A bientot!

Pardonnez mon Francais, qui est moche. Je vais au sud de la France. Je serai en erriere dans deux semaines.

Voyez-vous alors!*




(*Pardon my French, which is lousy. I am going to the South of France. I'll be back in two weeks. See you then!)

Unlimited Calling

My daughter is fixated on her cell phone. I think she wants to call someone. Not just anyone. I think she wants to phone home.

Who doesn't? Life is sad and complex, and just when you hit a brief coast, there's another tight curve.

My daughter says I can't understand her loss. Such a loss is like a death, she says. My daughter is wise beyond her years.

Well, I know from death. I've made that turn, several times. While my daughter and I might not be on the same street, we're headed in the same direction.

We all get here from somewhere else. Here, meaning this precise moment in time. This particular present tense. My daughter and I are living in the same house, breathing the same air, moving forward, together. Here. Now. Hearing the same voices, eating the same food (except for Brussels sprouts), slamming the same doors until the foundation shakes.

Tell me that isn't a family.

Sometimes my husband and I think of the other possible futures. What if this hadn't happened? Or that? What if it hadn't all gone down the way it did? Say one fine morning you open your door, there's a baby in a basket on the porch step. Who'd close the door? Now you know. It wasn't a decision, it was involuntary. Like breathing.

It is what it is, my father used to say. Also, Who could begin to know what's in a crow's mind.

Who could begin to know what's in the mind of someone who could lose track of the babies. That's plural, Virginia. One after another, all these other things more pressing until, Oh, but, Your Honor, I am (incidentally) a mother.

Everyone knows from a mother. And that is no mother. That's a birth-giver. Like god.

But my daughter doesn't know this. How could she? She knows only some unspeakable primal loss that catches her offguard and stirs her breath and her blood and her cells, and now her cell phone. Her fingers flick over the keys like raindrops, like all the tears that have fallen, have yet to fall, life is a deluge, a flood,

it's raining it's pouring the baby is boring
she bumped her head she wet the bed
she didn't wake up she didn't wake up didn't

We have rules about the cell phone. Not at the table, not in school, not during homework, not while sleeping. At night I sit at the edge of my daughter's bed while she turns the phone off and plugs it in and places it inside an old gymnastics wristband, like a sleeping bag, or a bunting. Lovingly. She completes these rituals lovingly. Her version of Now I lay me down to sleep.

I wouldn't know how to go about monitoring my daughter's memory. That is, her phone's memory. I myself have a cell phone. When it rings, at least I no longer panic. But please don't ask me to recover my messages. I have over a hundred (I saw my inbox once, my daughter pointed it out), but obviously none was an emergency. Because here we are.

You are here.

It's easier for my husband and I to feel like parents than it is for our daughter to feel like, well, like our daughter. All the studies said this, all the books, all the social workers and professionals. But I'd already figured this out for myself.

Still, it doesn't change anything. It is what it is. The bough already broke, the baby already came down, we're just doing cradle recovery, here. That the cradle fell into our yard, into our laps, is one of those tight curves. You ride it out, and if you survive it, there you are, headed in a whole new direction. And the seasons, they go round and round, says the poet.

No direction home, says another poet. And I might agree. My daughter, however, keeps trying. Like ET, she needs to believe in (some sweet) home. She thinks she knows something I don't. Well, maybe she does. But so do I.

One day she'll make that connection. One day that call will go through, jumping from tower to tower until it strikes...home. Like cellular pinball. And the day after that (which could be a long long time in heart years), when the machine finally tilts and she takes the curve doing ninety, she might find herself on a road somewhere, looking around, wondering how she got there. She might want to call someone. Not just anyone.

I only want her to know that, by then, I'll have done my homework. By then, if I don't answer, she can always leave a message. Because, by then, I'll have figured out how to recover. That is, my messages.