…about  redemption

(an excerpt from a letter to a friend, 1998)

…I think there is a Great Big Fat Clue to why you have moved on and I haven't in the fact that you have a daughter. Well, yes, I know it's stupid--- but there is a part of me that thinks I will never *really* be accepted into the company of women because I never gave birth. It's a rite of passage that demands you change out of your girlhood togs, and that also admits you to a club I can't join. <kicks chair rung moodily>

  Knowing looks, tacit understandings. Labor and delivery stories. Blouses that have that sicky-sweet babybarf smell despite numerous washings. First-day-of-school, first period, first prom, first Big Problem. The sharing of a certain kind of love, the power of which is incomprehensible. 

 I have a lot of baggage--- stuff that I spent the early part of my life mulling over, and making decisions about, and putting in a sort of virtual hope chest against the day I could give it to my daughter. Mostly, it was the chance I felt I never had--- to feel completely and unconditionally loved. But other things--- from what to name her to how to tell her about sex. There were determinations stored: to never make her feel like her maintenance was a burden, to allow her the space and freedom to be her own person, even if the person wasn't much like me. There were quiet times filed away--- times for just the two of us, times when she had all of my focus and all of my attention, and knew that I wanted to give those things, that I wanted *her*, and that she was the most important being on the planet to me at that moment. All the things my mother never gave me were in that chest, waiting for my daughter. And all the vindication and redemption and justice and glory I ever needed were there too. Still are. Without a daughter in whom to see myself, and maybe some of my mother--- the early days of her, anyway--- without that beautiful mirror that clarifies and orders and distills poison into honey, I got lost. 

I sit here on my creaky old hope chest some days, thinking about how things went awry, still fighting the idea that my life will never be what I thought it would, planned it would, and that I have to redefine myself as myself alone, without my daughter. 

My life is rich--- I have no complaint about it, especially now. I have wonderful friends, a beautiful home, plenty of family on whom to spend emotional coin--- and a man I adore, who seems to thrive on making me happy. What more? What more. 

There is an emptiness at the center of me--- and as I nose my little craft toward the choppy waves of menopause, I am newly aware that it will be there forever. Dear as my lover is, cheerful and caring as my friends are and despite the warm embrace of my family, nothing can heal that place, and my little hope chest full of redemption will go unclaimed.  

Perhaps it is too easy to say that's the core of the difference between us, in regard to these mother issues. <shrug> It's just what I am feeling tonight. 

-=C=-