How We Heal Our Broken Hearts

From "Letters to Mom"

Dear Mom,

Once upon a time, I wrote these two words with an intense desire to reach inside you and change the you that was you and be the me you wanted me to be. We actually wrote back then, pen in hand, on folded drawing paper or lined notebook page. Front and center on mine the obvious target, a crooked heart crowding the cursive, an arrow piercing juicy red. I knew from an early age the sharp pains to expect from a vulnerable heart. I remained unaware I was sketching out a future for myself.

Beneath and all around Cupid’s major arcana, I scribbled letters to express my love for you on Valentine’s or Mother's Day, or on any day when my heart was filled to bursting with joy or sorrow or remorse, to say I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Whether for an act committed or considered, a hurt real or perceived, one I perhaps didn't even do or didn't recall doing or actually did do, which seemed insignificant to me but meant something to you.

There were so many situations I could not figure out how to handle and I was “careless” and broke things, including your heart but not on purpose. I was an ingenuous bundle of nerves and laughter and tears and enthusiasm—full of love—and joy. I remember this.

So full of myself and the fires life lit inside my chest as a youth, the heat spillwayed over the dam of learned proprieties, flooding the purple clover that rolled on the slopes around the interstate. Some teen Spring Sunday afternoons, allowed the family car for an hour or two while you and dad napped off him preaching and you feeding six people roastbeefriceandgravy. I gave into the urgent need to park your car and loll about, bathed in purple-pink clover to my waist, waving wildly at strangers zipping beneath the overpass. I opened all 4 doors of the Pontiac, cranked up the radio, and sang pop tunes at the top of my voice.

I was a kid, still optimistic, with no outlet for love but family. I did not suspicion that I was a dyke, or how that alone—this love of my body and of another woman's body—would be my most intimate crime against God and nature and you and dad, my entire extended family, as well as the church, society, America (godblessher), and most of the rest of the world. This is how, with the help of her Southern Baptist upbringing, my best butch buddy, already in her 60’s, still clung to the idea that we all deserved punishment.

“Don’t we?,” she asked.
“What the fuck for?” I asked back. (Excuse the language, Ma. I know you hate that word, but I’m writing this, ok?)

“Well, for something we've done or left undone. You know, sins, or how we hurt people, lied, lost our tempers. Like that.”
“How’s that's working out for you, meting out your own punishment?”

My friend was in tears, but she laughed. I said, “I’m not sure you’re feeling quite yourself, buddy. Maybe a little therapy would help? Helps me.”

“Don’t you think we’ve been punished enough?” I continued. “Think about it. We won’t even count the dishes family and church have served up in their punishment version of a potluck. What about rape and sexual assault? What are denigration, beatings, betrayal, isolation from the rest of polite society, if not punishment?” I waited. She shook her head.

Perhaps the purest form of love is punishable love. Jesus is a good example. There’s a god who paid for loving, well, hell, everybody! A woman who loves her body and loves other women's bodies, and this you knew before I did, Mom, in case I've gone off on a tangent you find difficult to follow, although I know how smart you are and if you don't follow the tangent it's because you don't want to, and you wouldn't want to, but now you have no choice since you aren't here to reject my sentiment (as you would call it), my idealism (as dad would call it) my entirely too sensitive nature which turned me, not only to love women, but to the love of literature, poetry, music, art, and singing solo for a chorus of clover.

My nature (from which the word natural is derived) turned me to women with curves like mountain roads—how sometimes I wanted to fly fast as a sports car with the top down and sometimes drive oh-so-slow in an old pick up, noticing every leaf on that tree, stopping at every overlook, taking pictures with my mind exactly where the big dips and hollows and round-top mountains lie. In this instance, anyway, Nurture, and God knows you tried, Mom, stood no chance against Nature. Hopefully, God knowing you tried is a comfort to you.

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Remember Momma, when you were in your eighties and I came to live near you in Arkansas, and your stomach bled and you had to get transfusions? Your small body ached constantly from the scleroderma and Sjogrens. When I visited, always spending several nights at your house, I would take lotion and rub your feet. Dad's, too.

This was me as Jesus washing your feet, but you never made that comparison, although you could have, both of you. When your muscles hurt all the time, I made you lie down and take off your gown, so I could massage coconut oil into the delicate thin skin of your back. You let me touch you after treating me like a pariah all those years because I'd touched other women.

Go ahead, tell me I simply found the wrong men. Really? Well, let me say there can be no percentage more off-putting than the ones that say men are as gentle with a woman's body as another woman could or would be. If you like it rough, well, there's no reason why not. Women can, truly, do anything we want longer and with more accuracy, since we already know the terrain. Just sayin', Mom.

I loved you so much that night when I anointed your body with oil, and I'm glad I did. It would be my last chance to touch you, for you to trust me to be with your body in the way in which I was accustomed to being with a woman; the same, but different. Still, love is love.

Although I wanted to be there when you were dying and do it all over again, bring my touch to your neck and back and shoulders. I marvel while helping you into the shower that you had a better ass than me and you were 85. You laughed, said you inherited it from your daddy, which made me wonder when did you see your daddy's ass? I was not there when you were helping him into a shower the last years of his life.

When you and Dad moved to Dallas, you exchanged my tenderness for fancy outfits and an attitude that left me excluded and wondering, “Damn! How many times can you be put out by one family?” Nearing 90, you were once again all about money that you did not have, but knew how to pretend you did. Always an expert at a sales rack, you found fancy clothes and donned your jewelry, diamonds on your hands, given, not by my father but by my sisters.

See how it works, Momma? Who gives you what you want? The women in your life, but it was the men you loved; my unfaithful father, my invisible brother. How did they hold you, hug you, massage you, make you feel better? They clung to you, their idea of you, not the you inside your body; your mind, your strength, your temperament, your independence. Your daughters loved you wholly. Maybe not your temper when we were direct targets, but we each had the passion to match you. We, your girls, inherited both your physical fragility and your mental toughness. Genetics, shit.

***************************************
You remember that time I came home, a rare visit at the time, as I was still banished, but not always on holidays. And let's face it, we really missed each other. I was a cop in Atlanta. My game face was tough as it had ever been, but came undone at unexpected moments. I was growing weary of the Job, my street cop veneer wearing thin, my heart beginning to show through in those places.

We were out in the garage or under the carport. You always had a freezer detached from the rest of the kitchen where you stored meats you bought on sale. On the shelves below were purple hull peas stacked next to baby limas and butterbeans you shelled over the hot Louisiana summer. You wanted me to have some purple hulls, a favorite, with dinner that night. You always fed us right, Mom. You demonstrated your love through excellence in cooking and well-balanced diets. Oh, yeah, and warm clothes. You feared we would get cold come winter, although none of us lived above the Mason-Dixon. We all had closets full of coats.

As we stood in the carport, a breeze heavy with the lemony scent of magnolias swept through and you said something sweet to me, or I to you, some little thing, and the world stopped for half a second and we forgot who we were and how we were supposed to be with each other. I bent with some of the purest love I've ever felt, and leaned down to hug you, then kissed you on the neck; really, as sweet as I would a lover. You continued to hug me. In that moment, there was no resistance or rebuff, no rejection. Honestly, I was taken off guard by the essence of my lips against that tender, vulnerable place, done with no thought to what it might mean to either of us. I did not think. I acted solely on an undeniable impulse of daughter-for-mother love. I understood for perhaps the first time that you did not really mind who I was, but only what others thought about who I was.

I felt the warmth of blood pumping from two hearts, where once there truly was only one, housed in your body. All the gratitude for any love you could spare me, and for all the life I had yet to live, poured through in that accidental kiss. I drew back, half afraid, not really believing I had kissed you on the neck like that. Expecting a withdrawal of affection, I received instead the warmth of your smile, blue eyes into blue eyes, pulses in sync. For that moment I felt affection override fear, radiating warmth, like that first sip of coffee on a cold morning. Around us, a gentle shield protected us from whatever it was that scared you into keeping me at arm’s length most of my life, while I felt safe enough to allow this intimacy to soften me to trust.

Nah, you don't even remember that, I bet you don't but I do. Years and years and years on, I cannot forget. This, the advantage of so few similar moments, that we take them with us into our bodies, never fading like ink on aging skin; the afternoon I tattooed my love on you, its permanence.

Love, Mendy