***So, some of the spacing is off because I have this ongoing battle with wordpress to try and get my stuff to space correctly, and as I look at it now I see a few sections that should be shifted around, but this is draft 004, for my BFA capstone project. I will be publishing the final draft (which I expect to be number 005 or 006) on Snotter Press this winter. I initially wrote this piece while I was pregnant with my son, Jorah. It came out of a “Personal Geography” assignment in a writing class, and an independent study I was doing during my 200 hour yoga teacher training in 2013/2014. My deepening yoga practice, combined with the writing and rewriting, let me finally reach a place where I could forgive my mother and myself for a very brutal falling out we had late in 2011, in addition to other issues/experiences. Writing this piece also helped me to look at my maternal grandmother with more compassion than I had previously.***
MOTHER IS THE WATER OF THE WORLD
“Can’t we ever go home? I asked my mother. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”
-Janet Fitch; White Oleander
2011
Everyone tells me to
“make a clean break”
and I’m trying.
But the break between
a mother and child is
never clean.
The ties that bind
are messy, wet,
and smell just like the ocean.
1964
When my mother was a girl, her mother, Muriel, forbade her from playing in the rain barrel.
One day, when Muriel was in the fields, my mother could not resist the call of the barrel. She stood on a cinderblock and set her toy boats on the surface, entranced by the little paths they cut across the surface of the water.
The way she tells it, she was pulled from her reprieve by and almost electrical charge the seemed to fill the air.
She looked up and saw Muriel striding across the yard towards her; lips compressed to thin white line.
Without a word she grabbed my mother by the ankles and dunked her, headfirst, into the rain barrel.
“I remember
how the light
looked
coming through the water.
It was so quiet
in the barrel –
everything cool
and amber-
I looked up
to the surface
and I could see
the sky,
my mother
up above me.”
Muriel pulled her out, dunked her again. And again. And again. When she finally released her, my mother spat water, ran to the woods and climbed a tree. She stayed there until it was dark out.
2008
Birth muddles your memory. For me, labor does not start. Claire is due November 2nd – el Dia de los Muertos – the day of the Dead.
Ten days past her due date, they begin the induction. First cervidil, which sends her into fetal distress. I am instructed to kneel on the hospital bed, breathe pure oxygen from a mask. I feel silly, loose as CF and the nurses mill around. I make jokes that are not appreciated. I am not afraid. I know in my heart that my baby is fine.
The next morning they start with the Pitocin. Birth is a messy, wet affair.
So much wet –
blood, amniotic fluid, sweat.
Gallons of sweat.
Vomit, too.
Tears and shit.
I had the epidural. My labor went on for 36 hours; epidural refilled 3 times. They ruptured 1 last pocket of fluid and then she came.
Or rather, began to come. I pushed for 4 hours.
Claire was born 13 days past her due date. I was her home. She did not want to leave.
1940’s (?)
Muriel’s car was so filled with garbage, only the front 2 seats were usable. My feet rested on so many newspapers that my knees almost touched the dash.
After speech team practice, she answered my questions for a class project. Interview someone who had been alive during the Depression.
Muriel was the oldest of three girls, one boy. Her mother, Lydia, hated her. Muriel had been born a girl instead of a boy, and, my mother later told me, was most likely not the biological daughter of her father, Ole. Lydia had been engaged to Ole’s brother first, but somehow he had died. A farming accident or maybe a war, I’m not sure. So Lydia had married Ole instead. Ole was a kind man, according to his children. Lydia was vicious.
Each girl owned a shoebox. One box for one girl. Each box contained the only things the girls owned. My grandmother’s held her valedictorian speech, a paper she had written and been especially proud of, the letter she had earned in speech but could not afford a jacket for, some trinkets.
After a disagreement with her sister Arlene, she came home to find the remains of the box and its contents in the woodstove. Lydia’s eyes glittered with pleasure, mid-day sun creating highlights in that dark Scottish color not really blue not really black. She watched her oldest sift through the ashes, in the same way a starving man may eat very rich butter. With infinite need and infinite delight.
“I watched her do it,” Lydia said over the rim of her coffee mug. “But you know how I don’t like to interfere in you girls’ arguments.”
Lydia took special pleasure in her grandchildren. She lavished gifts and affection on all, except Muriel’s children, upon whom she lavished criticism and contempt. I think she took the sharpest kind of pleasure in Muriel’s children. Like the taste that is so sweet is hurts inside your mouth. My grandmother seethed, burned, fumed.
Decades after her mother’s death, she still talks about how Lydia treated her children, voice still shaking with emotion that has long since rotted, and now festers.
2008
That summer CF stopped job hunting and started doctor shopping-
morphine
methadone
ativan
valium.
I don’t know how but he always managed to get his fix.
By July I had taken to placing a card in his front pocket, reading:
“Hello, my name is CF and sometimes my medication makes me confused. If you find me, please call Gabrielle at XXX-XXX-XXXX.”
The last time, they found his passed out underneath a tree, and for a while, thought he may have brain damage. Eventually he came out of it and was transferred to an inpatient treatment program.
I worked overtime,
came home
and let the silence
crawl inside me.
I rarely wrote.
There was nothing to say.
After Claire was born, he stayed sober for almost a year.
2009
One of the last times I saw CF was in October of 2009. The day I took Claire and left him.
He relapsed on a Wednesday.
When he picked me up from work that night, Claire was sleeping in her carseat – no jacket. Just a onesie and some socks. He told me they had been at the ER all day, while he tried to get an early refill on the klonipin prescription he had filled just the day before.
I did not go back to work. How could I? He got crazier and crazier. Every time he left I prayed that he would not come back. I hoped for an overdose, a car accident. Or that he would just vanish.
But he came back. Sometimes with more pills or alcohol. He went through phonebooks; calling doctors, looking for that one who might write him a prescription.
He began throwing things, sometimes at me. He broke Claire’s highchair; our blue rocking chair. I became bruised and silent, picking sharp pieces of wood out of the carpet and praying, praying, for some escape route.
On Sunday morning my mother called. Four days. Not asleep and not awake, 4 days and I saw the lifeboat on the horizon. She offered me and Claire a place to stay. I said yes. I packed a bag while CF slept, and waited.
He woke 30 minutes before my mother and her husband arrived. I did not tell him they were coming.
He’d sobered up a little and apologized for the past 4 days. I said he’d have to go to inpatient treatment. He refused. He told me it would be methadone and AA meetings.
“Take it or leave it,” he said.
I left it.
He would not let us take the crib
the humidifier
the baby swing.
He tried to keep
the playpen, too.
Memories of that day are fragmented as glass:
his face
as he charged down the pick-up,
slapped the passenger side window.
The sound he made
when my mother’s husband
threw him back
against the dumpster.
Driving away, my heart took wing like a grouse flushed from a wash of pine. I had to swallow down the hysterical, sparkling laughter that banged behind my ribcage. I was free. I had escaped. I could never go back.
1989
My brothers and I
spent summers swimming
Rainy Lake. Rock
islands; we were
barefoot
lichen scrapers.
8+ hours a day
in the water;
at night we cracked
crawfish
scaled northern
and walleye.
Fish guts thrown into
border bushes.
Their tough green branches
spring like magic
from fissures in stone.
2011
My mother and her husband, MRK, come to my house. I am not expecting them. Claire’s birthday has come and gone, but Thanksgiving is still a few days away. The night is bitter cold and black as a bruise.
My mother and I sit at the table. Fluorescent lighting makes us all look terminal. This is the last house that I will rent from them.
My house smells like
tandoori chicken
lemon juice
ume plum vinegar.
My house smells like
exhaustion.
MRK plays with Claire a few feet away from the table. My mother slits her eyes, purses lips, launches in.
I do not remember exact words. What I do remember is that I had classes 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. 3 days a week; worked Fridays and Saturdays 7:00 p.m. – 3:00 a.m., Sundays 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Finals were approaching and it seemed that I could never sleep.
My mother announces that I am using drugs. She is sure – suspects it’s heroin again.
Years later the repetition is what I remember most-
“You’re on drugs. You’re
on drugs. You are. You
are. You are. I know
it. Say it. Just say
it. Just tell me you’re on drugs.”
As if repeated like a mantra, her lies would all be true. Fears granted like a wish.
How long she says it? 45 minutes? An hour? MRK interjects – my daughter’s hand in his – tells me I am a liar, I suck my teeth and bob my head. Sure signs of drug abuse. Defiance. MRK tickles Claire’s chin, pushes her hair back, holds out a toy. If I stood up it would take me 3 steps to reach her. They are doing this right in front of her.
I try to keep my head, my neck, very very straight.
I concentrate
with each reply.
Keep lips flat to teeth
face empty
eyes calm.
I do not remember what it is she finally says. What drives me to my feet, heat rising in my face.
“Bitch. Get the fuck up out my house,” I tell her.
She stands and shoves me but she is old and I have 4 inches 15 pounds of muscle on her. I lift weights, bike and run each day. I step closer to her smiling slightly, whisper behind my teeth, “Well come on then.”
Underneath my rage I feel absolutely nothing.
Then MRK pulling her out of the house backwards, me repeating “Out. Out. Get. Out. Of. My. House.”
And her:
“It’s not your house.”
“My rent is paid through January, bitch,” I snap, shut the door in her face.
1970’s
“ . . . and I TOLD her not to get married, but you know how young people are . . .” my grandmother tittered.
My mother set her jaw and walked from the room.
My grandmother always tried to rewrite history, but the truth is inscribed, tattooed on tongue. For years atop the list “things we should not say.” Every summer, leaving for Rainy Lake, my mother would remind us, “Don’t say anything about me and Uncle M being married when we were younger, because Aunt J doesn’t know.”
It was before M was our uncle, before my parents married, before my brothers and I were born.
My grandmother coerced my mother into marrying M, the older brother of (the man who would later become) my father, the older brother of my future aunt, my mother’s best friend.
My mother (age 16) and M (age 18) were staying in a room at the Dutch Mill Motel/Video Rental store. My grandmother was livid, and told my mother that she was disgracing the Ranisate family, and if my mother did not marry M, she would never be allowed to see her younger brothers and sisters again.
“So I got married,” my mother would tell us, “moved to Illinois, and never saw my younger brothers and sisters again.”
She and M divorced within 2 years – she had worked 2 jobs to support him while he went to nursing school and slept with other women.
Three years after that, pregnant, she married AC, my father – M’s younger brother.
It did not sit well with either family. It did not sit well with my parents, according to family stories. But I still have their wedding photograph, and my mother’s face is bright and open, smiling and radiant. My father slouches next to her, his own smile crooked like all the Congraves, but real and there and reaching the corners of his eyes. So there must have been something. I can’t even imagine their courtship, or how they came together, but there was some sort of love – at least for a little while.
My mother always told me that if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me she never would have married my father. She would have moved someplace else. Someplace different. A place where no one knew her family, or who she was.
She would have been an artist.
My mother was always a very good artist. She took a community ed painting class when I was 7, maybe 8, and I would marvel over the canvases she brought home and hid in our basement, far from my father’s scornful gaze.
I do not know where my mother hides her paintings now.
2011
My mother did not like it that I went back to work. After 2 years on unemployment she thought I should get on cash assistance.
She did not like it that my classes necessitated daycare for Claire.
But when I started dating again – a match.com profile because I did not drink or know anyone, could not imagine how to meet them – that was when she could not bite back the words anymore.
That was when fear overtook her.
And she was sure that there was something, something going on.
1982
“Oh my,” my grandmother Muriel said, holding me in her lap as the car bounced along the gravel road, “She’s feisty in a sluggish sort of way.”
My mother fumed silently from behind the wheel.
It did not end there. Through my childhood and teens, Muriel kept up a running commentary on my weight.
My mother never spoke up and in the way of children, I blamed her more for her silence than my grandmother for her cruelty.
The rest of my mother’s family of origin took the cue, and my brothers and I were always the outcasts. The unwanted. Barely tolerated at family functions. Black sheep.
2011
And as it was bad, it soon got worse.
I still do not know for certain whether she and MRK believed the lies that they told. I do not know if they believe them still today.
That fall I work, finish school with a 3.23 GPA, and care for my daughter.
According to my mother, I am a prostitute and drug addict.
She watches my home. Searches trash cans for proof, and repeats, repeats her stories over and over again. This time she is determined – eye of eagle wide open – she will not miss the signs she missed during my heroin years.
A joke she told me once in an apartment that smelled like shit, stacks of syringes kicked beneath the futon:
How do you know when a junkie is lying?
Their lips
are moving.
This time she will not turn away. This time she will be different. This time she will get her chance. She will make her move. She will not be fooled by my cupid bow mouth, the pit of lies she let herself fall into time and time again.
She will redeem herself. This time, she will get to save her daughter. She will save us all. Mother, daughter, granddaughter.
Redemption. Salvation. The promise of it clouds her vision and haunts her waking hours. Sours her mouth and poisons her words with lies borne of fear and memories of a time when she chose to look away.
2009
7 years gone. I came home to the coldest July I remember. My grandmother Muriel came to meet Claire, and see me for the first time in close to a decade. As soon as my mother stepped out of the room, Muriel said “My, Claire really is beautiful. She doesn’t look a thing like you. She must favor her father.”
2000
My mother and I saw the ocean for the first time together. I was 18. She was 40. It was Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Late August 2000.
My mother had had a subarachnoid cerebral hemorrhage earlier that summer, in June, just 7 days after my high school graduation, but by August, she was ready for the drive out to Goddard College.
We get to Cape Elizabeth late in the day. Past 4pm. Everything is grey – sand. Sky. Water.
I watch my footprints fill with water and snap a photograph:
my mother playing on the shoreline. Overalls rolled up
past her knees. White t-shirt; one arm up, one down.
Head tilted to the side.
We wade out deeper, past pubic arches, sacrums, to the crest of out illiums. We stand.
The bowl of my pelvis (a dish that has not yet held fruit) is pulled gently by the salt water. I want to bring fingertips to lips; see just how salty the Atlantic really is.
I still remember the bone deep sensuality of it – how my jeans looked plastered wet against my hips; the water lapping up and up and towards my waist.
Back at shore, self-invited Muriel scuttles along, picks up dead crabs, abandoned lobster traps, misc bits of nautical garbage.
Long past dark my mother finally insists that we begin the drive back to Vermont, where college and the strangeness of life waited. Poised to break me into so many pieces.
It was the last time my mother was ever pleased with me.
1963
(a story that my mother told me)
“When I was
a little girl
I used to pull
my skirts
up
over the back of my head.
I thought I looked
so regal.
Queen in her cape,
willow switch
for a scepter.
When I realized
other people
could see my underwear
I was humiliated.”
2015
Some days I am sure I should not have been a mother.
My daughter is a brilliant thing. Claire. She is a light, a stunning creature, features beautifully wrought, skin like raw sugar and cream. She holds a beauty I could never imagine.
When I was a child I feared my parents. I was given to fits of melancholy and melodrama, but they played themselves out secretly, hidden away from my parents. I always swore that my children would never fear me, and that they would be able to open to me in a way I never could as a child.
But I find that sometimes I resent her for it. I spent years making sure my daughter could express herself, and now it pricks me when she does. She is so much like me when I was her age. She just does not hide it.
When I was her age I felt painfully ignored by my own parents, but unable to ask for the attention I needed. Claire takes what she wants, crawling on top of me, in front of me, taking my face in her hands and turning me to face her.
Mama, Mama. Look at me.
2013
This second pregnancy is strange for me.
While pregnant with Claire, I lived each day with a creeping sense of impending doom. I worked 60+ hours a week to pick up the slack for CF, who would rage and threaten in drug addled fits, then vanish for days at a time.
I gained so much weight, so fast, with Claire. I felt trapped. Sealed in the tomb of my own flesh. Sealed in the tomb of a relationship I did not dare to dream of escaping.
But escape was mine – wrapped in a bloody ribbon, gilt-edged box. Escape was mine and I rose to run from the catacombs I lay shrouded inside.
With this pregnancy, I am in yoga teacher training, walk and ride bicycle. My body is powerfully mine and I live and breathe joyously within it.
At 19 weeks my son begins to turn backflips in my uterus; little flutters that make my stomach drop with pleasure.
2015
My mother was born during the dark time of the Celtic year. Long ago, the Celts believed that darkness ruled in that handful of days after the winter solstice, and everything that came forth during those days belonged to the darkness.
Even the babies.
My mother told me that children born during the dark time were given back to the darkness – whether abandoned to the elements, sacrificed, or killed, I was never really sure. People did not leave their homes during the dark time, they hid themselves away and waited for the light to come again.
My mother told me that had she been born centuries before, she would have been abandoned (or worse) by her own blood. Betrayed by her own birth.
From my mother I am Norse, Scottish. Viking, Highlander.
But what might have been is not what happened. We are in my yard. The day is hot. But we are Norse-American. Minnesotans through and through, so we drink cups of fine dark coffee as we dip our bubble wands into shallow dishes of slick soapy liquid, pulling them lazily through the air.
A soft breeze does most of the work for us, and Claire runs shrieking after one bubble, then another, “ . . . ask a million QUESTIONS . . .” she sings over and over again – some tune that strikes a memory somewhere, but not enough to place it. “To me! To me! Mama! Mama here! Mama to me!”
Jorah stays closer, crawling up the steps then carefully backing down, belly close to the porch, knees bent.
“When I was a little girl,” my mother says, “I believed that I could move through solid objects if I only knew the right words to say. The right vibration. I was sure it was vibrational.” This catches my attention, and I begin to haltingly explain the Japji Sahib, Yogi Bhajan, the Sikhs and Gurbani. I’ve been reading these books, I tell her. I’ve been saying these words. And they’re changing my life, Mother.” They’re changing me.
“Do you remember that letter you wrote for your father?” my mother asks. “About the back child support.” Her face takes on a slightly apologetic, worried, look. “I’m not trying to bring up bad things I was just . . .”
“No,” I say. “it’s fine. I remember.”
“Well, a week after the court date, after I saw the letter, I got another letter from you in the mail. And I was so upset about the court letter, I never opened it, I just stuck it in a file box. Do you remember that letter?”
“No,” I tell her, a little worried now.
“I found it last week, and I opened it, and it was actually a really nice letter – you apologized for writing the letter for your dad’s court case, and for your addiction, and always trying to get me to give you money for drugs. I felt so bad, all these years, over a decade, that letter I never read.”
“I guess everything happens at the right time.” I smile and trace my bubble wand through the air. My children shriek with joy and I realize that this is it. Right now. My mother and I are healing those raw places, smoothing the rough patches between us.
2011
This time we strip it to the bone.
The last move was just 2 months ago – from Spruce 215 to Spruce 221. My mother and MRK own more houses in Bagley than I can believe, remembering how we grew up poor, despised. Now they collect rent, send out eviction notices to the families that tormented ours for generations. For decades.
Each time I move I throw things away, examine artifacts, decide – what parts of me to keep, and what to leave behind.
I stack discarded items – clothes toys books – in Claire’s bedroom.
This time we will leave the beds. The desks. The kitchen chairs. The table.
I want to get everything in one trip.
Once we are gone, we will not go back.
2008
My mother and I did not speak for most of the 5 years of my drug addiction.
She took it hard, bitter hard, when I got kicked out of the private Vermont college I had chosen to attend. Our relationship never recovered. Just became more and more strained the more addicted I became.
In August of 2007 I got sober. In February of 2008 I got pregnant. Made calls to mother, father, brothers.
I did not speak to my mother for another 6 months.
One day she called, asking “Are you really pregnant, or is that just something that you made up?”
I wanted to lie then. I wanted to say there was no baby. Or play dumb – like it was such a preposterous story, I could not even remember telling it.
Instead I told her the truth. And slowly, our relationship began to re-emerge.
But . . .
We did not talk about the past.
And so, we did not forgive.
She never forgave me for writing a letter on my father’s behalf when she sued him for back child support; for failing to make good on opportunities she had been denied; for using drugs and making porn; for the week I spent on life support; the track marks on my arms.
I never forgave her for guilt-tripping me out of calling the police when her brother attacked me in my bed; for staying silent while her family treated me and my brothers like second class citizens; for letting her friends drink and do drugs in front of us; for never protecting her children.
The ties that bind are garrote wires running back and forth-
mother’s hand to daughter’s throat,
son’s hand to father’s throat,
cousin to cousin
brother to sister.
Fingers splayed and chins raised, you could play our bitterness like a harpsichord, plucking gently on old grudges, broken promises.
I need only twist my wrist, bring hand to fist, and breath will stop.
2015
“I feel like I’m so angry,” my mother says. “Like I’ve been angry my whole life.”
Oh, Mother. We are angry women, you and I. Seven deadly sins – wrath was my tripwire, the one that would lay me flat on my face, or detonate the darkness inside me, laying waste to the fragile and crumbling structures I had tried to make into a life.
That was then and this is now, but still it lives inside me. Even as I chant Japji, flex my spine, focus gaze between the brows. Even as I start letters “Sat Nam” and end them “Namaste.” Some days I think it is gone. Some months I sigh deep and am sure it has deserted me, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, my jaw is clenched, trapezius stiff as iron.
And iron is a brittle metal. Some hollow thing inside of me keeps scraping, scraping, scraping. I hear it late at night, dragging a lame foot through the crypt I keep behind my face, knowing the lock is old, and every metal falls to rust eventually.
1998
When my mother’s car pulls out of the Arts High School parking lot, I cry. I have moved to the AHS on-campus dormitory to spend my last two years of high school studying creative writing, Literary Arts. It is a chance better than gold for a girl mired in Bagley, MN.
But every long weekend, every school vacation, I turn my face and cry as I leave my mother behind. Two years later I will cry when she leaves me at Goddard College in Vermont, and on into my mid 20’s, I will cry each time the car pulls away.
2012
At the end of the year my mother writes to me. It has been 12 months since I stripped our possessions down to one trailer load and left Bagley, note on the counter, no forwarding address. She wants to see Claire, wants to see me.
I write back – you may see Claire, and I will be civil. I will be polite. I will do these things to facilitate your relationship with her.
But I do not want to talk about what happened last year. There is no excuse or explanation you could offer me. I do not want that old English standard:
who
when
where
how
and why.
I will show you this kindness because you are human. Because you love my daughter and she loves you. Because you are my mother, and in the end that does count for (must count for, it please, please must count) for something.
2013
“This is a cute little house you have here,” my mother says.
“Yeah.” I quickly add, “I need to clean it, it’s such a mess.”
“Oh no,” she says, “it just looks like a busy mom’s house.”
That night, lying in savasana, I hear, You need to forgive your mother.
2012
We move into a one bedroom duplex less than a month before I turn 30. That spring I take a second job – as a barista at Dunn Brothers. Barista was a fantasy job for me in my 20’s. One I could never land, could never get. In the end I turned to sex work – nude massage and girls-behind-glass and “fantasy artisan” – a different kind of service industry.
All the other baristas are 7 years or more younger than me. They are tattooed and pierced, “suicide girl” style interperted by Bemidji, MN. My hair is white, my septum pierced, I have a pistol tattooed on my chest. Hearts and sugar skulls, locks and keys that do not fit them wrap around my arms. My years of drug use have set me back in terms of emotional and social development to right around 23. I fit right in.
2012 is a strange summer. Thursdays are for the thirsty, and we get started right around 2:00 p.m. Baristas start work at 5:30 a.m., so our revelries begin considerably earlier than nine-to-fivers. My daycare is set up in such a way that I have 4 hours between the end of my shift and my time to pick up Claire.
Never in my life have I been much for the bars. In college my drinking was confined to the rural mountainside campus of Goddard College, and by the time I was old enough to go to bars, heroin had taken over the majority of my disposable income. Bars were only to distract myself from the horrors of trying to quit hard drugs. And they did a poor job at that.
This time it is different. I am adored and petted by the other girls in a way I never have been before. They endlessly compliment my face and figure, my wardrobe – always going on they can’t believe I’m 30, they can’t believe I have a child. Men preen for me and I have my pick – this time around I am very selective and choose only my favorites instead of taking anyone who displayed an interest, like I would have in my 20’s. Sometimes I draw it out. Sometimes I make them chase or drop them with a kind word after just one go. I’ve never felt so pretty in all the years of my life.
That summer belongs to the Blue Ox patio things slowly narrowing, beginning to downslide. I go from drinking water the last 90 minutes and going home for a brief nap before picking up my daughter to slamming the last of a PBR before jumping behind the wheel of my car.
I become a functional alcoholic for the first time in my life – getting raises, promotions – probably only because all my co-workers are functional alcoholics, too. I bring Claire with me to the Blue Ox some afternoons. She is 3. Darling of the metalheads, squares, hipsters, and festival brats alike. The boys teach her how to play Pac-Man and hold a pool cue, explain the rules of football and give her hot wings and French fries from their plates. The girls swirl her hair and “oooo” and “aaaaah” over her almost atomic beauty. They have her draw them pictures, make them cards, give her their old dolls and ice skates.
In July Jake and I meet. September we begin seeing each other. 11 days later my car breaks down. That night he gets a DUI – I am in front seat of the car, Claire unrestrained, held in my arms. When the officer first leans in the car window, he asks why Claire is unrestrained. I carefully explain that her carseat was in my car, at the mechanic’s, and we are just getting a ride home from a friend. He holds a hand up to me and turns his attention to Jake – “I can see here that Mom’s drunk, and sir, I’d like to ask you to step outside of the vehicle . . .”
Suddenly summer is over and nothing is funny anymore. It is hot outside but I feel a bone deep chill thinking about what could have happened not just that night, but so many other nights that summer. I re-play in my mind the cop telling me “Technically we could take your daughter, because there’s no one fit to care for her here.” Somehow it doesn’t happen. Somehow she goes home with me, and the next day I check the Beltrami County Jail webpage a thousand times, hoping his picture will be gone. Hoping he’ll have seen the judge, have been released.
It was the best thing that could have happened. Not just to me, Jake, and Claire, but to everyone that summer. Thirsty Thursdays fall like a house of cards and everything comes stumbling to a halt. We all start staying in – drinking at home or (like me and Jake) not at all.
But the shame. Oh, the shame nearly brings me to my knees. My shame as a mother who drank around her child. Who scheduled extra daycare to drink with friends, who drove her car drunk with her 3 year old daughter inside. The shame drops on me like a rock. It is a physical loathing that threads through me, grips me like the venom in a snakebite.
The memory of my friends cooing over me and we drank Jameson Gingers and cheap beer. ‘Oh Gabby, you’re so strong, you’re such a good mom, Claire is so lucky. So lucky. So lucky to have you.” None of them had children. Someday they will know.
I know regret is a poisonous thing, and to linger on the past serves no purpose, but even sometimes still I will feel that sinking – that sense of some part of me dropping away inside and I stand naked and revealed. After I gave birth to my son, post-partum hormones left me teary-eyed with the memory of Claire as a baby, and how I had forgotten her like that, to do what I did, to be so callous, so selfish, so caught up in the illusions and crass pleasures of this world.
The yogis call it maya. The material or sensual world and all the traps it sets before us. I imagine the kind of snares hunters set for rabbits. Made of thin fine linen that seems to reflect the faces of all the people you’ve wanted to be right back at you.
Claire does not remember that summer. Cinco de Mayo to September 24th. But I cannot forget.
2009
Poem for Claire
my love for you,
child,
is a burning bush.
it is the voice of god
in the wilderness,
after all these years
of restless
wandering silence.
2015
“Do you hear that?” Kathryn asks us, looking up from her book.
“It’s an invitation to be the light,” Judy says.
“Even more,” Kathryn replies. “It’s an invitation to rise.”
I nod agreeably but I do not feel like the invitation is one I will ever be capable of taking. My face is streaked in tears and my nose full of snot. At Kundalini teacher apprenticeship I let go during our check-in period and told the truth. The nasty raw guts of it all. Self-loathing. Desire to die. And the hurt. The hurt the hurt the hurt.
I did not intend to be honest, but once I started I could not stop.
“I think you’re going to begin to find some answers,” Kathryn told me when I had stopped crying. But I do not believe her.
When apprenticeship is done, Kathryn offers me a ride the the Wild Hare. I dodge slushy puddles and walk in to the coffeeshop. Order coffee, say hello to people I did not expect to see. It’s only when I get to the back of the shop that I notice the paintings on the wall.
The one I see is watercolour. Yellow grey and black on thick cream paper. Woman’s delicate face, birds floating up behind her or maybe from her.
I step forward to look for a price tag and see the title.
Rise.
Julia is running late, and when she gets there we decide to pick a picture and write about it. My brain feels gluey after the emotional dumping at apprenticeship, and I try to come up with some way to work grouse into a poem. The sacred spiral. Make it sound real, and not forced.
I set down my pen, and stare at the painting.
Then I know what it reminds me of. My mother’s face. November 2005. When I woke up in the intensive care unit at HCMC, no glasses, the sunlight was streaming in through the window, outlining her hair, softening the pain in her face.
How had I forgotten? All those years, to barely think of it now. The terror she must have felt. 3 times they tried to take me off the vent. 3 times my own lungs failed before I could breathe again.
They could not keep me under, after the overdose. They had to put the IV in my foot because the veins in my hands and arms were too damaged. Once they had the IV in, they could not find the right amount, right combination, of opiates and narcotics to keep me asleep.
She stayed for a week in my room with me, watching as I seized. As I tore the IVs and the vent out. She said that I would climb out of bed, still unconscious, and try to leave the room. My body driven by something horrible inside me.
I had forgotten, those things she saw. I had forgotten how close I came to death, and that my mother sat with me there.
2015
It is June, and the smell of produce, raw things cut and pulled from the Earth whisper our names.
Our seedlings have died – tomatoes, kale, moonflowers, and beets. Only the peppers survived.
Today I will take our half-full seed packets, sow lavender and holy basil near the foot of every staircase. Ladybird poppies beside the porch. Mint and oregano will trace a path along the backline of the shed.
At home sprigs of lilac are pressed between sheets of paper in heavy books or turn darker, drier, looped from nails on the wall.
Claire keeps asking “Is it summer yet? Or still just spring?”
On Beltrami Avenue, bushes burst into bloom and petals litter each corner, mixing with abandoned shoes, empty beer cans, waterlogged receipts thrown from car windows.
I do not own a shovel, a tiller, a proper rake or hoe. I will open the earth with my fingers, fluff it with a fork or spoon, and hope that love will be enough to help each seed sprout and grow.
2013
I bike the beach to Diamond Point Park and watch waves lapping in and out, to try to understand the circular nature of a woman’s life, of my life and my mother’s: conception, birth, growing up, conception, birth, motherhood.
I sit at the edge of the sand, stone steps, and try to write the circle, try to see how I might swim the current back from anger, despair, to forgiveness and love once more.
I sit at the edge of the sand, and wonder, is this a raft that can be patched. Will my mother and I float together once again, gathered back into the ebb and flow of each other’s lives.
But this is a freshwater lake, overfished and greasy with pollution; not the ocean I have only seen that one grey day, at the cape with my mother’s first name, my daughter’s middle name. This is a freshwater lake and instead of the amniotic sac scent of salt I smell dying fish and algae rotting on the shore.
2014
Our curtains are gauze, drawn shut, infusing the living room with a soft sort of light that plays against the blue of the birth tub, the dark honey of the wood-paneled walls. Not quite warm, not quite cool, we shape the light to what we need it to be.
Lavender for relaxation and pain relief, clary sage to strengthen contractions, jasmine to instill confidence. Kirtan plays in the background – Sanskrit mantras, songs of devotion, love, celebration. We sing to Ganesh, remover of obstacles; Hanuman, the monkey god; Krishna and Shiva and Rama.
Five and a half years ago, in St. Paul, I gave birth to my daughter. She was born almost 2 weeks late, my body unwilling to give birth, my child unwilling to be born. The induction began on a Wednesday, she was born on a Friday. I was trapped by monitors, IVs, paralyzed from the waist down by an epidural. But oh, oh, when I held my daughter in my arms, those dark helpless hours melted away.
This time I choose a home birth. The labor begins slowly, the night before – at 8:00 p.m., I feel a contraction, and this one, I tell Jake, is different. An hour later, it comes again. Then again.
I sleep until 2:30 a.m., then rise and take a hot shower. The contractions are coming closer together now. I doze fitfully til 4:00 a.m. on the couch, and watch the day slowly break outside, light filtering in through the gauze covered windows of my cocoon.
Here I am safe. Here I can breathe.
At 8:00 a.m. I get into the tub. Birth is something your conscious mind makes you forget. Not completely – but it softens the edges, distorts sound, and rearranges time. If left alone, if allowed to do what it knows in its very bones and blood how to do, your body will give birth.
My memory of my son’s birth is already rendered in watercolour – glowing with delicacy of line and the warm wetness of love; depth of animal knowledge and feeling.
I remember screaming because I had to, letting my own voice circle and follow the sensation that unfolded those closed places inside of me. I am not contracting, I whisper to myself, I am expanding. I am opening.
Jake in the tub with me, sweat on my face, I braced against him as I pushed, and always he was there to hold me. Each push it grows, I feel it: descent. Ring of fire. And then – relief. Utter, glorious relief.
My son came at 11:32 a.m., last sounds of the Gayatri mantra fading into stillness. He was born in the caul – the water sac never ruptured, so he slid into the water – membrane over his face like a veil. The midwife peeled it off, put him to my chest, and the caul floated like a jellyfish beside us in the water – mother, father, son, and daughter leaning over the water to touch her brother’s hand.
And this is our family. And this is our home. So sacred, so secret, so open in love.
2015
Campsites. 46. 47. 48. We have pitched our tents at the edge of the world.
You can hear the waves both day and night – crashing, crashing, crashing into shore. Last night was cool, cold even. First camp of the season. I laid unsleeping in our tent, Jake spooned against my back for warmth of many kinds. I wondered if anyone has ever lived in a place like this and hated the sound of the waves. Wondered if I will love the sound of them by the time we pull out on Monday, or will I have blocked them out to keep from going crazy. Will I wake suddenly that first night back, enveloped in a silence made suddenly eerie by the absence of water nearby.
This is not a beach for swimming. From the main lot wooden staircase leads one step next down to a red and black sand beach; rocks the same colour as kidneys. Liver. Standing there you can see the riptide – pulling, dragging, tearing. Taking everything, everything out into lake.
Lake Superior is so big that you cannot see the opposite shore from where we are camping. Just the point where sky meets water. That is our horizon.
It has been misting, raining on and off since we got here, but there is a kind of raw beauty to it. Did we ever thing the going would be easy right here at the edge of everything?
Maybe I’ve been reading too much fantasy lately, but I can imagine waiting on the edge of an expanse very much like this. Alone, only a journal, few books to keep me company. I can imagine myself looking out each morning, waiting for a boat to appear suddenly on the horizon, the unseen becoming seen at that place where water meets sky. I can see myself standing on the shore, watching the boat grow slowly larger, larger, and knowing somewhere, below the decks, an envelope waits just for me.
An envelope with my name on the outside. And inside, the answers to all the questions that make it so very hard to sleep at night.
2015
Claire burns bright and clear as her name, eyes that magical shade of hazel that seems to hold so many colours all at once.
And she wants. She wants so much. Hands grasping this treat or that, shoving food in her mouth as fast as she can so she can get as much as she can. She’s always ready to reach out and take it, snatch up whatever it is she wants to have.
Maybe it’s written into our genes. Maybe I gave her too much when she was young, because it is sweet pleasure to give gifts to children.
She will be 7 this November. And I worry, worry, worry. This year her moonflower seedlings died before we could put them in the ground. The ones she planted outside grew and grew into a tangled mass of vines but did not bud. They did not bloom. Maybe it was just my poet’s fancy, but I worried it was a bad omen, that Claire’s moonflowers would not bloom.
My daughter fills my heart with love. My daughter makes me want to turn my face away.
I worry that I am one of those women, those awful women who love their sons more than their daughters. Maybe toddlers are easier to love than 6 year olds. My daughter is everything I was at her age, but she does not hide it like I did. She is completely open, completely in focus.
She looks into your eyes when she speaks, does not thread herself behind anything that might hide her.
Sometimes I know that I resent it – that part of me that is still a wounded child rails at the unfairness of it. The why why why should it be so much easier for her.
I started feeling that twinge of resentment 2 years ago. One month ago I finally was able to say it out loud. Write it down on paper. And it helps, it does. It helps to name it.
Each time I write it down the weight of it lessens, my heart softens a little more. I start to feel delight in my daughter’s voice, in her laughter again. She becomes lighter to carry. Easier to hold.
2015
I lay in bed at night and chew chew chew the words over and over in my mind. Words that never make it to my mouth, never make it to my pen. I lay in bed and try to get that feeling back, that warm bellied float but it’s not there and it’s not coming back.
Finally I’m up I’m up I’m up and pen to paper I am going going going too fast trying not to think, trying to outwrite outpace all those delicate and poisonous mechanisms that lurk inside my mind.
It’s the psychological equivalent of shitting out a piece of steel wool. I can feel the words scrubbing me out, cleaning my guts as they move down, pressed out of my mind and onto paper in a deeply physical way.
You have to be fit to be a writer, I’ve always though. Or maybe just tough. To keep up with the demands of the purge and the sour mess my heart becomes when I let the days pass by – too many no words and I grow sick inside. Crampy and toxic.
Earlier that evening I made a nest for Claire on the couch. I chose her softest sheet – pink with little Russian nesting dolls printed on it. When I bought it for her, I held it to her cheek to marvel at the softness, and told her that part of our family comes from the Ukraine, and they probably make nesting dolls much like the Russians do.
2015
The night before the wedding, we camp at Lake Bemidji State Park. September is still good swimming weather, despite the cold snaps that have ruined our smaller tomatoes and left the peppers stunted and green.
Tomorrow Jake and I will marry, take our vows to each other, and to Claire and Jorah. Right now they laugh and scream in the powerful push pull of the waves, stripping down to underwear and jumping in because they can’t bear to wait one minute to feel the water embrace them.
Claire has been angry lately, unbendable as iron. Blessed are those who bend, for they shall not break. I worry for my daughter, for her beauty and her wildness. For her unwillingness to listen, to pause, to breathe. When I do yoga with her, her breath is panicky and shallow – all in the chest. Or else paradoxical, reversed – belly pressing out with the exhale and dipping back in with the inhale.
Tomorrow I will wear a raw silk dress handmade in India, Claire will wear a dress all gauze and little girls’ daydreams. JB and Jorah will wear medieval tunics. We will eat lemon cake decorated with the Flower of Life and dance to “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” by ELO.
But right now I listen to my children laugh, and watch my feet sink into in wet sand, let the waves push and pull, push and pull, carry my silent prayers, fears, hopes and promises out over the water and back to me. The movement of the water is never very far away.
draft 004 – BFA Capstone revision
October 2015
Bemidji, MN
Practical Redemption 
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