Two Women

 

I’d bleed for both—one body, one heart

How to do this without tearing apart?

 

How to gain one while losing the other?

I’m growing my daughter while losing my mother

 

Her strength will surprise me in this great time.

She’s growing she’s changing, it’s all sublime.

 

She’s fragile and weak and yet so strong.

Her memory, her body, her life is a song.

 

As one life increases the other life fades.

Both change me forever.

 

This journey is broken—it isn’t right

When will God win? When will we see His light?

 

She’s fragile, she’s fading, she’s wasting away.

She’s growing stronger with each passing days.

 

I’d bleed for both—one body, one heart.

How to do this without tearing apart…

 

 Those of you who know me understand this poem is several years old. As I read it now, it feels a bit immature, unfinished. A little wanting of something I’m not sure what. It has the feel of an amateur poet–of which I certainly am–and so I shouldn’t be surprised that, to me, it feels a little childish. (One line doesn’t even rhyme…) However, it was written from a place of raw emotion, poured out while laying on my bed and shrouded in darkness, unable to sleep in the wee hours of the night. I wrote it with a swollen belly and shattered heart, trying to cope with both grief and joy, celebration and heartache. Trying to comprehend the mix of emotions that comes with both the joy of life and the heartache of death.

I never thought I’d have to struggle with loss while I rejoiced, with grief while I celebrated. I never imagined I would have to exchange one life for another.

I’ve attempted to fix the poem a couple of times, to make it more sophisticated, sharper, more poetic than the simple lines it is. But something about changing it seems to take away of the authenticity of a poem written from a place of sheer grief.

                  I was seven months pregnant with my daughter when I found myself at my mother’s bedside that Friday morning in August, oblivious to the simmering summer heat shining down on the outside world. I sat in the nondescript white room whose walls were covered with a few belongings of my mother’s—pieces of childish art made by the myriad of grandchildren, a fine painting my mom loved that used to hang in the entry way to their house, a few family pictures moved from her old residence. It was a room we’d just moved Mom into two weeks earlier, one that bore the markings of a temporary home—old pin holes from previous residence’s family’s artwork, a used dresser in the corner. Things that didn’t belong to my mother. As I sat beside her, I watched as the only thing that seemed to move was her chest itself and listened to her deep, infrequent breaths, the breaths I knew only too well—breaths of the dying—feeling each tear slip down my cheek. I thought I’d cried out all the tears over the preceding years. I thought there’d be no more left. I was wrong. Belly swollen, I’d hold my mother’s ever cold hand and watch as her tenuous grip on life was stilled by the blanket of death. And even though my head told me this was victory—victory for my suffering mother, victory from her broken body, and celebration that she was now released from the body that had failed her long ago and walked into the open arms of her maker—my shattered heart refused to listen. Cries of grief would escape my mouth as the tears I’d thought I’d cried long ago flowed freely once more, all while my daughter danced undisturbed within me.

                  I would be eight months pregnant when I stood behind a wooden podium in a room bathed in light from the large open windows which overlooked a blue sky and the silent river below and said my last goodbyes in front of an expectant audience.

Afterwards, I’d sit down next to my grandmother, the women from whom both my mother and I had descended. I’d feel the warmth of her voluptuous arm and thigh rub gently against mine as we both sat through the celebration and sadness of a life remembered on a video screen, my grandmother taking my hand as the tears once more wracked my body. I didn’t want to make a scene in front of the crowd and I silently regretting that I was sitting in the front row. I sat wishing instead I’d been in the back so I could be as hysterical as I felt and no one would notice instead of holding it all in and pretending I was only slightly upset, like this was only a little sad instead of the reality in which the world felt as though it was shattering into a million tiny shards, all which pierced every part of me. But even though I’d feel my grandmother’s warmth, feel her hand in mine as she tried to imbue some of her supernatural calm into me, all I could feel was the chasm of the absence of the woman who should have been sitting between us.

                  I still have two women in my life. Two gorgeous, amazing daughters with huge laughs and even bigger personalities, two women with spirits as wild and free as their hair in the morning. Two girls yet unencumbered by grief. They love art and the water and being silly, all fingerprints left by the woman they’d never really know. And while they sometimes feel more like tiny batting rams, always looking to challenge me to a head-butting dual of wills, they are still two women.

Two women for whom I bleed. Two women I rejoice over and stand in awe of. Two woman who are living pieces of the one I still grieve.