There are times I can't talk. It might be after I read something or hear something or watch the news. I'm rarely triggered by honesty, writing or memoir. I'm triggered by smells, nightfall and feeling trapped. Truth, even what is called "ugly truth," to me, when told, is always a window opening letting the air move.
Sometimes, I don't realize I'm clenched in my body or my life and holding tight to a secret or memory or belief. It's when I read a piece like this and feel a nod of knowing, not the same experiences but the experience of living with what maybe always seemed unspeakable. Something in me can relax and unfold. As a reader, I am reminded of how much we can feel and get and know and learn of one another just by telling the truth and stories.
Truth can be stunning and beautiful and difficult all at the same time. Love can be searing, life-changing and sometimes life-threatening all at the same time. And truth and love are sometimes are what we have for mothers. Hard love and soft truth.
This essay is by Melissa Chadburn. Here's an excerpt.
The night before Amanda’s children died she was inside a house with a 16-year-old guy. She was 19. Someone in the house said they heard the kids crying and asked her to bring them in. She chose not to. “Must’ve been drugs,” my partner said. Because who would leave their children alone in the car for so long, were it not for drugs?
My mom.
Man was mom’s drug. Tall man, short man, smart man, dumb man—when my mom saw Man, she became a ghost. All other times, she watched me: my everything, my hands, my hair, my face. She slept with a long T-shirt, no pants, her legs wrapped around me, our two twin beds pushed together. I felt the heat of her pulsing at my spine. I hated to feel the pulsing heat of her. She had dandruff. I hated the dandruff, all over her shirts and blouses. She thought people did not know when she skipped a shower, but we knew. Everyone knew. Because of the dandruff.
When I think of those two babies alone in the car, I think of myself, lying in a bed at night and slowly inching my outstretched hand in front of my face. My left hand around my right wrist pushing it away, my right hand pulsing forward. I pretended it was someone else’s hand. The Hand of a Predator. I did this to try to keep myself awake on nights I was left alone.
After reading about Amanda Hawkins, I headed to work, pulled onto the 5 freeway over by Griffith Park headed south when I heard about the second mother who left: P-42. Two small lion kittens were abandoned by their mother in the Santa Monica mountains. They died. Officials suspect that a male mountain lion, known as P-27, visited the cubs’ den. P-27 is roughly nine years old and wanders the western end of the Santa Monica Mountains. After visiting the den, P-27 and the kittens’ three-year-old mother traveled together for six days. Park Ranger Kate explained, “We have seen a similar scenario in our study when the mom will leave the den with another male, seemingly to distract him from preying on the kittens, and will then return and move the kittens to a new location.” In this case, the mother did not return.
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