Stories I've Only Told My Mom by Sarah Bryden-Brown

Author:Sarah Bryden-Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: women, family, motherhood, relationships and family, bloggers
Publisher: Sarah Bryden-Brown

Dear Brittany,

Have a wonderful time learning the history of Mexico. Don’t drink the water. Never walk anywhere alone. Don’t pierce or tattoo anything. I’ve enclosed an international calling card, just in case. I’m only a phone call away.

Love, Mom

P.S. I’ve also enclosed a rosary. He’s always watching.

I found out, in the heat of the moment, I just wasn’t ready. I never needed the rosary. But, the pamphlet on burning, that’s a whole other story.

CHAPTER 10

Complicatedness by Catherine Connors

"I only saw him once."

"Once, from behind the window of the nursery. He was wrapped in a blue blanket, and he was oh so small. They asked me if I wanted to hold him, and I said no. I said no."

"It would have killed me. I couldn’t have gone on. I loved him."

"So I said no. I refused to hold my son."

I was holding my own son on my lap – then just two and a half months old –when my mother told me this story. I would be stating the obvious if I said I clutched him a little tighter as I listened to her words and watched the tears brim in her eyes, but I’ll state it anyway: I held him, tightly, and my heart ached to think of not holding him. My heart ached to bursting at the thought of not holding him, of giving away any opportunity to hold him. And then my heart ached some more because I had, once upon a time, done something that, in some respects, amounts to the same thing.

Instead of asking my mother outright, how did your heart survive it?, I conducted a secret inner dialogue with myself and asked myself those questions instead. I did this because I knew the answer - her heart hadn't survived; her heart was still broken - and because I was afraid to hear her say it. I was also afraid of speaking out loud my own fears about interrogating my own heart on just this question: How does the heart survive giving up love like that?

Me: Oh, my god, my god, how terrible, how heartbreaking, how did her heart survive it?

Myself: How did YOUR heart survive it?

Me: Survive what?

Myself: Abortion.

Me: That’s so different.

Myself: It’s not.

Me: The heartbreak of giving up a child…

Myself: Isn’t abortion a kind of ‘giving up’? Except, you know, MORE FINAL?

Me: Yeah, but…

Myself: But what?

Me: She’s mourning a child that she lost, a child who is still out there somewhere.

Myself: Exactly.

I had this conversation with myself and clutched Jasper to my chest. I squeezed him gently and I thought about the child who is not out there somewhere. A little part of my heart collapsed in on itself. I did not share this with my mother.

My mother’s heartbreak was almost unbearable to absorb. Her guilt, her worry, her desire to both know and not know whether her son, the son she'd given up, had been given a happy life, whether she’d done right by him to give him up. She insisted that there

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