Molly, tears and being a mom

This made me cry. It reminded me of what I would could confess right now, were confession possible at this hour. I miss my horse. More than that, I cannot face my own culpability in the way my life changed, in the way I had to give him up in order to help Zeke. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The divorce destroyed something in her — her trust, her faith that things would turn out all right. They always had before, but when she was 10 — almost 11 — they didn’t. By the time she had turned 13, she was struggling. Adolescence stretched before her — before me — and I dreaded what was happening. I was struggling to keep my horse, and working off his board, and rarely home, and she said, one day, “You love that horse more than me.” And I said, “It’s not true.” And she didn’t believe me.

My friend, who was letting me keep my horse at her place, said she was being manipulative, that she was being spoilt. She might have been, I suppose, but still, I couldn’t sleep for worry about her. Another horse friend said I needed to assert my authority. “I would never have been able to treat my parents the way she treats you,” she said. “You need to teach her who’s boss.”

But my heart said something else. Zeke is sensitive, extremely so. I knew it. Whatever was happening was a response to pain, not misbehavior. So I gave away my horse. I couldn’t sell him, although he had cost me a lot. I just couldn’t sell him. It was like taking money to sell a friend.

Zeke got better, though not totally. “What do you need from us?” I asked her one day, meaning “from your father and me.”

“I want to live with you,” she said. “All the time. I don’t want to have to go to Dad’s house.” I had full custody at the time, but she had been staying with him on a three or four school nights a week because her school was in his town, not mine, and she didn’t want to change schools. I would pick her up from school and bring her home with me, and she’d stay with me till he picked her up on the way home from work. I saw her every day that way, but didn’t have to get up an hour earlier to take her to school. It seemed ideal, except that she was struggling.

It’s not that she doesn’t love her dad. She just didn’t click with his wife (and there are good reasons, I would say). So I talked to her father. We worked something out. She has been with me full time for two years, and I drive her to and from school every day. Two days a week he’s supposed to pick her up from school, but he’s busy, and doesn’t always have time. It’s OK. She is far happier now.

In the end, listening to her worked. Giving up my horse was what she needed. Getting up an hour earlier every day to get her to school so she didn’t have to stay with her dad made the difference. Her grades are good. She is popular and happy. She stands up for what matters to her — a day of silence in support of her gay and lesbian friends, choosing to sit at the lunch table with the overweight new  girl, resisting the tremendous peer pressure to smoke cigarettes and the omnipresent we*d, to have s*x, to drink and party hard.

On Mother’s Day she and a friend made me dinner, baked me a cake. We sat down together and ate and talked and laughed. That night, at 1:00 a.m., she came into my room and lay down beside me (as she sometimes does; she’s been a lifelong light sleeper, starting before birth!). “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’m lucky to have you as a mother. I can tell you anything, and you listen to me.” We talked for a while, and then she hugged me and went back to bed.

I’m proud of her, proud to bursting. She’s funny and strong and sweet. She’s beautiful and smart too. I think of Molly, and my own horse, whom I gave up and miss terribly at times. I think of Zeke. I wish it could have been different, but I think it was right not to teach her “who’s boss.”

It’s the human conundrum. I did what I must confess, failed to love my horse enough in order to love my daughter the way I think she needed to be loved. One wrong to try to make a bigger right. Is it bigger? People who don’t love horses the way I do would probably say yes, but horse lovers would probably disagree. My horse friends would. Childless themselves, they don’t understand. Their horses are their children. They see me as having given up my child.

Conner. I’m sorry.

Happy Birthday!

At 12:02 p.m., 15 years ago, Zeke was born.

I cannot imagine my life without her, without our headbutts and arguments, without our heartfelt late-night conversations, without our restaurant trips with her friends where I get a glimpse into what being a teenager these days is. I can’t imagine a life not surrounded by her and her friends, who fill this house on the weekends, and sometimes during the week. I can’t imagine not hearing the sound of her voice as she sings in the shower, or not seeing her dancing in her room to the  tunes on her iPod.

She and I live together with our dogs in a little two-bedroom condo. I drive her all over the valley to pick up and drop off friends, and sometimes I feel like an ATM machine as I hand out $20 here and $20 there so she can take a friend to a movie or walk to the grocery store and buy “movie night” snacks. But I’d rather always be on the verge of running out of money and have her in my life than have a fat savings account without her. When I hear her talk to her friends, and counsel them on their life problems, I am proud. She is thoughtful, wise and strong-willed. She doesn’t bow to peer pressure. And she makes me laugh.

Fifteen years ago today, my little miracle was born. I’d had three previous pregnancies (and two after her birth),  and was not supposed to be pregnant at that time because I was undergoing medical treatment for a scarred uterus and ovaries. “You can abort it,” the doctor said, “and start over. Or you can keep it and risk another miscarriage.” Or keep it and be violently sick for eight months (don’t worry, severe morning sickness is a sign of a “good” pregnancy, according to my OB-GYN), and then give birth early, induced because of toxemia, and hold in your arms, at last, the tiny, perfect product of years of wishing and yearning.

Happy Birthday, Zeke! I love you.

Confluence

Last night, I dreamed of my father, my biological father, that is — the sperm donor. The alarm woke me, or the dog barking, and the dream fled. I retained a slight sense of disturbance, a sense that I needed to remember the dream, but no details yielded when I probed the darkness of my sleeping memory. But later it came back to me surprisingly, all of a piece, during a student conference. I read a paragraph from my student’s paper, and a single word resurrected the memory, entire, with all its associated feelings. As soon as the student left — not soon enough — I typed the memory into my computer and emailed it to my home address, an unlike-me blurring of the boundaries between work and home. I work at work. And I write at home. Sometimes I work at home, but I never write at work. I never write down my dreams on my work computer and email them to my home address, though as a writing teacher such splits between what is right for work and what is right for home are artificial at best, and damaging ultimately. But that is my life — full of compartmentalization. Until today, when I wrote down my dream at work and emailed it to home. Somehow it seemed important.

Later I came home to find an email from an old acquaintance on the beach. He was my mother’s friend. He knew me when I was an embryo, a fetus, a squalling newborn. He came to my college graduation. I shared a bed with his lesbian daughter when I was 17. I liked her. We lay in the window of the loft bedroom in his beach house, which was glassless, just a six-foot square space that let in the sea-salt night air, and we counted the stars. She is my age now, and a smoker, and her voice is deep and evocative of late nights in bars. We pass on the beach, and I wonder if she remembers that night in the window. Her father, anyway, emails me to tell me that my biological father’s second wife, whom my father divorced the year I met him for the first time since babyhood, had toured the beach that day. He then suggested it was time that Zeke met my “her grandmother,” that the call of blood and heritage was too important to dismiss. But I was confused. Zeke has met both her grandmothers. She knows my ex-husband’s mother well, and sees her several times a year. And she was close to my mother, till my mother died. So who is this grandmother? Perhaps my father’s second wife, a step-grandmother of sorts? But she was never my stepmother, being divorced from my father only months after I met him at the age of 19. Why should she care to meet the granddaughter of her ex-husband’s first wife? It’s confusing, right?

And then I realized he was talking of my grandmother, my biological father’s mother, who is Zeke’s great-grandmother, and I felt a rush of irritation at his assumptions. Zeke has met her great-grandmother. Zeke’s great-grandmother is not interested in her. She said, once, “The first granddaughter to give me a son will inherit my estate. Otherwise it goes to my dog.” It will go to her dog. Rachel is childless. I have a daughter, a miracle child. I don’t care that she’s not a son. I am horrified that my grandmother does care. I have not been averse to the odd email or phone call, but the onus is on her. If she cares, she’ll make the effort. My daughter has heritage a-plenty in her life.

So I emailed back: “I don’t feel Zeke needs to know her great-grandmother any more than she does already. As far as I’m concerned, Dad is my father. He is the man who raised me as his own when JDS was long gone. He has loved Zeke as a grandfather loves his blood kin. Family, to me, is a product of love, not DNA, and my Dad is the only father I care to know.”

And then, on returning home from dinner with Summer tonight, I found a package in the mail: It was the “paperback” I had ordered a few days ago, “In Memoriam,” about my mother’s father. And there it was, the neatly packaged transcript of the memorial service held at Vanderbilt after my grandfather’ death. And within it was a family story — which I always thought apocryphal — proven true.

And I see the links, entwined like the separate locks that twist together to make a braid, my dream of my biological father last night, and then the email reminding me of the importance of blood, of the connection between my biological father’s mother and my own daughter. And finally, that relic from my mother’s side of the family, the booklet recalling the words spoken at my grandfather’s memorial service, evoking a day that fills my mind as though it is my own memory.

My father calls. I am buzzed on gin. Summer grabs the phone: “Let me listen. I’ve never heard his voice and I’ve always wanted to. You invited me over, and then I backed out. Now I want to know him.” We are cheek to cheek in the restaurant, the phone between us. Dad’s voice leaks out and falls away. I can barely understand him. What lingers is the softness of Summer’s cheek, and the restaurant sounds in the background.

Afterwards, I think of the confluences of this day: My biological father, my biological grandmother on my father’s side, my biological grandfather on my mother’s side. On this one day they all crowded forward, demanding their place in my memory, their pre-eminence in my heritage.

But my (step)father is the one who matters. Blood is only one strand in the braid of life, and in my braid, blood is the thinnest strand. What remains, what endures, is love.

Retrospective 5: 1967 — Impossible Memories

I have always wondered about the life of the unborn. Babies feel pain. My daughter howled when her heel was pricked for the PKU test when she was a few days old. The old wives’ tale says that a happy mother brings a happy baby. I was a happy baby, the product of blissful months on the beach. Rachel was not, the product of my father’s wanderings, my mother’s loneliness and uncertainty, her cowed return to a home she had fled and an “I told you so” mother who hated the man she had married. And then there is Leah.

In spring of 1967 we are in Nashville. I am not quite two and a half. Rachel is seven months old. And my mother is pregnant again, already.

She feels well, as she always did when pregnant. But my dad has been offered a job at CERN in Switzerland. Her mother is growing sicker with every passing day. My mother has two babies and no resources for another. At some point, she sits in the doctor’s office and asks for an abortion.

He plays an imaginary violin. “You don’t want that,” he says. “Really, you don’t.”

Whether she really didn’t want an abortion and his words awoke her, or whether she simply bowed to male wisdom, accepting her fate as a woman without a mind, she folded her hands in her lap and said OK.

Thus Leah was given her chance. But since childhood this almost-aborted sister of mine has lived in horror of death, of the dark, damp, clamminess of it. She grew up with nightmares, with a jittering terror of the world around her and its dangers lurking everywhere. Still, she is the biggest risk-taker of the four of us: She has backpacked alone in Brazil, worked the agricultural seasons all over Europe, parachuted out of an airplane, squatted in a condemned London house, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. She is both anal retentive and crazywild. She is empathetically generous and simultaneously grasping, always afraid of loss.

It was years after she was born that I found out about my mother’s visit to the doctor’s office. I don’t know if Leah knows about my mother’s moment of ambiguity towards her; I haven’t dared to ask.

One other memory: We are in Switzerland in November, in our sixth-floor apartment in Nyon. Leah has just been born. She has a shock of dark hair and an indignant expression. My mother names her after her mother, who died four months earlier. And I realize, now, that I don’t know whether my mother went home for her mother’s funeral. I realize that I know nothing at all about my mother, other than some facts, and a story I weave into a fabric of my own design out of my memories and those facts.

Retrospective 4: 1966 — In shadow

Two moments rise out of memory for this year, two pieces of information that I can never fully reconcile. There is my mother, in the doorway, backlit, with me on her hip. My dad (not my father, you understand) turns in his office chair, arrested by the fall of golden hair, the silhouette, the voice. When she comes into his office, he sees the clear pale cream of her skin, the scattering of freckles across her nose, and he aches with love. It is the first moment, the first recognition. It is the last image of her he carries, for after she dies, all the others flee. He remembers her most clearly in that first instance.

My mother asks for a job in my dad’s physics lab at Vanderbilt. My dad says yes. How long before they pass beyond boss and worker status? How long beyond friendship?

The other moment is my mother’s memory. She walks into her mother’s house, a house that is now historic, that was iconic when it was built because it was made to her father’s order in the new style by a rising architect. I hold only fleeting memories of the house, of long hallways, of flagstones in pale colors, of everything angled and squared. The roof is flat. The rooms are white, and the light beams in through cool square windows, straight and hard. But this is not true now. Now the house is surrounded by trees, and everything is softened.

My mother goes into her mother’s bedroom, and stops. Does she hear something that draws her there? Does the air feel different? Disturbed? Does she expect to find her mother, ailing, there in the bedroom? She finds, instead, my father coupled with her best friend.

Where was I? In the playpen on the grass outside, perhaps. In my grandmother’s arms, someplace else? It seems I can hear the dreadful silence of my mother’s cry. She sliced through whatever it was that had kept her loving him at that moment, and sent him off, back to the house on the beach, back to the the windy gray days and the gunmetal flash of the water that she had loved.

There is a shadow over this time. Did my father and my dad overlap? My mother says no, but still, the time is full of confusion. There were letters that Rachel and I found years later, love letters from Dad, recalling the “lawnmower engine” of her little Saab in those days. Recalling me in the playpen or on her hip. Rachel? Rachel was a blacocyst, then an embryo. At some point she was a fetus. At what point? We are 21 months apart. Was my mother pregnant that day in the doorway, standing in the light? Or did that come later?

We will probably never know. It is a darkness that shadows those years, that touched me, Rachel, all of us, in a future we could not predict, back then, when I was a baby and Rachel was still in waiting.

Retrospective 3: 1965 — Reconciliation

We are four, sitting on the grass, in bright sunshine. She wears a pink cotton dress, and her honey-lit hair falls sleek down her back. She turns to him, and he holds me on his shoulders, his hands dark against the pale cream of my baby legs. I smile, toothless still, wispy blond hair catching light. My grandmother, her mother, watches us all, wrapped in a lace and orange dress that is like a sari, that hangs loose over her body, which has been ravaged by cancer. She is breastless but bloated, large. Her dark hair is wrapped in a smooth bun on top of her head, and she carries herself imperiously. She must have one of those deep, commanding smoker’s voices. She looks happy, in the pictures where she holds me, but also distant. There is a time when those who are dying begin to let go, to drift away. She is right there, teetering, fighting for life, and yet somehow, irresistibly, beginning to leave.

My mother looks at my father, smiling, happy. She knows, already, his proclivities. These pictures must have been taken at the time of reconciliation, after she left him to come home to Nashville, and after he followed her, begging for another chance. And she loved him, hard and deep and without boundaries. Oh he drove too fast, so that she clung to me in the car and prayed to the God in whom she no longer believed. Oh he left her alone in her little house on the beach, sometimes for days, and then came blowing in with stories of danger, and lust and loss in Mexico, carrying flowers, or a handful of earth, or a stone from some far-off beach. “I thought of you. This stone is the color of your eyes.”

Carrying a leaf.

In the end, though, his rage, his fits, his acid-dropping hallucinatory nights, the way he drove as though he desired to push the car through into another dimension — to bring all of us with him to that place he longed to find, me crying or quiet, I don’t remember — these things were enough, and she fled.

In the pictures, taken after he followed her to Nashville, there is no hint of the darkness. I reach for him and he laughs. He looks as though he loves me. Everything is green and pink and white and orange and rich and filled with something lovely. But my grandmother is letting go, the cancer spreading through her. My mother is reaching for him, and he is looking elsewhere. And I? I am laughing, laughing, petulant in one of the pictures, spoilt, loved, oblivious.

Retrospective 2: 1964 — Commencement

My mother negotiated the boardwalks behind the houses with her belly swelling bigger and bigger, though the doctor told her she had a retroverted uterus and was at risk of miscarriage. She should take it easy. She should lie down, put her feet up. My mother laughed. She lived in a little house at the bottom of a cliff. She had to take 213 steps up the cliff just to see the doctor, and to go grocery shopping. She packed the trash out on her back. Walking down the stairs was harder because sometimes she thought she might tip forward with the weight of me in her belly; she might go end-over-end into the water below.

Those first months of her pregnancy were idyllic. Spring and summer came to the area and the water lay glass smooth with the sun going down behind the mountains across the bay. She sat on the deck with her feet up and drank wine. I know she smoked, and now I know she smoked pot too, and perhaps I turned and turned in a world thick with dreams and giddyness, there in the dark warm womb with the light shining pink through her belly skin.

She was happy when she was pregnant. The food intolerances that plagued her between pregnancies and after, till she died, quieted down in those days. She was young and pretty, and her husband was handsome and kind, and the beach was a place for hippies and long conversations and secret trysts, for finding God in the phosphorescence when they took the boat out at night.

Then fall came, the days shortening, the wind hissing across the water. Did she lug herself up the hill alone to buy food, or did that come later? There was a time it all changed; the bliss, the being young-and-beautiful.

In late October I was born. She wrote a poem years later about the birth, and gave Rachel and I a copy. How? She was dead. How did we find it? I forget; I think she came up out of some place of memory and said, “Read this.” It was an act of love.

No.

Rachel said, “Mum wanted us to have this.” She handed it over. The light blew across the room, carrying Mum’s voice. I heard her read to me, from where she had gone just days before:

Your Father’s Gift

He brought a leaf,
Gold, russet, a touch of auburn, so lovely.
I imagine him spotting it as he walked, a girl by his side, smiling.
Its beauty a reflection of hers — in his eyes.
Were they lovers already?
Dappled, dazzled, by the sun as they danced through the whispering leaves.
Chattering. Laughing.

Golden as the leaf, the sun that filled my hospital window.
Golden, shading to amber, shading to umber,
As I waited.

When he came, he brought the leaf. So lovely.
A gift to exchange for the baby I’d just borne him.
I loved the leaf.
It was only the first of many such gifts but it was the best.
Forty falls later I pick up a leaf — shades of gold and amber-brown.
He’s long gone from my life, but I remember.
And I forgive because he brought a leaf.

Lector, part two

Continued from here

The question is why I would want to be a lector in the first place. There are several reasons. First, I’ve always loved to read aloud. I spent many happy hours reading stories to my daughter when she was younger, putting on different voices for all the different characters. Second, I have terrible stage fright. I can walk into a classroom and teach, but strangers terrify me. I thought it might be good for me to get in front of a cathedral full of strangers now and again. Third, I want to know more about the Bible. Maybe reading it regularly will help me to learn about it. There’s something about religion that gets my students fired up, and I find myself resisting the common academic stance that there’s nothing for students to learn in religion. In fact, I think they need to study religion in college. Having teachers that are open to discussions of religion, and knowledgeable, and willing to accept that intellectual pursuits and spiritual ones are not mutually exclusive, these things might make all the difference to a highly religious student’s experience in college (and I have a lot of them, in my conservative, fundamentalist town). And it might allow us to find some common ground from which to begin conversations about global warming and the Iraq war. Maybe I won’t be seen as the enemy, the intellectual anti-religious Satan worshipper their mothers warned them about (and believe me, my students do get warned about us Satan-loving professors — using those words, too!) If they sense a kinship in inquiry and spirituality, perhaps they’ll be more willing to listen to the questions I ask and the viewpoints I present.

And finally, I just love the language of the Bible. It’s majestic and powerful and cadenced… and oh, wait… that’s the King James Version, which no one uses any more. Sigh. I have to settle for more modern translations, which might be more accessible and perhaps even more accurate, but which lack what I remember from my childhood — that soaring language, a kind of poetry. Still, it’s fun to read.

Eventually I was contacted for training, and after my lessons I was allowed to read at a daily mass in the little chapel. During the summer, I read on Thursday and Saturday mornings, to a scant dozen in the little chapel which I love so much. Then I was brought in for a Sunday service, along with my trainer, who had softened towards me by then, perhaps because I do enjoy it, when I’ve over being terrified, and because I do feel a kind of reverence in reading.

And now, now, I’ve been scheduled for Holy Thursday, one of the biggest masses of the year. Last year I sat up front with my fellow RCIA journeyers while the bishop washed our feet. Nada sat close by, participating too, and all I could remember was a story he told of being in India with his best friend. They’d been walking all day, and their feet were filthy. “And we went into a bathroom and he took off my shoes and washed my feet. I think that was one of the most moving moments of my life,” Nada said when he told me the story, and his face was soft as he remembered.

As the bishop came closer to me, with his jug of water, and the catch basin, and the small white towel, I realized what Nada had meant, how the act of foot-washing symbolized so very much: humility, love, grace, compassion. Nada’s friend’s act was an act of love and reverence towards him. The bishop’s action commemorated Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, as well as the words Jesus told the disciples at the time: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (KJV John 13:34). The bishop, an elderly man, sank to his knees before us, and washed our feet, and dried them gently, with words of compassion, and I was moved by it all, by the incense and organ music and choir, and the holy water sprinkled over us, and the prospect of being able to participate in the Eucharist in just two days. And by the bishop’s “peace be with you,” as he finished drying my feet, and stood carefully up to move to the next person, grimacing slightly, his knees paining him, and yet no word of complaint. Just a service to us on this eve of baptism and confirmation. It was grand.

In the end, perhaps reading on Sundays is a way of thanking them all, the RCIA team, the bishop and monseignor, the choir, everyone else, for that moment of understanding.

Listening

Like something dropped on me, so sudden does it hit, stopping me there in the center of the path, in the mute light, shards of ice catching sparks from the hiding sun, black branches, a horizon where the snow and the sky meet and weave together and become one another. And I am filled with it, the suddenness of it — transubstantiation.

It doesn’t matter that I am here, on the path, and not at Mass. It doesn’t matter that the dogs sniff the undergrowth and I worry about my father. It doesn’t matter, any of it. It will be fine.

They hit me, these small epiphanies, in surprising ways. They always have. I had no words for them before, and few enough words now. I simply stand and wait, absorbing it — the knowing, the calm. I could die like this. There is another side — but that is the wrong word, side. As though there really is one place, and another, or one time, and another. Opposites. Bifercation. They are constructs. Words cannot say.

My mother’s head spilled light when she was dying. I dreamed of beautiful nothingness and came back through flaming embers. Those moments, those memories that are more than memories, stop me dead. They return and return. If I had been born and raised Catholic, I would be a nun.

Old Girl’s reference to Martin Luther King’s experience on the bench when he was tired of fighting, a time when God spoke to him, followed me all day yesterday. I have carried with me the moment on the path last weekend, that sudden, knee-buckling realization that is pain and ecstasy at once. There is no difference between the two, in the end. Martin Luther King heard God speaking to him. I hear no words. There is no grand light, no operatic music. Just that moment, repeated and repeated. Mum’s head spilling light, the rich earth spilling through my fingers in Ireland, the rising up and up and then falling into emptiness of my strange moments as a 10-year-old in Ireland. Kuan Yin and Teresa of Avila spin in the clouds, touch fingers and dissolve. Nada is my beautiful emptiness. I tell Mum of my dream. “I know,” she says. “I’m not afraid.”

The light in her head flickers, and fades. I am the only one who sees it — Mum and I alone in the house that afternoon — but the heron is for all of us. I do not fear dying.

Disloyal

I feel disloyal, writing about Mum. Don’t speak ill of the dead, right? And anyway, what I say could be misconstrued. I don’t mean anything to be a judgment on her. She was wonderful in multiple ways. When she died, people who barely knew her, who had met her only once or twice, stopped me to say how she had touched them. She lived lightly, easily, after the struggles of her difficult past. Horrendously difficult, really, if I add up all she suffered. She overcame.

Was it the “Right Speech” facet of Buddhism that taught her not to speak ill of my biological father, though there was much she could have said about him? I didn’t know Dad wasn’t my father till I was 12. My last name was changed by court order to my Dad’s last name, as was Rachel’s, so that we wouldn’t be recognized as illegitimate in a country that forbade divorce till 1997. When I found out Dad wasn’t my dad it was a relief for various reasons, but my mother said little about my biological dad. She could have said plenty: Drug dealer, alcoholic, abuser. Her reticence made a difference. Right speech. Am I not speaking right now in recalling my biological father? I am talking facts about him, but there are other facts too. His mother loves him. Perhaps he is kind to her. I cannot take it further; I have not talked to him since 1988.

I  wrote more about Switzerland yesterday, about my mother after her mother died, but I can’t hit “publish.” She loved all of us in the best way she knew how. It was a complicated love, shaped by her ambiguous relationship to her parents. What surprises me is how parallel our lives have been, in a way — though mine was far easier than hers as a child. But later, her diagnosis, then mine five weeks later. Treatment at the same time; her mastectomy the day before mine. The hope that came afterwards, when 2000 rang in. We were living the fantasy that both she and I would be in remission for the rest of our lives. I got lucky. She didn’t. Maybe if it wasn’t for her dying I wouldn’t be here now, but there’s no point speculating. When her mother died when she was 24, when mine died when I was 38, we both went crazy in our own ways. Dad waited for Mum to find her way. Greg didn’t. That’s the difference. In fact, Greg was finding his own way long before I met Nada, before we knew that Mum’s cancer had metasticized.

What I saw when my father spoke, before I knew about Greg’s lover, was that my father and Greg had their parallels, ways of being in the world that Dad pointed out to me. What I see now is that my life and my mother’s also had parallels. Our lives ran down the same road for a while, but they have diverged. Both my mother and I went crazy at the deaths of our mothers. But Dad waited. Greg didn’t. Dad loved Mum till the day she died, and loves her memory still. Greg was carrying on a secret correspondence with a former student long before I met Nada. He filed for divorce and three weeks after I signed he told me he was getting married to his secret love.  It’s the way things go.

I don’t even want to publish this. I don’t know where it’s going. Stella wrote about repetition some days ago, and what am I doing now but repeating parts of what I knew before, but only dimly. Finding my way through to a new place, recognizing on the way the signposts. This I knew. That… oh that is new. That tree. That moment of connection.

To be continued… maybe.