Altered/distorted photo: Jenny Wonderling; Original:Fausto Garcia, unsplash.com

1.

Red

Blood

That wends its way through the umbilicus

Long ago cut, but still pulsing

Very much connecting my mother

And me

Like a secret passageway

2.

They say that when a pregnant mother suffers, the growing life does too

As if one body

One continuous landscape of pulsing, feeling, breath and form

When my friend G was regressed

She slipped into the womb

And recalled

A searing pain on one side of her face

Radiating a shame so big that it enveloped her

Where safety and amniotic fluid, slippery and warm, should have been

The hypnotist assured her

“In this moment you are a baby, protected; the pain is not yours,”

But G’s face actually hurt

And she was overwhelmed by an unworthiness so big she spoke it aloud

“Just let it go,” the therapist whispered, “It’s not yours to hold”

G carried it all the way to her mother’s apartment in the West Village anyway

And said, “Did something happen when you were pregnant with me?”

Two adult women staring each other down

Denial would give way to recollection and eventual admission

Of a searing pain

And a garish bruise inflicted by the hand of G’s father (clenching something metal)

The first of many abuses

And the torrent of humiliation and wounding to recover from

But that particular night of Gs birth, her mother had paced

And crumpled

In a hospital parking lot, companionless

So far from Sacred

Too humiliated to endure a hospital staff’s certain inquiries of what kind of man could attack a pregnant woman

In the face

Like that

So she labored alone

But not alone

One continuous landscape of pulsing, feeling, breath and bodies

Altered photo. Original: Enrique Guzmán Egas, unsplash — **Altered photo.** Original: Enrique Guzmán Egas, unsplash

3.

My watery world was vulnerable for other reasons

My mother, too, labored without loved ones to support her

Yet just a year before she was dramatically sucking a pacifier to go with her short shorts, cotton candy pink nails, petulant beauty, and cleavage, working the Welcome Desk at Alouette Records where my dad was a rising star

They nodded off on seconals together as they crossed bridges and crashed

Popped tuinals at intersections, fingers braided, her tiny diamond proudly flashing

She has the scars to prove it

Won tearing away from their too-small neighborhoods, burrough accents, and childhood homes

Where she had snuck out windows in the black night in short skirts, shoeless

Padding across asphalt and empty train cars, alone, to see him

Just to be with him

And towards

Stardust

A woman old enough to conceive

And merely twenty

Still excited by things like

My father bringing home a fudgsicle

Which she ate enthusiastically, licking fingers playfully, a taunt

“Oh Johnny, if only I had more,” she’d say, batting eyelashes and pouting like Bardot

Each time

Their game

Til he’d procure another, dripping and melted from a back pocket

Thrusting it forward with devilish charm

Mixing chocolate flavored tongues and lips, cold and sweet

Chasing one another laughing

Through rooms where they played grownup

Barely making rent

And he strummed and sang her songs

In a cloud of smoke

Of one kind or another

As her belly swelled

Til, like the bursting of bubbles, or slamming of doors

Photo: Marc Sendra Martorell, unsplash.com

I was forced

Out into fluorescent lights, sharp corners, flat walls

Pushed through that holy portal, by way of

The cutting of flesh

And not carefully, or tenderly

Where she had almost only known pleasure

And exploration

“It hurt. A lot,” she has said many times to remind me

“Took me nine years to recover from your birth,” she has said

Again

She has not let me forget

The brutality of the cut

The pain she endured and all she has sacrificed

For me

To be

The ache while it healed

And they made love

Or didn’t

“Because of you”

The ribby scar it (I) left her

Photo: Olenka Kotyk, unsplash.com — **Photo:** Olenka Kotyk, unsplash.com

“The pain is not yours. Well, not yours, but yours collectively…”

Yet her pain, too, is mine

Way beyond universalities like I am the other you

And

Your healing is my healing

This is different

Even deeper

From mother to daughter

A birthright

Inherited

Of blood

And cords

Long ago cut but still pulsing

I “owe her” she tells me too many times recently

I owe her

Fifty-one years ago,

And four months and seven hours or so,

My exit and simultaneous entrance immediately caused her pain

Did I feel it too?

We have never had the chance to discuss the severance I also had to endure

Beyond what I may have experienced when she was cut

The journey from round, dark, protected, connected,

When she loved me just as I was

To: (in an instant, poof!)

Separate

Too much

Too much like him

Not enough like her

Not enough

Woven by this frayed and complex channel of lasting, invisible threads

um·bil·i·cal cord

/ˌəmˈbilək(ə)l ˌkôrd/

noun

a flexible cordlike structure containing blood vessels and attaching a human or other mammalian fetus to the placenta during gestation.
- a flexible cable, pipe, or other line carrying essential services or supplies.

Did you know I cried a lot my first many months?

I’m sure she did too

Left alone with me, a constant miniature reminder of his absence and ways he had failed her

His dark brown eyes

Reflecting back into her blue ones through my gaze

His fuller lips within my smile and pout

My constant hunt for joy like his

And name a mere vowel shift from his: Jenny, she would say or scream or praise

In the absence of his:

Johnny,

A man so loving and fun

That he could be too fun

And too used to being doted on

By my mother and every woman

A man who had promised, even vowed, he would always stay

In spite of how they pushed each other away

Til soon, he left more and more

The love of her life

All music, wild, laughter, creativity and sex pouring through him and into her

And the apartment near Gramercy Park with its linoleum black and white checkerboard tiles felt emptier

My memories are as sharp as that first bright light

The hard square bars of my crib prison, crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, fear and separation

I’m not making up the clarity

I can see it

Feel it

I remember the sepia angel photograph in the small bathroom there, the feathered wings that I wanted to burst from my back too

While my mom kneeled near me, an encouraging hand on my knee or small foot

As I “went potty”

Or didn’t

Til my small feet tingled

Dangling above the ground

Not rooted

Like…

my mother’s heart

Without community or family to support her in a daily way

And help her hold a tether to who she had been before me

While her hipster, guitar slinging friends in handmade leather clothes and bell bottomed embroidered jeans

Gallivanted through music venues

And clouds of hash

My dad off similarly exploring

Then sent home songs about other women and the wilds of places faraway

His life changing little with what should have been responsibility

As hers must have felt like it was coming to a lonely halt

So I could thrive

Paused was the glamor and partying

Replaced by the stretching of time that a young child with constant needs offers up

THIS daily walk to the park, THIS toy or meal, this season’s shift

Carefully cutting my meat into tiny toddler size pieces, making me food with care

Running another bath, and another

To wash my growing form

And for those two whole years

We had each other mostly to ourselves

Found simple rhythms and order we could both abide by

Loving each other fiercely, even joyously

One day I ate my first Milk Duds on our stoop

Rolling each one slowly around like I had just tasted what a secret was

While we watched the world walk by

Each sweet dark globe huge on my tongue

And felt naughty

As we fed pigeons

Missing him together

My beautiful young mother and me

Maybe that missing even brought us closer

And sometimes farther apart

While I grew and gained language

She sang in her unsure voice

Lullabies and nursery rhymes

Or hammed up the few songs she could remember, to make us laugh

Even without the lull of his guitar

And she read simple books with bright pictures

Held together in our small and larger hands

Look down, look back, climb back in

I was a miniature her (too)

Within my fleshy limbs and belly and hope

We repeated words together

Or opened and closed paper doors and gates which led to lush gardens, warbled voices and mirrors

And loved each other

To the moon

And back

twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are…

somewhere over the rainbow…

out came the sun and dried up all the rain…

there was an old farmer who had a horse…

Then years later

My mother

Who gave me life

Birthed my brother into my 9-year-old hands

Trusting that I was brave and could be of support

Important enough to share such a profound experience

And rewarded me by gifting me that incredible being to grow with

Did you know she taught me to express myself fearlessly?

To cook, and show love and creativity in so many forms?

And between us there is still a secret passageway

Through which we still witness, inspire, coax and

Share messages and recipes telepathically

She is talented beyond words

Her images and creations worthy of museum halls

And we can say absolutely anything even if it hurts

While relieved to know we have also loved with loyal abandon

Beyond time itself

Even if we are not speaking

My beautiful mom and me. So much love between us too; and still… — My beautiful mom and me.

But she was also once a woman who

Missed my father

Then pushed me too soon to love a sad eyed man

And when I finally did

She used it against me

She has threatened too many times to count

That she could be dead

Or might never speak to me again

Cut me out of her will

Reminded me I was or am not enough

Or too much

Too much like him

Not enough like her

Yet I have learned

That under the illusion of words hurled

That sting

Or any disappointments

There is a woven connection that only she and I can know

Or understand

And thankfully, with the generosity of time, I have learned there is more true love

Than the ugly bits

That we must be forgiving if we want to have half a chance

And to question this:

What if it was all just right?

The dark there to help us rise to the sun

And grow each other in all the ways we have and can?

What if we needed to keep slogging through

Until we realize/d

We must choose joy and our own resilience

And scream for what’s actually important

Get things wrong

And right

Until we finally celebrate

That THIS is enough

This colorful, eccentric family

Ripe with love imperfect

THIS very life

And this flow between us that only a mother and child can know…

Eventually I would move away from the big city

Tuck myself within the safety of my own technicolor garden

(Very real indeed)

Beneath a hopeful starry sky

On a farm teeming with life

Though strangely, again, amidst the beauty

And healthy children growing

Words and creativity and Life and dreams pouring out

And so much love

A father is too far away once again

Still

A family imperfectly exquisite

Tender with hope

And

Overflowing

Shared, mended, witnessed

Believing still, in spite of things

Held within a house of raucous meals, stories and laughter

Of creative dreams made manifest

Music

Beautiful grief

And the alchemy of art

While some 78 miles south

In her Loft Museum

Filled with potent photographs

Hanging all around

Worn things that hold memory

Miraculous sunlight

And feisty, trailblazers in shoulder pads

Beauty has been aging honestly

Propped up by raw truth and courage

And the fine line between laughing and crying

Within conversations shared without shame

Tribeca photographer west Murray — Photography (here and the two just below) by Shana Trajanoska for Margot Magazine

It took me a while to comprehend

How raucous love

And artful lives

Can actually nourish an inauthentic, lonely and botoxed world

In spite of any wild discord

And sometimes because of it

Screenshot 2024-12-02 at 12.08.36 PM.png

Yet it does

You will just have to know for yourself

So pull up a chair at the table

Hers

Mine

Ours

Just as you are

To also (maybe) remember

How every one of us once knew a continuous landscape

Of pulsing, feeling, breath and bodies

Milk flowing spiced by life

And

Red

Blood

That wends its way through the umbilicus

Long ago cut, but still pulsing

Maybe you even still do

Passage

um·bil·i·cal cord

Travels, stays, (mostly stays these days) explorations of the heart and life.