Trading letters with myself
I don't know what my future is, if one even exists. I only know I am stuck in a parallel universe, a place between here and here. I don't care if I'm stuck, it's alright with me. But I need to know one thing, just one thing. What's a mother who is a mother who isn't a mother?
All my life I've been a mother. I tended to my younger sisters growing up, when my mom had to work and my dad was always away at school. I ran away from home too young, got pregnant, got married, got pregnant again, didn't know a life outside of caring for others. And in the middle of these things I got raped, got pregnant, gave up a baby daughter, handed her over to the Catholic Charities who shuffled her from foster home to foster home until she was two months old and the paperwork was ready for her new adoptive parents. The last time I saw her in person, she was seven weeks old, and I had to sign the final documents relinquishing my parental rights. A foster mom carried her into the room so I could see her, make sure I didn't want to take up counseling and welfare assistance and take her home. I wanted to back out then and there, wanted to grab her and run across the country, but I took the pen and left my name in a blotchy mess at the bottom of the page.
She became an adult and contacted me six weeks ago. My life is a blotchy mess since then, like my inked up name, like my black and blue days, the purgatory I thought I left behind I discovered still surrounded me.
I found out her name is the same name of my best girlfriend from back home. I found out she's an artist, a bit of a bohemian, a bit of a wild child. I found out her parents are divorced. I found out she loves pizza. I found out she looks just like me, just like me minus all those years, the most like me of all my children, the most look alike, the most think alike. It's like looking into a mirror that takes you back into time, into the road you didn't take, the better and smoother super interstate highway, not the crappy backroads washed out tumbleweed road I know.
And I don't know where this leaves me, or leaves her. I found out her parents won't do the things I think are normal, like pay for college education, like find a reliable car. I found out she's never traveled anywhere in the world, not even across half the country. My heart breaks, because I think every kid should see the country and every teenagers should see the world, they all need to see the things I didn't see. I sent 19 to France, Italy, and Spain two years ago and next year am sending 17 to Scotland to bike through the land of castles and peat. I want to do these things for my birth-daughter-with-a-familiar-name, I want to say Hey! I'll pay for that stuff! I'll buy you a car! I'll send you to school! I'll send you to Paris to eat crepes citron and sit in Rodin's Garden. But I can't. I'm not her mom. But I am her mom. I'm such a nobody and such an everything in the same breath and this is the biggest eggshell floor in the universe.
So instead I put photos in an album and write funny captions and pack them in a box with postcards from the Rocky Mountains and Tibetan prayer flags and hope it translates into something she'll understand about our common bonds, the ways we are alike, the ways we grew the same.
8:48:05 PM 
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