by Sheri Venema
Sometimes I wonder: Would it have been a girl? Would she walk with me today, on Mother’s Day, along this creekside trail where we often spy bluebirds? Perhaps her own child would hold her hand, or mine.
A fleeting fancy – the ponderings of a not-mother on this day. A not-mother because all those years ago I wasn’t ready. Not for any child – girl or boy – rock-and-hard-place as I felt between a murky future and a present filled with sorrow and dead-end jobs.
The sorrow was a recent divorce. Friends, seeing our easy way with each other, had often called us the ideal couple – until we weren’t. It was a short marriage, but I had expected to love him long, to make a family. The loss of that hope emptied me. Dead-end jobs followed: retail, substitute teaching, macramé instruction.
Growing up, I had nurtured a nascent rebel spirit, a mettle that had helped me navigate the strictures of my evangelical upbringing. But that grit had fled for now. It was somewhere inside the pain, and I sensed the other side of misery would find me someday. But now nothing felt solid.
I drifted through the post-divorce months in my Michigan hometown. My heart, a tiny skiff bobbing on rough seas, searched for an anchorage. A few lovers sailed by, but none provided a mooring.
Later in that rootless year, I found work at a greenhouse/floral shop. The pay was paltry, but I sensed that the work would help heal me. The women there taught me the names of plants –Dracaena marginata, Pothos, Sansevieria – showed me how to transplant seedlings and prune for future growth. The soil felt alive in my hands, and the daily affirmation of green shoots emerging from the dark earth cheered me. Like those plants, I was bending toward the sunshine, beginning to feel something like possibility.
Then I became aware of something growing inside me—dividing cells that would turn into an embryo. I was not ready for that future. Not yet. Not with little income, no promises from the Russian-Cuban man who was the father, still a load of despair and no vision of how to steer my destiny. I could not see far, but there was only one way ahead that I could tell, so I walked it.
A few months later, I left my hometown for Minneapolis. Starting over. No job, but by then enough faith that I would land well. Still, self-confidence was elusive, and I settled for abusive lovers and more dead-end jobs. Slowly, I discovered my power. I observed how people operated in the world. A new friend and I used to say to each other, “You have so much faith in yourself that you’ve given me faith in myself.” Finally, graduate school helped rescue me.
I recently found an old photo of myself, a decade after that move. By then, I had become a journalist. In the picture, I’m sitting at the controls of a submarine training simulator, pen in upraised hand. My face, in profile, is turned up to the naval instructor I am interviewing. I am in mid-question, intense, wanting to learn everything. This is not the same girl-woman who fled her hometown. Here I am confident, sure of where I am headed, what I know and what I still have to learn. I have found my anchorage.
Later, when I was married again and ready for that child, the universe said no, and no, and no once more. I have never doubted that I took the right road those years ago, but sometimes I feel that bygone choice in my bones, a tender secret enfolded there.
It doesn’t happen every Mother’s Day, but the maybe-girl – the one with the dark hair and eyes of her father – floated into my thoughts today on that woodland walk. The sun made everything greener, and above us my husband and I spotted orange-breasted Baltimore orioles for the first time, flitting in sycamore trees against the burning blue of the cosmos.
Sheri Venema is a Baltimore writer whose nonfiction has appeared in Coal Hill Review, Art in the Time of Covid-19 (San Fedele Press) and Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids (Eerdmans). Her essays have also appeared in Baltimore Style magazine; travel and feature stories appeared in Baltimore Magazine and The Washington Post.
Emerge Literary Journal 