“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Keroac, Dharma Bums

Some things do not make sense to me now. They might if I allow it. Or they might not. It's hard to say.

Each time there was a spell during which the children were very small before they could speak to anyone but me with their eyes and need of me. Then they grew on, started talking and became people, inside of whom is the secret of who they were before they began to take their shape and harden into their identities. I know that secret better than they do, as my mother knows mine before my memory begins. When I die or lose my memory of their secrets, those secrets will go with me, and I think we all mourn the loss of those as much as we do the sound of our mothers' laugh fading.

These are very elemental things. Like a b c. I'm not talking about relationships, their complications and all that. Our perpetual becoming in them. Transaction that happens in words. I'm talking about simpler things, underneath that.

All of what I've done and has been done to me, all the transactions, they push me out into a shape. Like a play doh fun factory. Mother being one. Friend. Daughter. Professor, even. It is damn difficult to balk the shape you're in once you're in it. Having an identity is a bitch. Even if it doesn't suck, it is certainly constraining. And let's face it, it often does suck. Friend. Daughter. Etc. But if you try to put it down, you're a shitty friend, an estranged daughter. You've accomplished nothing but acquiring an adjective. Cheating husband. What did that accomplish? Might as well pick an adjective like "sane" or "good", and try for that, logically speaking. Sane daughter. Good wife. Take that shape. Whatever it needs to be.

My daughter is once again obsessed with having (acquiring) children. Foster kids, her job like a shopping spree off and on, her imagining each as her own and trying them on as such. This happens when she takes a lover and doesn't love him. Last month she was thinking of moving to Seattle, where she would like to open a bakery, and I thought hmm maybe she could open one here as I walked by a for rent sign. But then a man, and almost immediately and counter-intuitively she seems like she needs to get laid something fierce, wound tight as hell, and the foster children mania begins again. Talking without taking breaths. Almost as to herself up and down the street in need of a cigarette madness. Talking right through you like you're not there. Because to her, you are not. The man is not there, not really. I can relate. All she can know to do is love a kid instead, so she wants to do that.

Did I teach her that? I might have thought so, but Aaron makes me doubt it. He also has a version of her madness. It wants more identity. Parent. To be called by that name. Like a solidifying agent to offset the runny (manic) nature of their beings.

I never wanted that. To be called mom, I mean. I didn't not want it. But I WANTED what they gave me before they could talk to call anybody anything. I paid that back trying to be a good mother, a consequence of having gotten something prior, something elemental. They could have called me whatever. Tbone. Luckily for me, I enjoyed mothering. A lot of it. And I really like them, too. They're all incredibly funny people. My family is a small mob to which I belong as a consequence of several times having indulged in the extreme pleasure of putting my nose behind the ear of another human being for as many hours in a row as I wanted once upon a time before they all started talking.

I now do that again. Not child. Husband. With the same ferocity of need. Plus something else. Plus sex, I guess. But sex is just a Way. All the work I did between having children and becoming a wife. The sitting still. The breathing up my spine and over my head and back down my abdomen and around and around. Open. And quiet. I pulled him through me when he came. I take his secret unworded self in, and spit it back. There is no part of his body I do not know well, calloused heel to asshole to hair follicle, with all my senses. I know what his arteries sound like inside him, the squishy humming of his sleep. Where words begin is where he, separate from me, starts. As a consequence, I have to relate to him, because here he is. I try to be a good wife. It's the way I pay it back, the more elemental thing. Lover. That's what he calls me.

My friend Patti adopted three children. She was their foster mother. She was the stepmother of girls that we called The Daughters. Ears dubbed them that because in his typical way he could not remember their individual names. Maria and Lauren. Patti's daughters. They called her Patti. When they grew into teenagers, and after Patti and her husband had given up on the fertility treatments, Patti went through classes and set out to adopt. I remember her telling me, I want to be called mom. Just like Aaron said, why he had to hurt me. Besides, what else is there that matters? Parenting matters, she said. Fair enough, it does that. Now the girl she got when she was 5 years old is 10. At the rate that girl is going, she might herself become a mother at 12. To say nothing of the two boys. Just the girl and her attachment disorder. She needs to pet Patti constantly or she cries and carries on. She's my size trying to ride her mother's hip like a toddler, exhausting Patti completely day in and out with no respite, turning her into this shape: hates to be touched. That is Patti's shape now. Mother, Wife, Professor, Recoiling. Guilty. Anxious. Committed. Admirable. I ask her, how is your marriage holding up? She says, 'It will survive, we are nothing if not loyal, but I hate going home and I couldn't have sex if my life depended on it.'

What if you're wrong about what you assume to be true and your life does actually depend on being able to do what you cannot? That's what I'm wondering.

The Girl comes for family dinner. Aaron enjoys these evenings a great deal. He is not as easily exhausted as I am, for one thing. I wish she'd shut up and make earrings with me (let's melt crayons), but say la vee. She says at one point that of course we too will have to go through foster parent certification classes to be able to babysit for her. Aaron readily assents, can't wait, little kids are so great. I say, Of course we will do whatever is needed. He seems a better stepfather than I am a mother in this. Perhaps I am a better spouse, if that is measured in suffering, it's hard to say. Here's what I do know: no part of me wants to take foster parent classes whatsoever. I do not want to take that shape at all. I do not want to sit through youcanthaveababy classes weekly. Not even ONE week, let alone months' worth. Pure Torture. I probably will suffer that (try to) because they both want it of me, and I respect that, and I understand I have an obligation to try to be good in my relationships to each of them. Mother. Wife. I will try to allow whatever that might mean for me. But I absolutely do not want to, and will be summoning all my faith in the forces of a benevolent universe that anything but more pain will come of it. For myself, I do not desire a troubled foster child. And truly, I cannot really make myself want a different baby either; I want the one I had, have, who did nothing to regret. I do not want anything between me and that baby, obliterating her like she doesn't count. I would have preferred her alive longer, but kids aren't obliged to fulfill your wishes. Say la vee. If a baby falls out of the sky like an Eli, it would be in my arms and I would surely want it, and then have to face the consequences of that fact, which at that point would be a home study classes whatever it is to be able to keep the baby behind whose ear my nose is already parked. In which case, fine. Otherwise, no.

I was up all night,
thinking: no. Other things DO
matter to us both.

I want nothing more getting stuck between myself and Aaron like a poppy seed between gum and tooth. Hurting. I want nothing between my skin and his. Not now. I want nothing forcing me to contort to fulfill something else. Lover is a new shape I've taken. A lover has desires and that is what shape she takes, the shape of herself.

Finally morning is near enough. I turn towards him and breathe. And breathe. Quiet. I think: yes. I want him. I wake him up.