Measuring Cup
Thursday afternoon I board a plane headed for New York City. I will stay at my sister's apartment and walk her two fat and spoiled dogs and take in the junk mail while she attends a work conference on the west coast. I get to see her Sunday and Monday, but she isn't the reason I'm traveling to the big city. I will visit my elderly grandfather for a few hours Friday morning and bring him diabetic-allowed oatmeal cookies and a new pair of warm corduroy slippers. My uncle will arrive at noon and take my grandfather to Cape Cod for the weekend. My grandfather and uncle aren't the reasons I'm traveling, either.
Saturday morning I will borrow my sister's tiny green car perfect for her small family of three, and drive thirty miles out of the city to a town I have never seen. My reason waits here. My birth daughter. I don't know what to expect. I'm nervous.
I spent all day yesterday and all day today trying to find the perfect gift. I want to give her something she can hold, something she can look at and think of me, something that tells her I never forgot her dark eyes. My whole body hurt doing this exercise. You'd think those muscles of regret would be stronger by now. You'd think I could pick out something simple and elegant and loving without bursting into tears. And in between I bought a new telephone for my daughter in college and a notebook my oldest son needed. I'm stuck in slow motion molasses hiccup memories, and everything is heavy and thick syrup around me.
A week or so ago, driving home from dropping my daughter off at school, I met up with my online friend, Stephanie. She picked the location, a breakfast place off some highway I didn't know, and we ate huge chucks of blueberry cake with powdered sugar. She told me about the new job she was starting that afternoon. It held so much promise. But now that job is long gone, just another one of those life blips. Stephanie didn't see it coming, didn't know she'd be terminated before a fair chance measure. What can you do? Eat blueberry cake, just eat it like it's the last piece, just know sugar will fall across your chest.
You never know what pieces will fall into and out of place, do you? You never do. And this is what I'm so afraid of, this is exactly it. Maybe I'm just some dumb job life blip for my birth daughter. Maybe she'll meet me and say Hi! And Wow! I did get that big nose from you! And we'll have a grand time laughing over photos and I'll give her whatever present I can find before I can catch my plane, and then I'll find myself home, full of promise, full of employment hope, and I'll never get another call. Life can be like that. You never know.
I met another blogger the same week, Susan and her sweetie sidekick Doc M. We talked about keeping life secrets and sharing glimpses of them, and writing, we talked about writing, how you get words down on the page. She showed me a spiral notebook full of handwritten flashback, and I stared and listened to her read a slice from her life, a moment from her time with a grape grower, a crazy man of wild hair and vanity plates with a smart disregard for specific wine numbers. I remember all of this, and it's a testament to how good that harsh draft writing was.
I wish I could do that, keep a diary, ink down the wisdom of vintners early in the morning. But I have no discipline. I'm such a seat of the pants girl. I've built such a seat of the pants life. I don't know where I'm headed, I've got no diary, no blueberry cake reserves, nothing in front of my face but a plane ticket to a far away noise box of a city. I don't even have a gift to bring. I'm the little drummer boy without a talent for drumming. The only thing I ever thought I was any good at - being a mother - is the one thing I fucked up big time with my birth daughter. I wish I didn't give her away. I know it was the only thing I could do then, I know it, I can't hate myself for it. But I don't have anything else to show for myself.
3:58:46 PM 
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