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

Red.

Blood.

What wends its way through the umbilicus,

Long ago cut, but still pulsing.

Very much connected between my mother

And me.

Like a secret passageway.

Or is it: connecting my mother and me?

They say that when a pregnant mother suffers, the growing life registers the same as if

One body

One continuous landscape of pulsing, feeling, breath and form.

When my friend G. was regressed back to the womb, she recalled

Terrible pain on one side of her face radiating a shame so big that it enveloped her

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

“Did something happen when you were pregnant with me?” she would eventually ask her mother,

Two adult women staring each other down.

Denial gave way to admission, the eventual recollection that

The bruises were at the hand of her father, the first of many abuses,

A torrent of more humiliation and wounding to recover from.

But that night of her 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 punch a pregnant woman.

In the face

Like that.

So she labored alone.

But not alone.

One continuous landscape of pulsing, feeling, breath and form.

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

My watery world felt 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

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

She has the scars to prove it

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

Where she had snuck out windows in the black night, 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.

And yet again 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 the 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,

Not carefully, or tenderly,

Where she had almost only known pleasure

And exploration.

“It hurt. A lot,” she has said. “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 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

Her pain is still very much mine.

Way beyond universalities like I am the other you

And

Your healing is mine

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.

But before that…

Fifty-one years ago,

And four months and seven hours or so,

Did I feel it too?

How my exit and simultaneous entrance was one that immediately caused her pain.

And she mine?

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

From round, dark, protected, connected, when she loved me just as I was

To: (in an instant, poof!)

Separate

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 through each scold, and praise,

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

In the absence of his:

Johnny,

A man so loving and fun, but too-used to being doted on by my mother and every woman,

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, this love of her life, all music, wild, laughter, creativity and sex pouring through him and into her

Until

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, her wings that I wanted to burst from my back

While my mom kneeled down with me, an encouraging hand on me

As I “went potty”

Or didn’t

Til my small feet tingled,

Dangling too long above the ground

Not rooted

Like my mother’s heart.

Without community or family to support her in a daily way either

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

Gallivanted through music venues and clouds of hash and the like

Just as my dad still did, his life changing little

While hers must have felt like it came to a 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

Without support

There is only THIS daily walk to the park, THIS toy or meal, as seasons shift, and she cut my meat into tiny manageable pieces, another bath, and another.

Still, we loved each other fiercely, even joyously

And for those two whole years we had each other mostly to ourselves.

She found simple rhythms and order we could both abide by.

I ate my first Milk Duds on our NYC stoop, rolling each one slowly around like I had just tasted what a secret was

While she and I 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

And she sang in her unsure voice often out of tune, lullabies and nursery rhymes, the few songs she could remember,

She in many ways, also still a girl just without the lull of his guitar.

There were simple books we held together in small and larger hands, mine like hers, could she notice it then?: how looking down she was looking back, climbing in,

Me a smaller her (too)

Fleshy limbs and belly and hope as we repeated words together,

Or as in my favorite book, opened and closed paper doors and gates which led to lush gardens, and warbled voices and mirrors.

Twinkle twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what you are...when I get all steamed up, hear me shout...this little piggy stayed home...see how they run...out came the sun and dried up all the rain…there was an old farmer who had a horse…

And so that is what I became, tucking myself away within the safety of that technicolor garden, under a hopeful starry sky, a farm teeming with life, where everyone is welcome,

Though a litany of disappointments is not.

Here, family is forgiving and always holds the possibility to get it right, even when we live in separate houses, are “separate”, and all the rest

Here, a world past jagged, sharp, grey, punitive, divided, unforgiving, fearful, not enough.

But it would take me a circuitous route to fully arrive and bloom all this,

To gain the courage to simply step through that magical doorway,

Into the garden and feel free, whole, present, loved,

Even sometimes with “less”,

Or if no man is there to partner.

Feeling safer, with less armor. Richer with less income or ambition.

But more time and wisdom to be present and grateful, to see the beauty in not what is bought, but

Grown, shared, mended, gifted, witnessed, expressed, and loved so fully,

And in the acceptance that THIS is enough. This colorful, eccentric family so ripe with love, so generous.

As I am.

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

THIS marriage, enough finally too, the edges of trust that one man can hold me, (even this man whom I love)

That the stakes are high enough to stay for,

And grow with,

Or at least stay true for until we both decide it isn’t.

Here, in this house we share raucous meals, stories and laughter

And where my mother’s scrutiny of “Another serving?!” and fear of lack (peppered with contradictory extravagances) are not welcome at this table

But you are

As she is

So pull up a chair and I will grab you a plate, Dearest Ones

There will always be room for you here.

Join us,

In this place she also has helped to transform and bring her gifts over the years.

And laughter, and laughter, along with the tears.

For the rest of us though, no one owes anyone anything

On this land where we plant dreams and connection, make music and weave stories, despite and because of how alone so many now feel.

We have each other and that feels like so much,

With doors and gates that remain open

Loving one another with the same blatant honesty she did my brother and I, but without the conditions.

Again, she is welcome and loved too

Even if she wouldn’t give me the keys to her loft when I asked so long ago

As if I have not been trustworthy

This woman who has shown me beauty, raw truth, courage,

Lived without shame

I am so grateful

And who gave birth to my brother into my 9 year old hands,

Trusting that I was brave and could be of support

(I was)

Important enough to share that profound experience.

And she gifted me that incredible being to grow with.

My mother, who taught me to express myself fearlessly,

To cook, and show love and creativity through so many forms

Who is talented beyond words

And whose images and creations are worthy of museum halls

But who also

Pushed me to love a sad eyed man who was not my father

And then used it against me

Who 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,

My mother, who taught me loyalty

And also, confusingly, showed me a conditional, split-hearted kind of love

As if I was never enough

Or I was too much

Too much like him

Not enough like her

Don’t trust men completely

“You don’t respect me enough”

And will spend months ranting about a kitchen island I don’t want or need for my kitchen, or some other things she has fixated on

Telling me she has to buy it, but screaming in the same breath that she doesn’t have enough money for her life

Because of me.

Still

We are very much connected

My mother

And me.

Red.

Blood.

What wends its way through the umbilicus,

Long ago cut, but still pulsing.

Like a secret passageway

Where we have also witnessed, inspired, coaxed, and

Shared messages and recipes telepathically

Can say absolutely anything even if it hurts like fuck

While relieved to know we have loved fiercely

Though differently

While never ever laboring alone.

Passage

um·bil·i·cal cord

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