by Rica Keenum
I envisioned the church women I used to know, manicured hands interlocked in suburban chains of prayer. In the carpeted room across from the church gymnasium, we set our Starbucks cups on the round tables next to shiny Bibles and notebooks. Because we’d been taught to pray about everything, that God walked with us at all times, we petitioned him for car repairs, for better jobs, for speedy real estate transactions. We believed that when our kids were sick, he healed. When our luck was down, prayer was our rabbit’s foot. I never stopped to ask why he’d heal my son’s fever when mothers were burying their babies every day. Was God picking favorites? And if he had created all things, didn’t that include the suffering as well as the cure? What kind of game was this? I wanted to know too much, and answers are antithetical to faith.
For many years, religion had been an anchor, but now it isn’t strong enough to hold me. My soul is a paper ship, drifting in the current of the unknown.
***
Without religion, my internal world collapses and leaves me feeling deflated. I educate myself on the therapeutic nature of yoga, the mind-body connection and the spiritual components of the practice — elements I’d previously ignored while bending and twisting on my mat. Yoga engages me and teaches me to step into the moment and just be in that moment — to be present in my skin with the rhythm of my breath and the slow, steady beat of my heart. I learn to occupy myself in all the places religion had once lived. What is it like to be me, and who am I apart from everything I’d clung to: my marriage, the church, and the notion that God was my father? Yoga becomes an expedition, a journey to the depths of myself.
In tree pose, I stretch out my toes and take root, as I lengthen my spine and draw my hands up toward the sky. I am a mighty sequoia, strengthened by the wind. In lotus pose, I rest my palms on my knees and turn my attention lovingly inward. Each exhale feels like an emotional release. I no longer fumble through scriptures in search of meaning, plead for answers or strive for change. I tell myself I have what I need. And when I hear my voice, it sounds like the truth.
Precarious poses bring new challenges. While attempting tricky arm balances, I face plant again and again. Each failure unleashes a swarm of self-defeating thoughts. They sting and buzz at my ego, and I am forced to remember that tenacity drives away fear. I grow more determined with each fall. I begin to see my mat as a training ground for life. If I achieve balance here, I will feel more stable in the world. Equilibrium on the outside, equilibrium on the inside. Eventually, my arms strengthen and my gaze narrows. I find my drishti, the external point upon which I can fix my focus. My hands move mindlessly into position. My weight shifts, bones lock, breath flows like a steady current. Here I am, holding myself up in bakasana (crow pose) and it feels like actual flying.
Reaching a physical goal is an emotional win, and each one becomes a salve on my scars. Every movement is a metaphor. How far can I stretch, bend, move with fluidity and power? Building muscle and gaining flexibility is not merely a matter of the body, but of the spirit too.
At the end of a robust flow, my body sinks into the mat, into savasana, a still pose in which I find myself squarely in front of myself, like a child with her face against a window. I behold myself as never before. I close my eyes and see the state of my mind, the mayhem of too much thinking. Domestic thoughts hail-storm inside my head. Did I remember to pay the electric bill, wash Sym’s martial arts uniform, turn in the school forms for that field trip? Then the existential crisis: Am I a good mother, a good woman, a good writer, a good friend? Then the guilt: This is stupid. I’m wasting my morning. Shouldn’t I be doing something else? But there are pockets of silence too, warm and enveloping. I learn to surrender to these, and I feel something shifting in me. A sense of peace permeates the chaos and the hail storm melts into rain, into dew, into mere smudges of old worry on my consciousness. At last, I learn to conjure the calm from the corners of my mind, where fear and anxiety forced it down. I learn a new variation of prayer — gratitude.
Chapter 11
An Image Seared in My Memory
I have distance; I have space, and these things can be dangerous. With my marriage now far behind me, I begin to entertain ghosts — the ghosts of who we were. Memories come to haunt me. Sym was nearly three years old when I arrived home from work to find him red-faced and shirtless in the doorway. His tiny mouth trembled like a hummingbird’s wings. J sat transfixed in front of the television. I bent down to face my child and found torment in his eyes. His sweet breath was hot and quick on my neck.
“What happened?” I asked. His little chest bore the faint imprints of a beating. The sight of it flipped my internal switch and rendered everything dark.
I’d heard that a person could steal your heart, but here’s where the possession took place — this moment, his little hand in mine.
“Don’t worry about it,” J snapped.
I had seen J pound out windows, hurl furniture across the room, toss a holiday pie at the ceiling — the hot bits of sweet potato clinging overhead. His sharp glances could shrink me back like a turtle into its shell. But strange as it seemed, I’d never imagined he’d hurt our sons. This was a dreadful aberration, I reasoned. But more than a decade later, Sym recounted other cruel incidents in counseling sessions — the time his dad made him eat cat feces from the litter box as a punishment. For what, I didn’t ask. It didn’t matter.
J rarely turned his anger on KJ.
“It’s because he looks just like him,” my mother noted in a phone conversation one day. Not many people can stand to punch their own face.
Sym, however, boasts many of my genes — from the curve of his face to his creative tendencies. Nearing the end of our marriage, J cornered him and yelled so ferociously, Sym peed his pants on the spot, and I watched the urine trickle down like hot fear. The image is seared in my memory. If I could gather the dust of that day in my hands, I’d reshape the moments that caused my son pain.
***
All we need is Windex...
As a girl, I watch my mother burst into my bedroom. I see her mad form rushing toward me in threadbare pajamas. It’s 5 a.m. or so but I’m not alarmed. I am accustomed to watching her scurry about as if the fire alarm has been pulled.
“Slide over,” she commands, nudging me to the far end of my twin mattress.
She tugs at the fitted sheet and a corner springs free. She does this with the precision of a hotel maid, which she is not. But according to her, the entire family thinks so, which is why she vows to rent her own apartment and never give us her address. As with many of her fantasies, the plan never comes to fruition. Mom’s actual employment involves computers and customer accounts. However, clean sheets, lemon-scented floor tiles and smudge-free glass are her specialties. Her compulsory cleaning habits do not strike me as obsessive. When I enter the house with grimy sneakers, I expect her to pop up like a wild-eyed jack-in-the-box, wielding a bottle of sanitizer. I assume this is standard Mom behavior, like spit-shining smudged faces or forcing broccoli on picky eaters. I am too young to know where the lines are drawn, but when a friend spends the night, I receive my first clue that something is amiss.
“What’s happening?” My friend whispers into my pillow while shaking me awake. I hear the vacuum cleaner rumbling in the hallway as my mother curses at imaginary clutter. I rip off my pajamas and toss them on the floor where Mom will come to collect them like the groaning neighborhood waste truck.
“Laundry,” I tell my confused friend before pulling my pillow overhead and drifting back to sleep.
***
When KJ is small and wobbly, J and I take him to a diner that serves breakfast all day. I snap on a white bib and wipe down the wooden high chair before corkscrewing my boy into his newly cleaned seat. J and I scan our menus and I consider the least messy options for KJ — scrambled eggs with fruit seem better than pancakes and syrup. Another set of parents and their toddler sit across the room near the window. Their child is about KJ’s age. Pigtailed and plump, the gir
l chatters above the din of the crowded room. Armed with a fat plastic spoon, she smatters the table with applesauce like an artist indulging her muse. Her food-streaked cheeks are full and bright. No one wipes her face with napkins or plucks crumbs from her curls. I want this messiness, this freedom, for me, for my child. It’s a strange thing to want.
I’m at a table with my son and a stack of napkins but mentally, I am back in my childhood bedroom. It’s 5 a.m. and this time, I’m the one changing the sheets.
***
I am not my mother. I am not my mother, I tell myself as I sweep the floor, straighten a rumpled rug or pick lint off my sons’ clothing. It is as though I am her in those moments, in method and mind. I cannot help but examine my hands to be sure they are my own.
As my boys grow up, I continue to scrutinize my behavior while fumbling through motherhood. I know that while I compare my mother’s cleaning habits to mine and assess our parental failures, what I am really asking myself is this: Will I be stronger than she was? Will I make the mistakes she made? These questions have plagued me my entire life as my inner voice jeers you’re weak, you’re flawed, you’ll never be good enough.
When Sym was 3 years old, he wandered from the backyard one afternoon while I assembled sandwiches in the kitchen. From the window, I could see him playing next to KJ, sprawled out on a wedge of grass behind our home with Hotwheels in his lap. I looked away for a second and when I glanced back out the window, he was gone. My little boy had vanished.
I sprinted around the yard then barreled into the alley where aluminum garbage cans shimmered in the sun, their dented, half-cocked lids exposing bulging trash bags. I searched the jagged hedges, the parked cars and open yards. I spotted a child’s pink tricycle tipped on two fat wheels, a cracked garden gnome and a pair of rusted lawn chairs. Still no son.
I rushed about, looked left, right, left, right, as I hollered for my child. An earthquake had begun to rumble at my core, the vibrations of which traveled throughout my body. I continued my search, scanning, calling, scanning, calling. I visualized his outfit — green denim pants and a matching striped shirt. Would I have to recite these details to someone, some officer of the law? My son is yea high; his hair is dark and curly.
When I heard a car door slam, it sounded like a clanging cymbal in my ear. My senses had heightened to superhero proportions. I was ready to tip the world on its side. Hulk-mom. Eventually, I spotted him a few houses over, hunkered down on a picnic bench, thrusting his cars across the weathered wood.
Late at night, these parental blunders float to the surface of my thinking like dead things bobbing on a lake. I lost my child. He could’ve been kidnapped, could've been hit by a car, could’ve fallen into a well, like baby Jessica in Midland, Texas, 1987. Could’ve, could've, could’ve, and it would’ve been my fault. How many times will I fail to protect my sons?
***
I am working as a magazine staff writer when my aunt texts me on a Tuesday morning. Read the advice column in the newspaper. It could be us. A woman writes to Dear Annie, frustrated because her family won’t face their demons. They have collective amnesia, she says. Collective amnesia — the phrase packs a punch to my gut. This is our disease, the disease of forgetting what we know, the compulsion to sweep the dirt under the rug. Later, I read an article in Psychology Today. Following a trauma, it’s not unusual for the victims to be in denial. When children are abused, when a spouse cheats, when something unimaginable happens. But how far do we go in forgetting? I think about all the years I cooked and cleaned because it was all I could do to make a house a home. If I mopped the floor, could I erase the imprint of my husband’s angry boots? If I wiped the table clean, could I forget his vile words over dinner?
And my mother — did she think a spritz of Windex could wipe the past clean? The right amount of elbow grease could polish a dirty conscience? Perhaps we are tidy by nature, genetically inclined to carry our mops and brooms. But maybe it’s something more. I wonder if Mom thought clean sheets could undo the sins in the night, could usher us into sweet dreams.
Chapter 12
Love Him Hard
Some nights when I wrestle with sleep, I hear the metallic clunk of the ambulance door. It is a phantom sound that will haunt me forever, I think. The memory twitches to life like some monster in a low-budget horror flick: Sym sitting upright on a stretcher, foaming at the mouth, eyes floating in the darkness. We’d been fighting that evening, as per our routine. It always starts the same way. After hours of video game play, I find him feral, sweaty and cursing at the television or pounding on the desk where his gaming console blinks a red eye.
“Please shut it off now,” I beg. “You’ve had enough.”
“Get out of my room” he snarls and shoots his arm toward the door. The ceiling fan whirls above my head in his bedroom, where dented soda cans and a small army of food-crusted plates and bowls congregate. He will have to clean it all later, I think. But later unfolds a bit differently this night…
At 5’11”, he has nine inches on me, and he uses them like chips on a poker table — always winning. His anger rattles my insides and I realize I fear my own son. But it’s not him so much in these moments. Who it is, I can’t say. He looks like the boy I know, only amplified and magnified. A dark comic book version.
Nudging me out of the way, he storms into the bathroom and locks the door.
“Just wait,” he says. “You’ll see.” His words don’t register until minutes later when he flings the door open again and I see a face I have not seen in a decade — his child face, features small and quivering, eyes muddled with panic.
“What did you do?” I screech.
Chlorine fumes hang sharp in the air as he crouches over and convulses, spewing tidal waves of bleach into the sink. I know what he did. I just can’t believe he did it. I recall the video he showed me months prior.
“Mom, today is the anniversary of Amanda Todd’s death,” he’d said.
“I don’t know who that is,” I said as he stepped into my room and clicked on the lamp near my bed. I had been trying to sleep for an hour, but I welcomed those occasional night chats because they offered rare glimpses into his otherwise guarded world. He set his laptop on my bed and we watched the YouTube video in which a somber, 15-year-old girl used a series of flashcards to tell her story. Ostracized, bullied and even physically assaulted by her peers, the girl made her first suicide attempt by drinking bleach. Later she succeeded by way of hanging and her videos went viral. I watched the screen throw light on my son’s cheeks. His eyes were screwed to the monitor. Screwed to the fact of suicide: Here today, gone tomorrow. A life like a gust of wind.
When Sym was in ninth grade, his class was reading the book 13 Reasons Why, a novel about a bullied student who’d killed herself. Scorned teens had become household names after death. The internet romanticized their suicides, and it seemed the ultimate revenge to publicly shame the young tyrants who taunted you. No one at school had bullied Sym, and he had no desire to die. Instead he was desperate to interrupt his pain cycle, to trip his emotional breaker.
“You can’t drink poison expecting your enemy to die,” I told Sym. But it didn’t stop him from trying only a few months later.
I know there is a darkness burrowing in his center like a worm in the heart of an apple. I would do anything to keep him from feeling it. I want to love him so hard the sheer force of it lifts him out of the pain. Can a mother love that hard?
***
After calling 911, I reach my mother and she rushes over. I don’t ask, she just comes, and later I will think of the way she showed up, the way she sat beside me wordless with her hands in her lap. Nothing so say, but so much to offer. The presence of a mother who went numb and limp and deaf to the sounds of her children crying out in the night. And I don’t know the body of her regrets, or whether she has skeletons or living organisms, things that can creep in her mom-soul. But if I think of the good, I find memories of her reaching out. Of her arranging sta
cks of quarters on the counter. “Don’t forget your lunch money.” Of her remembering every birthday and gifting all the best things: a sparkly sweater, a pair of shoes or diamond stud earrings. Of her on the phone leaving messages. “I haven’t heard from you in a week. What’s going on? I’m worried.” So many sides to a story, angles to consider. Angles of a mother.
I see yet another side of her as she takes the passenger seat and we follow the ambulance to the emergency waiting room. I watch the other haggard and impatient visitors cough and blow into soggy tissues. It’s Sunday night, quiet with the television flashing a sitcom on the wall and the occasional sound of the glass doors swishing open to let a smoker back in or out. Mom doesn't say a word. She’s not a talker, a crier, a consoler in times of grief. But she is here, and it feels like enough. I’m anxious, tapping my foot on the floor. What is taking so long and why do I have to wait here?
The last time I’d been at this hospital was four years ago, just after the boys and I had moved to Florida. I’d found KJ doubled over in his bedroom with a stomach ache. “Too many pizza rolls,” he moaned. But it was more than that and I knew it. His symptoms worsened and soon he was throwing up bile. It was a Sunday like this one, and we sat in this same waiting room for hours until they scanned his abdomen then whisked him away for an emergency appendectomy. Now I am back, staring at the same bleak walls and watching the red-blue glow of the ambulance lights flicker in the window beside me. I have another sick child, I try to tell myself as they pump Sym’s stomach in another room. Another sick child, that’s all.
***
Sym’s bleach cocktail caused minor damage, including some esophageal scars. In my memory, I returned to the hospital again the following morning. And I can’t be sure, but I think his wrist was cuffed to the bedrail and a staff member lingered outside his door. Suicide watch. These images are like pieces of an unworked puzzle in my brain, but I think I prefer them that way. The Starbucks Frappuccino I brought him is the only thing vivid in my mind. I set it down on the bedside table. He sneered in my direction and turned his gaze to the television where an episode of Ghost Hunters played. I sat there, motionless, watching the whipped cream sink into the coffee and ice. Sink, sink, sink. I could commiserate with that.