Making her Mother’s Day card
BY GAIL HAYDEN
Life is all memories. The present moves so quickly
we barely notice.–
Larry Michael Serbin*
She carries herself with grace and beauty. No,
grace and beauty combine together to carry her—like twin,
weightless-bearing manservants called upon to transport her elegant
butterfly spirit to places only she knows where to go. She is my
daughter, my youngest daughter, still so achingly a maiden at her
age of barely 19 years that I struggle now not to sneak in and smooth
her covers as she sleeps once more on the bed she now only occasionally
uses when home from college on the weekends.
I became very ill when she was born. I remember
the extreme urgency I felt while carrying her inside of me—knowing
she would be a girl—that I must make her room beautiful. The
room had been soaked in so much sorrow. Seven years before, her
father’s first wife had lived and lay dying in another room
down the hall. The room where I had affixed teddy bear-on-rocking
horse wallpaper while standing pregnant on a precarious stool had,
for the years since, been the repository of her father’s first
wife’s unclaimed heirlooms left behind for me: an AA book,
an oxygen tank, a flotation mattress, a wig, several Vicki Carr
albums, an archived text telling me about the pain borne by a deceased
woman I had never known and now regretted I never met. I had married
her widowed husband and moved into her home.
My unborn daughter, Vonni, and I were on the
same mission. Save her father from his pain. Save her father from
his pain. Make the room a different space. Make some room in the
room for a cradle. Make some room in my womb for a daughter. Gently
rock the cradle.
She has been gently rocking like that long-ago
teddy bear for so long she must be tired. Indeed at age 16 she too
became ill—an over-active thyroid brought on I think from
too much rocking. Her father and I didn’t make it. Our marriage
shattered in front of her when she was 3 years old. I look at the
old photos and I can tell exactly which ones were taken before the
separation, and which ones after, by the change in the look on her
face. I place those photos side by side and I try to capture the
fleeting difference between them as if you could capture a monarch
butterfly’s spirit before the monarch is put in a jar.
The illness I experienced when she was born
was identified as a staph infection; it began in the incision of
my caesarian section, spread through my bloodstream and abscessed
in my left breast. The 10 weeks of progressively stronger, more
potent antibiotic therapy was futile (resistant spirits make great
petri dishes). Only another surgeon’s scalpel could excise
the walled-off abscess and only betadine-soaked gauze poked into
the open wound right above my heart and pulled out twice a day carrying
with it dried bacterial debris could save me from a premature departure
like her father’s first wife. This kind of healing they called
“healing from the inside out.” I called it hell.
I look at Vonni now and I know she is just as
much her father’s first wife’s daughter as she is mine.
And I am glad for that—for my DNA alone, when combined with
his, would have fallen far short of creating this “Michelangelo.”
There had to be more subtle pigmentation to make the eyes that see
beyond the visible, to make the mouth incapable of speaking unkindness,
to flesh out a vessel of human creativity that has become this,
our maiden daughter.
At 3 years of age she’d gather all the
pretty pieces of our lives and place them around her in a circle.
At 9 years of age she began to play by ear songs on the piano. By
12 she was composing her own melodies. Then she picked up my guitar
one day and formed chords I’d never known. Quietly and gently
she wove beauty into our reality and breathed green new life into
our cold, cold hearts.
Her father and I speak now. We are actually
friendly. It is because we are now on the same mission. We, although
we don’t talk about it, guard ourselves against the pain of
letting go of our butterfly. We, I know it must be true, go about
our days away from her silently praying the same mantra. In fact,
that mantra is much like the music we played at the baby-naming
we had for her at our second home when when she was 2 years old.
The ceremony had been delayed a year until we could move into a
more upbeat environment in which to raise this spirit child. In
actuality, it was she who raised us.
May the Lord protect and defend you.
May the Lord keep you from harm.
Gradually, ever so gradually, this girl child
transformed us. With the keys of a piano playing tunes she heard
in her head and bold strokes of color she wanted to wear, she gathered
in our souls. Growing up in front of us she fed our starving bodies
with her beauty. Vigilantly she coaxed us with her music to set
aside our fear. Lovingly she helped us find our way back to a mutual
warm regard for each other.
I see her now, fleeting, and fleeting and fleeting.
The university of life is taking her little by little in new directions
we are not able to follow. I cry. I also celebrate. I reach out
to grasp her, but she is not there. I wait for her to call. Sometimes
it is her father who calls and we have long talks about where she
is going. Many times I find myself wondering if his first wife—her
other mother—is listening in on our conversation in the realm
of another world, smiling as she goes about the mission—the
spinning of weightless butterfly wings into our daughter that come
forth and come forward like gold—come forth and come forward
like gold.
From where I am now, to where she is now—I
gratefully wish her the happiest Mother’s Day. And send this
message to her with the flutter of my own new wings.
Butterfly, flutter bye.
* Larry is my first cousin who introduced
Vonni’s father to me.
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