A twenty-five-year-old girl might be hot as hell. But she can’t know that deep warmth, that fierce heat.
When I took the dress off for the last time and hung it back in the closet for keeps, I wasn’t confused about why I would never let it go and why I didn’t need to put it on again. I’ve kept it to honor that part of me who will always be a wild child, a beautiful girl. I don’t need to wear it on the outside, because I’m cultivating its power on the inside.
It works differently that way. It may not command a room to full attention. It’s lost altogether on some. But it’s a power that’s earned and owned in full, and time can’t steal it away from me. Fade- and wrinkle-proof, one hundred percent genuine and pure.
AFTERWORD
Cat’s Cradle
In the daily stream of pouring milk, wiping noses, signing schoolwork, and the endless karmic cycle of loading and unloading the dishwasher, it’s easy to think this is how my life has always been, and must always be. Memories of life before Patrick and the children seem like fragments of a dream to me now, or stories overheard in passing about someone else. But this time is measured, a length of string that’s woven in and out of days like a nest built in my hands—elaborate but finite. My own mother is a reminder of that. She lives by herself now, in a different house from the one she shared with my father before he died, when my sister and I were their little girls. The structure of our life together as a family—so intricate, so permanent-seeming—collapsed between her hands when that time was done.
My boys are six, nine, and eleven. A band of changelings has taken the babies they were, and hidden them in a briar of limbs, freckles, and missing teeth. Milestones skip across the surface of their days so fast I miss them, and they have to call them out to me. “Mom! I jumped off the diving board!” “Mom! My tooth came out!”
But that tooth just came in, I think. And how long was he in the deep end?
“Mom!”
They can’t conceive of a time or a place that didn’t include them. Their consciousness is like a pre-Columbian map of the world, centered on themselves. Here in the middle of everything, are they. Somewhere, sketched amorphously in the margins of their awareness, is my life before them. I locate it for them on maps: up there, a ragged granite triangle in the North Atlantic, Newfoundland. That’s where I was then. Down here, one roughly rectangular patchwork piece among four dozen, is where we live now. They can see it is a long route—about three thousand miles—but it looks relatively direct on paper. A strand of dots and numbered shields, broken by a few millimeters of blue; one very long day on planes when we travel to visit their cousins and grandmother. But that’s not how their father came to me. I guide their fingers along his path, the last-ditch trek from Mexico to Newfoundland in winter, by land and sea. You go this way until you come to the end of everything. Then you go a leap further.
It’s a leap of faith, I tell them in my heart. When you come to it, take it.
At the foot of our bed, there are stacked three antique suitcases. In the bottom one, at the oldest stratum of memorabilia, are reams of printed e-mails, bundled envelopes postmarked Mexico, United States, and Canada, the stubs of boarding passes and bus tickets, immigration visas, and maps. The artifacts of letting go. The middle contains baby curls and teeth, pressed flowers, yellowed obituaries, and old family photos—these are about hanging on. The top one still has room for keepsakes yet to come.
This is the layered archaeology of a small civilization: its origin myth and its sacred objects. It tells the story of a family. About becoming us, the construct we pass hand to hand, one generation to the next. But nested within our collective story, there is also my story, a story about what it means to belong: to a family and a place, and still, to oneself. The cat in the cradle. I would pass that to my children, too.
Oh, my sons, my lovely barbarians. See this string around my hands. Reach in. Hold on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Laura Mathews, literary editor at Good Housekeeping, for pulling my needle out of a haystack 500 million blogs high. Without her keen eye, deft hand, and extraordinary patience in unraveling the tangled threads that run through my wild mind, I would have no cause to thank my impeccable agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, or my wonderfully intuitive editor at Riverhead, Sarah McGrath. Together they have been midwives, cheerleaders, and author-whisperers. My dream team.
A big thank-you to all my virtual frontier neighbors, the “mommy” and “daddy” bloggers—many now authors themselves—who have been so generous with their moral support, tactical advice, and diversionary wit. I am indebted to my loyal online readers, who incubated many of these stories with their kind attention, and whose e-mails and comments nourished and sustained me as I found my voice. Thank you for wandering over to visit, coffee in hand, day after day.
To my relatives and friends who cast a net of love and kindness over me from one corner of the world to another, and never let it go, in spite of being neglected, stood up, and repeatedly let down, I thank you for your support, and I beg your forgiveness. My beloved Little Rock girlfriends, who’ve heard most of these stories before, were the compass point as I wrote them. If I couldn’t hear myself share the words over Thursday cocktails on my front porch, they didn’t make it into the manuscript. Thanks for keeping me true.
To my sister, Emily, and my mother, Marilee, for standing by with outward calm and confidence while I rifled through our most personal family history. Thank you for your belief and trust. Forgive me my trespasses.
To my late father, the poet Al Pittman, I owe innumerable gifts, including one that is difficult for a parent to give a child: freedom. I hope to pass it to my sons, along with my love, my gratitude, and, as the child of a writer, my empathy for all that is wonderful and terrible about having a parent who turns life into books.
Finally, for Patrick, a quotation from Joe Versus the Volcano, one of my favorite cinematic fables:
“Thank you for my life. I forgot how big.”
Thank you.
Planting Dandelions Page 21
