Expect a miracle

Expect a Miracle

I was born with my mother’s pain, so I lived on borrowed emotions, which usually ran particularly low. It’s unnatural to be this spent. But that’s the thing with generational trauma. It makes a mess of your insides, an overturned trunk of clothes in your room and a crooked painting with no one around to help you or will you to fix it. My back hurt with the weight of today. Maybe because it was Monday and I had a 15-page paper due, with only one page typed, or because it was the anniversary of my mother’s death.

Still, I tiptoed over the jeans on the floor, making my way to start the day. I always watched people from my dorm. The freshman speed walk up the sidewalk and the senior’s sauntered, where you are determines who you are at that moment. I left my cracked grammar textbooks on the table, grabbed a sweater, and made my way to beetle bailey, my 98’ Civic. Her engine turns with a sigh that is familiar. That sigh reminded me of each one that I birthed at six when they would ask if I was shy, then again at 12 when they would ask if it was puberty, 16 if it was a guy, and 20 when they resigned to shaking their head at my existence.

“Pull in here Gracie!” My grandmother waved ferociously as if she was landing a fighter jet.

I appreciated her enthusiasm about me, it felt genuine. My boots touched the gravel and I peered through the rain seeing the sign “Expect a miracle” in the back window of my grandmother’s Lincoln town car.

“Why do you have that sign, the miracle one?”

“Well, after your mother died, I felt like I needed a reminder.”

She glanced over to my mom’s sepia prom picture; her eyes ripe with hope next to her date.

She looked at me with a hint of defeat in her eyes,

“The past follows you in ways you don’t understand, Grace.”

I wonder when the understanding ever set in. I felt like not understanding life means you actually don’t understand people. The complexity of this life is the sum of all the decisions we make, good, bad, and selfish.

“Your mother never got that stuff off her, the things that kept her down. She lived with her face to the floor until one day she couldn’t make it.”

“Is that why you say what you say about me?” I asked.

“Yes. You were in the womb with an anchor on your heart.”

Though this is true, I loved my mother and would answer unwaveringly so when anyone would ask me if I did. Still, my heart flinched when she was near, much in the same way she would when anyone would raise their hands around her. Except, no one ever hit me. Her pain leaped off her skin, stinging mine, making me a breech baby. How she ended up with him was something I wondered but never asked and no one else around me knew. Randy wasn’t my father, but he was the closest thing to a man that I knew.

“You think she was a bad person?”

“No, she was a victim, just like the rest of us and not only because of Randy. Life has a way of tying us up. Restricting us one day and making us a puppet the next. It creates grooves on our skin until we stand in front of a mirror and see ourselves in ten little hands and toes. She tried hard to see herself, she just never could. I think that’s why she escaped, so she wouldn’t hurt you anymore, God rest her.”

She leaned up on her cane and walked me out to my car. The rain let up. She opened the back seat of her car and placed her “Expect a Miracle” paper in my hand. She kissed my cheek and made her way in. I fell into my seat, the rain started again. I placed my phone on shuffle and Giveon played, “Maybe I’m the one to blame, maybe I'm the cause of the pain.”I wondered if suicide freed my mother. I wonder if it redeemed her. My grandmother’s sign sat erect, making a small black book fall from it. Only one page was filled, addressed to me. The rain started again, pummeling my windshield unforgivingly and Giveon’s voice filled my car with grief.

“Dear Grace,

I wanted to be able to tell you the truth in a way where I wouldn’t be there to hinder you.

I met your father when I was a sophomore in college. We took one course together and became the best of friends. I knew he loved me, and I loved him. Your father was a descendant of the founder of the school, a born millionaire and I, a poor lower girl. But it never got in our way of loving each other. I turned up pregnant at the end of the year and we planned to keep it...keep you. Until he told the news to his family who disapproved of my wealth class but also that we were unwed, his family threaten to disown him if he did not make me get an abortion. He didn’t want to lose me or you, but he didn’t want to lose his family more. He offered me $26,000 from his family to have an abortion. I kept the money and you. I spiraled into a depression being a single mother, I soon found refuge in Randy who made my pregnancy and life more tumultuous that it would’ve been if I had been alone. Your father soon found me, and I told him about my miracle that was Grace. Still bound to his family the only thing he had to offer was his love and a guaranteed acceptance to his university, the school you go to now. I knew you would eventually want to know who he was. Here is his address. I’m sorry, and I know this guilt will follow me to my grave and beyond it. I put the money in a bank account for you with your name on it, it’s ready whenever you are. I hope all this can free you in ways that I was never able to free myself.”

Mama