I still keep two bottles of frozen milk in my freezer behind the frozen waffles and chicken nuggets, despite my daughter being weaned almost two years ago. I know they’re expired and should be tossed, but I can’t. I worked so hard for them. I don’t care if it’s weird.
I called him every year on her birthday, to tell him the same thing. How she was doing, where we were, my unchanged contact information. I considered this an open invitation to our lives – but all of this information was left on his voicemail, and he never returned my call. On her eighth birthday, I was met with the automated nonworking phone number message, and resorted to email, giving me a better venue for my case. I wrote that we were at the cusp of the land of teenage Anna, and it was a perfect opportunity to change his mind. He could have a relationship with his daughter. He could help with the more difficult questions by simply showing up.
I am having a fight-or-flight reaction to my laundry.
It shouldn’t surprise me, really. I’m angry a lot these days. I’m angry about the laundry, sure; there’s no better symbol of the Sisyphean futility of things than the laundry, so smug that it continues to accumulate around me even as I surrender myself to doing it. I find myself wistfully nostalgic for my college years, when I could just go buy new underwear on my way out to the bars rather than waste an evening in the laundromat, when the dryer buzzes
Don’t sweat what to call your kids. All our names are pretty much doomed, anyway. My name is Susan. I’m only fifty-four. But as everyone I introduce myself to can readily discern, I’m old.
Maybe my story doesn’t have to be about sadness and death. Maybe it can be the story of a girl who had great parents, was loved fiercely, and is brave enough to keep going after her world is rocked by loss and pain. Maybe my story is about having the audacity to hope.
