there is no time machine

Being at Allume a few weekends ago, being there around so many women, their conversations were peppered with what is true in their lives.

Words like

“And then I discussed this with my husband…”

or

“My husband told me I should …..”

“And that’s when my husband looked and at me and suggested …”

And I don’t know these people.

I don’t know their stories.

I don’t know if this is their sixteenth husband – or their first – I don’t know if they are truthful women or liars.

I don’t know.

It doesn’t even matter.

But, if I am being honest,

it hurt to hear all that talk.

It hurt in the same manner I assume it probably hurts for women who desperately want to be pregnant hurt as they listen to their pregnant friends talk about the baby kicking in their wombs.

It hurt with the same sort of pain that it hurts when I hear people sing praises (or cry out in anger) against their own adult relationship with their mother and I just want my mother to be alive to rail against or to praise too.

I don’t want what I have right now.

I don’t want it.

(Or, more precisely, what I don’t have.)

I don’t want my children to feel divided in their bodies, in their selves. I don’t want that.

I don’t want it.

I don’t want this division.

It is not a gift

or burden

that I pick for my kids.

And I cannot believe that I don’t have a voice in this.

There is no singular thing that has made me feel more powerless than this lack of ability to to shape the look of my home.

There is no greater loss to me than this loss of solidarity, union, of a family unit.

There is no division whose sting I feel greater than the sting of this division.

My entire body aches with the desire to change this course.

To pull the plug.

To reroute the tracks.

Anything.

Anything.

My son often talks about a time machine – building one, going in it, going back – to right before everything happened, he says.

Right before.

And, of course, because he’s ten, he doesn’t even know that the right before isn’t when he thinks it is.

He doesn’t know

we’d have to go back farther than the right before.

He doesn’t know.

And I don’t know.

I don’t know how far back we’d have to go.

I don’t know.

I just know that there is no time machine.

There is no fix.

There’s just

the wound

the healing

the scar tissue

the scar

stained and puffy and sun damaged

the scar

like the one on my left shoulder that kept me from wearing sleeveless shirts for years until I realized it was just a stupid scar. Who cares?

Who cares?

It’s just a stupid scar.

Just a piece of my skin that bears the image and tells the story and blazes like a sign on my shoulder.

And a little part of me knows that a scar is in my future.  And a memory of a scar.

And that a scar doesn’t actually feel pain.  But it’s still all there – obvious and in the open.  A sign.

And I don’t want that either.

The scars my kids will wear like badges, like jackets and hats and billboard signs.

This is not the attire I had in mind.