Magical Thinking v1

Dad walked to me while I was raking after a
fresh mowing;  it was August, warm, less than
a month after I turned eight and we had arrived
for our vacation.  I was in a new pair of jeans,
grass stains on my knees.  The sky was blue,
brilliant, not a single cloud.  I watched as he
walked closer.  “You have to make a choice,” he said.

 
I thought of the possibilities; The kind
of candy should I get before we left for the
movie!  Do I want to stay the night at my new
friend’s house?  What kind of art supplies can
I get?  Drawing and painting and making pictures
out of nothing; a very favorite thing!  “I’m  leaving
now,” dad could have said. “Do you want to go?” 

It was Bean’s fault, really; calling the other
woman, Mom.  Why he would do such a thing,
I do not know, but he was the brother, older,
always looking out for us, making sure we were
taken care of.  He knew things I didn’t.  I called
her Mom, too, and then I didn’t.  Then, I did. 
I didn’t.  I did.  And, I didn’t.  And now, I had to
make a choice; to call her one or the other, but
not both.  “You can’t call her by her name and then
change your mind and call her Mom,” Dad told me, 
“You are hurting her feelings.” 

This was not the vacation you had told us about
before we left and got on an airplane where
I pushed the blue button with the white girl figure
so nice ladies would bring us can after
can of Gingerale.  Instead, I had to fight
to disown you; I thought you had done
the same with me.  You could no longer be
my mom.  She was.  I chose it. 

It was August, warm, less than a month
after my twenty-ninth birthday and I had arrived
for your funeral.  Days earlier, my other mother
called.  “Your mom,” she said, “had a heart attack
and died.”  I considered I caused your heart to
break; a bit of magical thinking, I suppose,
the way it was when I was young, making a
new life and an old somehow easier to accept. 

You were no longer there; I could no longer dream
of a day you would be.  And so I sat in your trailer,
looking through all of the letters and cards you kept
through-out the years.  I found one particular letter
I had written, telling you of a new job, about the
money I saved.  One day, I wrote, I will send you
a ticket and keep you in a hotel and we can be
together because they won’t let me see you or
help you.  You must have felt the same as I
or I the same as you, not only before you died,
but for a very, very long time.  I did not remember
this letter, with numbers and dollar amounts
scribbled in, telling you how much I had saved,
how much I needed.  I wrote, I love and miss you. 

It was a stark contrast to that which I fought
so long and hard for – not to see you, but to forget.