I felt abortion was a kick straight to the empty damaged uterus that I carried inside my body. How could a woman be selfish enough to have an abortion when adoption was an alternative, when couples waited years to fill their homes with the pitter patter of little feet, when my son was alive and growing strong because of his birthmother’s choice?

This answer is simple.

Those women are not me. They have their own paths, their own reasons, their own stories to tell. If I keep sitting here in judgment, expecting them to make determinations with their body based on the heartbreak of my own, than I have no right to call myself mother, sister, and friend. I dishonor the pain that my son’s birthmother suffered when she let Bug go, with nothing but the hope he might come back to thank her for it, when I expect every woman faced with this decision to choose as she did. Adoption is not an easy choice, and not the only one worth making.

The truth is that these decisions are never simple. I know that. And this is why I write these words down, and will my heart to listen. I want to be supportive when I learn that there are women who live both with or without regret for their abortions or for giving births or for placing their child for adoption. I have to remember that we are all differnt in our lifestyle choices and for some women the only choice is not to pursue motherhood at all. I need to support all women. If I do not reclaim the roots of my own pro-choice beliefs, even though my own life has made abortion a non-alternative, I will be the one stuck carrying around a regret that should not belong to any of us.

The children find the secret room, and make a shape of conspiracy with the fingers of both hands; they beg to be admitted. So, Daddy takes them to the attic to search for buried treasure. That night, we sit in front of the television and watch old movies found in the bottom of boxes, underneath the horizontal stripes of sweaters that are no longer fit. 

A flash on the screen, and I am dressed in ivory and expectation, standing saying my vows to love and cherish forever.  I look close and wonder at the girl who did not know of bloodstains before babies, social worker visits, and a judge to finally make it so. I figured it would be easy. And in many ways, it was. It is human nature to edit our own history, and so I do. I tell the story of Bug being born, and how the nurses called me Momma, and that they placed him in my arms. I am careful to omit the shadow lying silent in the room, how I turned my back so she could not see him while I memorised the lines of his face, furtively and claiming. There is no video for this. But, this is how it was. And it was because I willed it.

It is not chance that finds me typing on the keys while the children sit all Indian-knees on the rough pine boards of the attic floor, and their father keeps their interest with guitar strings and buffalo pennies. I have always been the object of purpose-driven space. When I was 13, I watched them at the food court, how he brushed the damp hair from the nape of her neck, and rubbed the swelling of her belly, I knew this was what I wanted. I knew I would have both. This family in my making was a start of some deep longing I could not ignore.

And as it was with love, it will be with art. I could not dream this dream before. I was too busy with the building of a family, needing their tiny arms to pull me down from where I had placed myself on a shelf, forgotten along with the spiral notebooks that followed after princess diaries of glittery pink with golden keys. I could not dream this until you came and filled the empty spaces. And, so now that I am more than the sum of my own body, and time stretches herself like a too thin blanket that barely covers my feet, the need is stronger than it has ever been, to brush the cobwebs and the dust of too many years accumulation of denial, and welcome me back into the equation that is us.

And because I know that there is no such thing as luck, as putting on a Marvin Gaye cd to drink a bottle of wine, and love my way into a baby, but instead I have to search and yearn, and seize what was not mine, because I could not help but love him, I know this other journey may not be easy. But, I have never been afraid of troubled births.

I can tell you that I am sorry, but what would it mean. I am not sorry that I am here, now. And, I am here because I willed it. The wanting makes it so.

I tell my husband to bring the babies into the secret room, where they surrounded themselves with moth balls and old newspapers clippings. I listen to them sing, as their daddy strums a shaky melody on the guitar, and I re-write our history, one simple truth at a time.

I found myself a stranger in a strange land.

Surrounded by beer cups, frat boys, and too many visible thongs, I did the only thing a sensible girl could do. I focused on the music.

I tried to ignore the meaty-pawed line backer who was salivating to get down my blouse.

I vowed never to let my new college roommate set me up with any of her friends, again.

I made a mental note to use her toothbrush to get the vomit stain off my sweater. That is what I got for trying to help the dizzying redhead, in the bathroom, hold back her stiff aqua-net hair as she puked up a plate of macaroni laced with tequila and Jim Beam.

What else could I do but focus on the music?

He stood on the makeshift stage with a guitar that had clearly been loved like a fine, fine, woman, and he sang. His voice was half heartache and half jubilation. It would have been mesmerising if he had not been getting it all wrong.

He played and he pandered, Jonas Brothers where there should have been Dylan.
I hated him for it.

When he ended his first set, I snaked over and whispered in his ear. Like some modern day Eve, I tempted him with this,

“You are better than this moment. You should never play that damn guitar without soul, again.”

I whispered it in his ear and I walked away.

Then we were Tangled Up In Blue, together. I verged on weeping in a bar barely lit to camouflage my sins.

That song was forgiveness.

That song stopped the crowd dead. They turned their eyes away from the liquor and their lust.

The room stood still.

The singer crooned and for a moment every sentence made sense.

For a moment, until….

The drunken crowd revolted. They threw stale beer. They booed. They stamped their feet like petulant children denied a second cookie after a meal.

The moment was ruined.

After the song limped to conclusion, the musician, with eyes now glazed, returned to his best of pop cliches. The crowd returned to licking the salt off of the chest of big breasted waitresses.

I left the bar where couples stood with their arms intertwined, either in loving embraces or as structural support, and with nothing but my own teenage angst to keep me warm, I walked home alone in the rain.

15 years later, I wonder about the choice of The Jonas Brothers or Dylan. And I realize, it still really does matter to me, after all.

Belief does not always fall in a straight line that we can follow like the rosary beads my great grandmother passed on to my mother, then to me, the rosary beads I used to pray with each night before I went to sleep, back before I had ever heard words like abortion, birth control, and sin.

Belief is easy when you are 2 and 5 and 10. Even at 12, I found comfort in the ritual of incense and wine, bread that dissolved on my tongue, 10 Hail Marys under a wooden crucifixion.

Belief was mine.

The college girl that fell in love with Kafka, walked across a campus in thick woolen sweaters, wearing socks with Birkenstocks, carrying a tattered copy of the Tao Te Ching, did not have God on her syllabus, then.

For so long, the only image of God that I could muster came chained to the doctrines of a church I had lost faith in, a church that demanded ownership of a woman’s body, along with her soul. I could not pray to a god that would dictate love as only between a man and a woman. The type of God that I wanted to worship did not judge.

I saw no God like that in the bible I still had in the nightstand of my family home. I heard no God in the sermon in the church that I was baptised in.
I felt no God in my heart at all.

My God was gone. But, belief does not always fall in a straight line that we can follow with the tip of our finger or the wag of the tongue.

I used to lay in bed at night, the loss of three children behind me, gone like three red balloons tied to the anchors of my heart, and I would wonder and worry about the choice that Angel would have to make, the choice that would or would not make me the mother to Bug, the child that I had already loved.

In the silent desperation of one lonely night, I called out, to fashion something from nothing. I begged God to send me a vision, some sign that Bug would be mine.

That night, I woke up with my back against a belief brought to me in the dream of a tiny child, swaddled in a blanket, soft and new to the world.

When Bug was born, when the nurses cleaned him up, wrapped him tight, put him in my arms, I knew him. I had seen that face before. That little boy was suppose to be mine.

It is easy to believe in God when you are holding your fresh, sweet-faced child, packing up the blankets and bottles that will line the shelves of the nursery you have decorated, the nursery where you have spent hours sitting in silence, praying against the wooden rocking chair your father has built with his own two hands for the grandson he too has dreamed of, calling out to God.

Belief comes natural to you then. But, belief is not a straight line that we can follow like the rosary beads your mother was given by your grand-grandmother, the beads she has passed on to you.

When you enter the hospital room to say goodbye to a young girl, a woman on the verge of bloom, who has come to be your Angel, the woman who is making the greatest sacrifice of all, and you find her cradling the tiny child that is the exact replica of your vision in the night, and you notice how perfectly he fits in her lap, and how she so easily supports his tiny head in her one shaking hand, while the other hands turns the pages of The Giving Tree, you can not help but be wrecked by the tears that fall from her eyes like unanswered prayers, and the voice that breaks in the sermon of her grief.

It is then when you grasp for something akin to belief, and you are left with no faith at all.

There are things that we do not speak of. This is one of them.

The ringing phone slices through the cold silent night. You are somewhere I am not. I am struggling to hear you in this distance.

“I can not stop the bleeding. I am so scared.”

Your voice, each word folding in on itself, collapsing like a house of cards, stuns me.

And then I am right there with you in your terror, though separated by an hour times eight.

All I wanted was to throw my arms around you, and bring back the night we ate our dinner underneath the dinning room table. We believed nothing in the world could scare us as much as the storm that was raging around us, battering the windows and doors.

I wanted you to stand before me with your orange popsicle lips and tell me you were only kidding, that you were not, at that moment, bleeding a shadow of yourself onto your mother’s newly carpeted floors.

I wanted. We both did.

I did not get to you that night, or the nights after. They would not let me come to you.

“It would be too much. He needs to be left alone, right now. You will only make it worse.”

For a long time I believed that it was my fault. I should have been better, loved harder, listened more.

For a long time, I could not stand the sound of a ringing phone.

That was a long time ago.

I hope you know how thankful I am that you are in my life. I want you to know how proud I am of the man that you have become.

I want to tell you all of this, pull you back under that dinning room table, throw open all those windows and doors.

But, I cannot. There are still some things we just don’t talk about.

Maybe, we should.