“We’ve talked about this before, Gwen,” my father says.
“I have no memory of her ever smiling. Do you have any photos of her smiling, Dad?” I show him the photo I pinched from his footlocker all those years ago of me sitting between him and my birth mother when I was five years old. “Was she ever happy?”
I took the retirement community shuttle to his place this morning. I just needed to get out of Dodge and think about something other than dead bodies.
We are sitting in the living room of his comfortable apartment. The TV is muted, a silenced distraction hanging on the wall across from us. Our knees are almost touching as we sit facing each other at an angle on his love seat. He is much taller and thinner than me. His hair is silver, and unlike most former military men, he has let it grow over his ears to touch his collar. My stepmom is bringing a sick friend and her husband some soup and sandwiches for lunch. It gives Dad and me time to talk about something she doesn’t have to feel obligated to listen to for the umpteenth time.
“We only knew each other for a short time before she learned that she was pregnant,” he says. This is the first time he tells me about their courtship, and I am surprised by it.
“Are you saying that you didn’t love each other?”
“She took a liking to me, and I took a liking to her.” He touches her face in the photo. “You can see where you got your good looks from.” He sets the photo on the coffee table. “We both were in a place where we knew that we’d both be moving on. We just gravitated towards each other. Some things happened faster than others.” He shrugs. “I offered to marry her, and she accepted. She wasn’t looking for an American husband while finishing up her nursing degree at an infirmary on a Royal Air Force base in England. She planned to return to Jamaica to become a nurse and resume her life there.”
“I knew it. I knew I was a mistake.” I had never said those words out loud to him before.
“No, honey. You were and are Stan Wallin’s lovely daughter. I loved you from the minute they let me hold you.”
“But Eleanor didn’t.” I step over a line.
“How old are you now?” he asks me.
“I’m fifty-seven, you know that,” I gently scold him.
“You are old enough to know now that your mother probably suffered from postpartum depression. She may have been clinically depressed on top of that. None of us knew what that was back then, that it was a real thing.” He stops to sip his coffee.
I have never considered that possibility. What did I know about depression?
He continues. “Jean and I have lots of friends here at the village, and we are learning about all kinds of illnesses. People here are very vocal about who has what. No sense hiding anything at this stage of the game. Depression runs right behind high-blood pressure, diabetes, and the big C for ailments around here.”
I am understanding how my father would see his new friends behave and then look back at those similar signs of depression in my mom.
“Consider this for a minute,” he goes on. “On top of an undiagnosed chemical imbalance, she was all alone. When I had to travel for work, I left a mind-sick young mother with a colicky baby. She had no family there. She was one of only a few black people on the base or in the town nearby. Let me remind you that this was the 1960’s, Gwen. England was a little better than America in race relations.” He held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “But just a little. I know. I was married to a Black woman.”
He takes a deep breath and stares into my eyes. “It's high time I ask you to stop acting like an abandoned six-year-old and put yourself in her shoes. Why don’t you take a few minutes and do just that? I’m right here, and I am not going anywhere.”
I start to say something but look down instead. The way he said it was not a reprimand, but a heartfelt request.
I reach out for his right hand with my left, and we sit closer while I close my eyes and breathe deeply, slowly in and out. I have never looked at the situation from her point of view before. I imagine myself to be my birth mother. Every time my own anger or resentment wells up from those familiar places in my heart, I gently release those feelings and return to putting myself in her place.
Alone and Black in a lily-white world, Jim Crow talks with a clipped British accent. Pregnant by a man I barely know. Scared and maybe ashamed. No, there is no maybe. I am ashamed. Away from home and everyone I know. I’ve given birth in a sterile-white British hospital, then was sent home. I’m abandoned for long stretches of time with a crying baby.
When these thoughts start to fade, I return to my steady and deep, rhythmic breathing.
I imagine life in the English countryside. It’s nothing like Kingston. In my mind, I see and taste the bland food. I listen to their white pop music on the radio.
I am slightly aware of my body, but in my mind, I am there in England.
Nothing is as I planned. I stare at this infant in my arms as it cries and cries. My newlywed husband is at work, and I can’t reach him.
My breath now catches. I feel the anxiousness well up, that chest-tightening, star-seeing, pulsing red-light before my eyes panic.
I force myself to keep my eyes closed, and I am there in that desperation, that utter loneliness, with a shattered self-worth, a screaming baby in my arms. It is dark. The officers’ housing is cold from the winter wind blowing outside. I have never felt this cold before in my life. I shiver.
I see the baby as a toddler now. The little girl wants to play, and her father allows her to ride on his back until his knees are raw from the threadbare carpet. I see the happiness on their faces. Slowly, the panic attack subsides. I return to deep breathing in and out. I don’t need to count. Slowly in and slower out after a pause.
I see the young girl in the photo is going to the American school on base. She can be cared for now. She’s a happy kid and her father loves her. They will be all right.
As I breathe in and out, tears fill my eyes, and I begin to sob. My sobbing becomes louder and my breathing more difficult. The waves of feelings well up from deep within me, a place in my heart long guarded by the childhood scars, the feeling of being unwanted by my mother.
My father’s hand moves up my arm and then around my shoulder. I feel him hold me now as my sobbing increases. A lifetime of anger, resentment, fear of not being good enough melts into his embrace, like the biblical banishing of an unclean spirit.
I open my wet eyes, and my dad scurries to the kitchen and brings back a wad of paper towels. I blow my nose and wipe my eyes, then reorient myself to place and time.
“Do you want to talk about it, Gwen? You were somewhere else for the last forty-five minutes.”
“I walked in Ele—my mother’s shoes just like you asked.”
“Where’d you go? St. Louis?” He snorts softly. He appears relieved that I returned from the trip.
I laugh. “I’ve started meditating this week, and I guess your suggestion was all I needed today to go where I’ve been afraid to go all my adult life.”
“And?”
“I never made the leap from how everything affected me to how everything affected her. Adding that she was probably prone to depression made it easier for me to be—to feel—to see her side, and to…” I can’t find the word to describe my feeling.
“To cut her some slack,” he says.
“More than that.” Slowly, the words come. “To feel compassion for her and all the things that she had to have suffered through.”
“And?”
“C’mon, Daddy. You’re doing to me what I did to my kindergarteners.”
“And?” he persists.
“And I turned out okay.” The words spill out without a brain filter. Straight from my heart to my mouth. I feel it for the first time. I turned out okay. I am not damaged property.
“No, honey,” he says. “You turned out wonderful.” It is his turn to have misty eyes.