Letters to my Daughter: September 2, 2019
Being your mummy is nuanced: I pay bills, mete out my time prudently throughout the day, and ensure you have what you need. Days blend into each other. I avoid cheap coffee with an electric espresso machine under my desk. I should feel fortunate, but my heart is a black star folding into itself.
Your father bought a small house with an in-ground pool in the backyard and invited us to live with him for a while. The water is a deep emerald and your toys are kept in a broken bucket by the steps. You have a queen size bed in a room twice the size of your old room with a window facing the tepid green water in the backyard. What's left of our modest life before your father's house is stacked in boxes in the attic. I imagine taping them closed and shipping them back to Washington state. I don't understand why he wanted us here or even why I agreed. He's left painter's tape on the walls and ceiling of the master bedroom and partially sanded the walls. You sometimes walk into the bedroom and tell me Daddy made a mess. I agree with you. The soft purple makes the blue tape stand out.
My sadness is exhausting to him, Charlotte, but sometimes being a grownup means making decisions that chip away at your sense of self until you're convinced there's nothing left. He liked to tell me I was directionless and lacked purpose. I imagine him holding a burlap sack of dead birds and throwing them at my feet to see, as if I wasn't cognizant of their deaths: graduate school, my writing, military career, social life, motherhood. All of them limp before me, plumage dulled from their time in his sack. Looking at them makes me tired and he wants me to justify why I've left them to whither, each one crooked and glass-eyed at my feet. Nothing I say will change their broken bodies. I feel them move with me throughout the day, small beings attracted to my warmth.
We had a field mouse living in the walls of our old home. I imagined him eating roach eggs like dark croissants. He was a nuisance taking care of another nuisance before it had a chance to exercise its own fecundity. I vacuumed his droppings, small burnt match heads, scattered behind the cheap wall space heater in your room. The carpet throughout the apartment was worn dark, paint peeled from the walls revealing older layers, a visible crack under the front door cancelled out all effort for equilibrium. It was our home, the small space I hung our photos and taught you how to use a spoon. During the summer I spread an old quilt on the front porch we shared with two other families. The weight of their steps creaked through the ceiling the way your cries could be heard throughout all four units late at night. It's hard to say why I found it comforting.
Your abuela passed twelve days before mother's day and there's a hole in my heart that leaves me breathless. I feel it under my clothes at the center of my sternum flapping open to the rhythm of my pulse. She was found face-down in her bedroom in front of her closet naked. I saw her when I was three months pregnant with you and haven't gone back home. Her fundamental disapproval of me is something I haven't been able to let go. She told me I was too hard to love. We didn't talk for the rest of my pregnancy. It culminated with a box of clothes for you and a flurry of phone calls that left me feeling anxious. I have messages on my phone from her I listen to when I'm alone and wear a bracelet your bisabuela gave her when she became an American citizen. I hug you and tell you how much I love you every day. How will my death impact you?
