Marooned

by Erika Trafton

The sunny day lured us to the park. I'd just picked my son Julian up from preschool. Parents sat on benches circling the play structure. They looked bored. I cried silently behind black sunglasses, my brain under siege, again.

Meanwhile, an aging Asian nanny read a dog-eared paperback. A dad in his office clothes draped his lanky body proprietarily across an entire bench and furiously sent text messages. Two women, noteworthy for their footwear (one in knee-high black leather boots, the other in designer flip-flops that showed off a recent pedicure) chatted loudly enough for all of us to hear over the voices of shrieking children. They leaned against the play structure a few feet from me, as if to appear engaged with their kids.

"That team of housekeepers you recommended is faaabulous–their attention to detail is amaaaazing."

"Aren't they lifesavers?"

"Yeah, except our nanny said they’re not very nice. They don't say 'please' and 'thank you.'"

The friend shrugged. Apparently her nanny didn't have such stringent etiquette requirements. "I'm just glad we have Fridays to spend with our little ones."

"Absolutely–without the nannies' day off we’d never get this quality time."

The women seemed unaware that one of their little girls had just stolen another child's sand pail and flung it down the slide.

My phone rang. My phone never rings. I only use it for emergencies.
This was an emergency. It was my therapist returning my call.

"So what's going on?"

"I’m really depressed and anxious and I want to kill myself." I began to sob.

"Where are you?"

"The park."

Her voice had an enforced calm about it. I was glad. "Should you be driving? Your voice sounds a little slurred."

"It does? I took some Klonopin. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if I should be driving. But I'm only a few blocks from home."

"OK, you are going to drive home and then you are going to call Steve and tell him to come home immediately to take care of Julian, and then you are going to do whatever you need to do to stay safe."

Silence. Crying.

"Erika, do you need to go to the hospital?"

I might need to go to the hospital. "I don't want to go to the hospital!"

I was pacing now, circling the children, keeping an eye on my own, noticing nothing but his tow-headed form, working busily in the sandbox.

I could feel a panic attack coming on. I no longer saw the man who was texting or the nanny who was reading or the overprivileged women with their legions of help. I was thinking about how I went to the hospital once, before my son was born, and how it felt like prison.

"I know you don’t want to go to the hospital. But I’m asking: do you need to go?"

More crying. "I don't know."

"OK. Can you do what I asked you to do?"

"Yes."

"If you feel worse tonight, call a crisis worker."

"But they won't know me, they won’t know I'm a responsible person, and they'll throw me in the hospital against my will!"

My therapist's voice remained calm. "I'll put a note in the computer and explain the situation…OK?"

I couldn't talk. All I knew was that I didn't want her to hang up on me. I needed the sound of her voice. But she had other patients. She couldn't stay on the line while I paced for another hour. Suddenly I became aware that I was audibly crying. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone might be observing this meltdown.

"OK. Thanks."

I collapsed on my bench and looked around. Kids played, adults chatted or messed with their phones. Dappled sunlight played across the sandbox where Julian narrated his tractor action. A pair of grandparents pushed their granddaughter in a swing. And the two women with the shoes recoiled from me in horror as I dried my face with my shirt. Clearly they had overheard my conversation.

Only a fragile membrane separates life and death and I had my hands and mouth pressed up against it.

I need a seeing eye dog. To guide me through the mood swings. To offer a handle I can grip, guidance I can yield to. A reassuring nuzzle, a friend I need not find words for. Most of all, eyes to see the future when I cannot.

I am bipolar. It runs in my family. After years of research and the support of two therapists, one psychiatrist, and my OB/GYN, I went off almost all my meds and had a child. During that time, some professionals and family members treated me in ways they never would have treated a deaf, blind, or diabetic woman who had conceived. They believed I had no right to be a mother, despite the fact that I was responsibly managing my illness and always reached out for help when I needed it. Fighting the stigma was draining. No wonder I had learned to "pass," or pretend everything was all right.

By age eighteen I was class valedictorian and state tennis champion. By age twenty I was living alone in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I attended two colleges and worked two jobs. By age twenty-six I'd taught countless college prep classes, scoring well with students for my "cheerfulness." By age twenty-eight I'd spent two years circling the globe and married a computer programmer. By age thirty I'd written a book about my travels and published several excerpts.

Then there's the other story: By age eight I'd had my first psychotic experiences (I told no one; no one ever noticed). By fourteen I had my first major depression. By fifteen I had an eating disorder. By sixteen I was manic. By twenty-five I was diagnosed bipolar. By thirty-two I'd been hospitalized. By thirty-three I'd endured an extremely difficult pregnancy, a horrific birth, and postpartum psychosis. All the while, I’d tried countless medications—mostly ineffective, nearly all causing serious side effects like dementia, suicidality, and–this one’s great—a potentially fatal rash on my face.

For years before Julian's birth, I’d wondered how I would explain my illness to him. Luckily, I had a role model in an aunt with lupus who’d handled her illness with grace. She and her son had had an enviable bond. She showed me we all have limitations, and our children will not punish us for them, but rather learn from them.

That morning simple tasks felt impossible. Like getting my son’s lunch together. Making sure he had extra clothes. Putting sunblock on his face. Feeding him breakfast. I tried to keep it together.
But something overwhelmed me in the car on the way there. I started crying.

"You have sad eyes again, Mommy?" asked Julian.

"Yes, I'm afraid so."

"I want to give you a hug and a kiss, Mommy." His voice was insistent. He was two years old and he was going to fix this problem.

He is not an affectionate child—I have to take it when I can get it. So I pulled the car over and crawled into the backseat.

We hugged and kissed through my tears and he said, "You are so happy now?!", a question as much as an exclamation.

I could feel my heart cracking. I loved him so much and I wanted to protect him from everything. But I couldn't.

As the traffic rushed past us, I said, "You know Mommy is sick and that sickness makes her sad sometimes?"

"Like when Daddy was sick in bed?" His dad had recently gone through a bout of hepatitis.

"Yes, kind of like Daddy." I stroked his hair. "And you know I love you so so much!"

This same little person who threw tantrums in parking lots and screamed, "Don't look at me!" on nearly a daily basis, this same little person was trying to understand the incomprehensible and to help in the best way he knew how.

Obviously, Julian could not cure me. After I dropped him off at preschool, I spent the rest of the morning pacing the house, debating whether or not to overdose on my meds. I was agitated, I was suicidal, I was desperate. I have to kill myself, I can't kill myself played in a rapid, endless loop in my head. Yet I continued to play the proper mother, taking him to the park after preschool and packing a snack.

I survived that dark patch. Even without a seeing eye dog. I did as my therapist instructed: I called my husband to come home to watch Julian, I called supportive people, I distracted myself with TV and DVD’s. I also debated whether to give Steve control of my meds, but decided not to, opting instead to increase my antipsychotic dose in order to slow the self-destructive thoughts and agitation (I was a pro at tinkering with my meds after so many years). When I could, I slept–my sole relief. I struggled to survive each second. In short, I hung on by my fingernails for a few days until the suicidal urges began to recede.

Unfortunately, it was not the last time I'd find myself marooned on my own bipolar island. I'll admit the repetition wears me down. But Julian keeps me from giving up. He did not choose a mentally ill mommy; I owe it to him to stay alive. I can only hope that someday he'll be proud of how hard I always fight to swim back to him.

Erika Trafton is the mother of a three year-old boy. Her work has appeared in Adventures in Wine and Encounters with the Middle East. She is the recipient of a Solas House Best Travel Writing Award and is at work on a novel.

Surfacing

by Karen Barnett

My second child arrived amid disaster. Not my own disaster in any personal sense; I am not among the hundreds of thousands whose lives are ruined. But two catastrophes usher him into my life, their presence a dark backdrop to his arrival. The day I find out I am pregnant, a Tsunami devours entire islands in Indonesia and Thailand, drowning an unimaginable number of people and rendering inconsequential the shock I feel at my own unexpected circumstances. Almost nine months later, just as I feel the first rhythmic cramps that will bring his birth, a hurricane strikes. The extent of its aftermath slowly becomes evident during our first evening together. As I hold my puffy-faced baby in a clean, bright room, I imagine a woman in New Orleans giving birth in a flooded hospital, or on a crowded stadium floor.

Perhaps the pairing of these two cataclysmic events with such pivotal moments in my life causes the sense of foreboding I carry home from the hospital, along with my second child. Or maybe the foreboding comes from exhaustion. My newborn is not one of those mythical creatures that sleep five-hour stretches from day one. Still, theoretically I could get snatches of rest between wakings, or nurse mostly in my sleep. It's just that sleep no longer comes. I stumble through the grey weeks, play with my daughter, feed the baby, buy groceries. At the end of a day I cannot remember how I accomplished any of these things. When I finally close my eyes at night, all I see are waves.

During these endless first few months, my husband, Andy, and I develop a nightly ritual. After my daughter is finally in bed for the night, we collapse on the couch to watch part of a movie, while I nurse baby Solomon to sleep and carry him up to our bed. One evening, in the midst of the never-ending rain, I wrap little arms tight to their sides, while Andy picks An Inconvenient Truth from the top of our pile. Our customary 20-minute installment stretches until the credits end and we continue to stare at the screen. That night, Solomon is restless and unsettled, placated only by my breast. I lie motionless, my body cramped uncomfortably around his, visions of smashing polar ice caps and submerging cities flowing through my mind. Despite the tenuous link between global warming and my own strange post-Katrina/tsunami anxiety, I feel oddly justified. My fears now have a name, a basis in reality.

The next day, aching with exhaustion, I resolve to do something. I will not sit idly by during a moment of planetary emergency. I will not sink into inaction with the future of the human race, the future of my children, at stake. I drop my daughter at preschool and try desperately to get Solomon to sleep so I can concentrate. He refuses to be settled, so I hold him in one aching arm and scour the Internet while bouncing on an exercise ball. I buy carbon credits for our cars, the miles we flew last year, the output of my electrical appliances. Only when I realize I have driven my checking account into overdraft do I stop. I feel good, buoyed up, I am taking action.

Over the next weeks and months I replace our light bulbs, turn the thermostat down, and make everyone wear slippers. I leave the car in the garage and walk everywhere I can, one baby in the sling, the other in the stroller, cloth bags hanging precariously from the handles. I sign petitions, send letters to Congress, forward email campaigns. I wash plastic snack bags and hang them from cabinet doors to dry. I cancel our diaper service, and soak them myself, replacing disposable wipes with squares of cotton. I soon reach a point where I can think of nothing else to do. The momentary elation of these tiny actions quickly grows thin. I berate myself for not being strong enough, good enough, brilliant enough to come up with some way to be more proactive. Should I stand on a street corner holding a sign, or volunteer to go door to door? I search for jobs in environmental organizations, even though I cannot yet imagine returning to work, but find none looking for a lawyer with no environmental experience, (other than Internet carbon off-setting).

My preoccupation grows hand in hand with my mounting sleep debt. I squander the little time I have sitting at the computer reading of multiplying disasters: receding glaciers, dwindling forests, rising sea levels, peak oil, ecosystem collapse. By some accounts the disaster will strike in 20 years, some say in as few as 10. My entire life trajectory suddenly makes little sense. Sometimes the weight of it presses physically onto my chest. I feel as though I am suffocating. My eerily green-glowing light bulbs and carbon credits are meaningless, empty gestures, tiny exhalations in a mounting windstorm. At night I finally sink into sleep, then wake suddenly, gasping to get my head above water.

It seems I am not the only one struck with worry. All around me, other parents swap the latest calamitous news over the din of playground noise. My inbox is inundated with snippets from articles, lectures and magazines, ranging in tone from the cheerily optimistic (let's all buy organic cashmere and save the planet) to the morbidly pessimistic (we have eight years left until the end of oil and collapse of suburbia). Dinner conversation with friends veers frequently to the post-apocalyptic. Survival plans for various disaster scenarios are hashed out over glasses of wine, sometimes with fatalistic jest, sometimes followed by sharp silence.

Like other couples we know, Andy and I hammer out our own short-term emergency strategies. We discuss meeting places, contact points, routes of escape. Having mocked survivalists for years, I feel slightly silly as I fill our garage with five-gallon jugs of water, cans of food, medical supplies and duct tape. Andy, a vegetarian who leaves me to usher spiders from the house and set bait in mousetraps, suddenly talks of buying a shotgun. He wants to learn to shoot, to hunt food if necessary and defend our family if law and order break down. At first I laugh him off, then argue vehemently. Slowly, over the course of months of these conversations, the Katrina footage never fading from my mind, I begin to wish he'd just go and buy one and lock it up in the house without my knowledge.

As lost as I am in my new baby fog, it seems this is the year that climate change becomes a household issue. Disaster preparedness pamphlets pop up in preschools, grocery stores, the local YMCA. (Apparently my bins in the basement aren't weird, they're responsible.) Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Even our reluctant President makes a few statements of broad acknowledgment. For a short time, I am hopeful. Maybe it's not too late. However, despite the increasing public awareness and rapidly rising gas prices, things continue as normal. I stare incredulously from my detached, exhausted place, but nothing seems to change. The facts are overwhelming, impossible to ignore, but ignoring them seems to be the predominate response.

I wonder often throughout this long, sleep-deprived year whether I would be as preoccupied with the future of the planet, or lack thereof, if I did not have children. At this moment, life in North America is still affluent and comfortable. Leaving aside the worst predictions, it is entirely possible that for most of my own lifetime, energy prices may rise dramatically and weather patterns may shift and intensify, but life in my privileged little corner of the globe will otherwise continue as I currently consider normal. If I did not have children, I could live my life in comfort and relative unconcern. How deeply can one really feel the pain of unknown generations to come? But, I do have children. And some day they may have children too. I have read no predictions that leave their lives unaltered. The future that I've always imagined for them may be nothing like the world they will inhabit.

As the baby slowly morphs from appendage to person, this becomes my predominate concern: what world do I prepare my children for? The business-as-usual version where a decent education, some extra-curricular enrichment and a bit of good luck will ensure them middle class security and some measure of happiness? The world where college funds and 401(k)s and investments in private schools make sense? Or should I try to somehow prepare them for a post-apocalyptic future: one where they will have to eke out their own livings amid constant natural disaster? Will they really end up in the technology-driven, class-divided, American-dominated, ever-more-globalized trajectory they were born into?

This becomes the background to my thinking on numerous issues, from what to buy to how to invest to where to live. We are unsettled in career and geographic location anyway, torn between two countries, families on two coasts, and competing desires for career/family balance. To these deliberations we add our fears of climate change, rising sea levels, urban unrest, oil shortages. The waters become so murky that I cannot picture myself and my family anywhere. Do we pursue my legal career and a second residency for my husband in New York City or San Francisco? Both are cities we have lived in before and considered returning to. However, both are also overpopulated, oil-dependent and destined to be under sea level in the not too distant future according to many predictions. Do we instead opt for a more rural, simple existence and buy a parcel of land somewhere where we can grow food and maybe raise a few chickens? The specter of environmental disaster is not the only consideration guiding our thoughts, but it is an unshakable factor–a trump card often played by my more rurally-inclined husband, that I can no longer completely discount.

My quest for concrete action continues. Along with it, the web of interconnected issues expands. Search as I might, I cannot seem to find any obvious avenue for my own dramatic contribution, no ingenious idea for carbon reduction, no chutzpah to start a political movement. Instead, I find small actions and imperfect ones at that; more tiny steps beyond light bulbs and cloth bags.

The most fundamental and obvious contribution is to consume less, and this I attempt to do. However, it is not easy. As any new parent will attest, babies seem to require an enormous number of things. Many of them are large and plastic and many seem to be indispensable. There is a continuous stream of products for beautifying and simplifying parenting and for purifying and edifying one's children. I am drawn by their endless promise. I try to resist, to question my purchasing motives, to think about how long an item will last and where it will end up. I consider packaging, buy from "green" labels, shop in bulk, opting frequently against convenience. I turn to second-hand stores, get things off Craigslist, borrow from friends. I understand that my overall consumption matters far more than the cosmetic or minor greening of the products I buy. Nonetheless, these small measures salve my conscience, making me feel better as I continue to consume far more than my planetary share.

It seems that for every message against consumption, there are at least three counter messages, many of them "moral" ones, urging me to buy. I must keep my children safe, myself young and vibrant, my house Zen-like and peaceful, my technology at least somewhat up-to-date. How can I be good or happy, a competent mother or strong woman without the necessary things? These purchases make me feel good. New jeans and a great pair of boots remind me I'm something more than an un-showered, stained and saggy mother. Hand-made German wooden toys with non-toxic, vegetable-based paint, not only amuse and educate my children, they look nice scattered around my living room. Many of these things I consider my birthright–I need an attractive home, fashionable clothing, decent cosmetics, well-dressed children. But slowly, I begin to understand them as extravagant luxuries that come at a cost far greater than the amounts of money I spend on them. However, even knowing this, I continue to buy. For I discover that I am no different than my neighbors or friends, or the imagined uncaring masses whom I rail against in my most passionately self-righteous moments. I too cannot feel the urgency at every moment. I too act as if nothing were wrong.

One recurrent theme that emerges from my search for action beyond the three Rs is localism. I read about the efforts of so-called "locavores" who attempt to eat nothing from outside a certain geographic range. My husband and I try to emulate them wherever possible, buying as much food as we can from local sources. In the summer this is relatively easy; we shop at farmer's markets, choosing from a wide range of fruits and vegetables grown in the Pacific Northwest. I enjoy the process of hunting out local food, meeting some of the farmers who grow it, hearing about the particular conditions and challenges of a given growing season. In the winter localism becomes more difficult: my toddler and baby have apparently inherited the palate of a globalized, modern, American, rather than a native Northwesterner. They shun applesauce, greens, and potatoes, begging instead for tropical fare like mangoes, bananas, and kiwi. I feel furtive and guilty loading grapes from Chile into my shopping cart in February, but the motherly fear of vitamin deficiency and the battle of picky eating trump my convictions. True localism doesn't work with young children, I rationalize. Of course for most of human history it had to, and in the future, it may again.

Even more satisfying than buying locally, we soon discover, is not-buying locally. Growing and foraging our own food slowly become central family activities. We build raised garden beds in the yard, fill them with organic soil, plant seeds, water and weed. My daughter, the vegetable-phobe, stands outside picking peas and lettuce and eating them by the handful. I steam and mash home-grown carrots to spoon-feed the baby, feeling powerful and pure. We forage for shellfish, digging clams and oysters all over the Puget Sound. Soon we are gathering berries, then wild greens, then mushrooms, first with mycological societies and experienced friends. We spend many weekend days tromping through the woods, children strapped to our backs or toddling along the path at our sides. After a few months of learning, we fill baskets with wild kitchen mushrooms: porcini, chanterelle, morel. I am nervous about all of it at first. But my confidence soon increases, and I am quickly surprised by how safe and easy it actually is to gather hundreds of dollars worth of delicious food on a morning walk with my children.

Gardening, foraging, buying locally, consuming and driving less: these things make me feel somewhat proactive and, as a result, more optimistic. They, along with the supplies in my basement, also give me at least the illusion that my family could weather short-, or even long-term disaster. I know my actions are far from perfect. I probably contribute to the problems in more ways than I help, although my search for new ways to lessen our footprint continues. Clearly, nothing I do will change the planetary outcome. I have yet to find a dramatic angle for a massive social movement. Of course, it may not be necessary for me to do anything at all. The world may very well continue on its current course, ushering billions in India and China into the industrial age with nothing more than a few hiccups. Human ingenuity and modern technology are powerful forces. Marshaled in time, they may stave off disaster, reverse carbon levels and perfect new, clean, renewable energy sources that allow us to keep consuming and living our comfortable, suburban lives.

Although hopeful, I am unable to believe that things will remain entirely unchanged. I feel certain that my children will live their adult lives in a world unlike the one in which I came of age. But hasn't that always been the case? Things have changed dramatically in the past few generations, and we have done just fine. Despite the dark speculations and my wildest disaster planning, I am too programmed, too comfortably middle class to abandon it all and move out to some property in the wilderness and learn to survive off the land. I have invested too much in this way of life to give it up completely just yet.

So where does that leave me? Right here, on my current trajectory, saving for college, planning for an unaltered future. Yet I am also trying to raise my children to be prepared for whatever awaits them, with an awareness of the issues and a moral obligation to consider the impact of their actions. I will try to provide them with an understanding of where their necessities come from and empower them to obtain some of them in the same way their great-grandparents did, without a lengthy web of fossil-fueled assistance. I want them to understand that their comfortable, suburban lifestyle is neither inevitable nor universal. Most of all, I want to foster in them a flexibility and toughness that will allow them to flourish no matter their circumstances. I will try not to rush to solve their every problem, alleviate their every discomfort or provide a material solution to their every need. Only time will tell if this will be enough.

Camping with my family on the slopes of Mt. Rainier one summer night just before my son's second birthday, I lie awake in my sleeping bag, unable to drift off amid the tangled limbs that surround me. Lying there, slowly watching the hours pass, I realize suddenly that my suffocating nightmares have ended. It has been months since the last time I woke to water crashing over my head. It now seems slightly quaint, my preoccupation with the tsunami and Katrina. I think about the mythical woman I imagined so often, the one who gave birth on the stadium floor. Her child is also nearing two. I wonder how her life has moved on.

I sneak quietly out of the tent, stepping around the sleeping bodies of my children. Outside I breathe the sharp night air, the smell of damp soil and leaves. Enormous Douglas firs surround me, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, the moon low behind them. A breeze washes through the branches then disappears, leaving only the faintest trembling of needles. Crouching beneath trees that have stood in this spot for hundreds of years, I feel small, safely insignificant, an inconsequential part of something unbroken and enduring. It is hard to imagine anything that could alter a world so vast, so endless. More than anything, I want my children to feel this, this sense of peace in their own insignificance, breathing in the night air in some unspoiled forest. If nothing else, I can raise them to know that this existed, that this is the world they belong to; this is their beautiful home. I crawl back in the tent beside my sleeping family and listen to them breathing in the night.

Karen Barnett has been a social worker and a lawyer and is currently full-time mommy to her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. Originally from Canada, Karen currently lives in Tacoma, Washington where she spends most weekends camping and foraging in the Puget Sound. She is working (very slowly) on a novel and beginning to think about returning to a so-called "real job." This is her second publication in Literary Mama. She can be reached at barnett.karen@gmail.com.

Girl Feelings

by Alle C. Hall

We were in Manhattan when I started spotting. Everything about our pregnancy had been we. "We're pregnant," we told Aunt Lucy at lunch, breaking the three-month rule because we weren't in Manhattan that often. We told Cliff's parents, his cousins. Yet here it was, indisputably me who was spotting.

I called my OB's office to ask if it was safe to fly back to Seattle.

"How many weeks are you?"

"Eleven."

"What does the spotting look like?"

Purplish. Kind of thick, but not a lot of blood. Not a lot, I stressed. It took nine months to get pregnant—nine months of temperature-taking, "Now, Cliff!" sex; of waiting, waiting, waiting; of fourteen other couples, all good friends, making their big announcements.

When we finally got pregnant, we didn't tell my family—not parents or siblings, not seconds, however removed. Ten years prior, I'd tried to talk to them about the abuse that happened during my childhood. They shut me down. I was alone, still five years from knowing that Cliff Meyer walked the planet, but I accepted that my family couldn't be the one I deserved. I would create a family that could. And now I was spotting.

My OB said nothing could stop a miscarriage once it started, so the flight wouldn't determine the situation one way or another. We flew home, and went bleeding—I was bleeding—to our scheduled appointment with the genetic counselor.

She flips open our thin file. "Alle Hall and Cliff Meyer?"

Cliff squeezes my hand with a regular, comforting rhythm, radioing over: "Best Sweetheart."

"What kind of blood?"

"Bright red, now," I say. "Lots."

They send us to ultrasound. The med tech—compassionate eyes above the severe neutrality of her white mask—says, "I am not seeing a fetus" and leaves to fetch the doctor. In the false twilight of the exam room I reach for Cliff's hand, to tell him what I had previously told two best girlfriends but not him.

"I thought she was a girl."

Her name was Mira. In Hebrew, Mira is short for Miriam, one of the few women in the Torah who wasn't "So-and-so's mother," or "So-and-so's sister." Miriam was a prophet and a diviner. Her name means "bitterness," though I prefer the alternate translation: "rebellion."
I wanted a Hebrew name that worked as a Sea World name—if you get picked from the audience and the dolphin trainer says, "What's your name, kid?" you don't want to have to say, "Liviyatan."

Cliff wanted a "normal" name.

I wanted Mira.

In those first weeks I didn't reveal that I was having girl feelings, but as Cliff and I played with names—"Nadav!" "Is that a boy or a girl?"—I did lay the groundwork.

"Cliff, did you know that 'Meira' is Hebrew for 'light'? If we have a girl, we could make your last name into her first name."

"Meira Meyer? Like, 'Duran Duran'?"

"Not Meira Meyer. Meira Hall."

Cliff answered, "How about Halle Meyer?"

In theory, Cliff was okay with Mira, perhaps by comparison only. At least now, we wouldn't have to fight over her name.

The exam room. The doctor wields a large, vibrator-looking thing that can only be the vaginal ultrasound. In it goes. Some pain. I worry, as I have for the last eleven weeks when anything went in, about miscarrying.

The medical wand against my belly projects my innards onto the blue computer screen. No fetus.

Click click. With a mouse, the doctor circles the lump of cells that was supposed to have been my child. In seconds, he determines that "development stopped" between five and seven weeks.

I am eleven weeks pregnant. Was. Am. The egg sac and placenta are developing normally, so I (choose your verb) pregnant. There is weight gain, gas, nausea that elicits, "Good!" from every mom and medical person I talk to. They all say, "That means the baby is taking what it needs."

Only she wasn't. She quit at five weeks.

"Why?" I ask.

The doctor has no answer. No one has that answer. Left-leaning friends remind me that in Buddhist philosophy, a woman doesn't lose a baby. The baby chooses different parents.

I want to cave their hippy skulls in. Why didn't Mira think I'd be a good mom? I'd done all this work around my childhood abuse. I would background-check caregivers. I wouldn't give her Barbies. I would feed her organic everything but would let her eat junk when the other kids were eating it. OK, I'd even give her a Barbie if she wanted one, but I'd also sign her up for Aikido.

Two days after confirming I am/was pregnant, it takes ten minutes for my OB to scrape the remnants of Mira's placenta and egg sac from my uterus. It is months before I can act on Cliff's suggestion that we plant something in her honor. The list of pregnant friends keeps growing: 22, 23. Even the receptionist where I go for physical therapy sports a bump. Finally, we fill the two terra cotta planters on the front porch with shrubs.

They are evergreen.

When Miriam the Prophet was a five-year-old slave girl, the Pharaoh of Egypt ordered all Hebrew boys murdered at birth. The slaves resolved to stop having babies. This might not need explaining, but in ancient times, the only way to ensure that there would be no more babies was to have no more sex. All of five years old, Miriam foresaw the man who would lead her people to freedom. All of five years old, she convinced her father to once again take her mother under the chuppa. They had a son.

His name was Mosheh. Moses.

Which makes Miriam someone's sister, after all. I imagine a lean girl with fierce eyes above a strong nose, quiet until she has something to say—at which point, you can't shut her up. I imagine a child with an uncanny ability to hope, even when the grown-ups give up.

Rebellion.

As an adult, Miriam used her divining skills to find water for the former slaves during the 40 years they wandered the dessert. Jewish women of the feminist variety adore Miriam. She was not a big part of Passover until we reconstructed it. We re-wrote the haggadah—the book that leads us through the ritual seder—to include her. We created songs and readings in her honor. We made up the Miriam's Cup, to balance the traditional Cup of Elijah, which stands filled with wine for the prophet Elijah to drink from, a harbinger of the Messiah.

Miriam's Cup only ever holds mayim hayim, "living waters." We found her. She validates us.

I have a Miriam's Cup, made by my friend Yael. Its thick, blue, ceramic base tapers to a narrow, beaded neck, on which sits a shallow scoop of hand-blown glass. Yael also made a companion Elijah's Cup, in red. Elijah waits in the cabinet for his once-a-year appearance on our seder table. Initially, in addition to seder, I used Miriam to honor the new moon each month. Recently, I've started using her weekly. Cliff and I welcome Shabbat with traditional candles, challah, wine, and Miriam's living waters. Miriam enables me to claim my heritage without claiming my parents. I like to imagine I have some of her insight. But I had hoped for a daughter who would have her power—the power that was taken from me as a child.

Bitterness.

After the D&C, my OB diagnoses my progesterone level as "lowish." The daily dose she prescribes must be shoved up my crotch, followed by fifteen horizontal minutes allotted to "absorbing"—a euphemism for "dripping all over the goddamn place." Even less charming, progesterone makes me feel as if I've eaten an excess of meat.

I stop taking it and find an acupuncturist who specializes in fertility issues—underscoring that I have them. Meanwhile, all the literature instructs me to believe that I am perfectly normal: one in every twenty pregnancies miscarries. I am not supposed to worry until I kill three.

We (we are back to "we") spend the summer in treatment (though I'm the one with all the appointments) and the fall "trying." When the number of friends making their happy announcements tops thirty, I stop counting. When Cliff calls me, "Best Sweetheart," I say, "A 'Best Sweetheart' wouldn't have lost the baby." I hate having fertility issues. I hate taking my temperature. I hate sex.

January. Bingo. And the real waiting begins. I can't ignore that Mira chose another mom. My acupuncturist says I worry too much. For this she needs medical training?

I thought she was a girl. Clear girl feelings. I didn't tell Cliff because Cliff didn't even want to let many friends know we were "trying." I had begrudgingly accommodated his caution, telling only my closest friends. Then, when it was the last thing I wanted to discuss, I had had to tell them the baby died.

I am having boy feelings.

When we make our happy announcement, friends who don't know about the miscarriage ask if we want a boy or girl. There's a question for the privileged. I want to bond without the terror of "What if I do?" I want to stop aching. Every time I stand for more than twenty minutes, a deep ache permeates my pelvis. Neither my OB nor acupuncturist can diagnose it. They both ask if it feels like pre-menstrual cramping.

"I don't know. I don't cramp."

"What happens before your period?"

"I get this ache."

They both say, "Oh." They both look worried.

Around the end of my fourth month, I dream of a boy with dark curls and eyes that crinkle into new moons when he smiles. He looks like the photographs of Cliff's father as a child. In the dream, I press my son's face into my neck and say, "I love you," over and over.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. He hugs my neck with the pulse-like rhythm his papa uses to comfort me.

When the genetic counselor reveals, "It's a boy," I laugh and burst into tears.

Cliff looks puzzled. "You really wanted a boy?"

"No! I was right!"

We favor the name Zachary. It means "in memory of." Zachary Fritz Hall Meyer. "Fritz" was Cliff's father's name. We are unclear if "Hall" is a second middle or first last name. I don't care. It just has to be there.

Zachary also means "remembrance of God."

I am terrified that I will kill him, too; so terrified, that when I turn an ankle waddling to the front door, I insist we go to the emergency room. The ER confirms that Zachary is fine but my ankle is sprained. They send me back to PT, where I find out that the receptionist's baby was stillborn. Routine delivery, no problem, then, dead.

Oh, Julie.

Eight months pregnant and wobbling around on crutches, I finally stop worrying about miscarriage. I've got my teeth into stillbirth. "What to do if stillborn" occupies an inordinate amount of space on our birth plan. Surely once I hold him, once he is safely delivered, these worries will end.

Prior to pregnancy—prior to meeting Cliff, even—I spent a solid decade in therapy, addressing the repercussions of surviving the family I was born into. Pushing out Zac after six hours of active labor that began on my due date, I felt pretty on top of how I would parent; no Barbies, no abuse. When I finally held him, when he was finally safely here, my fears did not go away. They intensified.

Parents often say their greatest fear is that what happened to them will happen to their kids. The luckier want to be more emotionally available/have more money,/spend more time than their parents did. My father was a pedophile and a rapist; my mother, always either outrageously happy or raging. Once—I was between four and six years old—I opened the door and found her standing there. I knew my mother. Why was she knocking like a visitor on her own front door?

My therapist suspects my mother suffered from what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder—now, Dissociative Identity Disorder. This explains the furious swirl in an orchid-colored bathrobe coming after me with a steak knife. The bend of her back over my brother's bed. I have no doubt that she physically, sexually, and emotionally abused us, but this murky diptych is my clearest memory. I have crystalline images of my father's abuse. At a core level, I accept that men rape and batter. In a way, I expect them to. The same level of betrayal from my mother is more than I will allow myself to remember in detail.

For years, I checked regularly with my therapist: are you sure I am not multiple? She said she was sure. She had been seeing me for 12 years. Alle always showed up. Work never complained about absenteeism. I wore a consistent style of clothing. I didn't suddenly find myself in Argentina. Most importantly, I remembered my life. There were no big holes. I showed no signs of DID.

My question became, "Why not?"

Doctors never have that answer.

As the years passed, as I moved toward marriage, then motherhood, I lived with an uneasy acceptance of what I could only categorize as a blessing: Alle continued to show up.

Then they handed me that tiny, amazing bundle named Zac.

Initially, I was only aware of everything that someone else could do to him. I knew the odds: one in every three girls, slightly fewer boys. This was a time when the relevant parts still hurt—vagina from giving birth, nipples from breastfeeding—when the night feedings meant more than interrupted sleep. The terror of a dark house. Of the grocery store, the park. What if I turned my back for too long, or misjudged a sitter? A friend I had had for years?

Cliff did his best, waking during night feedings to sit with me until he conked out flat on the carpet in Zac's room, but he could not get on board with what we agreed to call my hypervigilance. He—like most of our parenting peers—thought me a paranoid freak. Cliff, my question is not, "Don't all parents insist their nannies memorize what to do if a child goes missing in public?" (Call 911 ASAP, even before you call us. You have twenty minutes until that child is raped and dead. If you are in a store, have the staff close the doors immediately.Never leave the house without quickly reviewing your child's clothing. A clear description for the police could make the difference.) My question is, "Why don't they?" Oblivious, or swimming in denial. There are monsters out there.

The panic attacks start when Zac turns fifteen months old. Every morning, between 3:15 and 3:45, I wake to a silver terror binding my esophagus, unable to get back to sleep. Around this time, I miscarry again—sorry, we, we we. My sleep dwindles to two hours a night. Another sprained ankle takes four stupid months to heal. I get fat (nine pounds), fail two different tests for sleep apnea-the first because, during the overnight stay, the guy in the next room wakes me by screaming and yelling and banging around. I am jerked from sleep into an unfamiliar room, wires and goo in my hair, thinking my insides have become my outsides and are coming to get me. This is where I start to wonder about my mother's DID. Did I say my mother's?

The second apnea test I fail because I do not have apnea. I have depression. I am sleep deprived, in general, and re-traumatized from the first test. I get on antidepressants, claw my way back to five hours of solid sleep followed by three, intermittent. One night I wake with the usual silver-jumbles, convinced of my multiplicity.

For several months prior, Zac had been obsessed with "walk in street by self." "Zac!" I say. "Do little boys walk in the street by themselves, or do they hold Mama or Daddy's hand?"

"No vant, no vant!"

Zac so vanted to walk in street by self that he began darting. My therapist—a recognized expert on the adult children of screwy families and by no means an advocate of physical abuse—said,
"You're going to have to spank him."

It took me a full three weeks to hear that she was not saying, "Beat him senseless," but rather, "Hit him just hard enough to get his attention." Mother wolves snap at their cubs to teach critical lessons in survival, she told me. One whap with an open palm on a covered bottom is not child abuse, she said. Never hit when you are out of control of your anger or fear. Hit only in situations where your child is truly at risk. Immediately following, take him firmly by the shoulders and say in an unyielding voice, "Never ever go in the street again. Ever." And he won't.

But, "hit."

One afternoon, as Zac and I approached our car, I let go of his hand in order to find my keys. He darted for the street.
I yanked him back: "Don't do that again."

He laughed.

I did not hit him. But I knew then I was going to have to.
That weekend, during a visit to an outlet mall, I realized I could not hear the burbles of laughter I associated with my two year old. I could not see him. Fluorescent light flooded the store. He wasn't among the endless rounds of discounted children's clothes, all made in China—sticky pastels for girls; for boys, tedious navy, sharp red, and grey. There must have been customers other than one Japanese couple, just as there must have been sales staff besides the late-teens/early-twenties male with the pallor that so often accompanies bad skin; at least one more staff member, probably female. In my memory, there are only the Japanese couple and the salesman.

Why would a man work at a children's clothing store?

If your child disappears in a store, have the staff close the doors immediately. The door stood open. The night was black.

Never leave the house without quickly reviewing your child's clothing.

Rounds and rounds of children's clothing.

You have twenty minutes.

"Zac?"

"Zachary?" I said, more loudly. "Zachary Fritz?"

I could not move. "Has anyone seen my child?"

Zac was gone for all of two minutes. He and the Japanese boy were playing under a clothing round in the back of the store. That night, the silver jumbles: I lost him. I am going to have to hit him. She hit me. Our insides are our outsides. He needs to be protected from me.

I stayed on my meds. I slept better. I did what anyone who really wants to address any aspect of childhood has to do: admit where and who we come from. Accept the possibilities while striving to live in the probability: Sybil is not on childcare. I am.

I am not convinced that had my first run at motherhood been with a girl-child, I would have been able to achieve what I did with Zac. I never once hit or shook him. I certainly never sexually abused him. I can state with confidence that I would not have sexually abused Mira, but I can easily envision how adding "she is a girl/I was a girl/I am my mother's illness" to the raw cocktail of panic, depression, and sleep deprivation would have tipped me into yelling. Perhaps Zac's being a boy enabled me to keep it together, however incrementally. I never once yelled—at him; Cliff got it a fair bit. When Zac inevitably darted again, I grabbed him by the shoulders and loudly said, "Don't ever do that again!" I felt angry, and almost—but definitely not—out of control. It was a year before he tried it again.

I sat him down. "The next time I say, 'Stop,' and you don't, I will smack your tushie."

"Don't do dat. Dat will hurt."

"Yes. But I will do it." I was dead calm in my certainty.

I was also pregnant again. Stop. Seeing the heartbeat at the eight-week ultrasound for the pregnancy that turned into Zac, my unbidden thought was, "Boy." Upon seeing this fourth pregnancy's heartbeat, I had the same experience. Only it was, "Girl."

Rewind. It is late one night or early one morning, some time during the first month of Zac's life. Cliff is out flat on the carpet. Zac's little feet are like pieces of sushi. You could dunk them in soy sauce. I can't wait until he poops so I can change him—partially because once he has pooped, I know exactly what he needs, and partially because I am strangely in love with the milky smell. That's weird, I know.

A poop!

I struggle Zac out of the two-blanket burrito wrap, out of the footie-jammies and the onesie bodysuit, out of the poopy diaper and into the clean, then back into the onesie, the jammies, and the two-blanket burrito wrap; all to have him let out another massive, wet poop.
Zac's mouth twitches. He is too young for a mouth twitch to be anything but a muscle reaction, but it sure looks like he is smiling.

Totally Cliff's sense of humor.

Almost two years after Mira chose another mom, I understand. Zachary Fritz Hall Meyer is the baby we are supposed to have.

I still don't understand why.

It still hurts.

The prophet Miriam was five years old when she foresaw the brother that would lead the slaves to freedom. She knew where the Pharaoh's daughter bathed, and sailed the newborn toward her in a reed basket. When Pharaoh's daughter drew the baby from the river and needed a wet nurse, Miriam presented their mother. Miriam's vision ensured that the otherwise doomed boy would survive, nursed by his own mama.

I doubt my Mira was a prophet, but I wonder if she used the insight I ascribe to her to understand that a mom who wanted a daughter to be everything that was taken from her was not a mom who was ready for a daughter. Perhaps Mira accessed the power I ascribe to her to wisely choose a mother who was.

The admission is no longer painful. Mira's choice goes beyond what was good for her or me. It's all of us: why, in Mira's position, my pre-born self chose to stay with my mother; why the uber-mensch I married so loves and willingly stays with someone from such an extreme set of circumstances; why Zac is the child we were supposed to have first. Observing Zac at this stage allows me to pretend I know the answer to a question that used to plague me: what would I have been like, had my parents been remotely normal?

I would have been happy.

But if you go back in time and step on even one butterfly, you will return to a radically altered reality. As it so happens, I was right, again. Girl. I am doing a good job of not spending much time on that; I'm otherwise occupied debating Cliff about her name. We might have her middle name. Ruth. Beloved. But every first-name consideration lacks that Sea World je ne sais quois. Zac is lobbying for Greta, which is darling and means pearls, but is a tad "Yodel-ay-hee-hoo." My choices all evoke light or ascendance. Had I my druthers, she'd be Jaden. God has heard.

So have I.

Alle C. Hall last wrote for Literary Mama reviewing Haiku Mama. Other work appears in or on Creative Nonfiction, Bust Magazine, Literary Café Radio, The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger, for whom she interviewed Leonard Nimoy. One day, her two preschoolers will hit their teens and will think that is cool.

More Than a Boy

by Dedria H. Barker

What a bad idea: a middle-aged woman in the praying position on the kitchen floor, a big young guy hovering over her. Still, the big guy, my fourteen-year-old son David, pressed down on my shoulder trying to get me to my knees. "No," I blurted out, jerking away.

"Mom!" David yelped, throwing his big hands in the air. "I'm trying to show you something."

Every day of his high-school freshman year, David came home to show me something. That winter, David was showing me wrestling. I wanted him to have a good time, but I sure didn't want him to wrestle. I only knew one black wrestler in my whole life. My college professor had wrestled in prep school until he got his neck snapped like it was a branch on my neighbor's spindly magnolia tree. After that he was a paraplegic in a wheelchair.

If I got to my knees for David, he might think I wanted to be his wrestling partner. Prep wrestling involved serious training. It was more than tussling on the beat-down brown sofa in the family room, tumbling off it onto the floor, not that we ever did that. We had got to our knees together in church. He had protested that much less than I protested wrestling.

Still, speaking as a mother of two black boys, this scenario was not altogether a bad thing. David's just a regular boy who needs to play and be a boy, just a boy. David showing me something he had learned that day was simply a part of our after-school routine.

But, why would David want to show his mother something that might involve pain? Because boys will be boys.

I have two sons. David has an older brother. His name is Diallo. He's the child of my youth, a 1970s child who has one of those 1970s names, like Sunshine. But we are African-American so his name is African, and it means warrior. One day, a long time ago, when Diallo was seven years old, I lay on the sofa nursing a hurt finger. We got into some kind of beef--as mothers and their oldest sons sometimes do. In his anger, Diallo grabbed my hurt finger in his little fingers and he bent my finger, my hurt finger.

"Diallo!" I screamed at the flash of pain. "That's my hurt finger."

Diallo slunk away, his little boy body defiant. I felt betrayed. My little boy had turned into some kind of brute.

Since then, I have been as rough and tumble with my sons as I need to be. By the time David, my third child and younger son, came along, it was necessary. David was a real little boy who liked physical sensation. He didn't cry when doctors stitched his forehead back together. He took it. As a teenager, David wrestled. How could he? That's not what I wanted, but it was what the football coach wanted. Wrestling built strength.

Wrestling terrified me, but because five of my brothers played high school football, I understood football. So it was because of football I got to my knees in the kitchen where dinner should have been cooking. My head came up to David's waist.

At fourteen, David was just about the same height as I, a grown woman. We were both five foot six inches tall. David though seemed shorter. He was wide at the shoulders and dense muscled like a Staffordshire terrier. That was the original Buster Brown children's shoe mascot which is now feared as the dangerous pit bull. Just the opposite, I am so thin-limbed that when I was growing up my father called me "Sticks." So there we were: the pit bull and the twig.

David closed in on me, circling with plodding flat-footed wrestler's steps. The purse strings of the kitchen space pulled tighter around me. My eyes darted far into their corners tracking him as far as they could. Oh, if only I truly had eyes in the back of my head.

At the edge of my glasses, I lost sight of David. My spine stiffened. The move he was showing me was called "man-on-the-bottom." Was it too late for me to just get up? Could I just say, "Wait 'til your father gets home"?

David crouched behind me. He encircled my body with his thick arms. I could feel his heat. Not since he was a wee boy creeping into my bed at night had we been this close. I caught my breath. The energy crackled between our bodies. We live in a society that considers being that close the turf of lovers, where electricity fuels sex.

My ears strained toward David's words. I could hear him, but it was like he spoke in a foreign tongue. "A wrestler," David rasped, "must be careful not to touch his opponent until he is ready to wrestle ."

Was this my baby, his blunt-tipped fingers writhing through the air in front of me like octopus tentacles? He acted like he couldn't wait to get his hands on me.

However, there was no tenderness in David's voice. "When contact is made ," he said, "the round starts, and Bam!" His voice clapped. "It's on."

I crashed over onto the floor, sprawling, all arms and legs. Though it might not have looked it, my collapse was choreographed and it came with sound effects.

"Knave!" I shrieked at Dave, rhyming his nickname with the lowly class of folk we had read about in The Big Book of Castles.

David reached out his square tan hand to help me up. I looked up to see his eyes, the ones that reminded me of the chocolate in s'mores, twinkling. His grin was almost like a friendly Jack-a-lantern. It showed a slanted front tooth chipped from an earlier rough boy activity. I couldn't fool David.

"Mom," he chided. "You did that."

I did. I did do that. David never touched me. I just fell over. That was easier than waiting to see if mom as 'man-on-the-bottom' was going to work out for me. Don't you know, I have enough stuff to wrestle with raising my boy without have to wrestle with? him.

Dedria H. Barker, the mother of three and professor of writing in Michigan, is at work on a memoir about moms, sons, and sports.

A Mother and a Daughter on the Subject of Men

by Deborah Adelman

She storms through the front door, a tempest blasting past me, face consumed by deep, dark anger. It would be foolish to smile pleasantly and ask, "How was your day?" so I just close the door behind her and sigh.

"Hi, Maya," is all I dare.

"I hate that place," she declares. "How can you send me there?"

I shrug. It’s the high school we have, is one possible answer. Why are you so picky? There are plenty of other kids who like it, could be another. Because you are 14 years old and ready for ninth grade. But I have parented this child long enough to know what is wrong with each of those answers, so I remain silent.

"I had a horrible day," she says. "Awful. You wouldn’t believe what happened in French class."

By nine p.m., the after-school hurricane has turned into clinging affection, and Maya asks me to walk the dog with her. Our Chihuahua in tow, we go out into the November darkness, a magical evening, breezy but unseasonably warm, almost 60 degrees, falling leaves rustling and whirling in the air around us like rain.

"That boy Chris? The one who told me I could be in his group after that mean girl Jessica wouldn’t let me in hers?" At the beginning of the semester, Chris, who is Black, told Maya to go take her white punk-ass attitude somewhere, but they have become friendly now. And Jessica, who is white, purportedly smokes, drinks, buys condoms from vending machines, and tells other kids she might be pregnant.

"Yeah?" I say, guardedly.

"He said to his friends, 'If I were thirty, I would totally fuck Ms. Barnes." Mrs. Barnes is the French teacher.

Her voice chokes with rage.

"And I was sitting right there. And his friends said, 'Ooh, yeah, man.'"

She tells me this as I am bent over the lawn, wishing I had brought a flashlight to recover the waste of our five-pound dog, which is hard to spot in the grass in the dark. This buys me a little time. I hesitate, poking around in the grass with a plastic bag.

I’d like to smack those idiot boys in the face is the first thing that comes to mind. But that obviously will not do as a response. Or would it?

"Wow," I say, still stalling.

"And?" Maya insists. I am walking a fine line here, no room for even one misstep. Boys like to brag like that, a lot of hot air, a lot of wishful thinking, crosses my mind. But a general denunciation of men and their tendency toward braggadocio doesn’t strike me as a really good direction to steer my fourteen-year-old, as she begins to wonder about what her future with males might hold.

Even so, what comes to my mind is the unguarded way I have heard men talk about women. Once, when I was on a study abroad program, I snuck a peek at a letter, not intended for me, written by a male grad student to a male friend back home, about the female grad student he was involved with. They made quite the couple in our dorm on Lenin Hills in Moscow, but the letter said, "I am drilling one of the girls here, pretty regularly, only she is starting to get too attached."

Or once, as I stood on Broadway in NYC with a group of Italian guys--one of whom was my boyfriend--and a woman in black stockings with mini-skirt passed, I heard one of my group blurt in Italian, "Look at those luscious legs! What a pussy! Che fica!"

Or the time in Moscow, when I was walking with a tall German woman down a dorm hall, and a Cuban man behind us, thinking we did not understand Spanish, told a friend, "You take the short one. I like tall women."

Or one summer, on a Black Sea beach, with a female friend from Moscow, when some men, mistaking us (dark-haired, Jewish and Armenian) as Mexicans, got excited. Thinking we did not understand Russian, one shouted up the hill, "Seryozha! They’re Mexican! And there’s ten more of them up the hill. Wow! I’ve never fucked a Mexican before!"

A woman is for the taking, that is, just as Chris would take Ms. Barnes, if only she weren’t so god-awful old. Wow. But at least I was already a woman when I encountered those remarks, wasn’t fourteen, still so open, untested and vulnerable.

At fourteen, I spent the summer at the camp my parents directed, longing for the romantic attention of Ken, an Ojibwa boy from inner-city Milwaukee, who worked in maintenance. Ken was tall, brown, older than I. He had learned how to sail the Sunfish on Lake Nemahbin and took me out in the mornings, before breakfast. While we sailed around the lake, I watched his expertise with awe, watched his naturally tan, lean arms, oddly hairless to a girl from a family of wooly Semitic men, with a deep desire I did not know what to do with. But Ken sent mixed messages.

My mother watched me head to those morning sailing excursions with a smile. She was kind and supportive, watching the scenario unfold but never teasing. She liked Ken -- everybody liked Ken, who was charming, with his shiny black hair, dark, laughing eyes, beautiful smile despite crooked teeth, and his tall, thin frame with just a hint of a potbelly. He was smart and had a sly, teasing sense of humor. I was crazy about him. One night, during a heavy rain, we met under the pine trees in the field near the Girls’ Village, laughing, dripping, and ended up in each other’s arms. But still no kiss.

But Ken was about the best of what happened between the teenaged me and the boys at Camp. The agency served inner-city families, and every year the camp hired youths, mostly males, to work in the kitchen and maintenance department. Black, white, Latino, known at Camp as the "Kitchen Boys," they came from low-income urban families and needed summer employment. They were too old to be campers but too young, and untrained and probably way too irresponsible to work with the children. Those kitchen and maintenance boys at Camp could be rough, but there they were, all summer, urban boys on the loose, and there was I, all summer, all girl, albeit in jeans, oversized t-shirt, and red bandanna.

There was Phil. One evening, riding in the crowded camp van, I found myself sitting on the vehicle floor in the darkness next to him. Phil moved the full length of his thigh against mine. I was uncertain of his intentions and too embarrassed to say anything. What if I denounced him, and he had intended nothing? I felt his hand touch my leg, warm and heavy against my upper thigh, but still I sat, paralyzed. The hand moved along my leg, until it rested on my inner thigh. I sat, trapped between him and the door. We arrived back at camp, and I fled to my family apartment, never telling my mother, or anyone else, what had happened.

There was Lynneal, originally from the South, who had come to Milwaukee as a boy. He was rough and angry, but one night, after hours, the campers now asleep in their cabins, I sat at one of the tables in the main lodge, a well-lit and open public space, and Lynneal came over, sat next to me and spoke in a quiet, sweet voice, something I felt but didn’t quite identify as flirtation. Lynneal was older than I, frightening to me with his gruff manner. But that evening, his voice was sugar-coated. At some point an older program staff member, a social worker and long-time friend of my family, walked into the building and came toward us, interrupting our interaction. Later, to my deep embarrassment, I heard him tell my mother, in a hushed voice that contained anger, resignation, but also humor, that he had noticed Lynneal’s excitement, showing through his pants, as he talked to me.

One of those kitchen boys was the first boy I did kiss, finally. I was fifteen. We were in the small library nestled into one corner of the main lodge. A staff party was underway in our small apartment, as there usually was toward the end of the season, and I snuck off with him. The kiss was awkward, both thrilling and disgusting, somebody else’s lips against mine, somebody else’s tongue searching my mouth, some boy’s hands touching my breasts through my clothing. Like Lynneal, that boy also came from the South, from Mississippi, where years earlier, he had seen his father, in a fit of rage, shoot and kill his mother. Some time after the summer of our kiss, I heard he had been arrested for robbing a bus driver. And then, some years later, which was the last time I ran into him, he had found religion and become a storefront preacher. That was the last time I ran into him.

The daily lives of my three sisters and I were completely enmeshed with my parents’ work. We were from the white, liberal, intellectual east side of Milwaukee, daughters of middle-class educated professionals, but raised alongside the inner-city people that our parents worked with and helped to organize. We grew up marching, protesting, refusing to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance, instead saluting the resisters and demonstrators, and insisting on our right, as girls, to wear pants to school. Summers, we grew up at Camp, first as young children with a babysitter, spending the days running through fields and swimming, and as older girls, riding horses. And then, as teenagers, mixing with those kitchen boys, urban guys spending three months in the country, not sure how to pass their free time.

My mother raised us only into our teens because she died suddenly, at 44. I can’t ask her now, but I wonder: Did she worry about her four girls, running with those rough boys all summer? Did she try to protect us? And from what, exactly?

Maya and I continue our evening walk around the block, and she describes how things got even worse in French class that day.

"They asked me if I have a boyfriend. Then they asked me if I have ever had a boyfriend. And then they wanted to know if I even want to have a boyfriend. And then they said, '‘Maya, what do you do after school'?"

She shakes her head, embarrassed as she recounts her answers: no, not now, not in the past either, and after school I do my homework!

"They told me I need to get a life! I felt so stupid, like some naïve geek."

"Ok, but that’s how it is," I say. "You haven’t gotten interested in boys yet."

"No, that’s not true," Maya answers. And I remember the boy in Mexico, in the village she visited on her eighth grade class trip.

But her mind is still on French class. She lowers her head, to avoid eye contact, and reveals the final horror: one boy, probing to see just how innocent she is, said, "Maya, do you know what dirty fingers means?"

"What did you say?" I ask. And then, "I have no idea either." And then we shake our heads, laughing at the absurdity.

I’d like to think that my daughter is in a delicate and beautiful moment, at the beginning of her teen years, so much experience and adventure yet to come. My daughter is lovely--tall, slim--her body filling out in womanly ways. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, the braces off, glasses exchanged for contacts, baggy t-shirts exchanged for body-hugging layers with a peek of camisole at the neck and waist. She’s discovering confidence in her academic talents in a high school filled with more than three thousand teenagers, a chaotic mixture of black and white, affluent and low-income, accomplished performing artists and drug users, some headed for Yale, others for trouble.

In her non-Honors section of French, she found herself sitting as a lone white girl in the middle of six or seven Black boys. She has struggled to find her place among these boys, who started out by tossing pencils at her, complaining about her "white punk-ass attitude." But over the past two months, Maya and these boys have started talking to each other, to accept each other. It’s been rough for Maya, but she has been determined, resisting any suggestion of changing seats. She tells me her observation--that Black students have support networks, solidarity, and she admires that.

My daughter is out in the world now, almost a young woman. I would like her to find an easy path, and a man who will love her, who will feel passionately about this lovely, tempestuous girl with her dark eyes and wavy hair, her frenetic energy, her emotional highs and lows--a calm, even-keeled man who will respect her, treat her with kindness, gentleness, and devotion.

But in the meantime, there is French class tomorrow, with Chris and his friends, with Jessica. Maya doesn’t really want to know what I wish for her future. She wants to know what to do tomorrow.

We continue our walk up the street, and she watches me expectantly. I feel, as I often do as a parent, lost. Maya wants help. I’m her mother. But what can I offer as guidance? How do I help her make sense out of the muddle when so often I do not know how to do that myself?

These are the moments when my own distant memories insist on surfacing. And so I do what I always seem to do in such situations, for better or worse: I tell her the stories. And at least for now, she listens.

When she is not busy teaching, commuting and raising two children (Maya and Jonah), Deborah Adelman writes fiction, non-fiction and a bit of poetry. Her work includes The "Children of Perestroika": Moscow Teenagers Talk About Their Lives and the Future, The "Children of Perestroika" Come of Age: Young People of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia and an article on the community garden she co-founded and co-directs at College of DuPage, where she is an English faculty member. Deborah lives with her family in Oak Park, IL.

The Color of Alone

by Reine Bouton

It's night and the house is empty. As quiet as it's ever been. None of the usual dirt or clutter because there's been ample time to clean, too much time. At midnight, unable to sleep, I walk through the house alone, something I feel I've never done before. Like a child in a new school. My bare feet pad softly on the floor as I wander. Each room is perfect. Slowly, I've scrubbed, cleaned, purged, and redecorated each room--a fresh start.

The bedroom, no longer our bedroom, but my bedroom, has been recently painted Terra Cotta Tuscan, with the feminine, puffy toile curtains I'd always wanted. I know I'll never move to Tuscany but at least my room will remind me of that place. Paintings hang on every wall, sometimes covering the entire space. Whatever I want. The largest canvas depicts a lone road in the countryside, tall green cypress trees lining the way. Beside it hangs a painting of an ochre-colored villa and its rolling vineyard. Several small Madonnas hover together to the right. This room has become a sanctuary, a place to read, to nap, to hide. No piles of dirty clothes litter the other side of the room--it is bare.

Hardwood floors have been polished until I can see my reflection, my long legs moving down the hall. I'm wearing black shorts and a black top, all black, a new habit. Now I know that black's not the color of death, but the color of loss. The short hallway is lined with pictures--a charcoal sketch of my son at two, photos of my parents, of my trips abroad. For a while, there were faded spots where photos had been removed, but they've been replaced--tonight I can hardly remember which ones used to be there. That's not true, I can remember them all . . . wedding photos, photos of us on the beach. I move on.

The bathroom is now Canary Yellow, the closet organized with little white baskets for each cluster of stuff: nail polish, files, and remover in one, face creams, exfoliators, masks in the next one, another for my son's brush, bubble bath, powder, his little deodorant. I spent an hour fixing that bathroom closet. Now, everything goes back in its proper place because order has somehow become important. The room doesn't smell as much like pee now, because there is only one male using the toilet. I'm doing my best to make him aim right and to put down the seat. Don't forget to wash your hands, Jacob.

Jacob's room is lime green, Chartreuse Champion--it's been that color since his birth. I wanted his room to be bright and happy, just like I thought our lives would be upon the birth of a much wanted child. No longer nursery-like, the room contains bins of Legos, Matchbox cars, books, Jedi lightsabers, Happy Meal toys. Tonight, though, the room is empty, quiet. I lie on his bed for a moment, turn my face into his SpongeBob pillow and breathe deeply. I get up quickly and walk out.

Into the living room, mocha colored walls--Mocha Madness--with scarlet sofas that look like wounds, horizontal slashes of red in the otherwise brown room. Brown walls, floors, piano, furniture. The only light at this hour is the moonlight, shining in from a window; tonight it barely brightens the room.

Flipping the switch, I walk into the kitchen. The whiteness of it makes me squint. Spackled corners, filled-in cracks all around--attempts to cover up time's damage. This room is next. It will be pink, I think. Cotton Candy Pink. Or Tickled Pink. I can have a pink kitchen if I want. A ladder stands in the middle of the room, left there after I stopped working today. I climb to the tip-top and sit, glad that no one can see me perched in the middle of my utterly still kitchen. Through the back window, I spy a hawk, sitting on a wire, waiting, waiting for something. A mouse? I've never seen a hawk in my neighborhood before--after all, this is a suburb, not the country. What is it doing here? A lone hawk. I watch it, it watches something else. We're both still. Then it takes off. I get down and continue roaming through the house, finally getting sleepy.

There is no noise. I'm aware of the silence. The air conditioner has cut off, the ice maker has stopped churning out cubes, no cars speed or even glide down the street. The phone doesn't ring. No one speaks. All is frozen, like a snapshot. A black and white snapshot of me in my colorless kitchen, now divorced, my son's first sleepover at his dad's, and I'm alone and still in my empty, quiet house.

Reine Dugas Bouton teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University. In addition to teaching literature and creative nonfiction courses, she takes students to Tuscany each summer to study abroad. Her scholarly publications have focused on Eudora Welty and the travel writing of Italy. She has recently published a travel essay in Italy from a Backpack. She lives in New Orleans with her eight-year-old son.

Holding On

by Rochelle L. Levy

His hands are around my neck. Squeezing. Out of control. I'm used to his blind rages, used to being kicked and scratched and pummeled, but this is different, this is scarier. I'm afraid he might really hurt me this time.

"Let go!" I struggle to breathe, struggle to pull his fingers off my neck. "Let go!" I beg him again, falling to my knees on the Oriental rug outside the kitchen, the maroons, greens and golds all blurring together. Another April southern California evening lost to anger and frustration. I finally break his grip, gasp for air, run down the hall, and fall on my bed exhausted. I'm more afraid for him than for myself. Just like seven years ago.

He wasn't crying that night. His skin was blue. And the umbilical cord—his life force for the past nine months—was wrapped around his tiny neck. As one doctor gently held his alarmingly scrawny body upright, the other slowly unwound the cord, counting along with each revolution: "One, two, three, four."

Twenty-six hours after being unsuccessfully induced, my biggest fear had come true—a middle-of-the-night emergency C-section. A tugging sensation, my husband's tightly clenched hand, and I watched in a mirror as our baby emerged from my belly. A boy! A blue-faced, silent boy. Why isn't he crying? Why isn't he crying? I couldn't catch my breath until he did. Finally, finally, he screamed.

We named him Jonah. His six pounds felt just right in my arms. I stared in awe at my new best friend—at rose petal lips twitching as he exercised brand new muscles; at a tiny tongue darting in and out like a hungry kitten; at slightly clouded, not-yet-focused eyes taking in a world that had unexpectedly expanded as inevitably as mine had just shrunk. I'd never been so thrilled—and nervous—to meet someone.

Even before his birth, he'd become my entire world. An extremely difficult pregnancy—coupled with the oppressive silences and contemptuous stares of a long-dying marriage—had me turning to my belly for companionship, those jabbing feet, knees and elbows assuring me that someone was listening, someone was on my side. In the sixth month, when the unrelenting nausea was finally manageable, my husband and I met up with my east coast sister and brother-in-law for a long-planned San Francisco vacation.

"Say something nice about your wife," my sister said at dinner our first night, trying to lighten the mood, to diffuse the tension that seemed to envelop us like the early morning northern California fog. We all turned toward my husband, eyebrows raised, forks still. He stared back defiantly, eyes unblinking, lips unmoving. The father of my seven-year-old stepdaughter, of my unborn baby, the man with all the words now had none.

"Mom?" Jonah's standing in my bedroom doorway, the hard scary anger replaced by a little boy's regret. He doesn't want to lose his TV shows.

"Sorry I did that. You just made me so angry."

I've heard it all before: You made me hit you. It's your fault I didn't do my homework. Blaming me comes so naturally to him.

"Maybe it's best for you if you spend more time with your dad," I say, not believing it but feeling defeated, out of options.

"No! I want to be with you! I know you better than I know my dad."

My mouth struggles to remain neutral, but my eyes betray me.

"It wouldn't be to punish you," I say. "I just want to do what's best for you right now." And for me, I think, but cannot say.

"I came out of your body—you can't leave me!"

He's right; I can't. He's been my one constant, the only person I know who will always be there, one day to the next.

When, at six weeks, he graduated from the bedside bassinet to the nursery, I followed, sleeping in the lumpy twin bed just feet from his crib. My husband and I were barely speaking at that point anyway, so it was a relief not to lie next to him—hating his loud snoring, his teeth grinding, his very presence. When Jonah and I moved out for good just a year later, the adjustment was more physical than emotional.

I talked to Jonah nonstop. Sitting in his highchair, trying out new teeth on soft bread, his eyes would fix on my mouth, as if trying to decipher how I formed words. So I'd place his chubby fingers gently on my throat, letting him feel my larynx as it rose and fell. By 15 months he was talking in complete sentences. "Purse?" I'd ask, as part of our leaving-the-house routine. "Check," he'd say. "Diaper bag?" "Check." "Cheese?" "You mean keys!" he'd laugh—we'd laugh—and it never got old.

He depended on me, trusted me to keep him safe. Until one Saturday morning.

His father—angry because Jonah wasn't quite ready when he arrived to pick him up—barged into our house. It was the day before Jonah's third birthday, and his father was furious that he hadn't been invited to the backyard party I was throwing the next day.

"Please wait outside," I said softly, as I saw the insanity creeping into his eyes. But he stormed into the kitchen, reached for a butcher knife, dragged me across the floor—my boy clutched in my arms—and out the front door. I was still weak from a bout of food poisoning, so could barely fight back, was grabbing onto chairs and doorways, holding onto Jonah, trying to keep my bathrobe closed. My ex-husband wrenched Jonah from my arms, threw him in his car seat, sped down the street.

The next afternoon, after the guests were gone and the gifts unwrapped, Jonah ran agitatedly around the dining room-turned-playroom, legs and arms lashing out at me with frenetic kicks and hits.

I sat down in our special corner, knees up, back against the dark gray wall. "Jonah, do you want to talk about what happened yesterday between Mommy and Daddy?"

He came to a sudden halt, crumpled next to me on the gray shag carpet.

"I didn't like it when Daddy grabbed me from you and took me out of the house," he said. "And I didn't like it when you were screaming and crying and Daddy was dragging you across the floor. It scared me." He put his head in my lap.

His skin was warm and flushed, bangs moist against his forehead, a thin film of sweat smearing the blue face paint that squiggled down his left cheek. We were still in summer clothes on this first Sunday in October. It was five o'clock and finally cooling off. A lawn mower puttered and died a few houses down; leftover sandwiches, fruit salad and birthday cake awaited refrigeration. I'd thrown a good party.

Jonah sat upright. "I'm mad you let that happen."

I'd filed a police report, was off to court the next day to obtain a restraining order, had brought two officers with me that morning to pick Jonah up from his father's. But none of that mattered to a frightened three-year-old who no longer trusted his mother.

He stared at me, long lashes fluttering ever so slightly. "Dad came in our house and you couldn't stop him." Outside the window, the birthday balloons flapped gently in the breeze, well into the drooping stage, soon to face the inevitable shrivel. "So how are you going to stop other bad guys from breaking in?"

"I will always keep you safe." I had to say—and hear—those words. "I will never let anyone hurt you." I'm sure he wanted to believe me but decided not to chance it.

"Jonah was hitting kids all morning and was sent to the director's office a number of times," Maria, his preschool teacher, reported when I arrived for pickup one afternoon two months later. "Out on the playground, he hit one child with a shovel." His father had been right there watching, Maria said, yet he'd offered no words, no discipline. "Boys will be boys," he told me later. He was just slightly more concerned when, in kindergarten, Jonah held a plastic knife to a little girl's throat.

Although his actions had directly provoked Jonah's aggression and anxiety, his father adamantly refused to discuss or even acknowledge his violent behavior in our house that day. "I try to ask him about it," Jonah would say as we snuggled in his blue teddy bear bed before lights out, "but he just says it never happened." By denying the episode, he was also denying its devastating effects: Jonah's very real, very raw anger, fear and confusion.

And so Jonah learned to hide his feelings from his father, saving his bottled-up rage for me. And, eventually, our uncommon bond lost all boundaries. He responded to everything from, "It's time to turn off the TV," to "Let's go for a walk" with defiance and anger. After being scratched in the face too many times, I learned to grab him from behind, successfully restraining his thrashing limbs, but usually forgetting until too late about the backward head snap. As he grew stronger, I'd wrestle him down, sitting on his thighs with just enough pressure to control his legs, holding his arms flat to the ground.

Yet, he had difficulty separating from me. One summer, during his two-week vacation with his father, he called me regularly. "I want to come home," he sobbed. "I miss you." "Jonah, why are you whispering?" "Because if Dad hears me saying I want to come there, he'll spank me."

"Dad says if you know I miss you, then you'll go to court to take me away from him," Jonah said first thing when he returned home. "Is that true?" When I assured him it was not, he seemed momentarily relieved. "It makes me feel really bad when he says that," he admitted. "But I don't want Dad to know that he's hurting my feelings."

At the same time, he refused to accept any male friends into our lives. The few times I introduced him to someone I was dating, he responded with a kick to the groin. It didn't even seem to matter if we knew the man—in an elevator one day, he turned and punched a complete stranger in the stomach.

He stopped sleeping in his own bed, refused to walk alone from one room to another at night, cried in fear if I didn't keep the bathroom door open. He shadowed me to the kitchen while I washed dishes, to the laundry room while I folded clothes, finally falling asleep on the sofa while I read the paper.

These days, his nighttime fears overpower both of us. Occasionally he'll sleep in his own bed, but only after waking me up nearly every hour, sneaking in to crawl under the covers next to me. "No," I tell him, "back to your own bed." He's a solid 70 pounds; I can't pick him up anymore. So I pull him by his legs, wrap my arms around his chest—leaving red marks on his pale skin, still so pure and unblemished—dance clumsily down the hall until he slips from my grasp. I wrestle him back to his room, throw him onto his bed, pin his arms above his head. He glares at me. "I hate you!" He looks just like his father.

Now, watching him in the doorway, I want to tell him that I divorced his father to escape this kind of anger, that every time he blames me for his rages I lose hope that he'll grow out of it, that it breaks my heart to be abused by my own child.

"I'd never leave you," I say. "You know that. We just can't go on like this." My voice cracks. "Go wait for me in the living room."

"Mom, you're crying. I can't leave you when you're crying."

His soft arms, fingernails always in need of a trim, are around me.

"It's okay, Mom. You're just under a lot of stress."

I hug him tight, my lips grazing his crew cut, remembering a smaller, softer scalp, the silkiness of brand new hair, that intoxicating baby smell. Since the moment he was born, irrational fear has been my constant companion too.

That first morning home from the hospital, I awoke suddenly, peering down at the Moses basket beside our bed. His tiny face was covered by the blanket I'd so carefully swaddled him in the previous night. That's it, I thought, strangely calm, I've suffocated him. I'm still afraid of losing him, still afraid that if I can't see him breathing, can't feel his anger, can't hold onto his childhood, then he'll be gone.

It's dark out now, nearly eight o'clock. Another bedtime battle is but an hour away. I run my index finger over his downy eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, kiss the freckles cascading onto his cheeks. They multiply every summer, no matter how much sun block I slather on. I want to cherish this time, these years soon to be just a memory.

"Let's have ice cream and watch 'The Simpsons,'" I say, choosing reward over punishment, forgiveness over reproach, peace over confrontation. For myself more than him. Because if I send Jonah to live with his father, I won't be leaving him; he'll be leaving me. And I'm not ready to let go.

Rochelle L. Levy is the author of two chapbooks, Admit One and Living in Limbo, and has been published in The Washington Post, Salon, Glamour and The Los Angeles Times Magazine, as well as in the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She lives with her son, Jonah, in Los Angeles.

Where the World Is

by Karen Kasaba

It is a rich aroma, an earthy perfume, the scent of freshly turned soil. It exudes through the thin drum of skin over the place where bone hasn't closed. It is pheromonic--this smell nestling against the down of my newborn daughter's head, rising briefly into my nostrils as I inhale deeply, then swirling and gathering again after I exhale reluctantly, pressing lips to her feathery hair to breathe it in once more, to inflate with it.

I discovered this smell within hours of my daughter's birth, after the morphine had begun to thin in my system, after I stopped shaking. Twenty-four hours of labor followed by caesarian had wracked my body and wrung my nerves, but the epiphany of my daughter's scent soothed me to tears. I had anticipated something cloying and powdery and pink. Instead, what emitted from her head was not an aroma but an atmosphere, the fertile climate of an enchanted forest. I relaxed into the world she evoked, grounded in the wonder of my love for her, and we napped.

Now she is four, and I believe the last traces of that magic, mushroomy fragrance slipped away when she weaned, just before her first birthday. As the scent grew fainter I would pull it up into my brain, forcing a crease, working to commit it to memory. I wanted to remember how our world became encapsulated, how her scent was the weather that swirled around the globe of us. I found it grounding and constant. When it was gone, I imagined there would be nothing like it again.

Last week I held a baby. A beautiful boy four months in the world--wise-eyed and willing to be held. My voice twittered and fluted in an attempt to enchant him, really to allow me more time to remain enchanted by him. I bounced him and hugged him and tested his grip. Then I sniffed his head.

There, unexpectedly nestled in his silken hair–that lost sylvan smell. My daughter's smell.

I inhaled, eddying into a cellular memory of primeval mists, of rain-soaked stones, of the eventual oak contained in an acorn–a nascent atmosphere voltaic with change, yet delicate as a fern's fist unfurling. Smelling his sweet, earthy head transported me once more to that vibrant place of portent and possibility, a place I know now I will find again.

It's always somewhere in the air.

A member of the Writers Guild of America, West and mother of a wonderfully funny and artistic ten-year-old daughter, Karen Kasaba’s work as a playwright and screenwriter has earned multiple awards including an Emmy nomination. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Santa Barbara Magazine (Fiction Competition Winner), Hawai‘i Review, Chariton Review, The Summerset Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Collectedstories.com, Westways, ByLine, American Cinematographer, Los Angeles Times, and The Santa Barbara Independent, among others. She has completed a novel, Dreaming of Daylight, and is currently at work on another.

Choosing Daddy

by Greta Gaard

"Butterfly!" Flora yells, dashing toward me in her best toddler version of Charlie Chaplin's rocking gait, carrying a clear tube with a cork at one end. She shows me the tube, which contains both a butterfly and what looks like a wasp. "Butterfly!"

Her father is following close behind, explaining that they just found the butterfly in the final stages of death and have now added it to Flora's new insect collection. As a high school Biology teacher, Barry offers Flora a close-up look at cockroaches, lizards, aphids clinging to the undersides of leaves--things I don't normally point out. This summer I've found the two of them sitting on the back porch, staring at Flora's chubby little hand while an ant crawls across it. They stop on sidewalks after the rain, inspecting worms and ant hills.

When Barry and I first met, one of the things that drew us together was our environmentalism, though our passion for nature manifests differently for each of us. I'm a theorist and an activist, more likely to write essays and deliver speeches defending the earth, while Barry investigates the natural world, collects book after book about Darwin, and defends evolution. We work at different ends of the same environment, occasionally meeting in the middle to discuss politics on a hike, or take Flora to the landscape arboretum.

I've needed some time to appreciate the way our characters complement each other, since I never intended to stay with Barry much longer than the birth of our child.

Four years ago on a snowy and bright Martin Luther King day, I walked in to a tiny coffee shop and recognized the man whose picture I had seen on Match.com. Barry's dark brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and Guatemalan woven sweater spoke to me of an old friendship. When he rose to greet me and bought me coffee, I saw that he was lean, angular, and taller than me, almost six feet tall. For the next three hours, we chatted about our lives, our different paths leading us to Minneapolis and to our chosen profession, teaching. Both Barry and I had recently lost childless, long-term relationships and spent the past two years grieving. Neither of us had healed. Neither of us had unbroken hearts, ready to offer to a new mate. Yet each of us wanted a child.

In fact, I had one waiting. An unplanned pregnancy in the abusive marriage of my twenties shocked me into terminating both the pregnancy and the marriage. As the suction tube pulled that eight-week embryo from my body, I whispered, "Wait for me," to the little soul who had chosen me to be its mother. "Wait for me, darling," I promised, "and I will find you a good father, a good home." Twenty years later, I felt that little soul's presence. It was time to bring her home.

With a cool head, I had chosen Match.com over a sperm donor. My own father cherished me, tickled me, camped with me, and gave me self-confidence in the short sixteen years we had together; I wanted my child to have the same opportunity of knowing a father's love. If I could find a man with integrity, the partnership piece wouldn't matter. At 44, I didn't have much time to search for a real partner. A co-parent would have to do. We could have the child, separate, and share de facto joint custody, each of us free to choose other mates for love and companionship. Biologically disadvantaged as a potential father at age 46, Barry must have faced a more difficult challenge: find and woo a woman (preferably in her 30's) into marrying him and having a child.

Over the next six months, Barry pursued me while I continued to break up with him. We were not a good fit, I insisted. He was Jewish; I was Buddhist. He liked comedies; I preferred documentaries. He was a liberal; I was a radical. Worst of all, our shortcomings annoyed each other: he was a mild-mannered procrastinator, with a diagnosable clutter problem; I was impatient, quick to action, to anger, and to passion. We weren't in love. It just wouldn't work.

The last time I tried to break up with him, we were about to leave for a week's vacation exploring Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. True to our characters, Barry did endless research to choose the best independent hotels, while I was ready to book the trip after an hour's investigation. Two nights before our scheduled departure, I just knew I couldn't go with him. Barry was paying for more of the trip since I was in the middle of a career change, looking for work and finding none. I couldn't afford a vacation, and I couldn't be indebted to someone I didn't love.

By 3:00 a.m. I was wide awake, tense with anxiety, certain I was walking into an impossible situation by agreeing to spend ten days with this impossible man in a foreign country. I picked up the telephone and called him. He picked up on the second ring.

"Barry, I'm so worried about this trip," I launched in. "I can't even sleep."

What was he going to say? Surely he had been sleeping. Surely this would be the last straw. Surely he would dump me at last.

"I'm so glad you called," Barry replied.

Kindness is Barry's leading suit. He assured me we could fly home any time if the trip weren't fun for both of us. After an hour's conversation, I agreed to go with him.

In Mexico, we played. In a cabana outside Tulum we shared romantic afternoon sex amid thunderstorms, hitchhiked into town to see the ruins, separated for a day so we could each explore our own interests. In Merida we strolled the zocalo in the evenings, watching sidewalk artists and vendors, listening to music and sitting at tiny café tables having drinks. On our bicycle trip around Isla Mujeres and our half-day tour of Chichen Itza, we visited shrines to fertility, the Goddess Ixchel, and the ruin whose enclosed room ensured that every woman who entered there would become pregnant within the year. Was it flirtation, or were we serious? On our last morning in Mexico, Barry wrote me a note in the airport, when we were supposed to be writing postcards, and expressed his anxiety about our separation upon returning to the U.S. He asked me to live with him.

I thought about it for a few days, and agreed. I could tell Barry had integrity: he wouldn't leave me with a child, he wouldn't betray me with another woman unless I betrayed him first, and he wouldn't tell me he was in love with me when he wasn't. Besides, he had Paul Wellstone's book on his nightstand at home. An unspoken agreement formed. We would have a child. After that, we would see.

In September, I charted my waking temperature, picked the date, and we conceived. The little soul who had waited twenty years for me settled in to my body, and began to make herself at home. Meanwhile, Barry and I adjusted to living together, sleeping together, and sharing household duties. Still looking for work, and picking up part-time teaching jobs for income, I wasn't able to pay my fair share. Barry carried the bulk of the expenses, bought me a cell phone for protection, and kept a bedside copy of the book, How to Make a Pregnant Woman Happy. He did the housekeeping and the laundry, while I grocery shopped and cooked the meals. We had a shared project and a shared household.

What I didn't anticipate was how our lives would change with the birth of our shared project, Flora.

Up to the birth we had leaped certain hurdles, met each other's families, announced our expectant child and our absence of marriage, chosen a name in Jewish tradition by honoring Barry's mother, Florence, and even agreed to hyphenate our child's last name. In the hospital after the birth, Barry signed the affidavit of paternity that would record him as the father on Flora's birth certificate, and we were catapulted into the role of co-parents, exchanging our newborn between us every few hours while the other parent slept, ate, or rested. We used the hair-dryer and the vacuum cleaner for white noise to soothe our sobbing infant, left fine dinners with to-go cartons because our baby just couldn't wait. We shared the intensity of that first summer with Flora--and the absolute beauty of it, of her fragile tender alert presence--and we loved her fiercely, in ways no other two people would ever love her. When Flora wailed and Barry walked with her, back and forth, rubbing her back and whispering to her, something shifted for me. I watched my child's father nurturing her with patience and kindness. No other man or woman would have the relationship to Flora that Barry could offer her. He was even willing to take her at 3:00 a.m., when I was exhausted after hours of nursing and tears, frustrated and sleep-deprived.

I decided to postpone leaving him.

Since then, it's been two years.

"Mommy! Mommy!" Flora calls out from the front door and dashes in to the kitchen where I am cooking dinner.

It is always like this: she and Barry have been out on some amazing expedition, visiting the zoo, riding the train or the carousel, and she can't wait to tell me where she's been and what she's seen. Barry is slower to enter, muttering and stammering something about their adventures while Flora excitedly narrates in two-year-old English, "Train! Carousel!"

They look at each other for affirmation and then back at me as they try to tell the story of their time together, each talking at the same time, Flora shouting and jumping, Barry setting down the travel bag and unpacking what's left of Flora's snacks, clothing, souvenirs. He often brings back something to put in her baby book: a postcard, a train ticket, something that will help her know how much she was loved.

As parents nearing 50, we know our lives are rich with Flora. We know life is not without end. We take pictures; we write narratives; we save mementos.

Our relationship is like an arranged marriage from the old days: we have chosen each other with little prelude, and have been thrown into family life while still getting acquainted. In the process we have become friends, sometime lovers, occasional companions. The intimacy is tenuous, partial, erratic. I sleep with Flora; Barry sleeps in the guest room. Occasionally, we rendezvous during nap-time, joke about our cabana in Tulum, fantasize about faculty exchanges to Italy or Greece. Meanwhile Barry's stacks of books, papers, and boxes fills the family room, the study, the basement. Meanwhile I am impatient and quick to act, quick to anger and criticism.

We try to be patient with each other's quirks. We try to be patient with our toddler.

Each morning when Flora wakes up, I take her to the window and show her the back yard: there is her swing, here is her sandbox, then it's her pool, the trees, the flowers, the birds. Flora knows no other home except this one, here, with us. Because Flora is here, I cook healthy meals, keep regular hours, cut flirtations in the bud. Barry repairs the house, keeps the temperature warmer in winter and cooler in summer than either one of us would do for ourselves. We both work less, and play more. With Flora, we become a family rather than two isolated academics, a family that recreates and continues our own childhoods. Originally thinking that I would "stick it out" for Flora, I find some unexpected benefits here for myself. With Barry and Flora to come home to, I feel grounded, content. The waiting is over.

"Mommy, Daddy, Flora!" Often, Flora will recite the attendance list: who is here in our house? Who is part of our family? Sometimes the doggy makes it to the list, other times not, but the trinity of Mommy-Daddy-Flora remains consistent.

This week, Barry was away at a conference, and I read library books to Flora each night before bedtime, trying to keep her mind away from her absent father.

"Where is the mommy?" I asked, opening a book of animal stories that featured a duck family. Flora points to the larger duck. "That's right, Flora. And how many mommies are there?" I persist, trying to teach Flora her numbers.

"Two," Flora replies. There is only one large duck, but two small ducklings.

"Two?" I decide this is a teachable moment. "How many mommies does Flora have?"

"Two," Flora replies. "Mommy," she rests her head on my shoulder, "and Daddy."

Damn. If he's that good, I decide, I'll have to stay another year. Maybe longer.

Greta Gaard's book of feminist, ecological creative nonfiction, The Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place, was just published by University of Arizona Press (2007). She teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and at The Loft: A Center for Writers in Minneapolis. She is still co-parenting her daughter, Flora, with her child's father in south Minneapolis.

A Tree House of Her Own

by Kelli Russell Agodon

This morning my husband went on the Internet and printed out detailed plans for building a tree house. There was a quick discussion on cost--I heard "about four hundred dollars"--but what concerned me most was that the tree house would be finished, not left incomplete in our backyard as a visual sign to the world: "The Agodons Do Not Finish Projects." An in-progress kayak has remained hidden for seven years in our basement; the washing machine covers a half-finished floor in the laundry room; and in the bathroom a strategically-placed toothbrush holder conceals missing wall tiles. But the tree house will be one of the first things you see as you open the garden gate and walk to our front door. If it isn't completed, it will be the oversized and un-finished welcome wagon we'll be rationalizing to guests for years to come.

My fear of incompleteness expands: I imagine my daughter at sixteen standing in our backyard; there behind her is the unfinished tree house, the one she was never able to climb. We will start her a therapy fund instead of a college account so she can talk about her childhood's unfulfilled hopes and dreams. And there's a part of me that would understand. After all of our googling for tree house plans and our talks about how to do this, when my husband walked into the garage to find his chainsaw to trim down a space for the tree house I thought, "No kidding, this is seriously going to happen."

I always wanted a tree house, but my father was a sort of Ward Cleaver dad, magically appearing at night for dinner, then, just as quickly as he arrived, disappearing into the bedroom to go to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, he was already back at work, a phantom dad who smoked a pipe, had an office, and left a check for my allowance under my placemat every other Monday. I realized this year that my memories of times with my father were so clear because they were so infrequent. In second grade he took me to my first Mariner's game on a school night. They played the Kansas City Royals. I brought my mitt. I wore my Mariner's shirt and red baseball cap. We walked up the slope of Seattle's Kingdome to look out over the city--my dad and me at a ballgame.

One night my dad brought me home a Styrofoam replica of Boeing's new 747. One night he came home with a guitar for me. Another time, it was a cockatiel. I had never asked for all these strange gifts, or even known I wanted them. But this was my father: a sort of eccentric Republican who arrived occasionally with surprising presents. To thank him, I would buy him soap on a rope at Christmas time from our Avon lady, and with this I considered us even. I remembered so many distinct interactions with my dad because in my life he played the part of the mysterious stranger who moved through the house like a shadow.

As I considered all these memories from my dad, I wondered why I didn't have any particularly strong memories of my mother. Then it occurred to me: my mom was always there. She was the comfortable beige chair I never noticed, always available and open to have me sit with her. I don't remember my mom as much because we were always together. Just as surely as I can't remember when the common freckle on my hand appeared, I know I received the unusual scar on my leg when I accidentally impaled myself with a pair of scissors while cutting out a photo of Scott Baio and watching Lawrence Welk with my nana. It's easy to remember the exception or the freak occurrence, and my father was more of that uncommon element. He was the shiny white agate on the beach, not the common gray rocks that were my life.

So as my husband revved up the chainsaw this morning to cut down any parts of the cherry tree that didn't say "tree house," I was returning to my own childhood. My daughter and I stood in the yard with our safety glasses on and when we heard the chainsaw roar, a sound I imagine could compare to a T-Rex ready to kill its prey, we raced into the house to watch from the bathroom window. We would return to the carnage of branches and splinters later.

When the roar quieted, we went outside to see what my husband had done. I saw huge long limbs of the cherry tree laying across our lawn and I felt a little weepy. Not because I was the tree hugger who cried when our neighbors cut down four beautiful evergreens from their lot (and were forever nicknamed "The Tree-haters"), but because this was really happening. We would be the owners of a tree house, a mini-condo under a cherry universe. I realized that our daughter would experience what I never did, a place of her own above earth in the limbs of another world. But more than just a tree house of her own, she would experience a father who would be there for her in the details of life, not a mysterious stranger who appeared after work with gifts or tickets. As she looked up into the space where her tree house would be, I realized that she will know herself better because she knows him.

Kelli Russell Agodon, the author of two books of poems, Small Knots and Geography, lives in the Northwest with her husband and daughter. She can be found reading in her daughter's tree house on warm summer days.

Pendulum

by Teryl Faulkner

"Nothing can make me stop drinking," my father told my mother the day my brother was born.

Twelve years later, a first and last family meeting is called. My mother and father stand in front of the couch, each at opposite ends of the coffee table. She appears agitated and reluctant, as though summoning the courage to leap into a freshly thawed lake; he, the slightest bit eager.

"I'll only be gone for awhile," my father promises. "I'll be back."

Car keys loose in his mechanic's hand, he leaves the house as a sigh does the lungs. Through the window, the three of us watch the night's big snowflakes settle about his hair. The Cadillac swallows his down-filled bomber and, in melodramatic slow motion, my father drifts away.

My mother has been going to Al-Anon for some time. She tells us our father has a disease that prevents him from changing with life, that caps his growth. Because of it, he forgets to retrieve his six-year-old son from baseball games. He misses dinners and eats out more and spends time and money at the bar down the street with his friends. He loses track of things that might otherwise matter.

I rarely see him during the years that follow, which seems mostly alright. I have my own friends, I love high school, and I bond with our family dog Martha. I can count on the gentle rhythm of Martha's rough pads on pavement, and the more accomplished sounds of their sinking and plucking in the mud. We walk in the rain and the snow and along creeks filled with sequins by the sun. Martha draws me off the trails and into the longer grasses, the deeper woods.

Which is where I meet Bill and his dog, Rambo. I like that Bill dresses in camouflage, takes to the forests, and walks his dog. Later, when I think of him (and I'll occasionally pick him out of sylvan dreams), I see red sugar candied onto the corners of his laughing mouth. This is how he appears tonight in my best friend Paige's rec room. Paige has been dating Bill's best friend, Todd and the four of us play cards and watch movies and toboggan in the parks together. It's Friday night and Bill and Todd know Paige's parents are away. They knock at her door, Rambo nosing in the snow behind them.

Their laughter is loud and fills the entranceway with familiar vapours. They remove their scarves and toques and amass a pile of damp outerwear on the steps. The four of us descend the short flight of steps to the TV and VCR. I ask Bill, how was the ravine, aren't you cold? He grins and asks for a kiss. I ask again about the ravine. He grins and puckers. He must be kidding, I think. Can he not hear me? And then, not the puckering but the glassy eyes, the rummy breath and the sleepy smile take me back to the kitchen where I used to find my father late at night.

I would already have been in bed for hours, waiting for the familiar scuffling of my father's key in the door. Next, I would hear him shuffling the pots and pans in the drawer beneath the oven. I might wander downstairs to find him holding a can opener and staring at the cupboard of canned food – pork and beans, tuna, Klik, sweet corn. Then he would abandon that mission and instead root through leftovers in the fridge. He would talk and I would listen. I didn't mind his sweet rummy breath and the way his words seemed to have no edges, the way they rolled and blended back into his body. "Imagine living on a boat and drifting towards all the ends of the lake and never choosing one end or another." Most of the time I didn't know what he was talking about but I didn't need to know. As a child, I was happy to see my father happy.

But Bill's happiness, and at this moment it seems plentiful, is annoying. Bill and I are both fifteen and I expect inclusion. I want any kissing to mean something; I want everything to mean something. I'm indignant, self-righteous and repulsed. Clearly, boys can't be trusted. Alcohol is evil and people, especially boys, who drink it are no pals of mine. Paige and I send Bill and Todd back into the cold ravine. Through the screen door we watch their breath freeze into hard white clouds.

~

At ten you can show a child a pair of lungs blackened by smoking and the child becomes a fierce non-smoking advocate. She runs home to tell her father to quit. The smoke in the restaurant makes her despair and write sensible letters to the local newspaper. But then adolescence creeps in and wipes that strong, body-centred morality from mind. Self-destructive forces prevail and she will stand in their midst: placid, strong, smoking. She will understand, her confused bodymind will understand, why her father does it.

Similarly, Paige's parents' liquor cabinet soon begins to shimmer and sparkle, indeed to beckon and bewitch. One day I hate Bill for drinking, and the next I plunge with glee into the cabinet's enchanting depths: peach schnapps, cherry brandy, pink wines, Baby Duck. We soon move on to cans of Coors Light, bottles of Molson Dry, vodkas and rums and velvety red wines. Paige and I pride ourselves on the granite caves we have for stomachs. Now if Bill were to shed his big camouflage parka and descend the short flight of steps to the TV and VCR, I would merrily pour tequila into his red candy grin, drink and kiss and drink some more until we would travel my father's infinite sea together.

But who needs Bill, really? What's important is that I have discovered a buoyant new way of being. My father and I can now relate. I drop by to visit him in his new apartment with his New Woman. She makes me Caesars with just the right seasoning, the perfect stalk of celery and just the right amount of vodka.

~

By twenty-one I've become a regular at my father's dinner parties. My brother is here and New Woman and a few other drinking buddies, some cousins, uncles. All are welcome for a toddy (or twelve). My brother stays the night since there's recently been a close call and a stop to the drinking and driving. I stay too and wake early with a hangover. I have a coffee with New Woman, whose bloodshot eyes seem sad and small in a surround of pillow-imprinted skin. The boys are still sleeping. This always amazes me. I might pass out for awhile but my sleep is fitful and by seven, after only three or four hours, I'm wide awake. It's as though my body can't sleep and clean at the same time. I feel bad for body, sort of. I ask New Woman to say good-bye for me, to tell them thanks, I had a great time. And then I drive back to my mother's place.

My mother lives only a twenty minute drive away. Her place is still my home, not because it's where I grew up but because it's where she lives. I stayed with my mother after my father left and after my brother followed him and after my father didn't come back. I stay with her when I'm home from university. Nonetheless, I operate more and more like my father. I panic at the prospect of being without booze in any social situation. I make sure I am the one in charge of stocking up for weekends and evenings. I spend money I don't have. I love a good hangover, the fogginess, an excuse to do nothing all day but relive the blurry events of the evening before.

Even after university, I connect most deeply with those who remain at the bar the longest. I adore friends who can drink to marvelous excess and feign interest in those who either can't or, inconceivably, choose not to. I can tell the difference between the two by matching my drinks to theirs. If they're ready to order another with me, or, even better (and most rare), before me, they are keepers. If, however, I have to hold back too much, I become uncomfortable. I feel I have to repress the most buoyant, convivial, indeed lovable me, the me I'm sure I like best. In these relationships I am my father at the edge of that coffee table, eager to be in my element, eager to be with the keepers.

By the time I've driven across town to my mother's place, I'm sure I've aged a decade. My cells perk up slightly at the garlic sautéing on the stove. I follow them, my cells, as they settle like millions of tiny magnets onto her couch; there we lie and await sober conversation, lemon water and herbal tea.

"Chamomile?" My mother seems so energetic, so… hydrated as she hovers by the tea cupboard.

"Maybe. What else is there?"

"Orange mango. Peppermint. Fennel. Apple spice. Lemon zinger. Dandelion. Raspberry leaf..." The list pours from a face so smooth she might have slept in mid-air. She knows I'm hung-over. The amount and frequency of my drinking may be a secret, but the drinking itself is a fact. She smiles, remembering how she once endured her own hangovers. After all, she was married to my father for several years. They drank together until we children appeared. She seems to trust that, like her, I will happen upon a good rea