Emma is sitting next to me, her hair tousled, smelling of chlorine. We are sitting on the old wooden bench outside of our favorite ice cream shoppe, savoring out favorite flavor: Banana Chocolate. It drips down her arm; her face kissed with summer. All summer long stretches before us. every day after summer school finding us here after the long cool stretch of the pool. The world beyond is far away but it arrives
Before that and we are at the big Belleville city pool. She is too young to be in school. 3 or 4. I have already separated from her father. She has no memory of us together. Or at least they are invisible to me. The pool has a big whale covering the bottom, undulating with the water’s waves. I play teacher, scolding the neighborhood kids who are wading in the water with cookies or bags of chips. Emma drags me from my chair; I am her playmate. We jump up and down in the water, disappearing and appearing again. She squeals: I see you, I see you. Her yellow-sequined suit sparkles in the summer sun.
It is her fourth birthday. We are in McDonald’s. It is easy but I am stressed. I don’t know why. The smallest occasions seem to send me in a tizzy. It has to be perfect. Five years later I will be on my hands and knees cleaning the hardwood floors of my apartment in a city I cannot afford but with good schools and fancy houses I do not own where people spend their money sending their children to expensive summer camps. I am worried how my apartment will look to the parents of the children who will be arriving. I spend too much money on things –flowers that I have had the florist on the corner prepare in special vases. I am stressed. It feels like too much work.
Another day and I am putting the groceries away in the kitchen. Emma is in the third grade. It is after work and we have stopped at the grocery store for ingredients. It is March 14th and “pi” day at school. Emma has asked me to make a banana cream pie. Rather, she had wanted to make it with me, but I seem to have missed that. I yell at her. She is nine.
She is in the fifth grade in a purple dress in the gym for the talent show. I am standing in the back of the room, the man I am dating, who I will date for the next six years, is by my side. she sings a song that she wrote herself about her father who at the moment she feels has abandoned her and he probably has. Her eyelids are covered in glitter.
She is fifteen and talking to me at the dining room table doing homework. She tells me about a boy at a school dance the week before, what she let him do. I try to tell her all the usual mother things, caution her about doing too much, too soon, what will people think, regret crushing in.
Begin Again 