Dear Sigourney May or Elsie Jo or Loa Kathleen or Ethlyn Esper,
Firstly, I hope you never read this. If you do, it’s because you exist.
Though, if you do exist, it means you were very much wanted.
Because if you had been unwanted, I would not have selfishly kept you and given you empty love. No child can grow with platitudes for breakfast.
In all likelihood, you were born of another woman but somehow found yourself running to me.
Probably because you weren’t looking where you were going.
While I have what are often described by well-meaning women as “child bearing hips” (which is to say they are wide and could cradle a hopefully <10 cm in circumference baby head), I don’t have the pinnacle of women’s health and endometrial ability.
My womb is a scar.
Even still, you may have been freshly placed in my arms. It’s possible I’ve known you since you were little more than a fetus who had tasted air.
It’s possible that I am the only mother you have ever known.
For this I am truly sorry.
Surely you should know better.
I should have known better than to pull you tighter to my breast when someone offered to take you away.
The beginning was likely clunky at best. I’ve never been at ease around the vagaries of babyhood. Poor verbal skills. Body fluids. Screeching.
No doubt there were times when we would sit together in exhausted silence, lulled by a rocking chair and the static of a radio. Maybe I ran a vacuum cleaner until it burnt out; white noise to drown out the roar of failing you.
Your legs grew stronger each day until you stood, decided that the world would remain forever under your feet. You trampled grass with gusto and I was envious of how you grasped for ferns, demanding that the earth steady you — not the other way around.
One moment you’re a muddy-kneed warrior. The next, you’re reaching up to me, your other world, your mother world. And you ask me to steady you.
I’ll take your chubby hand and we’ll walk along the hedgerows while you tell me that the world is green because it’s your favorite color.
I’ll fear for you when autumn comes.
I would be so horrible to you, darling. And you would love me blindly when you’re young, and that would be our ruin. Because I would let you.
My face would hover inches from yours and coax a smile, my ears listening for Mama but hearing fraud.
I would hold your rooting, petal-soft mouth to my chest and close my lips tightly around the lie.
If you are mine, hopefully you have my eyes — and nothing else.
I promise you this, and only this: if you make hand-print turkeys at school for Thanksgiving, or scamper into a snowstorm and spread your tiny angel wings in our yard — I will love you for it.
If you stay up past your bedtime to read books with more words than are in your vocabulary or scribble in your diary, testing out the secret, new language you learn in the velvet night, I will love you for it.
Even when you write a horrible line about me.
Even when you mean it.
There will be nights when you crawl into my bed while I’m reading and you will inevitably feel ignored. I’m sorry. I will read to you until you learn.
Then, we’ll read together. Aloud. In silence.
If you don’t want to read you can sit on my lap while I do.
I will let you turn the pages.
Your hunger will terrify me.
And you’ll know it — but I will always feed you.
You will not starve.
And if, one day, you ask me if you are pretty, I will stroke your soft hair and tell you that galaxies are beautiful and you are made of stardust.
If you ask me if you are fat, I will hold you in my arms and tell you that if you measure them by weight, there are 70 trillion cells in your body and I love every single one.
If you ask me if you are enough, not with your shaking voice but your pleading eyes, I will wait for you to lift your gaze to meet mine and with a kind but firm voice, I will ask you — “For who, my darling?”
And when you wake up one morning having lost your center of gravity, when the painful lengthening of your spine keeps you awake at night, when you bleed a river in your bed sheets — I will steady you.
When you push me away, staggering like a deerling, I will let you go.
I will watch in awe as you reclaim your earth.
Dear daughter I hope I never have,
One day — I will die.
And when I do, you may be as tall as you will ever be.
Or even growing down.
But there is a chance I will leave you before your legs have reached their mighty stretch, before you lose all your pearly white baby teeth, replaced by the fangs of adulthood (which you’ll need, honey — and you’ll need to keep them sharp).
And if I do, dear girl, I will think of you as my mind burns down to the wick.
So too it should be considered that I may outlive you.
And if that day should find me — unsuspecting as we always are to how death peeks around corners and sticks his hand through doors left ajar —
I will have to let you go.
Still, I’ll find solace in a memory of you gently trampling the grass beneath your feet, of your sweet weight in my lap, turning the pages of our days.
In death, you reclaim the earth; forever your favorite shade of green.
Abby Norman is currently writing a memoir for Nation Books and vying for the title of village witch. Follow her on Twitter to stay up to date on the outcomes of either of these pursuits.
