She Would've Stayed

I was born between abortions. I am the middle child of three, the youngest placed for adoption at birth. No one could accuse my mother of lacking self-awareness about her capacity for caretaking. Her willingness to acknowledge her limitations - her deficits - is one of her greatest strengths. But it’s dulled by her inability to do anything about them.

My life, the fact that I belonged to this family at all — quite literally a miracle — has, at times, felt like a curse. Narrowly escaping being suctioned from my mother’s womb or alternately placed in another woman’s charge, I suppose I should show some gratitude for having my two feet on the ground here with these people.

I am a product of my mother’s childhood, and when I reflect on my own, I worry about my kids — how much of our story is written by what came before us, by the impact of lives we haven’t even lived.

She was beaten nearly to death when she was three — accidentally locked in the basement, screaming for help while company was over. She had to pay for the careless disturbance. Slapped for cutting a small hole in her underwear when she was removing a tag. Hit for spilling milk.

Between the drugs and dysfunction of her relationship with my father, care and protection were paramount to my mother.

In the summer, there were thermoses full of icy hibiscus tea, made tarter to my preference with hand-squeezed lemons. During playdates, she’d bring my friends and me plates of giant sliced oranges. I’d watch Jenny Jones and call out for my third bowl of salad tossed to perfection with my favorite dressing.

She’d read me chapters from the Little House on the Prairie books, a series I collected through the Scholastic book fair. Sometimes when we were driving and she thought I'd dozed off, she’d reach over and stroke my face. I slept in her bed through all my father’s incarcerations and myriad other absences. And unlike me with my own children, she never once let on that she’d prefer to be alone.

Except when I was alone.

Left to bang on the other side of the bathroom door, locked out while they were cooking dope. Or when she failed to pick me up from a friend’s house because she was on a bender.

She gave me her best guess at care and protection.

One of my most potent childhood memories was the audible delivery of a list. Five men who would never hurt me. There is no subtlety with my mother. There were only five men she believed, without a doubt, would never sexually abuse me. She simply could not vouch for anyone else and life experience made her rigid in her belief. I didn’t need to write it down. I recited those five names by rote, like a Catholic does their prayers. Only one of her three brothers was on that list.

I began to understand. A memory surfaced — an adolescent neighbor over for a sleepover with my brother when I was preschool-aged. She terrified me that day. By the end of my sophomore year, I knew she was right to.

At best, a woman’s life is underscored by a series of discomforts, harassments, light assaults. At worst, those — plus a big event.

It wasn’t the first time. But it was the first time I felt afraid.

I was walking the barren field between my boyfriend’s house and the bonfire of underage drinking behind it. My friend’s boyfriend collided with me in the center, nose to nose. He forced his hands down the front of my jeans and shoved his fingers inside, scraping me. He was so angry, it felt like he was trying to lift me off the ground before yanking his hand out and jolting me away. He called me a slut and effectively burdened me with the responsibility of his violence. We kept walking in opposite directions.

A few years later I heard he hit my friend; it seemed like an obvious truth.

The incidents have amassed in varying degrees, I recite my mother’s list of five and conclude with she’s right, my version of amen –– a twisted Hail Mary.

I hold my mom accountable for my pain in a way I don’t with my father. I guess you can only punish the one who’s there. I made her sorry enough for both of their crimes.

She hasn’t come to support my decision to divorce easily. She is rightly affected by my ex-husband in the ways that he bewitches most of the world. His intelligence, his wit, his jovial blankness. Her loyalty, however misguided, is a result of her own bruised experience.

She comes from a generation that didn’t know how to name their rapes as rape. The concept of a present father is so foreign to her, she can’t fathom forsaking it. She doesn’t have compassion for women who ask for more than the bare minimum. She believes I was given enough to stay. She would’ve.

I understand my mother. I indict her. I love her.