Megan Doney
Dear Stella,
I can’t sleep. Your dad is upstairs, snoring; the floor practically vibrates from the electric drone coming from his nose. I’m watching the snow shroud the cars outside, big flakes of shimmering confetti in the yellow light from the streetlamp, hoping that I’ll have a snow day tomorrow. Sam is lying on my feet, and they’re warm but numb. A Saint Bernard is good to have around when the fire in the woodstove is dead.
I have been thinking of you a lot tonight; in the throes of insomnia, your face becomes clearer and clearer to me. I can just see you standing at the foot of the stairs, your hair glinting red and brown, looking at me as though I am the crazy one to be up so late. But though I am staring right at you, I’m not even sure what color eyes you have; blue like your grandfather's, brown like mine, your dad’s elven hazel-green?
Jacob doesn’t know that I am writing to you. He might think it a little weird, but perhaps no more than he has come to expect from me. Writing a letter to a child who doesn’t exist? That may be more than some people can take. It’s not that he doesn’t care, really, but for him, you weren’t quite as real as you were to me. He hasn’t woken in the night with his hands folded like wings around his belly, imagining you there in your watery nest, waiting. He never imagined you at five, sending you off to school carrying a stiff new book bag with folded wrinkles still crisscrossing the canvas, your wee face solemn as a monk. He never imagined you at thirteen, alternately slamming doors in our faces and crawling into our laps, your eyes smeared with clumsy mascara. He never imagined you at thirty, all of our effort and tears and love finally poured out into a woman, the best and worst of us both, with your own dizzy brew of quirk and humor laced like brandy swirl throughout.
But I did. I imagined you at all those ages and at every one in between. I knew the moment you stirred within me, the moment I looked into your eyes and wept with recognition at the creature he and I had created. I knew the moment I chose not to bring you into the world.
I want to tell you how I chose your names. Stella: feminine and arch and quaint, easy to shout when I call you inside for lunch, the smooth double l’s rounding out into a soft satiated ah at the end. A cognate of the word for “star” many languages over: estrella, etoile. And a star was just what I wanted you to be: not a pop star, or a movie star, but pulsing, enigmatic, lucent. And Fearn, rhyming with learn and turn: a tiny village in the Scottish Highlands. I say it aloud and think of green hills, jagged coastline and grey seas, black soil, selkies. So you have two names, uniting the heavens and the soil. When I think of you I string the two names together, three syllables, Stellafearn.
It doesn’t seem right, the ease of it all. I woke up on the morning of Valentine’s Day, a year ago. I showered, dressed, drove a hundred miles to the clinic. I sat in the waiting room for exactly thirty-seven minutes. I went into a room where I took off my clothes and lay down on a sterile table. I heard a faint, light thud, like a bird falling from its nest onto the sidewalk, the swish of liquid. They wiped me off and helped me dress. I sat in a recovery room for sixty-one minutes. I got in the car and drove a hundred miles back. Once home, I took off my blouse and jeans again, and stared at myself sideways in the bathroom mirror. Was the faint swelling I had begun to see gone, or had it only been an apparition in the first place? It was the same pasty body speckled with early cellulite I had seen every day for the last thirty years. I felt withered and empty, as though I had spent the entire afternoon vomiting. Everything in me had been expelled, and only a dry husk remained.
The third Tuesday of each month, I feel a gravid, earthbound pull in my belly by midmorning. By afternoon, the familiar dark stain appears. I know this ritual well enough by now: the blood soaked into white cotton, quietly disposed of in clanging metal containers. It’s a cold ending to such an elemental fluid. When I was thirteen, the blood was accompanied by cramps and pain as bad as anything I had ever felt; I remember passing out on the cold, cruddy floor of the girls’ bathroom. Now the blood falls into the toilet bowl in dark streaks and reminds me of plates sent back still full.
The Celts named the land where no one ever aged or died Tir naNog, the land of the ever-young. This, I think, must be similar to the land where you live now. You and your neighbors there dwell only in the minds of the parents who concluded that the world wasn’t quite up to snuff, and decided to leave you as you were: bodiless and silent. Stella, believe me, it is better this way. I know that like all girls you are reluctant to accept the authority of your mother, but trust me on this one. This way you are always new to me, and I to you. You never have to hate me or your dad, or worse, your own body and mind. The words and events that keep me up at night and trickle into my writhing dreams will never be your burden, too. You won’t have secondary memories of people falling from towers, airplanes blossoming into fiery roses, schools overflowing with dead children. There have been times when I thought I would be torn to shreds by the things I witnessed, when I had to curl myself into a ball like the little grey segmented bugs that crawl around in the garage, to protect my innards from being ripped out and devoured by the jaws of violence and unimaginable suffering. Even in dreamtime, my mind opens to the nightmares of mothers the world over. Am I wrong to have tried to spare you from that? Wouldn’t any mother have the same instinct?
I had an e-mail from my friend Michelle the other day; she lives in a tiny house in California, overlooking the sea, with her husband and daughter. She told me that when she had Samantha, she stopped thinking of what she wanted and started thinking of what she could give. This, Stella, is the biggest problem. It’s true that the world did not meet my standards of justice and kindness, and so I did not want you to live in such a place. I did not want you to fear rape, condescension, belittling, try to reconcile the patent unfairness of simply living as an American in this world. But I can’t fool myself or you that it was done entirely out of a sense of nobility.
I must tell you that it was because I am selfish, and I thought you would take me away from Jacob, from making love in a cool bed on a Saturday afternoon, from losing myself in a novel, from silence. I knew that the moment we saw one another I would be at your mercy; you, a crimson polliwog with a screwed-up face, would be my murderer. I would disappear into your wailing mouth, insubstantial as a tissue, and never be seen again.
Stella Fearn, rhyming with burn and yearn, I know that from wherever you are, you’re probably railing at me, saying that it wasn’t my choice to make. What right had I to deny you flesh and food, a hand, a mind? Despite my best efforts, trying to spare you from hating me, you hate me anyway. I cannot tell you that I am sorry, because a mother shouldn’t lie to her daughter. But there was nothing else to be done. Kill you, or allow you to kill me.
You are the only one I can say these things to. There’s an irony in that. I had no other reason to do what I have done than simply wanting my own life more than I wanted yours. I look back on what I’ve written so far, and my voice sounds like Gwendolyn Brooks’: I loved you, though I stole from you. Since this letter isn’t exactly sendable, there is nothing more I can say.
Stella, stop looking at me like that. Reproach in the eyes of a toddler is as ugly as anything I have ever seen on television. Go upstairs to sleep. Let me finish here. I would like some rest, too.
Your mother
©2004 by Megan Doney
