A Coda For My Previous...
May. 5th, 2024 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chicatingIt's weird when you discover your own feelings when you write. Especially since this is so...wacky.
Life was good, if somewhat less than I would pray for, if prayer had outlasted puberty.
A YEAR LATER
That year passed in a blur of indeterminate desert seasons and paperwork to make the women’s adoption official.(Nobody quite believed there wasn’t a father but maybe they just didn’t want to pick my imagined emotional scab.) Hope prospered and hit all of her milestones on time, though if there was magic in her, it wasn’t found in accomplishing everything early. I was relieved, though the feeling felt somewhat…unseemly, given how I’d spent my own life. If something had turned out to be wrong, I’d be in a unique position to offer support and counsel beyond hoping she didn’t parasail or ride an ATV in college.
But I certainly didn’t need to be recruiting; I wasn’t some kind of living “It Gets Better”
When she took her first steps and I watched the jerky video, I let out a spiritual breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Maybe I’d done the impossible again.
One weekend afternoon, I got a call from my own father.
“I would have helped you…why didn’t you tell me about the baby?” For an instant, I longed to be ten and believe again, but that would have made my pregnancy repulsive, as well as otherworldly and inconvenient.
“I did…we had lunch…you rescheduled three times?! Anyway, she lives with my attendant and her partner.”
“Well, I wish you would have told me.”
I thought about speaking again, but let my mouth snap shut. “Sometimes I wish I could have kept her too.” Sometimes if I accepted my dad was like a brick wall, he was all right to vent things in front of. Like a crazy man on a bus. “It’s too late now, though.”
“You should be careful.” My workaholic dad chided. “Work won’t love you back.”
o
Life was good, if somewhat less than I would pray for, if prayer had outlasted puberty.
A YEAR LATER
That year passed in a blur of indeterminate desert seasons and paperwork to make the women’s adoption official.(Nobody quite believed there wasn’t a father but maybe they just didn’t want to pick my imagined emotional scab.) Hope prospered and hit all of her milestones on time, though if there was magic in her, it wasn’t found in accomplishing everything early. I was relieved, though the feeling felt somewhat…unseemly, given how I’d spent my own life. If something had turned out to be wrong, I’d be in a unique position to offer support and counsel beyond hoping she didn’t parasail or ride an ATV in college.
But I certainly didn’t need to be recruiting; I wasn’t some kind of living “It Gets Better”
When she took her first steps and I watched the jerky video, I let out a spiritual breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Maybe I’d done the impossible again.
One weekend afternoon, I got a call from my own father.
“I would have helped you…why didn’t you tell me about the baby?” For an instant, I longed to be ten and believe again, but that would have made my pregnancy repulsive, as well as otherworldly and inconvenient.
“I did…we had lunch…you rescheduled three times?! Anyway, she lives with my attendant and her partner.”
“Well, I wish you would have told me.”
I thought about speaking again, but let my mouth snap shut. “Sometimes I wish I could have kept her too.” Sometimes if I accepted my dad was like a brick wall, he was all right to vent things in front of. Like a crazy man on a bus. “It’s too late now, though.”
“You should be careful.” My workaholic dad chided. “Work won’t love you back.”
o
