Every time is the last

A holiday meditation

With Elena in Benito Juárez, in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, 2016. Photo by Jorge.

The first time I ever left my daughter for a multi-day trip was to give a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. The festival put me up in an old, gorgeous hotel right on the lake. From my window I could see that still, frigid northern water I used to run past all winter. I FaceTimed with three-year-old Elena when I arrived and showed her the ducks, bobbing. “Ducks!”she exclaimed. Who cared about literary whatever? “Brown ducks!”

It was such an exotic thrill to be alone. I got coffee and listened to music and walked. I ran the lake trails. I put lipstick on slowly and deliberately.

At the event, which was full, I read my birth story, already taking a kind of rebel delight in narrating for a large audience the excruciating and transcendent emergence of a human from my vagina. Said audience was very warm and receptive and mostly female. One older woman raised her hand and told me, “You’ll get your self back, but she’ll be different.”

I’ve carried this simple comment – wisdom passed from woman to woman, given in community – with me for many years, and every year it seems to take on new meaning.