A Life In Seasons
by Tracie Adams
The Days Grow Longer
(publishing December 14th)
Sunshine Daydream
(publishing December 15th)
Ghosts of Autumns Past
(publishing December 16th)
The Days Grow Longer
When I say that she emerged like a seedling in the thaw of frozen soil, what I mean is she popped up like a weed, uninvited. In our chaotically cultivated home, I had not yet learned to be a real mother to my toddler son. And now a daughter’s shrill screams demanded my attention. I was still a child myself, only pretending to be grown by working two jobs and washing loads of cloth diapers. At twenty, I was a single mother, perpetually tired and angry. My need for order had overtaken my sense of humor. Counting towels as I folded them provided soothing relief. I started counting everything—the stairs I climbed a thousand times a day to clean up the clutter of toys, the carrots I chopped for dinner, the steps I took to the mailbox to collect the bills, and the ticking hands of the clock on long, sleepless nights.
Something about my daughter’s invincible spirit and the sound of her laughter mocked me. What the hell made her think we were having fun? Surviving is not fun. It’s surviving. I tried to teach her that lesson by sitting her in a corner while her brother played upstairs. For hours each day, she sat like a statue in the small, wooden chair. To keep her from escaping into slumber, I screamed at her to sit up straight, just the way my mother had taught me. When she tried to make a game out of it, I snapped. “I could have been famous. Like on-the-radio famous,” I said proudly. The child just swung her legs, tapping her bare feet on the carpet and counting the taps without a care in the world. My own mother had told me that happiness is not a human right. She must have said it ten thousand times. It worked.
As my daughter grew, she was full of questions and insecurities, always drilling me on the schedule, demanding to know what came next. “What time will you pick us up? Where are we going when we leave here? Will you be working late tonight?” One question bled into another, and she was never satisfied with the answers. Her nervous energy was restrained only by the pulling of her thin hair while rocking quietly back and forth. At first it was strands, then handfuls, until the back of her head was almost bald. Each night I taped the mittens to her hands and tied the hat around her chin, but every morning was the same. The hat and gloves would be on the floor beside her bed, and her pillow would be covered in a mess of tangled, dark hair. I did everything I knew to do. I tried to love the child, but she was determined to be unlovable.
Unlike her brother, she was discontent. He didn’t ask for seconds at dinner. And when I read them a book, he didn’t insist that I change my voice for every character. I could skip every other page, and he did not complain. He didn’t ask for more than what he was given. She was a reminder of everything I tried to forget. She just wanted too much out of life. Like stubborn weeds in the spring garden, she just kept coming back for more.
I could still hear my mother yelling at me “Child, put that doll down and go tend to the garden!” When I complained that I was having fun, she lowered her voice and growled, “There is no such thing as fun. And those weeds ain’t gonna pull themselves!”
Sunshine Daydream
The child has become a woman, wild and overgrown like summer branches reaching for light, reaching for the mother vine. She lashes out, grabbing hold of anything, everything, nothing at all. Night after night, she searches for something to stop the throbbing in her chest. The men numb her pain. They are all the same, but she is different. They need her, at least for the moment, but she doesn’t need anyone or anything. She has discovered her superpower. It was still dark outside this morning when she collected her clothes from the floor and tiptoed away from another sleeping stranger. The deep breaths were helping the rush linger, so she could savor it for as long as possible. The high was even better than the cocaine she binged last night.
On the drive to her apartment, she sings along with the radio, speakers rumbling with the bass, and memories begin to rise with the sun, looming straight ahead with blinding light. Pressing the gas pedal with bare feet, she watches the world go by at eighty miles per hour, trees blurring into the sides of buildings and yellow cabs melting like butter. Everything is in motion. Gripping the steering wheel, she blinks away an image of her mother singing karaoke to an audience of disinterested drunks.
“Did you hear them laughing?” Her mother’s tears had left bare streaks through her impeccably applied makeup.
“They weren’t laughing at you, mom. They’re just drunk,” she had offered, trying to console her mother.
“You don’t think I know when I’m being mocked? Humiliated? You’re twelve. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Her mother had been wrong. She did know what she was talking about. Still, her mother’s accusations always cut deep. While her entire world had shifted like sand beneath her feet over the past decade, her mother refused to evolve. She didn’t see the need for it, especially when there was nothing in it for her. She turns up the volume and sings louder, drawing up breath from deep in her diaphragm.
When her stomach growls, she relishes the feeling of emptiness. Starving herself empowers her, assuring her she is good at something. The sun continues to climb high in the atmosphere, the earth tilting toward its warmth. But she clings to the lesser light that lives inside, the only thing she trusts. She doesn’t even try to bridle the energy anymore. She is in control, and it feels good.
After dark, she applies the red lipstick without looking in a mirror. Slipping bare feet into her favorite heels left by the door, she grabs keys from the cluttered coffee table. As she slips her phone into her purse, it buzzes. It’s her mother. The familiar ache tugs at her but she cannot bring herself to answer it. The road between them is littered with obstacles, words left unspoken too hard to hear. They try to meet in the middle, but words stick in their throats so they swallow them instead. There are hills too steep to climb in this kind of heat, pregnant pauses and breath held, silence hanging in the thick air.
She wants to love her mother and to be loved, but spaces fill with disappointments, disillusionment, delusions. She remembers the sound of her mother crying alone in her room every night, mumbling the same mantra of regret behind a closed door. As a child, she would stand outside that door night after night, her hand resting on the paneled wood, reaching for something she could not name. Sadness is a language they both understand but cannot speak.
She turned twenty-six this year, and now the panic attacks were coming at a steady pace. Her mother once asked her why. “Because of the trauma,” shesays. “What trauma,” her mother asks. The distance between them is measured in unfulfilled dreams and countless unforgiven sins. “It is just too far from you to me, me to you,” she whispers to the ringing phone.
As she steps out into the humid night air, she crushes the cigarette with a stiletto heel. She lifts her head toward stars partially covered by clouds, moving swiftly with the warm wind. She adjusts her skirt with one hand and flips her hair with the other. She would sing that song tonight, the one her mother taught her, the one that always got the crowd going. They would ask for one more, and she would give them what they wanted. The applause would linger while she walked out holding tight to the arm of another stranger with vodka on his breath.
It is the summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
Ghosts of Autumns Past
I woke up this morning with the sensation of falling. Not a startling jolt, but a gentle drifting down, down, down. Like the yellowed leaves of tulip poplars outside my window, weightless and free to wander without limits, landing softly without a sound. I have not always felt this way. But things have changed. It has been over a decade since I flew into a rage, even longer since I have smashed anything. I can ride in elevators and stand in the crowded subway without having a panic attack. My kids can wreck the living room, building forts with pillows and blankets, and I just breathe through the tightness in my chest at the sight of chaos. I step over the wreckage on my way to the kitchen to scramble the eggs, calling out spelling words to my youngest while I pack everyone’s favorite sandwiches for lunch.
The nightmares are gone, not replaced with dreams of poppy fields or soaring birds, more like nothingness, an absence that doesn’t crush me. When I hear a marching band or smell Brunswick stew cooking over a fire, I don’t feel like crying like I used to. It doesn’t hurt. It feels like nothing, nothing at all. I don’t waste my thoughts on all the regrets, the deficits and losses, the not-enoughs. I barely remember the screams, the crashes, the bruises, the pleading. There’s no haunting of ghostly memories of a life teetering on the edge of danger. Now I just keep moving forward, taking the next safe step, doing the next right thing. And breathing. Lots of breathing.
I’m no longer caught between two worlds, trapped in time, wrestling with myself. I am a mother, so it is their world now, not mine, and that’s all that really matters. I fold the laundry, I cook the meals, I check the homework and sign the permission slips, I read the bedtime stories, and I say the prayers. If it hurts, I do not feel it. If it’s sad, I do not grieve it. Apathy is the new depression. I just keep falling, floating, flying through the days, the years.
“Mommy, did you see me? I did a cartwheel!” My daughter’s face is full of hope.
“Yes, I see you. Mommy sees you,” I tell her as I watch her tumble over and over.
When the carousel at the state fair carries my giggling daughters round and round, I do not mourn dreams I never dreamed or thoughts that never grew up into actions. I just watch them ride. And if I find myself wandering the desolate hallways in my mind, I just grab hold of that thread of thought, following it out of the labyrinth. And there I am, right back where I started, right where I left off.
Autumn’s show of muted colors and cooler temperatures speak of a job well done, a soft place to land after a long, hot summer. The sun is a cracked yolk spreading across the horizon, a golden center flipped and suspended in clouds. I reach out to touch it, to hold it, but it slips through the fingers of my outstretched hands. Amber, copper, and honey melt in the distance. My oldest son comes to take my hand, and together we watch, and we listen to the squeals of laughter as the girls go around. When he sees me twirling my hair, he asks me why I am sad. I tell him I’m not sad, but he doesn’t look convinced. I stand completely still as everything rotates, always returning to me.
I don’t think about the words I never spoke, the friends I never made, the dreams I never dreamed. And it does not hurt to smell the cotton candy, to hear the marching band, or watch the sunset. It doesn’t feel like anything at all. As the pink and purple horses go up and down, I smile and wave at the girls, and they wave back on each rotation like it is the first time.
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