guilt

After a careless mention last night, my mom murmured: oh that's right, your birthday's coming up. I barely registered this mis-memory. My birthdays have always been long-awaited, carefully planned, and came predictably with a cake of choice in my family (the only one that ever was--with my dad's birthday 3 days afterwards and my mom's a day after that, they always simply ate the leftovers of my festivities.)

A few years ago I would've minded my mom's atypical forgetting last night. A few years ago I did mind. For my 14th birthday, my mom was in bed with a stomachache, and no one mentioned anything as my dad dropped his work to tend to her. When I asked him about my day he snapped: we'll figure it out later, can't you see that your mom is sick? I got so mad I walked to the mall by myself and bought a quiznos sub. (Believe me, I wish I had a better story of rebellion, as this one is not only unimaginative and un-destructive, it's also just plain weird.) Then I felt terrible and nervous that I took it to-go and came right back, (Wish I was making this up...) when my dad promptly yelled at me for being so selfish.

A few months later my mom had her miscarriage. In her rage and pain I was the most terrified than I've ever been, so my dad sat me down and told me how hard it was on her. How it was her second miscarriage this year.

When was the first one? How come I didn't know?
Do you remember your mom's stomachache on your birthday? The fetus flushed out of her system then. It was a natural miscarriage.

The next year the birthday cakes resumed. And I was again the only child my parents bought cake for.

I feel a lot of guilt over my mom's miscarriages. Because of that incident. Because I think when they told me about her (second) pregnancy, beaming from ear to ear, they could tell I wasn't exactly thrilled. And even because when they came home from the doctor's on that fateful day, I was online when I wasn't supposed to be, so I signed off and rushed out to greet them a little too cheerfully, with a little too big a smile, the trace of which barely had time to leave my face as my mother's bloodshot look of hatred seared past me. At that moment there was guilt, I thought the look meant I was caught and she knew what I had been doing; panicked guilt.

Of course, none of these things are even remotely relevant to the outcomes. But we know that the deepest guilt never really have to make sense at all. When we unpack the buried wounds we find not knives but cardboard. Still, the cuts we carry remain exactly as they are. And I wish their poison too, would flush out of us.

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