Tag Archives: parenting

A promise to a promise

You were only a promise, then
white blobby thing
on a grainy black background
vaguely person-shaped
sucking your thumb
(which I never saw you do, again)
and gleefully hiding your sex
from the pushy-proddy thingy
on the other side
of the wall
between you and the world

You were only
a promise of a person
when I promised you
the best of me
for always

I haven’t always been
the best
but I have always given you
the best I had to give
to the best of my ability

Now
you are so much more
than a promise
you are a promise fulfilled
and still promising
a line of hope and beauty
music and love
laughter and tears
brilliance and vitality
and possibility
stretching farther out into the future
than I will ever go

And I am content
to simply keep
keeping my promise
and watching you
becoming yours


Originally posted elsewhere, September 14, 2014

Stopping the wheel

(Originally posted elsewhere, May 31, 2013)

I was chatting with my daughter. She had some … awkward questions.

Now, my mini-me already knew I was bisexual. We had that discussion a while back. Tonight, her questions led to me coming out to her again… as poly. I still haven’t wrapped my post-seizure brain around it. She, on the other hand, just took it completely in stride.

Then, she came out to me. As bisexual.

I don’t have enough words. I’m… torn. I know, firsthand, how difficult that will be, with her other family. Hell, with mine. With pretty much everyone in my old hometown, where her dad, and my family, still live. And that’s just for starters. Random people she doesn’t even know already hate her. She will have to face some serious shit. I hurt for her, and I already want to kill some people who might hurt her in the future. She’s my baby.

I’m also pretty proud of her, for being okay with who she is. I’m proud of her for not being afraid of the judgment of other people. I’m happier than I can describe that she felt comfortable coming to me, and telling me this. I not only know the names and faces of the three boys she has a crush on, but her first-ever girl-crush, too.

I hesitate to say this, because I don’t want to come off the wrong way, but I’m proud of me, too. I’m proud that my child is so secure in my love for her, that she feels okay confiding something so monumental to me, at thirteen. I got to share my coming out story with her, and in doing so, to actually see that I am doing so much better than my parents. I was terrified, back then. I spent hours sitting on my bed, my stuff packed underneath, trying to mentally prepare myself for being kicked out and disowned. Of course, that didn’t happen. My dad just called me a slut.

She was a little uncertain; I could see it in her eyes. She told me anyway, though. She smiled as she told me, and blushed when she talked about her girl-crush, but she wasn’t afraid. I was the one who taught her that love was never shameful. I was the one who discussed gender issues and orientation issues and political issues and the simple fact that we are who we are, and should never be ashamed of that or afraid of it. That the small-mindedness of others was to be pitied and laughed at, rather than hated and feared.

I’m also more than a little melancholy. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she was bringing me home hand prints made into reindeer and turkeys and about a zillion other things? Wasn’t it just the day before that she was smiling at me, through a chocolate mask, swearing she didn’t eat all the Andes mints I’d hidden in a drawer? Wasn’t she just throwing Cheerios across the kitchen, cackling madly as they scattered on the floor?

le sigh

I’m a little sad that those days are gone, but I am so amazed to be able to see the transformation from infant to child, and from child to young woman. She’s grown to be a pretty awesome young lady, and I did that. She’s funny, and witty, and compassionate and loving and talented and brilliant and … she’s just so beautiful.

I lived rough, as a kid. Maybe my kids are my chance to make up for some of that. Maybe this is so that I can show that some cycles can be broken. Maybe, in spite of the st00pid brain, I’m not doing such a bad job, after all.

Unexpected Setback

They say that pregnancy lasts nine months. The reality is that it lasts forever, and doesn’t last long enough. It seems like there’s this little alien being who has hijacked your body, and ruthlessly wrecks the place, week after week after week, with no regard at all for the original inhabitant, yet forty weeks is nowhere near enough time for a twenty year old to prepare herself for becoming a parent.

I saved up money. Squirreled it away in an envelope, inside a book, hidden in the space between the tops of the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling of the single-wide trailer we always seemed on the verge of losing. See, the boyfriend, Eric, was an addict. He wasn’t addicted to any one particular thing, though. It was almost like he was just addicted to… being addicted. He did have his favorites, though. First, he was the only person I think I’ve ever known who was actually capable of being addicted to weed. He smoked like a freight train, most days. It was wake-and-bake, every morning, then roll a couple of joints for the workday, then smoke a blunt or a bowl or three every evening. He regularly puffed his way through a half-ounce in less than a week.

Then, there was the gambling, which seemed to always be a presence. Sweepstakes machines, video poker machines, pool, and “friendly” poker games were his siren song. It was not uncommon for bill money to mysteriously go “missing,” the day before the bill was due. My family was already getting tired of bailing me out, and I was getting to the point where I was ashamed to ask for help, anymore.

So, I hid my money.

I was working at a newspaper, doing the graphics for the business ads. It was mindless, boring work, for just a little over minimum wage, but everyone seemed to think it was somehow the best job I’d ever had. Aside from having insurance (which cost about 20% of my pay), it was anything but. I was low man on the totem pole, and had discovered I was pregnant within my first month on the job, so I was a pariah. I brought my lunch, most days, and ate it alone in the bathroom, or in my car, to avoid the passive aggressive barbs or outright insults hurled by my co-workers.

But I was saving a little money. And I had some, already hidden, that I’d withdrawn from my bank account, after I learned that Eric had figured out my PIN.

Then I got sick. Just a sinus infection, at first, but it became pneumonia, seemingly overnight. My doctor hospitalized me, and took me out of work, shortly after my release. He’d decided my workplace was unhealthy, when I didn’t get any better.

By then, I had managed to fill my envelope with almost three thousand dollars. I figured I could trade in my two-seater for a more kid-friendly car, and still have enough money for a crib, and a stroller, and a car-seat. I knew better than to expect anyone in my family to throw a baby shower for the black sheep.

I was eight months pregnant. It was January, and freezing cold. My sister had come up for a visit, and we were supposed to go out to shoot pool with Eric. Then, she and I were planning a trip to Asheville, to shop for baby things. I climbed up from a stepladder, to the counter-top, and pulled down the book. Pulled out the envelope.

It was empty. All of the money I’d saved was gone. And there was only one possible culprit. So, little sister and I went looking for him. He wasn’t at the pool hall, where we were supposed to meet. A friend of his told us he’d gone to Mike’s house, for the poker game. Heart in my throat, stomach in knots, I herded my sister back into the little Datsun 280z, and sped out of town, tires lifting off the pavement on some of the hilly back roads. I pulled into Mike’s driveway, flashing my headlights and honking my horn. I’d managed to work myself into a fury, on the drive, and fairly flew out the driver’s side door, yelling for him, before the car had even come to a complete stop. There was still dust in the air, from the gravel drive, when I climbed onto the porch, and waddled my pregnant self through the kitchen door, the stereotype of a trashy pregnant girl in a redneck soap opera.

How much is left? I demanded.

His friend, rising from his chair, held up a hand. Wait just a minute, now…

HOW MUCH?  I yelled.

He’d lost almost all of it. There was a little under two hundred fifty dollars left. Out of three thousand. I was less than four weeks from my due date. I felt like throwing up.

Instead, I turned and walked out the door. A part of me wishes I’d just kept going. I didn’t, though. I waited, pacing like a nervous cat in the driveway, for him to make his excuses and come out. There was an argument. There were shouts and arm-waving, but I don’t remember the words, except one. He called me the c-word. At that point in my life, that was the most insulting thing I could imagine. My hand was caught in the sleeve of my sweater, and it connected with his jaw before I even knew I was swinging. For a moment, we just stood there, both of us stunned, jaws and eyes wide open, as a thin trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

When I spoke, my voice was flat, cold, toneless.

Get in the car, or you will never see me, or our baby, again.

He argued that there was no seat for him. Jaw clenched, eyebrow raised, I pointed to the hatch.

I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna…

I cut him off, and told him he would, or we’d be gone. I shouldn’t have given him the chance.

He folded himself into the hatch. I drove us home. Nobody spoke a word, the entire ride.

Unlikely conception

I never wanted to be anything as much as I wanted to be a mother. From my earliest recollections, even before a four-year-old me was saddled with the responsibility of parenting an infant sibling, I suppose I just knew that motherhood was my niche.

When I went for my very first visit to the health department hoo-ha doctors at the age of fifteen, to get birth control, they told me I had endometriosis, and probably wouldn’t ever be able to conceive. If I did conceive, they said, I wouldn’t be very likely to be able to carry a baby to term. Thus began my self-destructive years. Alcohol, pills, more alcohol, and a miserable, damaging quest to find love, and a sense of worth (in other people’s eyes, if not my own) via sex. My life, for a while, ceased to mean anything at all.

The story of all those terrifying risks, the times I got lucky and the times I didn’t, is harrowing, in hindsight, but it’s not the tale I want to tell, today.

When I was twenty, living with my douchey, narcissistic, redneck boyfriend, in an olive green 1970-ish mobile home with brown shag carpet that had once belonged to my great grandparents, I discovered that I was pregnant. I was working at a newspaper, the next town over, with (probably baseless) aspirations towards becoming a reporter, instead of just working in the advertising department, floating happily in whatever area of my brain was responsible for delusions of… I don’t know… higher mediocrity?

I’d just gone for my first tattoo, three weeks before. A kneeling, blonde fairy, in an array of cool colors (and I had to explain the difference between cool colors and warm colors to the tattoo artist, who, presumably, thought I was speaking some Southern version of Valley girl), perched on my left breast. It was just completely healed.

I drove over the mountain to Asheville, on this sweltering Saturday in late July, to do some shopping in a store that wasn’t Wal-Mart. I was walking around some scratch-and-dent place, when I saw a box of tampons, and realized I should probably have needed some of those, a couple of weeks before. No big deal, really. My cycle was always really irregular, anyway. I went on about my shopping, wandering happily in and out of little consignment shops and head shops and bookstores, while the calculations were, apparently, still going on in my subconscious. I was standing on the sidewalk, organizing money and receipts in the various pouches and zippered pockets on my purse, when my subconscious came up with some startling numbers. I froze, there, for a moment, like some strange piece of modern art, a statement, perhaps, on the effects of hipster consumerism on the mental acuity of young adults. My jaw dropped, and I clumsily navigated my way to the nearest bench. I’d like to say that I sat down gracefully, collected myself quickly, and moved on. Considering the endless loop of excitement, terror, joy, anxiety, and denial, all wrapped up in a  fragile lacework of hope, that was impossible. I wasn’t just a couple of days late. I was a couple of weeks late.

I dug, frantically through my oversized bag, to find my little planner, and my Marlboro lights. Had to dig a little harder for the lighter, and turn my back against the wind, to get a stable flame from my yellow bic, I smoked half of the cigarette, just sitting there on a bench, downtown. I looked up the red dots in my planner, connected by red lines.

I was three weeks and two days late.

I could barely breathe. I was so very excited, I couldn’t catch my breath.

When I did, I laughed out loud, there on that downtown bench, all by myself. I didn’t even think about how that may have looked to passers-by. I was on some other plane, where I couldn’t even see them, and couldn’t have cared any less what they might think of me.

I might be… *pregnant.*

But then, nah. I couldn’t be, right? I puffed rather furiously on my cigarette, soothed by the tobacco flavor, the familiar, habitual motions.

Then, I went to Wal-mart, after all.

I bought pregnancy tests. A two-pack. Don’t really know why I bought two, but it seemed like the thing to do, at the time.

I took the test next door, to an office supply store, and asked to use their bathroom (I suppose I was too embarrassed to pay for the thing in Wal-mart, then go immediately into their restroom). Where I peed on a stick.  And waited. I’d never taken a pregnancy test, before. I looked at the two lines, and thought that the second one was supposed to get darker, if I was pregnant. It was very pale, and it didn’t get any darker or more visible, so I thought I wasn’t pregnant.

A week later, when I still hadn’t started, I decided to take the test again. I called my cousin, and asked her to come over, because I didn’t want to be alone when I found out, and my boyfriend, as usual, was gone. My impatience (and the juice, I suppose), got the better of me, and I was just drying my hands, little plastic stick sitting on the bathroom counter, when she came barreling through the back door. I looked at my watch.

Ninety seconds to go, I told her.

This time, the second line was quite obvious. I squealed. No. Seriously. Squealed. Like a ten year old girl at a Justin Bieber concert. We hugged, and hop-danced in a circle.

The douchey boyfriend was, predictably, much less excited. It didn’t matter. I was going to have a baby!

pregnancy test