Coming Home

I wanted to be your everything. It was as simple, and as complicated as that.

When I held you in my arms in that fateful moment, for the very first time, you didn't wail or shriek or cry like every other newborn in the hospital that day did. When I wrapped my fingers around yours, your tiny, warm hand didn't clutch mine back. You pulled away.

When you looked up at me, the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I searched your eyes, the same pale blue as mine, for anything I could hold onto.

Maybe that was where it began. Or maybe it was before then. Maybe it began during those hot summer nights when I'd lie awake in bed, reading parenting manuals. I'd flip through pages upon pages of happy mothers hugging their contented babies close, or wide-eyed newborns playing with their rattles and giggling. The first paragraph of every book, every magazine, every pamphlet described a connection, that when I touched you for the first time we'd be forever bound, two intersecting loops, tied for eternity. Mother and daughter.

We weren't connected. Our eyes were the only thing that linked us. You were one loop, and I was another, and it was like trying to pull magnets together from opposite sides. I held you closer, tighter, trying desperately for us to be a unit. But we were two separate entities, two ships sailing, cut loose from the dock, spinning away from each other before we'd even had a chance to come together.

Maybe the emptiness came before then. Maybe it started when I hurt my back three years ago. Maybe it was when I was first prescribed those painkillers. Perhaps was it those long months, years, of crying out my back hurts, just to get one more tantalizing dosage. Maybe the little rips in my happiness had slowly turned into gaping holes, and I hadn't even noticed until it was too late.

Maybe it wasn't about you, but me.

Perhaps it wasn't that you needed me, but that I needed you. I needed more of you than you could give. After months of being clean, drug-free, but empty and depressed, I needed something to hold on to.

I wish you'd cried. I wish you'd kicked and screamed and acted up. And yet you would just lie there in your crib for hours, looking at me as if you weren't sure whether or not to cry.

Neither of us noticed the way things were changing. Some days, I didn't get out of bed when the wave of loneliness crashed like a pile of bricks into the pit of my stomach. I'd lie on my side, watching you out the window. You had a bigger smile on your face than you ever did when you were with me, giggling and shrieking with joy, the look on your face so free and untroubled that I could've taken a picture of it and pasted it into one of those parenting magazines I still agonized over. I'd roll over, my back to the window and feel like crying, but then I'd reach up and touch my face and find it dry. I was too drained to allow the tears to flow.

It was like music, sharp yet melodic, when you'd finally cry. You'd never cry in front of me, but when whichever neighbor was watching you you didn't hesitate to screech and wail. But when I'd move down the stairs sluggishly to you, Miss Edie from next door would pass you to me and the siren-like wailing would just stop. You didn't smile like a most babies when they see their mothers either. You just stared up at me, your face a stony mask. It was as if you didn't trust me, didn't want me to see you cry or smile, didn't want to let me in. I didn't deserve your trust.

Would I ever?

I held on. It got better. You cried, you laughed, you smiled. But it became too much. It was like when you go to the doctor's office to get your eyes tested, and they make you cover up one eye, and then your vision gets all blurry because you can only see out of the other eye. In one eye, I finally had everything I wanted. You gave me everything I needed of you.

But it was blurred over by the fuzzy lines of anxiety and temptation.

It never lasted long.

It was always a matter of too little, too late. My back would hurt, or at least I'd convince myself it did, and I'd go out, come back high, pass out with my head in my hands on the kitchen counter. You were still little, and you were always confused when I came home all messed up. I could see in your eyes that you were scared, too, but you'd never tell me that. The next morning I'd realize what I'd done, try to make it up to you. I'd shower you with meaningless little gifts and trinkets, as if that would fill the cracks in our relationship, as if that would make up for the late nights and the passing out at the counter.

The long nights of not coming home gradually became days at a time of not calling, not leaving a note, not doing anything. The pile of unpaid bills climbed up the counter. It became more about me than you once again. I let it escalate.

After a while, you weren't afraid or confused anymore. You'd put up that wall again, the same one you'd put up when you were born. I could hear the quiet newborn in my arms whispering all the the terrible things I knew were true. That you never should've trusted me, that the silent newborn that never once let out a shriek was right. That I never deserved your trust.

I've been gone more than a year now. You're in foster care.

I'm not clean. I'm not healthy. I can't come crawling back until I know it's real this time.

To say I'm sorry wouldn't change anything. I said that word every time I came back through that door. It's meaningless.

There's nothing I can say that will change anything. There are no words to fill the hole I created.

She folds the letter.

She seals the envelope.

She drops it through the slot.

"One day," she whispers. "one day I'll come home."