“I’m too young to be a grandmother,” I told Paul, over the phone. Puberty had come to my fledgling lady killer. He was taller now and his body was filling out. I didn’t have to force him into the shower or remind him to brush his teeth. Satin sheets were on his bed. Every waking hour, after school, was spent with Ellen. Once there even came a call—could he sleep over?

“Have you spoken to him about precautions?” Paul asked, kind of chuckling, although I knew the thought of sex sent him spiraling. Paul’s women were legend and kept surfacing, in Filene’s Basement, once, among the racks and harried shoppers, a striking older woman, titian-haired, make-up artfully applied, obviously well off. Me, in grubby tennis sneakers. Tra la! And once, in Florida, when I’d been playing bridge, a blonde who’d known him in Vegas. They both remembered him as a natty charmer and seemed surprised that we were still together. Maybe I seemed a real come-down for someone that Ava Gardner stood up Frank Sinatra to be with, but he was my go-to guy, when circumstances warranted. More than a significant other he was like that pencil-thin mustache guy who would always rescue Pauline off the railroad tracks in the silent movies. He had a mustache and the name on my birth certificate was Pauline, but I lied when I first met him, and the name I pulled out of thin air was his mother’s. Not a coincidence. Fate!

“Precautions? Are you kidding?” I answered. “ He’s got enough condoms stashed away in his room to start a drugstore. He must have bought a gross.”

Sean’s closet space where he slept was off limits though I’d stick my arm in every now and then to hang up his clothes. One Saturday, my customary day off to do the laundry and other nesting duties, I opened the door a crack, without knocking, so that I wouldn’t wake him if he were still asleep. “Got any quarters?” I asked, when I saw his open eyes leering at me.

“Get OUT of my room. Get your own quarters. I don’t have any.” The light of my life, my raison de tre. How had I failed? The walls were covered with enough signs to convict me of what? Danger Keep Out, in three languages, MBTA No Trespassing, the entire map of the Transit Authority, with its orange, green and red routes, spreading like capillaries across the city, even an orange sign: Danger Men Working Ahead. Here and there were evidences of his artistic temperament:cannisters of spray paint neatly aligned on a shelf, illegibly intertwined graffiti signatures on the walls, and a portrait of a Hawaiian dancer with exposed, lush breasts gracing the inside of his door. Michael Jackson’s poster reigned supreme.

My arms were filled with a basket of dirty laundry and I had to manipulate the lock in the front door knob so I wouldn’t get locked out. “Your father’s coming. You better get up,” I said, which elicited a muffled groan. I had a hard time saying the word “father.” I usually said: “You know who.” Now that Sean was a teenager, my ex was taking an interest, calling every other day or so and harassing me, saying I should take away the television, as if he knew how to raise a child better than I did. Cut off Sean’s television? I’d be the first person to admit that he watched entirely too much TV, but cut him off completely, and he’d have me up on child abuse.

Except for this fetish for the MBTA, and a penchant for turning concrete walls into psychedelic masterpieces, Sean seemed to be a normal, cantankerous teenager. What with my crazy family, the odds had been against it. Ellen’s family, on the other hand, seemed normal: a apron-wearing mother who didn’t have to work and baked, a father who worked as a salesman in a department store, and two other children, a boy and a girl. No wonder Sean enjoyed being there. It gave him a chance to feel as if he were part of a real family, play Monopoly, for example, which isn’t as much fun when there’s only two.

I took the laundry to the basement and walked to the corner store to get some quarters. There was a sign in front of the register We Do Not Give Out Change, but I was a regular, and had no problem. While the clothes were washing, I whisked through my housekeeping. The small apartment didn’t take long to clean. My predictable Ex would hit the bathroom the minute he came in to check out the toilet.

When he did come, Sean was in the shower and I was doing last night’s dishes. Letting them pile up in the sink was one of the perks of being unattached. At night I never had the urge to do more than shove a little Haagen Daz down my gullet, a pleasure I consistently felt I deserved after a long, lonely day in the trenches,driving taxi, babbling my head off to one customer after another.

When I finished the dishes, I came out of the kitchen, wiping my hands on my hips. I knew the first thing out of his mouth would be a complaint and I knew that one reason he refused to give me more money for child support was because he was itching to be a full time father, bored ,perhaps, with his BMW, his Apple computer, his regulation-sized pool table, his woofers and tweeters. Who knows? He’d never shown much interest when there were diapers to be changed, swings to be pushed, irate teachers to be faced.

“Why isn’t he ready? You knew I was coming for him today.” I hated to hear a grown man whine.

“He’s a big boy, now. He keeps track of his own appointments.”

He opened the closet door to peek in at all the contraband. His baby fine hair was beginning to grey at the temples. The jeans he wore had a just-bought look and so did the shiny new cowboy boots. Had he taken great pains so I’d think what a catch I’d missed? A smile played around the corners of his mouth in what I guessed was a nervous smirk. Sean was probably the only bank president’s kid in the country who slept in a closet. A jolt of remorse coursed through my body nearly knocking me off my feet. Maybe I should have stayed in Florida where Sean had his own bedroom and bath, everything color coordinated. “It’s not funny,” I said. “He doesn’t get enough fresh air in there.”

When Sean entertained, up to six kids at a time could fit in this closet, all sweating, with clothes hanging in their faces. They didn’t seem to mind, but I did. The only ventilation came from a small square hole leading to the outside hall. Some night a city rat might find its way to this vent. Many was the time my headlights had picked up the sight of a nocturnal rat crossing the street in search of food. Twice a week in front of my building the trash was piled for the collectors, barely a hop, skip and a jump up to our second floor apartment.

My yuppie Ex shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of people live worse,” he said. “Quit complaining.”

We could hear the sound of the running shower and loud and clear, “Jeremiah Was a Bull Frog,” coming through the bathroom door. Sean was singing along with the tape player he kept on the clothes hamper next to his hair dryer. It had taken awhile, but Paul’s neat-freak influence had taken hold on my son, and I knew he’d be in there primping without any concept of time.

I caught the faint whiff of my Ex’s Aqua Velva aftershave. If I hadn’t felt so fat and ugly I might have dragged him into my bedroom for a quick shtup, soften him up a bit before I approached the touchy subject of more child support. The law had changed in Massachusetts and if a child was going on to college, the custodial parent was entitled to child support until the child reached twenty-one. The bathroom door opened, and Sean, wrapped in a towel, scooted past us.

I didn’t like to talk about finances within Sean’s hearing, although the niggardly dispersal of the contents of my mother-in-law’s house left no doubt in anyone’s mind that my Ex was a tightwad. We needed everything when we first moved here and we were glad to get the things he’d brought over: a few hand towels, a standing lamp with a ripped lamp shade that had been in the living room, and a blanket that might have been a family heirloom, for all I knew, ripping down the middle the first time I washed it. The day I splurged and brought home a colander and a potato peeler, we celebrated.

“You don’t know how lucky you are that he has the time for you. He’s got a girlfriend now.”

“I know. She’s coming with us, today.”

“Where are you taking them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with another shrug. “Probably McDonald’s.”

“Bless you,” I said. “You’ve got a better stomach than I do. Sean would eat there all the time if I let him.”

“I don’t mind it. Once in a while.”

As we stood there in awkward silence, sizing each other up, seeing him there all spiffed up, I had the sense of time slipping away and the emptiness of lost passion. We were both younger than Sean was now when we’d first met, hanging around with a bunch of kids in schoolyard shadows, listening to someone’s portable radio, singing along with The Platters, Johnny Mathis, The Four Lads, Bill Haley and the Comets, memorizing every line, every shoe-bop shoe-bop. How innocent the first kiss. Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen. How bold we’d become, even after he’d bought his first car, making love on my mother’s couch within feet of her bedroom door, every Saturday night, turning the couch cushions, when we were done, to hide the semen stains.

“You’d better speak to him about this new love business,” I said, gruffly. Instead of dating other boys in college, I had braved the snowy, winding roads, a distance of a hundred and fifty miles each way, with something of the determination of a lemming. In all those weekends, my mother never once got up to get a drink of water. When I grew older, I came to the realization, with all her talk about my precious virginity, she hadn’t cared enough to interrupt. Now it was my turn, to lie sleeping with God knows what going on in the living room, sleeping the sleep of the dead, but never too tired to try to keep them honest, getting up for drinks of water from the kitchen, when I’d rather be sleeping. Paybacks are hell!

Sean came into the room, hair spiked up with gel, tail in the back, in a slight curl from the heat of the shower. He wore half a dozen silver chains, with a Playboy bunny medal that Ellen had given him, resting in the hollow of his neck. I’d put an end to that hickey business, right away. “Are you ready?” he asked his father.

“Is that what you are going to wear?” It didn’t matter what Sean wore, the question was always the same. When my son was younger and going for an extended visit, I’d have to rescue certain pairs of pants that seemed as if he were going begging. The pants he was wearing today were shredded at the cuffs and both knees showed through. Sean had used a razor blade.

“Yes, that’s what I’m wearing,” said Sean, testily. “It’s the style.”

He turned and went for the door. “Bye, Mom.”

My Ex followed meekly, his broad shoulders swaying from side to side in his leather jacket. How little concern Sean seemed to have for his father’s feelings. Served him right. If he had any feelings of desperation, he kept them well-hidden. My boy had grown up without him ever since we’d moved to Florida. In all that time, he’d only come to visit once, on a trip to Disneyland with his girlfriend. The precious childhood years had passed. The connection they should have made earlier was missing. Sean was almost as tall as he was.

“See you,” my Ex said, brusquely. “Get a job. Get a real job.”

“I do have a real job,” I countered. “What do you think I do all day, sit around and eat chocolates?”

Sean, eager to be off, reached around the door, and grabbed the leather jacket by one shoulder. “Come on Dad.” My husband’s face, so dear to me in my youth, looked back at me blankly.

I could have suggested a lot of things to lessen the tension between them, a real knock-down drag out encounter session, for example, to clear the air. But I managed to restrain myself. They would go on in this love/hate relationship which was so closely related to the subject of money, and figure it out themselves. It was safer to stay out of it and hire a lawyer if I could find one that would take me on without a retainer.

It had taken me years to resolve my own love/hate relationships. Perhaps, in figuring it out Sean would become stronger. Whenever they spoke on the phone, Sean would lock himself in the bathroom. Perhaps my husband was satisfied the way things were, a little together time, always buffeted by one of Sean’s friends. For all I knew, they could be having a great time the minute they left my door. Shoe-bop, shoe-bop, Life Could be a Dream, Sweetheart!

© 2012 Rachel Cann

I grew up attending the Catholic Church. The traditions and architecture of Catholicism are seated deep within me, and although I no longer attend the Catholic Church, I am sure what I experienced as a child lives within me still.

One of the traditional Catholic celebrations that I participated in as a child was the May Crowning of the Virgin Mary. Spring was regal during May in Indiana. The tulips had come and gone and the earth worms were back, covering the sidewalks and drives after the soaking warm rains of the season. The earth was wet and ripe, prepared to receive the seeds of life that she would carry through the year. Heavy winter jackets were replaced by raincoats. Gloves were happily stowed away. Galoshes were slipped over shoes and umbrellas popped up across the community. The May Crowning in the sanctuary was the highlight of spring, preceded by days of gathering lilacs and bachelor’s buttons to adorn the small shrine to the Virgin Mary placed in the classroom. There were processional practices in the afternoons. The girls were released to line up for the processional, while the boys restlessly waited in the rows of wooden pews.

May crownings occur in many Roman Catholic parishes and homes with the crowning of a statue of the Virgin Mary. The ceremony traditionally takes place with young girls wearing dresses and carrying flowers, traditionally hawthorn, to adorn the statue. One of the girls, often the youngest, carries a crown of flowers or an actual golden crown on a cushion for placement by the May Queen, often the oldest girl, on the statue. The flowers are replaced throughout the month to keep them fresh.

It was an eighth grade girl who was always selected to climb the wooden ladder up to the Virgin Mary and place the floral crown on her head. My sister, Candy – Cassandra Renee – had the honor when she was in the eighth grade. As I watched her I wanted to do that, too; to be like her.

When Candy was in high school, she dated the local drug dealer. He was a national debate champion and a druggie. Doesn’t seem to fit, but at the time it was manageable for him. Things got out of control for him when he went to college and the police caught up with him and my sister. It was a first offense for my sister, who was along for the ride one too many times. A good attorney and all of my parent’s savings cleaned things up for Candy. For my parents things weren’t as cleared up. It was the end of their relationship with Candy. She moved in with her boyfriend and he refused to allow her to see us – any of us. The last time we were together was the day before my sister Fran’s wedding. I went to her home to ask her to come to the wedding; to come celebrate with us. We got stoned together and listened to Michael rant about government policy. My sister gave me an “isn’t he wonderful” look and I was too stoned to argue, even though I wanted to tell her to run away as fast as she could. She didn’t come to the wedding.

The procession for the May crowning started at the back of the sanctuary and moved up the aisle toward the altar. The Virgin Mary had her place to the right of the altar, mounted on the wall behind a candelabrum, which was moved for the placement of the processional ladder. Classrooms of girls wearing pastel spring dresses and polished white shoes proceeded down the aisle, organized by grade and height to file into the front row pews. The eight grade girls entered the sanctuary, the chosen one following the pillowed crown of flowers. I’m sure there was music, but I don’t recall what it was. The sunlight flowed in from the windows over the altar and the pungent smells of wood and incense were strong. We each carried flowers. I either carried a clutch of bachelor’s buttons or lilacs. I do not recall.

Bachelor’s buttons grow wild in Indiana. They are a weed; Cornflower – Centaurea cyanus. They grew rampant in the field by the pond in our neighborhood and would bloom in shades of blue and purple. Their blooms lasted what seemed like forever. My sisters and I would clip them for our Mother and for the Virgin. I didn’t know they were a weed until one day when I took them for the classroom Virgin Mary shrine. My classmates laughed at my offering.

My Mom had a lilac bush in our yard and she allowed us to cut clippings from her bush to take to the shrine. She stopped going to church when Candy started dating Michael. We weren’t allowed to clip lilacs for the Virgin Shrine after that.

I never got to be the girl to crown the Virgin Mary, the May Queen. After the sixth grade I transferred to the local public school, said good-bye to daily mass and Nuns and turned my attention to boys and my own search for truth. My sister ran away from Terre Haute to find her truth. We heard that she was in Washington State and then Arizona. When I became a mother and started to understand my own mother’s heart, I hired a private detective to find her. She was in Hawaii, still with her Michael. We wrote for a while and I forwarded her address to my Mom and Dad. My mother wrote her and she wrote back. She also wrote to our Grandmothers who have passes away and with their passing, a loss of being in touch with Candy. My mother keeps Candy’s yearbooks, her first communion dress and a box of memorabilia for her in the coat closet in her home. The things wait for her return, but the reality of such an event is unlikely. My parents are selling their house and candy’s things will have to go. Candy sent flowers for my parent’s fiftieth anniversary but could not make the trip. Michael needed her. I sat in my mother’s bedroom this last summer and read the postcards that she sent from Hawaii to my Grandmother Miller. I read about her portrayal of an idyllic world with Michael and her three cats in her high rise condo with the view of Diamondhead. After I finished reading, I sat there for a while on my mother’s bed then got up, smoothed out the comforter and went outside to smell the lilacs.

Years after I found Candy my mother stopped me in the middle of the hustle and bustle of a family Christmas celebration and thanked me. Her eyes welled up with tears and she said she wanted me to know that she was grateful for what I had done. He said that without my efforts she still wouldn’t know where Candy was.

My Mom has a jar shaped like a snail in her china cabinet. It is an icon of my childhood, having been hanging around the house for as long as I can remember. It has wiggly antennae and looks at you with big eyelashed eyes. On its side is scrolled the word “candy.” She has had it for over fifty years. Inside it is a note reminding the curious visitor that the snail jar belongs to her oldest daughter, the YWCA national representative, prom queen, choir soloist, award winning pianist, salutatorian daughter who lives in Hawaii. Someday, after my mother dies, I will take that jar from her possessions, board a plane to the island and give it to Candy. It may not be the climb up a wooden ladder to adorn the Virgin Mary that I had always dreamed of doing, but maybe, if you will, a small act given to honor the sacrifice of a devoted mother.

© 2012 Gloria Bonnell

Watch your father pay credit card bills every month for 18 years. Notice how guilty you feel for picking out an expensive prom-dress.

Step Two:

Attend an private christian college. Work every semester and sometimes go hungry. Leave with an English degree and $34,000 worth of student loan debt, $50,000 counting what your father took out for you.

Step Three:

Marry a strong handsome Physical Therapist with a Doctorate degree and his own $30,000 worth of student loan debt. Go on a great honeymoon. Think about how great love is. Rack up $12,000 worth of credit card debt the first year you are married.

Step Four:

Earn a teaching credential and get a job as a high school teacher. Cry every day for an entire school year. Do not quit the job you hate because you have $92,000 worth of debt to help your husband pay off. Keep teaching. Pay off your credit card and $10,000 worth of student loan debt the first year. Now you have only $72,000 worth of debt to pay off. Lucky you.

Step Five:

Teach for another year. Pay off another $22,000. Now you have only $50,000 to go.

Step Six:

Move into a 30-foot trailer on your husband’s parent’s property and start saving money to build a home on their property, which they tell you you and your husband will recieve when they die. They are fairly young. Start doing laundry in your Mother-in-Law’s laundry room. Gain 10 pounds. Wallow in self-pity. Stop going out to eat or to the movies. Start shopping at Winco and thrift stores. Feel downcast when your father heavily recommends taking out a home-loan because he does not think you can save enough money to build one. Teach for a third year, save $30,000 towards your house and spend $20,000 paying off more debt. Only $30,000 to go!

Step Seven:

Take over the organizational aspect of house building. Create spreadsheets, find an architecht and apply for permits. Spend $20,000 you have saved on permit fees, architecht fees, water tests, and soil samples.  Notice that your husband has lost the 10 pounds you gained. Feel guilty for not feeding him enough, especially when your mother-in-law asks you if you are feeding him enough.

Step Eight:

Teach for a fourth year. Blush when people ask if your house is built yet and you have to tell them that the foundation has not even been dug. Explain that your husband and your father-in-law are doing all the building themselves. Pay off $10,000 more on debt and save another $40,000. Marvel at how you only have $20,000 left to go. Start thinking about how age 26 is a good time to have a baby.

Step Nine:

Watch happily as the men pour the foundation of your new home. Watch happily as the walls arrive four months later. Spend all $50,000 in your savings account on foundation and walls. Sit silently at breakfast when your father-in-law verbally abuses your mother-in-law. Sit silently in the trailer as you listen to your father-in-law yell at your husband for letting you go on a trip with your family while there were leaves to be raked. Wonder where your suitcase is. Realize that even if you wanted to get to it, it’s in storage with the rest of your stuff.

Step Ten:

Explain to the people at church that your husband doesn’t come anymore because he is working on the house. Explain to your family that your husband won’t come to holidays anymore because he is working on the house. Attend many functions alone.

Step Eleven:

Gain another 5 pounds. Teach for another year and pay off $18,000 of debt and save another $30,000 towards the house. Wonder if a mortgage is really such a bad thing. Ask your husband if you can quit your job yet because two students have committed suicide and the community is blaming the school. Plus, the school has forced you to teach yearbook, which you have no idea how to do. Cry piteously when he asks you to work for just one more year. Ask him why he ever dragged you up here to this hellhole to live with these horrible people in this crappy little trailer. Cry again when you realize how much saying that hurt him.

Step Twelve:

Hug your husband when you hear him finally stand up for his mother. Celebrate your six-year anniversary and realize that you would marry your husband all over again, even knowing what you know now. Work for a final year. Pray for your mother and father-in-law. Pray for your husband. Pray for yourself. Order fixtures and appliances. Cheer when the windows arrive. Order doors. Start trying to get pregant. Tell yourself that 28 years old is not that old to be having a first child. Pay off your final $2,000 worth of debt. Save the last $30,000 for the house. Lose 5 pounds. Try to be grateful to your in-laws and do more yardwork.  Wonder what life will be like when you finally live in your own home again.

© 2012 Sandra Rose Hughes

In trance it’s always mid-summer in the meadow where I meet the circle of my previous selves, the girls, my muses. The meadow encircles a pond whose mud shores decline gradually into blood-warm water. A circle of pine trees interspersed with a few hardwoods—birch, maple, oak—encompasses the area. Usually the girls are lounging, perhaps brushing each other’s hair, indulging the younger ones with stories or games and hugs, but sometimes they splash in the shallows of the pond, and occasionally they enact rituals of forgiveness, cleansing, or celebration. The circles enclosing circles in this setting duplicate the ripple effect the past has on my present; everything that happened to one of my former selves affects who and what I am today. A truism? I have not always thought so; I believed denial could eliminate—or at least alter—the past. What I failed to realize before beginning hypnotherapy in the hands of a skilled therapist was that in denying the validity of some of my selves, I also deprived myself full access to my creativity.

But perhaps I’m ahead of myself. What exactly is parts hypnosis? In trance with my therapist or in self-hypnosis, I contact different versions of myself at various ages, behind various personas—multi-layered, multi-voiced me. This process has been at turns joyful and sorrowful, peaceful and agonizing, celebratory and humiliating, reassuring and frightening, but always revelatory. I have persisted because I have come to believe that knowing myself, whatever its cost, is better than not knowing.

What effect has having access to my previous selves had on my creativity? These former selves have become my muses, as powerful for me as any ancient muse. Before hypnotherapy my creative life could best be described as diffuse and dilatory, even with writing which I loved. Early childhood attempts at art and music were effectively squelched by critical teachers more interested in product than process. As I grew older, I tried dancing, gardening, cooking, ceramics, needlework, home and self-decorating, amateur theater, and games and fantasies with our sons—some of which I found pleasurable but none as soul-satisfying as writing.

I’d scribbled forever—poems, letters, essays—but until I started therapy, I’d not taken myself seriously as a writer of anything but the academic writing necessary for my job as a community college English instructor (convention presentations, essays, academic journal articles, and textbooks). Except for sporadic journaling, I wrote for myself only when everything else was finished (which was almost never) and when the urge to write was overwhelming (which didn’t occur often).

Having finally achieved some leisure almost ten years ago, I took a creative writing course through the continuing education program at a local university; I loved it and wrote poetry, biographical sketches, part of a play, short stories, and monologues. The instructor thought some work publishable, but once the class was over, I stuffed the pieces away in a file cabinet—writing them had been a pleasant interlude but nothing more.

Besides, if I did occasionally pull something out of the file to re-examine, perhaps as a prelude to polishing for publication, the editor self/critic/censor/judge intervened, whispering: “Are you sure you know what you think about that subject? What makes you think anybody else would want to read what you write? What if your mother read it? Isn’t there something more important that needs doing?” Time after time, that insidious little voice defeated me.

But then through parts hypnosis I grew familiar with that voice; I learned her genesis, I knew her strengths, I learned when I needed her and when I did not. When she marched in, trampling seedling thoughts with her muddy boots, I could say, “Relax, we’re not going for the Pulitzer today, we’re just doodling. When I’m ready to submit, I’ll let you handle all the grammar and style questions, but right now I’d like the feeling self, please; I want to write my emotional body today.” She sulked, but she subsided, placated because I acknowledged her role. Then I was free to write what I felt without fear of interior contradiction.

And that’s important because hypnotherapy taught me that speaking or writing my truth is more important than worrying about whether a work will sell or even whether it will be affirmed by anyone else. Trance accorded me the freedom to be myself since it is for myself (and my muses) I write, yet paradoxically, the more personal, the more individual, the more specific I am, it seems the more universal the appeal of what I write. Similarly, trance gives me the courage to contradict myself, to write today’s truth today and tomorrow’s truth tomorrow whether they agree or not. It grants me the courage to write about everything and anything—the first time I publicly read something I had written about sexual abuse, my hands and voice quavered, but the next time it was easier, and the next time easier still. I learned that if I could write that taboo, I could write anything.

I write more now because trance provides access to the storehouse of the unconscious. I can enter a hypnotic state and ask my muses who has a story to tell today or who can tell me what direction the poem I started yesterday wants to take. Because my dream life has intensified, and my dream recall has improved, dreams have also become a writing resource. Daily journaling provides yet more source material for writing.

What else has changed in my writing life? When we lived in Houston, I was active in a large organization for women writers and artists. I belonged to three writing support groups there and I’m trying to start one in my new community. I take creative writing classes by e-mail.

A dream I had not long after starting therapy perhaps best symbolizes the influence of hypnosis on my creativity. In the dream I’m responsible for a baby who plays a minor part in a movie, so minor that only the baby’s head will be seen on screen. So that’s all the baby is—just a head. But it acts as though it were embodied; it looks questions, smiles, grimaces. Just now it cries, and I try to console it with cuddling. It turns hungrily toward my breast, and I am touched by its confidence but saddened because I have no milk. But surprisingly, I feel the familiar tingle, the slight erection of nipples that signals milk coming in, and I let the head nurse until it is satiated and still. Then I notice the baby now has a torso as well as a head. I seem to know that if I continue to nurse the baby, it will grow limbs, fingers, and toes; it will be more valued by the movie crew.

Later, I understood that infant as my creativity before parts hypnosis—deformed by self-censorship, stunted, limited to headwork, analysis, reasoning. When I joined my muses in the meadow, permitting my conscious self to play and explore with them, listen to, question, and above all, trust them, I became capable of nourishing my creativity with the mother’s milk of emotion; I enabled the baby to thrive.

© 2012 SuzAnne C. Cole

I stand in the calm of my kitchen at home, now that the whistle of the teakettle has been silenced. Although I am awake, I am not yet sharp in my mind. Tea will help: the momentum of the boil flings itself at my sleepiness even as it slows when I lift the kettle from the burner, tip it, pour water from it over the teabag. Steam spirals, like prayers on the wind.

After a minute, I regard the tea bag with still-unfocused eyes. It lies like debris on the surface of the water. The tea leaves are dry. I pinch the square tag hanging over the edge of the mug, take up the slack in the string, tease the bag against the water. Slowly, it sinks and the water begins to color. Slowly, the flavor rises.

It is a first-thing ritual, tea. The house is still; I live here alone with just the dog. Darkness backdrops the windows this morning, now that summer is over and the fall equinox is past. The edge of the sandy-brown countertop where I lean is stone-cold through my T-shirt. The wood floor has sapped the coziness of flannel bedsheets from my feet. Autumn is making itself at home. This mug of tea is welcome.

I have chosen a fragrant herbal tea instead of the usual black-with-milk because I’m not feeling my best. Perhaps it will comfort my throat, raw from coughing much of the night. Wafting through the silence and half-light comes the smell of mint and chamomile.

These leaves have traveled far to reach my kitchen. I wonder where they have come from. Japan, maybe. Or maybe China, or Sri Lanka. They grew on bushes in the sun and rain and wind of far-away hillsides. They were harvested by people speaking foreign tongues, thrust into shoulder bags with no notion of destination. Which leaves, exactly, would arrive in my home, flavor my boiling water, sooth my aching throat? There were sellers and buyers, tea factories and retailers, shippers and truckers involved here.

With my left hand, I heft the mug by its handle; with my right, I cup it. Both hands raise the warm ceramic, and I bow my head to the edge and drink, the tea now cool enough for a sip if I breathe across it first. I close my eyes against its humidity.

It is but a simple mug of tea, yet here I am, wondering about those other people halfway around the world. Perhaps they are picking another crop of leaves, or trudging a dirt path homeward with a full bag. Hauling the goods—on their backs, in a truck, on a ship. Or maybe making dinner, making love, doesn’t matter. They are there, I am here, and we are linked.

They say the world has become small. But to me, it’s a long way from here to there, and that’s the appeal. As I bend my head over my mug, my awakening gaze lowers to my chilly feet. These feet of mine, I muse, how they love to go places.

Wondering what’s out there fuels my curiosity, makes me want to set out, away from home. Wanderlust pushes, insistent, relentless, until I am moved to find a way to breathe the air somewhere else. It could be at the coffee shop in town or at another end of the world. Either way, there’s something to be discovered every place, every time. Finding out what each new day has in store is what gets me out of bed, even in the early dawn after a restless night.

My most recent journey has barely ended, but I wiggle my toes and wonder: where will my feet go next?

© 2012 Kate Dernocoeur

My fellow editors and I had the privilege of getting to know Stacy Furrer while we were all getting our MFAs. Stacy was there when TWF was just an idea, she was one of our first contributors, and has continued to be one of our biggest supporters. She has generously contributed work from her memoir and served as one of our Guest Editors. I have read her excerpts published on The Whistling Fire multiple times, and am always struck by how far removed they seem from the Stacy I know. Her dark, sometimes funny, catharsis seems a world away from the easy to laugh, single mother, who enjoys romance novels.

Reading her work in excerpts is like looking through a peep hole. I can see smart parts but not the whole. I am compelled to continue on the journey with her and finally see the entire picture, yet terrified of where the journey may lead me. And it is that which brings me back to this piece time and time again.

-Lauren Cummings, Editor

Mama Sings the Blues (Excerpt)

by Stacy Furrer

Check back every Tuesday this month to read more Editor’s Favorites.

My wife, Holly, and I get home at the same time. We ride in the elevator together. She says nothing. Inside, she goes to the bathroom. She closes the door. We don’t usually close the door when we go to the bathroom.

I sit on the couch, and put a pillow in my lap. She sits on the other end of the couch. She looks at me. I start to talk. Our story unspools rapidly and not in chronological order. I can’t remember when you met my son, Avery, and how often you hung out with Avery and when I told you I loved you and when we stopped using condoms and when I started thinking your drug use was out of control, and the stories keep coming, and I keep unraveling, and Holly is quiet until she starts to cry, and I keep talking until I have nothing left to say.

Help me, I say. You’re the only one who can help me.

Help you what?, she asks.

Write him. Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him that I didn’t mean to hurt him. You know me best of all, Holly. You and he know me. You can get through to him. He will listen to you. You can tell him what being in a relationship with me is like.

I know I’m asking her something I have no right to ask her, but I don’t know what else to do.

I know he loves me, I say. I love him.

She is still crying.

I will think about it, she says. I give her your e-mail address and phone number.

We have to get divorced, she says, not because you fell in love with someone else, but because you deserve to have the next man who wants to marry you, or who you want to marry, work out.

Would you consider staying married until after our child is born?, I ask.

Yes, she says.

I think I am in shock. I think Holly is in shock.

She goes to the bathroom. I know she is going to the bathroom to cry. She doesn’t want me to see how hurt she is. When she comes out, she has taken off her engagement and wedding rings. She has never taken off her wedding ring, not even when Avery was born. She has taken off her engagement ring plenty of times when she has been angry at me. I see she has taken off her rings, and I take off my wedding ring. Even though I had taken off my ring when I was with you, my finger now feels strange without my ring, or maybe I feel strange sitting with Holly without our rings on.

What did he know about me?, she asks.

I never told him we were married.

She walks into our bedroom and sits on the bed. She comes back into the living room, sits at the computer, and composes an e-mail to you. I don’t have to ask to know what she is doing. She loves me, probably more than I deserve, and because she loves me, and because she wants me to be happy, she is doing what no other wife would do.

Holly leaves to see a friend. You have not responded to the e-mail. Before I get Avery from daycare, I call the Hawthorne Hotel and cancel our reservation. I can’t return the swan boat tickets. On my way to Avery’s daycare, I stop at a Walgreens. I go inside, not for anything specific, but in the sleep-aid aisle I pick up a box of Motrin PM. I am tired. I need to sleep. I think the cashier knows what I am going to do later with the pills I hadn’t known I went into Walgreens to buy.

I get Avery. I hug him tightly. He says, daddy, down, down, daddy down. I put him down. He holds my hand as we walk across the parking lot to my car. Ummies daddy?, he asks. I have some crackers in my car, and I give them to him. At home, I put macaroni and cheese on a plate and put it on the kitchen table. I put cookies and crackers on a table in the living room. I fill three sippy cups with juice, and I leave them where Avery can reach. I lock the top lock of the front door so Avery can’t get out. I fill a small glass with some white wine. I open the Motrin PM box. I put the box in the bag I carry to work. I don’t want Holly to see the box in the garbage can. I open the bottle, look at the pills, tilt the bottle toward my mouth, and I dump in as many pills as I can fit in my mouth. I swallow them with a little white wine. I swallow the rest of the pills in the bottle, and I finish the white wine I have in the cup.

I check Facebook. You and your friends have blocked me. I have no Facebook friends. They had all been your friends. Using Holly’s account, I look for your profile. You have changed your relationship status to single. I send an e-mail to your mother. I thank her for caring for me and for Avery. I apologize for hurting you. I tell her I hadn’t meant to hurt you. I tell her I wish I had gotten the chance to know her better. I send an e-mail to one of your friends I had met at the party. She, I had thought, was the nicest. I tell her I hadn’t meant to hurt you. I tell her I wish I had had the chance to know her better.

I lay on the couch. I look at our text message history. Nearly 27,000 text messages. These texts are our history, everything we had been. I delete the chain of text messages. How easy to delete our life together. Less than a minute after hitting delete, everything is gone. I cannot delete the pictures of you, and of you and Avery, and even the few I have of me with you or of the three of us. I cannot delete our AIM history, because that is how we first communicated, and that is how you told me you needed to talk to me the night you asked me to date it out. Deleting everything means you are totally gone.

The Motrin PM won’t be enough, I think. I get the Melatonin out of the bathroom, and I take what is left, about 30 pills or so. I just don’t want to feel. I want to never feel again.

I go into the bathroom, turn on the faucet at the sink, and begin to shave, but the razor is mostly dull from Holly using it to shave her legs. I shave in awkward strokes. I cut myself. I cannot feel my hands. When I am done, I know there are patches of hair left, but I need to sit down. Someone else will finish, I think.

I call my brother, mostly to say goodbye, but also because he has called and texted several times. What’s going on?, he asks. When you blocked me on Facebook, you also blocked him.

I tell him what happened. While I talk to him, I feel myself begin to fade. I feel myself disappear at the edges. I cannot feel my head. I feel the phone drop out of my hand. I cannot reach for it. I still hear Avery playing with his cars. I wonder if he will remember me, or if he will only remember me as the man in the pictures with him.

I think you have already moved on. I think you have already slept with someone. Maybe more than one someone. I think you have already traded necklaces with someone, and asked them to go steady.

I call Holly. I need you to come home, I say.

Later, she says. I’ll be home later.

I sleep. Holly finds me on the couch. Avery is asleep on top of me. She changes his diaper and puts him to bed. Are you OK?, she asks.

I’m fine, I say. I am slurring. I just need to sleep, I say. I am so tired. Let me sleep.

What did you take?, she asks.

Just some Melatonin, I say.

How much?, she asks.

Just three pills, I say.

She looks for the bottle, but I have hidden it since it is empty. You took more than three pills, she says.

Maybe four, I say.

You need to go to the hospital, she says.

No, I say, I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. Just let me sleep.

She tries to get me to agree to go to the hospital. I tell her I am fine. I lay down. She goes to bed in the bed we used to share. I think that I will probably wake up later. I don’t want to wake up later.

In the morning, I think I have failed. I cannot even kill myself. I do not feel like myself. Everything today is different. I have been changed in the night. I am not the same this morning as I was yesterday morning. But if I’m not the same, then who am I? A great question. Who am I?

I am unsteady on my feet. In the bathroom, I finish shaving. I tell Holly I cannot go to work. I call my boss and tell her I am sick.

Holly, Avery, and I spend the day together mostly in silence. Holly doesn’t want to talk to me, and I don’t know what to say to get her to understand. She talks to her parents, but does it in the bathroom. She texts several friends. The word is spreading. There is no containing what I have done. I have now been outed. There is no retreating into the world Holly and I once occupied. I am gay. No take backs.

I think I could try pills again, but decide that later, after Holly and Avery are asleep, I will sneak out – as I have grown expert at doing – and I will drive to a nearby bridge and jump off. Jumping off this bridge makes perfect sense. All I have to do is leap. I’ve spent the last six-and-a-half months leaping away from everything I’ve known, and leaping toward everything I’ve wanted to know. Leaping off of a bridge should be easy. Only later do I think that neither suicide attempt was because of you. I was afraid of what living as an openly gay man meant. I was afraid of losing Avery. I was afraid of never feeling for another man how much I felt when I was with you.

Holly takes Avery out into the hall to play. While they are gone, I record a suicide video. Of course I record a suicide video. Everyone records a suicide video. A way to say goodbye. A way to explain.

I had been taught at an early age to hate myself. Don’t be gay, I heard over and over. Gay men aren’t happy. Gay men can’t have children. Gay men aren’t faithful. Over and over. Taught to hate myself. Never knew how to like myself. Never knew that I was looking for someone to like me, to teach me how to love myself.

I thought you were the one.

You told me you were the one. You told me I was the one.

I promised to love you unconditionally. But I guess I lied. I only wanted you to get sober. How could I tie myself to a man who gets high every night, and then lies to me about it? How could you expect that that was the future in which I wanted to invest?

I eat a piece of your birthday cake for dinner. I had not eaten yesterday. From the couch in the living room, I watch the sun set. I think this sunset will be my last. Sunsets are wonderful, when you’re feeling sad.

I’m tired, Holly says. Will you be safe if I go to sleep?

Can I sleep in bed with you and Avery tonight?, I ask.

Yes, she says.

I will stay on my side, I say.

I watch Avery struggle to fall asleep, and then he falls to sleep. Holly eventually falls to sleep too. I whisper her name. She doesn’t respond. I put on my shoes. There is no other way, I think. My head hurts. I just need to stop hurting. I never thought about the end during our beginning. I never thought our beginning would end.

Outside, I look at the sky and the stars, and as I had thought on the Fourth of July, I think you are also under these stars, probably with someone, probably high. I think in time you will be consoled, because everyone, eventually, is consoled. I hope in time you are happy to have known and loved me.

Once I’m dead — because I cannot think about the actual act of dying — but once I’m dead, I can sleep. I will not know another day without you. I will not have to see the way Holly looks at me: Disappointment. Sadness. Hate. Pity.

On the bridge, I look for the best place to stop. I turn off my engine. I put on my hazards. I open the driver’s side door and get out. I see headlights behind me. Another car. I get back in the car, wait for the car to pass, drive a few feet further, get out again, and this time I close the door behind me. The bridge feels unsteady under my feet. The bridge sways. Gravity holds me to the bridge. I am trying to fight gravity. I no longer want to fight gravity. You had pulled me out of my orbit. I no longer know which end is up. I think that love is like falling, and falling is like this, and my heart feels like it is gone, and all I have to do is jump, and then I will fall, and then everything will be done.

What is left behind seems so broken. I cannot think of myself as a person. Our when-not-if future will not happen. I have been erased. I am going out altogether like a candle. I wonder what I will be like then. I have not seen what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.

More headlights. More cars. I get back in my car and keep driving and then I’m past the point where I think the fall will kill me, and I decide I will turn around and jump from the other side. I pass the Charles River and the playground where you and I had played with Avery five days ago. I don’t want to die, but I don’t know how to live anymore. I’m crying. I call Holly. I need help, I say.

Where are you?, she asks.

I’m at the Tobin Bridge. I was going to jump. I don’t want to die.

Come home, she says. We can get you help. Come home.

OK, I say. I’m coming home.

Do you need me to stay on the line with you until you get here?

No, I say. I’m still crying.

Just come home, she says. Everything is going to be OK.

And she was right.

© 2012 William Henderson

I may have been too fat in my one-piece bathing suit but I thought I looked like Joan Baez, with my long straight brown hair and wise face. That pleased me, to look like a famous singer who represented moral passion and a dedication to music while expressing our moods and transforming our spirits. It was the Seventies.

Patty, Ingrid and Barb—virtually nude in bikinis—hadn’t assumed poses of the renowned and talented. Sunbathing with me on the lower terrace of my San Diego backyard, they sat at their ease watching the play in the swimming pool as if their children were the cherubs of the gods. My friends’ company usually cheered me, but I couldn’t feel part of their cohort that day.

Some days at the pool I taught the older youngsters to dive properly, but that day I couldn’t be bothered to teach let alone enjoy children’s antics. “Marco!” somebody shouted. “Polo!” somebody answered, and the pool came alive with shouting. Their noisy play didn’t interest me. I adjusted my sunglasses and gazed at the empty flower-pots lining the fence around the pool. It certainly didn’t occur to me to hum Joan Baez tunes.

As soon as I’d settled myself, my four-year-old daughter joined me, clinging to my leg. Her warm body seemed menacing, like she might bite me. I’m not sure why I let that fantastic notion take hold, but I often felt little Maggie could hurt me. She needed my attention every minute, pulling at me with a neediness that seemed a threat to my life.

“Tyler ran away again,” Patty announced, clapping a torn straw hat on her blond head. “Yesterday at the beach it took me forty-five minutes to find that kid. When I caught up with him he wasn’t hurt or even missing us. Sometimes I think he’s smarter than I am.”

“Teach him to read,” I suggested. “He’ll get into Proust while you play volleyball. God knows you’ve got enough books. He’s nearly four. He can do it.” Patty loved books. She shed them like a molting bird. They fell from her tote-bag, cluttered her car, lay open and spattered on her kitchen counter. She imbibed books like strong drink and knew arcane facts about the Supreme Court and arms treaties. Come to think of it, she also had a handsome, well-read husband who inspired my fantasies.

Patty didn’t look like a mommy. Her thin athletic frame was more suited to cross-country running. I was the one who looked like a mother: tall, full-breasted, a classic matron. The Fates, however, had not willed me the pregnancy I’d dreamed of; I was infertile. The three goddesses had instead blessed skinny Patty, who had three boys.

Five years ago I’d given up my teaching at the high school to be a mother of adopted infants. Babies were easily available to adopt in those days, and we thought they could be molded into our version of perfection if we were model parents. I’d intended to form my children—like a potter with clay—into agreeable, well-adjusted, clever people. Being a mother seemed the perfect challenge. I’d need to be patient and loving, an ideal tutor. The role would improve my character, and I’d become, well, motherly, a totem figure worthy of worship.

I’d be as good at parenting as I’d been at teaching. How hard could it be? Very hard, I learned. The loneliness at home with my daughter and her five-year-old brother was intolerable. Our son now went to kindergarten, but I spent every day at home with a little girl who resisted any directions, had little to say, and demanded my company. It felt like everything had ended with the adoptions of the babies, and I missed my classes and colleagues every day. I wished I’d run off with the basketball coach. He’d made a tempting offer.

Perhaps the changes we’d brought about in the Sixties made us think we could influence, even create, human beings. After all, we’d burned away entrenched values in the same way the sun burned away the water on our skin. We’d undermined the established culture by confronting restrictive laws, protesting policies of discrimination and war. We could do anything. Except I couldn’t. Nothing worked for me as it should have. My daughter balked at our wonderful progressive preschool. She didn’t enjoy the carefully chosen books I found for her or the educational excursions I planned.

I secured a pair of “floaties” around Maggie’s arms and watched her happily enter the shallow end of the pool by herself, her sun-bleached thick hair bobbing in two pony-tails. She kicked and splashed in the silken water—a California waterbaby—her tanned body sturdy and smooth. Following her movements, our spaniel, Daisy, crept along the poolside as if she could protect the child by intense scrutiny. I knew my friends also watched my daughter. I knew they thought I was too concerned about Maggie, too worried that something was wrong with her.

Patty sat up and faced me, frowning under her floppy hat. “Elaine, look at Maggie. She’s beautiful! She’ll be swimming and taking that slide in a week. If she grows up to marry Tyler, they’ll start a new race.” Patty liked to make pronouncements.

My athletic friend was trying to make me stop obsessing about Maggie’s disturbing ways that frightened me. She often screamed with rage and wouldn’t eat. She fought with the other children. Worst of all, she wouldn’t talk much. Doctors—I’d taken her to three so far—reassured me there was nothing wrong with her. I didn’t believe them and concluded that Maggie had “fetal alcohol syndrome,” resulting from her birth mother’s drinking. I’d read books about it. Patty—with her handsome husband, healthy boys, and literate soul—couldn’t know what I was going through with my daughter.

“Mark likes to wander too,” Ingrid sighed, observing her son wade tentatively into the pool, a tube around his waist. Relocated to California from Germany with her American husband, Ingrid had defied our long-haired look, preferring a short haircut. Today she’d even put a ridiculous hanky on her head as a sun-screen. With her German accent and unshaven armpits and legs, she looked the foreigner among us. “If I don’t catch him he pees in public,” she added, following little Mark’s every move. Two boys jumped off the side of the pool, holding their noses, and splashed Mark deliberately. The timid little boy and his wary mother, outsiders here in our California paradise, seemed tragic figures to me that day, human sacrifices to ridiculous disorderly chaos.

“If any place can help Maggie find herself, it’s our pre-school,” Ingrid said as she moved to the edge of the pool to be closer to her son. She sat and dangled her feet, rippling the ice blue surface. Ingrid could be counted on to mention our little school at the Unitarian Church, forever promoting it as a center of innovative child-care. We four mothers volunteered there and supported its progressive philosophy. For Ingrid, a teacher at the preschool, the place was celestial, model of enlightenment. She went on, “I think Maggie will get over her problems and will like school one of these days. It’s a readiness thing.”

Ingrid’s wisdom reached beyond faith in the preschool. Her European spirit seemed ancient, rising out of hidden places. I sensed a beneficent perceptiveness in her like fresh spring water enlivening the dry earth. One day years later I’d go to her with the truth about my marriage, but not that day. That day I needed to stay with my anguish and my anger, holding on as if to keep from drowning.

School? You think she’ll be fine if she adjusts to preschool? Who are you people?

“Yeah, these kids are wonderful.” Barb spoke up from the bench where she combed her straight black hair, like locks of a prehistoric maiden. “I think Maggie is especially darling.” Barb wore her black bikini easily, showing off her enviable small breasts and a flat stomach. “She’s an intense, thoughtful little girl, Elaine.”

She’s a barbarian! There’s something wrong with Maggie! Can’t she see it?

“I wonder,” I said, slipping into the pool next to my daughter and giving Maggie a hard push sending her skimming through the water. She giggled. Maggie liked to test herself, liked to risk, as if she felt most alive when in danger. How could a toddler be so fearless? “Maggie’s got her own ideas about things. It’s her way or no way.” No one spoke. Finally I added, “Why doesn’t she talk to me?” speaking louder than I intended. “Something’s wrong with me that I can’t inspire this child to do more than demand food!” I thought of Maggie’s self-portrait she’d drawn in preschool, an outline of a head scrawled in the palest yellow, a face with no mouth. The picture had been transferred—by a conscientious teacher—on to a plastic plate that now hung on my kitchen wall, and the soundless image watched me with a baffling stare, like a face on an aboriginal cave painting.

“Maggie’s waiting for something to say,” Barb said. “I’ve heard of kids who don’t talk until five or six and then speak in complete sentences.” She pushed her wonderful hair back into an elastic band and spread a towel on the deck.

I considered pushing Barb’s slim body into the pool. Damn them all. Barb’s too naïve for words; Patty’s in total denial; Ingrid thinks preschool can save the world. I leaned back in my chair, adjusted my glasses again, and wished for a vanilla milkshake.

After ten silent minutes, I lifted Maggie out of the water, dried her with a striped towel, and she walked away from me, her arms held out from her sides by the florescent orange floaties. Who is this independent child? Has she the genes of some warrior tribe? Some street gang? I ran my fingers through my Joan Baez hair to rid myself of nasty thoughts. Daisy regarded me with her usual worried look, her spaniel soul aware of my discontent.

In time, the sun cast long shadows of late afternoon, and the three bikinied mothers called to their children, “Five more minutes!” gathering their towels and totes. When they started their journey down the driveway to their cars, they looked like sleek princesses of a naked tribe trailed by their primitive children. Soon there’d be nothing left but dark footprints.

Patty stopped on her way and stooped to poke at the dirt-strip on the edge of the asphalt. She called to me, “I’ll bring you some pansies next week. You need something here.”

I didn’t want pansies. I wanted Maggie to talk. I wanted Maggie to progress like the other children. I wanted Maggie to play without hitting. I wanted my daughter to validate my mothering and make me happy.

I trudged up the stairs and into my empty house, Maggie trailing behind me. Inside, she put her wet bottom on the seat of her Big-Wheel—a toy cycle parked in the middle of the family room—and drove it into the furniture while I went to my bedroom to change clothes.

* * *

Patty planted the pansies and they flourished. Within the year, red bougainvillea draped the fence, and pink and white impatiens enhanced the flower pots around the pool. Time altered more than the look of things, though, as I watched Maggie master the pool-slide, as predicted, and heard her speak when she felt like it. She defied and fought, hating school, but anyone could see she didn’t have fetal alcohol syndrome. Every crisis shook my world, but we survived together and her provocations forced me to act. She taught me to dive, you could say, to find the resources I needed.

Eventually, like a mermaid emerging from the water to seek the sunlight, I moved out of my despair. I can’t report that I started singing like Joan Baez, but I can say I spoke truthful words and heard them. After cutting my long hair and exchanging the dark glasses of a sunbather for the clarity of bifocals, I divorced my husband and took the children with me to make a life in a small house across the street from a church. We had few flowers, and no pools, but we did have a healthy avocado tree and we ate the green fruit year-round.

© 2011 Elaine Greensmith Jordan

My mother planned our vacations and because she was not quite normal, neither were our vacations. While I dreamt of cheesy Disney cruises and relaxing all-inclusives, sipping virgin daiquiris at the pool bar like my vacationing teenage peers, part of my mother’s mid-life crisis meant an insatiable desire to shrug off our tourist identities and become one with our Central American neighbors. My mother the psychologist taught us early that it was impossible to enjoy a country without getting into the minds of the people who lived there. To understand and communicate with the people of these countries, the first step was to speak the language.

My little sister, my mother, and I had all learned Spanish in the classroom and my sister and I liked to keep it there. In the classroom, safe behind desks, among kids who chewed gum like cud. Balancing on the cliff of womanhood, we both had enough things to obsess about in our own language without worrying about our inability to roll our r’s. We felt every mispronunciation like a pimple, humiliation oozing from our teenage pores. My mother, on the other hand, had been swept off her feet by Zoloft a few years earlier and had lost the chemical compounds for shame in the process. On previous vacations, she had made it her unofficial job to practice her pitiful español on anyone who stood still long enough to feel obligated to listen. This usually meant hotel maids, waiters, cab drivers, gardeners, etc. Every trip had its own cast of characters, roped into our lives by my mother. She poked and prodded her characters, the bored, white lady who never tired of playing with dolls.

Don’t get me wrong. My mother speaks Spanish. She knows the difference between the preterite and imperfect, the masculine and feminine, and her phrase bank extends far past the necessary hotel “la cuenta, por favor”. However, despite a lifetime of classes and a college semester in Spain, she somehow manages to be nearly incomprehensible and mind-numbingly embarrassing whenever she speaks. She sounds like she learned Spanish from a Southern rodeo clown drunk on tequila. I think it was her eagerness that was the most painful to watch, the bug-eyed, craned-neck exuberance with which she spoke and how she was completely unaware of the sniggers waiting around the corner, just out of earshot. Having shriveled my dignity to the size of a pinhead on previous vacations, the next logical step was, of course, to stay with a family in Nicaragua and attend Spanish language school for six hours every day. In other words, drunk Southern rodeo clown all day every day for two weeks.

My mother was most excited to meet our host family, to show off her beautiful daughters and to bond with our madre and her hijos, to find people who appreciated (read: were paid to appreciate) the way she massacred her way through the Spanish language. It was going to be the ultimate adventure: my mother and her two girls, the three señoritas. When we arrived at the house, feeling sweaty and extremely American, hauling our rolling suitcases across the dirt street, we realized that we were not the only ones moving in. There was a van out front, with a life slowly being unpacked: mattresses, picture frames, cans of condensed milk, a child’s tricycle. My mother seemed oblivious to the moving crew, while I squeezed my sister’s hand as we both noticed the woman in black watching us as our host mother, Raquel, welcomed us inside. Her eyes darted between the three of us, the woman in the corner, and the steady stream of furniture weaving through the house.

“Bienvenidos,” she said. It looked like there were tiny men pulling the corners of her mouth into a smile. My mother motioned to the family rubble exploding silently around us. “Que es esto?” The woman in the corner let a sob escape and quickly covered her mouth as if keep the army of wails inside of her from leaving their loved ones and joining the front line. She left the room and Raquel explained in Spanish, quickly and without emotion.

The woman is my sister her husband died two days ago hit by a car the funeral was yesterday he earned the money so she and her family had to sell their house and move out she has a teenage daughter and a little boy they won’t disturb you the three of them will be living in one room you still have two rooms just like you reserved welcome to Nicaragua here are the towels.

For once, my mother had nothing to say. She looked old all of a sudden, the eagerness bleeding out of her face. Here we were, with fat suitcases and Spanish dictionaries, pencils sharpened, on the heels of a funeral procession. Raquel was as kind as she could be but we crowded every room. We were like three thick tongues, thrashing around in a mouth too small to fit us. Mealtime, which was when we were supposed to be swapping stories and collecting new words, was humid with silence. Our stay had all the makings of a great travel story. We swam in our own sweat, beneath mosquito nets. There were chickens shitting everywhere. Nine of us shared one bathroom. We ate plantains in as many forms as Forrest Gump could cook shrimp. But for evert detail we added to our emails (“The kitchen is outside!” “We eat our eggs straight from the chicken!”), there were a few we left out. Like the way the teenage girl stared at us from across the table, daring us to smile when she and her family were hit by the cold reality of their loss every time they opened their eyes in the morning. Or the way the little boy asked when his father would come back from the store with his Superman action figure and their perrito. We soon realized that this was not our adventure anymore. This was their lives, and we were more than tourists. We were intruders. We discussed our next step as a family, weighing the options on our way to and from the language school. If we stayed, that meant money, money that they needed. But if we left, that meant room, or what they needed even more, space. My mother eventually decided that it wouldn’t be fair to either of our families if we stayed.

While we were waiting at the front door to leave, my mother looked tired. I wanted to tie her loose shoelace and kiss her eyelids and pad her heart with something thicker than mud. Her eyes were deep as secrets and I could see the fire slapping at her bones. I realized that I had absentmindedly reached for her hand, my arm slung around my sister’s shoulder. I looked back and saw the teenage girl. Her eyes were not angry and threatening, staring unblinkingly to the back of my skull. She was looking at our hands, clasped and wet with each other’s sweat, and the easy way my sister leaned her head against my shoulder. Mi familia. Solid. Whole. Unbroken. As we left, my mother spoke for the three of us. “Adios, y lo siento,” she said. I don’t remember harsh shards of syllables, words like jagged glass. Her voice was warm and viscous, flowing into the cracks in their home like glue. My mother understood a language I had not yet mastered and she spoke it with a perfect accent.

© 2011 Emma Shakarshy

Feb. 15, 2011, CNN.com

© 2011 Steve Castro