In the garden of simple/where all of us are nameless/you were never anything but beautiful to me-Ani Difranco

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Oh she is so beautiful, the sales-lady says.

She leans toward us with floral polyester she masquerades as silk in break room conversation between the stubbed ends of borrowed cigarettes. I recoil from her perfume. It permeates the space between where I stand, disheveled at the counter, a box of generic tampons in hand, and where she rests her lacquered finger nails against the click-click-clacking of her cash registering machine.

Just beautiful. She says it again, and I watch her mouth bloom the color of hibiscus. 

Butterfly sits in the cart. Her eyes a very blue astonishment.  Her lips, the pucker of her unadorned mouth, the dart of her small tongue, rolls the word back and forth.

My daughter just turned two. Suddenly she is new, long and lean. I wonder where the chubby infancy has gone. On her birthday, I think about her birth. How they placed her all angry squirm on my chest, and I recoiled. There were months when I did not know just how the two of us would ever belong to one another. There is a part of my heart that sags as I write these words. Post-partum made me a puppet, and depression pulled my strings.  It wasn’t me. Someday she will read this blog, I hope, and I want her to forgive me.

I want her to see my now in some far off future. I want her to feel what I feel as I write these words, both weeping and laughing at the enormity of how I love her. My Butterfly. My girl.  Every sentence here is measured against the impact of who she will become as she grows into the shape of her own womanhood. 

I want to promise her things, like that I will never show up at PTA with botox or a boob job. I want her to know that I have been planning the cd of songs I will give to her the day that she leaves for college, since before she turned a year old. I want her to roll her eyes with exasperation that masks her tender pride over the fact that I sometimes cry when I listen to Ani Difranco or Regina Spektor, thinking we might pass lyrics between us like soft secrets whispered to bended ears.

I want to give my daughter a world without misogyny. I want to pass down a pair of thick black shit-kickers she can use to stomp her presence known to those in society that will expect her always soft and pink. I want her strong enough to tell me she wants pom-poms and lipstick, even though she knows it will wreck my stubborn heart. I do not want her to fear her shadow or the sound of her own voice. And so I tell her, as often as I can, that she is more.

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I said baby show me what you look like without skin-Ani Difranco

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I Beeeeeyoutooooful!

She tells me this as I pull her from the bathtub. Her tiny, naked body splays droplets of bathwater on the rug. I try and wrap her in a towel. She growls and escapes.  She runs across the bedroom giggling, away from my diapered hands.   

I Beeeeyoutoooful!

When she is laughing, I laugh with her.

You are, my darling girl. You are so Beeeeeyoutooful!  And, you are smart too.

You are so very smart, my sweetheart. And that is good, better than good,  smart is the very best of all.

Smart is something more.

**********************

You know they never really owned you/you just carried them around/and one day you put them down and found your hands were free/Your hands were free-Ani Difranco

**********************

Happy Birthday to my darling daughter, who taught me what it means to have my own hands be free, by allowing me to wrap her safely inside my arms.

Where Daddy?

My daughter wakes up every morning and this is the first thing that she asks. The eight hours of her sleep is too long spent away from the object of her affection. I used to be jealous of the way my daughter always wanted the strong arms of her Daddy, the scratching of his beard against her morning kiss. I used to be jealous, until I thought about this…

I was raised by a man with dirt under his nails. When I was small, my father worked three jobs to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. He often came home after working the night shift that turned to day then tumbled tired night again, only to fall asleep in his soup bowl. This was no disrespect to my Momma’s home cooking. It was just his sheer exhaustion.

My father used a hammer and nails to build my mother a coffee table for their first apartment. Later, he would build her the house that I grew up in. I like to imagine him at 19, meticulously sanding down the wood, whittling away at the curved lines of that first table. This was the poem he would create as a means to love my mom. He does not believe in wasting words.

My own children sit at that very table, now the centerpiece of my living room, and they color pictures for their Grandpa. He always brings them white-powered doughnuts every time he comes to visit them during the week. I come home from work to find them all wide-open grins of white sugar smiles. It is a tell-tale sign that they have spent a happy hour with their Pa.  That they love him more than any other person in their lives makes perfect sense for anyone who sees it.

My father taught me how to body surf. He would bring my brother and I to the ocean, weekends in the summer. He would show us how to throw our bodies in time with the waves. He had mastered the art of allowing himself to be caught up in the perfect trajectory. We would ride along with him, hurtling rocket-quick into the white foam before beaching on the shoreline with bellies turned to kiss the sky. I attribute my love of water to the way my father taught me to read a ripcurrent, to understand how the cycle of tides is controlled by the ebb and flow of the moon. 

My father is a man of science and hard fact, but he always encouraged the mystic, the poet, the daydreamer that was me, his only daughter.

I do not fear men, even after sexual assault, and a rough few years of giving myself away in an attempt to discover what was worthy of loving. Sticky bar floors and dirty bathroom fucking could not displace what I knew about men at the core, from watching the way my father takes my mother’s hand after 34 years of marriage, smiles as if it is as new as the first time.

You do not forget that you are worth something, even if the memory is long buried under your grief. I had a father that never raised a hand or a voice to any of us. My father would stay up late after a never-ending shift of dirty laborious work to patiently explain math problems or to help me rehearse for a school play. 

My father took me for a long drive when I came home from college. I was all aflutter with the news of the dread-locked boy who wrote me poetry and kissed me sweet under the lamplight on a twilight evening at the college campus that was 7 hours away from home.  My father told me confident that he would always love me. Four years later, we would drive alone in an old expensive car, hands clasped tightly to the other. When we arrived in front of the tiny historic chapel, he laughed and said it was not too late for me to turn back and go home. What I heard was him telling me that the choices I made each day of my life would always be my own.

It is not difficult to be fearless growing up my father’s daughter.

Where my Daddy?

I go to find my own daughter waiting impatient behind the baby gate at the top of the stairs. I pick her up. I kiss her cheeks. I breathe her in. I tell her sure, Your Daddy is downstairs, baby.

I carry her down and put her in the arms of the man that I have married. I place my daughter safe against his chest.  I stand back watching, now proud instead of jealous, certain about what I am seeing. I head into the kitchen to call my father. I call to tell him Good Morning, but what I am really thinking is that I am so thankful for all that he has done.    

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.

I am in the middle of writing it down.

I am elbows deep in the history of us. There are seven pages and no definite ending. 3,598 words dedicated to the way I love my son, how I grew to hate sharing him with another woman. 

My story, the accumulation of how selfish I was, is destined for publication. People are going to be reading this. My son will know the truth.

The process of writing this story, mining up mixed feelings as revelations on the page, makes me overly-sensitive. I sit staring at my computer screen tender as a bruise. I want this story to be the best thing that I have ever written. To be worthy enough it has to be true. The truth can be ugly sometimes. I have been taught that it isn’t lady-like to parade around my scars.  

Yesterday, I celebrated my 34th birthday. My husband had to work late. It was just me and the children. At 4:30, there was a knock on our front door. My parents arrived with helium balloons and the promise of ice cream Fribbles at Friendlys. I found myself overcome with emotion. It’s just ice cream at a chain restaurant frequented by five year olds, some part of my heart was telling me this, but I gave the moment the power to be so much more. My parents did not want me to be alone on my birthday. This was my proof of how much they love me. Suddenly it was me who felt five years old.  

In the restaurant, when Bug is wild and reckless, grabbing hastily for packets of pre-measured sugar, and refusing to sit politely in his seat, my parents shake their heads and ask for the ice cream to go. I apologize over and over for the simple fact that my son is 2 and a half years old. It turns out not to be a celebration at all. On the ride home, all I feel is disappointment.  

I do not want my son to be disappointed. This fear has stalled my efforts to finish this important piece of writing. I stare at the computer screen and I time travel 10, 11, 12 years ahead to our future. I imagine Bug holding my heart bound in hardcover. He recites aloud the paragraphs I have written, before he tells me I am not his real mother, that I never was.

I am his mother now, and apparently for some, I am not doing the best job of it.

I guess it would have been easier on everyone if Bug had just sat calmly in the restaurants and scooped up his applesauce with a spoon.

But this is not how our story happened.

I feel beholden by my love for my son, to tell it all as true.

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.  

We have entered into the stage of why and how? This is a new terrain of accountability. I find myself off balance.

How make snow, Mommy?

The first time it snowed in my motherhood, Bug was only five-months-old. I bundled him thick and warm and took him outside. I let the snow bless him; snowflakes on skin as translucent as weather. Back inside, I laid him safely on my chest. I told him make believe stories of fairy-tale queens who swept their crystal-tipped wands to dust the backyard to powder while little boys slept.

How make snow, Mommy?

Cumulus

Stratus

Cirrus

Nimbus. 

I do not have the answers.

I want to know how long my mythology can stretch before he comes looking for the fast and the firm. I am grabbing up the years with greedy hands, tallying on my fingers how long will I remain his magic. 

Before the bells ring and the steady stream of thick yellow buses come to take him to straight as row classes with teachers who smell of some foreign perfume, I want to be the one to tell him stories, stories as little bits of soul confetti that stick in random places, the curve of his elbow or the bottom of his shoe. I want to give him magic as something tangible he can carry into a world he will grow up to learn as fact.

Bug presses his face up against the window. He asks. 

How make snow, Mommy? This is what my son wants to know.

So… I show him how to write the letter of his first name in the pattern his breath fogs on the glass. In the curve of his tiny J, there is the swish-swish-swishing tail of a monster.

I will this simple picture to evaporate, slowly, slowly, slowly, slow.  

I tell my son a story about the way the snow falls.

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I may lie to myself, to others, but never to you.

People, inconsequential people, have wondered, some have even dared to ask the question,

Do you love your son as much as you love Butterfly? Is there any difference in the way you raise him, ya know, being that he is adopted?

I spit at them, NO! There is no difference! 

This is the lie.

You and Butterfly run into the playroom carrying dolls. You beg for me to stick them against your skin, tight against your tummies, held up by your printed tees. You are both fascinated by babies, clamoring to be Mommy, you ask…

Sis in Momma’s belly? 

We have had this talk before. I dread it each time. 

Yes, baby. Sissy grew in Mommy’s belly.

You smile at this.

I in Momma’s belly?

You are so hopeful when you ask. It is this look of hope that crushes me every time.

I  want to whisper what comes next, soften the sound of the blow. I don’t. I say it smoothly. I smile. 

No baby, Momma had a boo-boo in her belly when Momma tried to make a baby. I could not carry you in my belly, my love. So, Angel grew you in her belly for Momma and Daddy.

I reach out to hug the hurt away. You pull away sharply, the only time you do not let me touch. You stomp your feet.

NO! I IN MOMMA’S BELLY!!! 

I move in close to your ear, circle my body tight against yours, try and melt the tense and toughened sinew back to the softness of your baby bones. I tell you the truth.

I know baby. I know. I wish you had been in my belly too. But, I love you. I love you. I love you. Nothing changes that.

You relent. You melt into my lap as if you did in fact grow there. We let the question go, for now.

I do not lie to you, my darling boy. But, I do lie to others. I tell them there is no difference. I know there is. The truth is that sometimes my heart just breaks for you a little bit more.

Is the crook of my arm really that powerful?

I heard her before I saw her, the frantic feet against the floorboards.

Mommy, Hep me! Hep me!

She has taken to this saying with the thickness of its distress, as if there is no greater need than to find the waiting warmth of my body. I scoop her up and she wraps the length of little girl arms around my neck.

The race car bed can wait. I think.

 I carry her to my bedroom, the one I share with my husband, who sleeps soundly through it all. Once between the sheets, she refuses to disentangle, needing hair and skin and the smell of freshly brushed teeth to lay itself on the tender spot behind her left ear. She buries herself in the crook of my right arm and she is satisfied. She does not care that this hinders me from laying in the position I most like, sidesaddle to my pillow, firmly pressed to the length of my husband’s body, legs tucked underneath, blanket balanced with delicacy over both of our chins. She does not have a care. She is with her mother.

I do not sleep well, worrying that if I shift my weight she will wake.  I worry about the way I will have to sneak my arm out from under her at the first sign of the sun, to get ready to go back to work, to go, to leave her. I have to leave both of my children in the morning, and I resign myself to this fact, in the long hours of the night, as my eyes become grainy and burn, and sleep remains elusive. I have to leave my children. I am past the point of thinking it is what is best for them.

 Does any parent really know for sure? I want to comfort myself with belief that these choices I am making are the right ones. I want the assurance that my children will grow to be love and compassionate. I want the simple act of taking my child into my bed, cradling her in my arms, forsaking my own measure of sleep, a will to make it so.

A man was killed in a town not far from me. He was beat down because of the color of his skin. I tell my husband to be careful when he goes out at night to jog, worrying that the sort of men who would perpetrate this type of violence would not stop to ask questions about the shade of my husband’s Mediterranean skin, would not be assuaged when he proclaimed that he was simply a white Jewish boy. There is no way to fast talk against the sharp point of a knife buried into flesh when it is wielded by uncaring hands. Hate like that is colorblind, but just using the convenient excuse of color. What creates hatred like that?

Every moment we are growing and in that growth there is this becoming. I have come to believe that it is the relationships that most define the adults we morph into.  We, women who become the mothers we said we never would be, fall in love with men with the same worn dirty hands of our father’s five to eleven. We alternately stretch and revert back or against the patterns that were laid out before we were even a cell that began to divide.

I wonder about the parent who raises a monster.  Can they pinpoint the slip? Was it the moment they turned away due to the dishes filling up the sink, the rough backhand meeting skin? Is it ever really that simple? I guess not.

What turns an innocent child into something unrecognizable? How will nature vs. nurture play itself out in my own children, still soft, still small, still all parts good?

I am all questions without answers, arms full of Butterfly, who sighs like a song and touches the tip of her nose to my skin, both warmed by winter covers. There is no sleep then, just the silent wondering…

Is the crook of my arm really that powerful?

There are moments we live with a sharp edge of clarity, like the way I felt my son in my bones when I heard his first cry. I can not hear a newborn infant howl without my skin remembering the staccato of my own sob in that hospital room almost three years ago.

There are people that you can’t imagine not being able to reach your fingertips out to touch. He is like that touchstone for me. At night, he calls my name. I go to him in darkness, settle the day’s measure down on the edge of his small bed.  He sighs with such longing, Momma. There is a torrid of relief in that word. Each time he speaks it in a whisper soft and small; something inside of me breaks open.

This weekend I bought my son a purple bicycle. I put my hand on the handlebar to test the unsteady weight of my body against the frame. I fear the tipping point, the pump of his legs giving out against the cold hard of the rocky road. I imagine the cuts and scrapes that the future brings, and I am paralyzed by the purchase. I can not stop this growing. All I can do is bear witness to it.

All I can do is give witness to the why of her absence. I wrote Bug’s birthmother a letter this weekend that came out all wrong. I want to tell her that I miss her, but those words are choked down by the fear that someday she will stand before us both, and we will have to answer to her grief. He will look to her for answers. The cameleon that she is, she will pull rabbits out of a black felt hat, this slight of hand, an attempt to dazzle, a beautiful cover up, the lie of how she loved.

I write her a letter that is not filled with love; instead, I make a list of all the choices she got wrong, all the ways she fucked it up. Here are all the reasons I am better, I say. But, it does not make me feel better at all.

Sometimes all we can do is keep breathing, the intake of air, the tap, tap, tapping of the keys, this long drawn out effort.

It is Christmas time and I heard she is getting married. A baby girl, a husband she just met who will be heading off to war, I wonder about the way this life has wrapped itself around her in the three years now that she is gone. I wonder about the memories she carries. I carry her. I have been carrying her for so long. I wonder what it would feel like for my hands to finally be free. He is that free.

Our living room is filled with soft light. He giggles at the waking of each new day when he descends the stairs and the ornaments on the large and shapely pine catch his eye. Happy Birthday, Momma!, he shouts each morning. He can not believe that something so beautiful could be anything other than his favorite type of celebration. He does not believe in anything less than this life that makes him sure.

He is so sure that it is not Santa that will bring him the presents he wants for Christmas. He shakes his head each time I ask him if he wants to “write” a letter to Santa to ask for that purple bike. He cocks his head, and gives me this lopsided grin, No Anta, Momma. You get. Is Momma oooo loves me.

And I do. I do. I do love this child. He amazes me daily with the simplicity of it, how he does not believe in the capacity of anyone to love him more than I do.