My Ghost Daughter

 

 

It occurred to me that I never wrote about Ruby. I never told her story in full because its such a sad one- I have spent 23 years feeling like I’ve carried the unspeakable around- protecting other people from knowing about the darker side of motherhood I was trapped in for a brief period of my life. Even though what happened is incredibly common among women of childbearing age, it’s still a fact of life that nobody wants to hear, so I kept my story buried below the pleasantries and superficialness of being around others who haven’t experienced something as nightmarish. Nobody wants to have me bring down the room with my bummer of a life story. Even if it’s the biggest event in my life that affected me in every way- even if I think about it every day, I don’t talk about her because of other people’s discomfort at hearing it. I hate the faux-pity and the way people treat me when I have confessed this burden.  And also, just telling someone some of the basic facts doesn’t really do justice to the whole complexity of the awfulness- I feel like I can only verbally cover snippets and ultimately fail to convey the entire picture of what happened, much less how it has affected me, which leads only to further isolation from other people who don’t have the same scars and who show me that they can’t really understand. It’s these scars that make me cringe looking at sonograms, cause me to harden and turn away at the sight of a newborn, to have little mirth at a birth announcement and makes me to force myself to fake optimism whenever I have to interact with a pregnant person. I imagine people think I’m just an asshole.

Now I worry that if I don’t tell her story, she’ll be lost when I’m gone. The only holder of her memory will die without passing on her meaning if I allow it. I think she deserves better.

Her conception was an anomaly that occurred sometime in August 1998. I was living in a 2 bedroom apartment in Tigard with a grown toddler and an actual toddler. I never wanted to live in Tigard; the whole plan was to leave Utah so our son wouldn’t be raised a religious minority as a non-Mormon and also to spare him from being exposed to my dysfunctional family. My older sister Abby had a child that was six months older than mine, and so it was assumed as the first 2 grandchildren in the family that they would spend lots of time together growing up if I had chosen to stay in Utah. But Abby was not a normal older sister; she was undiagnosed but textbook Borderline Personality Disorder which created chaos everywhere she went. The reason she had Ashtyn in the first place was a deliberate plot to entrap the man she was in love with so he would marry her. I know this because she told me before meeting up with him after he had already wisely broken up with her- she stalked him for weeks and managed to lure him into one more drunken tryst that resulted in the pregnancy she thought would give her the man. Her scheme didn’t work. Even after finding out she was pregnant, the father still refused to have anything to do with her or the baby, with the exception of some child support. He was justified in doing so in my opinion because everyone who tangled with Abby ended up getting burned. He was lucky to have gotten away from her.

Abby was alternately kind and cruel. You never knew what side of her you were going to get, but one could always be sure that whatever it was would be grandiose and loud. I clearly remember watching her cursing wildly and slapping Ashtyn’s bare bottom while struggling to change her diaper in a fit of rage merely because the 3 month old was kicking like babies do. I was so mortified that my parents and everyone else in my large Mormon family would shrug off her outbursts and were willing to blindly support Abby’s decision to raise a baby as a single mother after her attempt at entrapment failed, because she was so mercurial, so unstable and occasionally violent verbally and physically. There was a lot of enabling of Abby’s behavior- propping her up to help her be more functional that she really was and picking up the pieces of her life that she would regularly tear asunder in some kind of emotional explosion. I was often resentful that my parents were willing to endlessly help someone who was essentially selfish and evil at the expense of the rest of us who were not so self-absorbed, and I am still angry that my parents failed to protect the six other siblings from Abby’s abuse while growing up with her foul temperament and constant tantrums. This dynamic with the family was unhealthy for a child, I knew.

My husband and I left Utah for Portland in 1997 when our boy Oscar was 9 months old. More accurately, he went to Portland first to find us a place to live and get a jump on getting a job there. The agreement was to find a place in SE Portland, where we had visited initially while I was still pregnant. He was in Portland for 3 weeks or so while I closed all the loops in Utah, packed up all our belongings into a U-haul and followed behind with the baby, making the drive alone. Its also a fact that my marriage was toxic. The only reason my son was ever even in existence was because my husband had convinced me my birth control was what made us argue all the time and it was what made me want to leave him- it was the Norplant in my arm that caused the knock-down, drag out, trash the apartment type of fights we had almost every week. By the time I relented and had the progesterone implant dug out of my arm, there had already been many bruises, broken doors and at least 3 attempts to leave him. And so much screaming. I had slept in a car in a blizzard to escape him because he would not let me leave the room when he was yelling at me- he couldn’t follow me if I drove away and parked someplace he couldn’t find me. I had plotted and planned and packed my belongings and gone to my best friend Laura’s house for sanctuary, only to have him show up, wheedle and whine and manipulate me into returning home to start the cycle all over again. Laura wasn’t protecting me from him- she inexplicably maintained neutrality, I assumed because she knew him before I did, in fact Laura was the one who introduced me to him when I was 17.

Laura left Utah for Portland too. She was the one who encouraged us to join her in the pacific northwest when Oscar was born. I wanted to be where Laura was because she was my closest friend.

What I didn’t realize at the time when my husband left for Portland ahead of me was that he and Laura were having an affair that started while I was still pregnant. So that’s another reason why Laura wasn’t very helpful- they had a secret, and that dalliance was also why he failed to get an apartment in Portland for us by the time I arrived; he had been distracted by Laura. Fooling around with her and only half-heartedly job-hunting and house-hunting meant that he had to scramble at the last minute to find us a place to live. He frittered his time away free from his wife and child, having a good time in a new town with an old “friend” hosting him quite warmly. When Oscar and I arrived, he had managed to find a shitty run-down apartment off Highway 99 next to a gas station in Tigard, which is a suburb southwest of Portland. It was far from the SE Portland neighborhood where I’d imagined us raising Oscar. It was a huge disappointment to be marooned so far from where I wanted to be. The dive apartment wasn’t even ready yet since it had just been vacated, so we were essentially homeless upon arrival and he still had not secured a job. Basically the opposite of what we had agreed upon, he had failed to set us up for a smooth landing and waited for me to come and take charge and sort everything out, including helping him fill out applications and nagging him until he finally acquired entry-level work at a nasty call center doing technical support.

We had been in the Tigard apartment for a year when I conceived. Things had not improved by this time. My husband was a high school dropout, who did eventually obtain his GED after I goaded him for about a year after our nuptials but he had no real intention of going to college or finding a career to support his wife and child. His head was in the clouds. We were both working low-paying call center jobs, barely making ends meet while raising Oscar in a high-conflict home. I didn’t really know anybody in Oregon. I had no support network other than Laura, and she wasn’t interested in helping me leave the husband who she considered a “friend” because she was afraid their secret would come to light. They had ended the affair shortly after I arrived, but he still carried out sexual acts with other “friends” that I was unaware of- this all came out later. At the time, he was having his cake and eating it too. He was working during the day, while I stayed home with the toddler, and I would work nights. When I came home at night, he would often go out with “friends” that I never knew or hung out with. I didn’t want to, and couldn’t anyways- there was a baby at home I liked more. My husband at this time ran into a crowd of folks at work who were involved with meth and weed, the weed smoking was not the issue with me, it was that he also wanted to deal it so that he could make enough in profits to support his own marijuana habit. I liked it better when he smoked, honestly. He raged less, was more placid and peaceful and smoked enough that it neutralized him on the couch so he was less likely to provoke and badger me. He was never a husband who cooked or cleaned, so the marijuana couldn’t be blamed for his general lack of helpfulness or functionality- I knew him before the weed- he was just as useless around the house before as he was after it’s arrival. Being raised in patriarchal homes implied that the man was not expected to do any homemaking anyways. Although we had abandoned our religious upbringings, it’s certain that some vestigial programming remained in how we operated as a family and how we treated each other but having left it also meant my husband could also decide not to be the provider for the family, rejecting parts of his patriarchy that didn’t suit him. I fully expected some kind of breadwinning on the part of the Head of the Household, at least while I had a little one. He was like a grasshopper in summer, not thinking about the future in any way- just interested in having fun in the sun. I nagged him into enrolling in a 9 month long computer programming certification class that would funnel him into a higher paying job, but he dropped out two months before finishing because he was “too tired” to complete the work. That was the last time he would try to better himself via education. He would eventually be caught dealing drugs to coworkers in his employer’s parking lot and was convicted of distribution of a controlled substance which meant that he would not qualify for financial aid anymore.

This was the backdrop to Ruby’s existence. It wasn’t a happy one. I think I spent at least the first trimester in a fog, and in denial that I was pregnant again with someone who I knew was not going to financially support us. I felt similarly grim throughout Oscar’s gestation. I was actually diagnosed and placed on disability for depression while I carried him because I was so distraught and hopeless about being pinned forever to someone who I didn’t really want to be with. I was going to be a mother of that man’s child and I didn’t want to be. If only I had run right then.

I was barely able to keep my toddler fed- we’d had food boxes donated to us by the time Ruby’s pregnancy happened. I once made diapers out of curtains for Oscar because I didn’t have the cash to buy actual diapers. I was drowning in debt and had a spouse who was more interested in having a good time with his social circle than helping me build a secure home for a growing family. My parents in Utah were against me marrying him in the first place, not because he was a flake and a liar, but because he was not Mormon. Therefore, the prevailing attitude was to let me suffer the consequences of my poor choices and sit back and watch my misery with a sense of moral superiority. The parental “I told you so” kept me with a person who was mentally unable to care for their only grandson were handcuffs of shame chaining me to my bad decisions for life. It was also a purposeful exercise in passive-aggressive cruelty on the part of my mother who was angry that I’d left the church and abandoned all that she had tried to impart religiously, and she was some kind of satisfied to see the harshness of life punish me for my atheistic defiance. I remember thinking I should get an abortion and not even tell him I was pregnant. I remember the dread, wondering how was I going to afford this other child, and how could I bring another child into a home that was full of screaming, hair-pulling, door slamming and just barely scraping by. I ultimately decided against termination because I knew my husband would be enraged if he ever knew, and I rationalized that my situation wasn’t so bad that it warranted the heavy emotional toll an abortion would have on me. I couldn’t even terminate a spider, how could I terminate a pregnancy?

So it was a numbed acceptance achieved by doing nothing. I guess this is happening…

I didn’t buy baby clothes for her. I didn’t really talk about being pregnant. When I did, I was definitely regretful. At the time, I had a boss who couldn’t keep a pregnancy- her name was Heidi. He had miscarried again recently and once she learned I was pregnant and was not that happy about it, she began micro-managing and fault-finding and taking her grief out on me in the workplace. Before she knew I was pregnant, she had elevated me to a senior position- we were friendly. But that changed. I felt like the workplace was becoming increasingly hostile as my belly grew. I started looking for and found another job, worrying that it was just going to get worse. Before losing my insurance due to switching jobs, I went to my OBGYN for the 4 month visit. Got the ultrasound- it’s a girl. Everything seemed normal except for a mild bacterial infection for which the Dr prescribed a topical cream. I knew there would be a lapse of insurance of 90 days while waiting for my new insurance to kick in. I rationalized that we would all be OK- I was young and already had a healthy child- it seemed low risk. A small gap in prenatal care shouldn’t be a big deal.

I spent that 90 days without insurance in a new job I didn’t like very much. A co-worker said to me, “I didn’t know you were pregnant, I thought you were just fat.” I just lived day to day keeping my head down and trying not to think about how I was going to pull all of this together. It was too hard trying to imagine how things were going to work out. Yet she kept growing. The household kept being a place I didn’t want to be but had no resources to leave. The only light in my life was my sweet Oscar- who was the person I gladly and happily spent every moment possible with. My darling golden boy! If I had managed to birth one perfectly wonderful child, I pretended to myself that I could do it again, even if I had no real help and despite the obstacles. There would be a way, somehow right?

One day, Saturday March 13^th to be exact, we drove to Cannon Beach for a day trip. This was common, as my husband had been raised on the coast and frequently liked to drive out to see the ocean he missed. I was 30 weeks along at this time; which is 2 weeks into the 3^rd trimester. I had another two weeks at the new job before my insurance would kick in. It was a lovely clear day- we barely argued that day, except for on the drive home, but that level of bickering was normal at this point in the marriage.  The sun was out, I could feel her little fluttering in my womb while we played with Oscar on the wide sandy beach in front of Haystack Rock. I remember the breeze blowing the dune grass on the northern flank of the shore. That day was so beautiful that I decided to finally pull myself out of the denial and the fear and embrace this little unwanted surprise and name her. I told my husband her name: Ruby Rose.

When we returned home, I noticed that I hadn’t felt her moving for a while, and I poked her in my belly trying to get her to wiggle a little. There was nothing. Every mother worries about this. Many a hysterical mother ends up in the ER demanding an ultrasound to check a heartbeat, only to discover that it was fine, baby must have been sleeping. Everything was fine, ma’am so just calm down. I told myself there was no problem, but I also ate a banana and drank a Pepsi to see if I could induce some kind of movement from my newly named daughter. The night grew late. I couldn’t sleep; laying on that mattress on the floor while my husband snored soundly unconcerned. I was just holding still with my hands over my stomach, waiting, prodding, palpating and choking down the fear as it grew by the hour.  After a sleepless night I told my husband that I knew there was a problem. Instead of the softness of a moveable body in my belly, there had become a hardness, like a rock where my daughter had once been a flittering and kicking. I don’t remember if he believed me or not. We were aware of the financial repercussions of going to the hospital uninsured, so it must have been agreed upon as a necessity in order to have found ourselves at St. Vincent’s ER on a Sunday morning. The ultrasound machine was up in the maternity ward, so after reassuring us that these were very typical fears that were often easily dismissed with some imaging, I was laid out, and the jelly was applied to my belly and the technician began their cursory probe to confirm that the fetus was just fine, mom. Don’t worry- we see moms like you every day who just need a little reassurance.

It was the long silence that was the beginning of the trauma. The extra length of time searching, pressing harder on my skin with the wand, veering it over to one side, sliding it over to the other side and saying nothing. I wonder if they get trained on how to not scare patients during important imaging. It was taking too long to assure me that everything was fine, and that’s because I already knew it wasn’t. The technician did not say anything stupid like “Ooops” or “That looks wrong” or “Oh no!”. It was all in her body language; how her shoulders tightened as she leaned in closer, breath shallowed, brow furrowed, concentration narrowed, squinting at the screen, and also in her inability to look me in the eyes as she excused herself vaguely and left us alone with the roaring silence.  There was nothing in her words or actions that could be considered terrifying to the outside observer, but to this day, this quiet, tactful realization of the technician is what still gives me nightmares and causes me to flash back mercilessly whenever I am in the stirrups getting probed in any gynecological way. I am terrified that something the medical professional didn’t anticipate is going to happen again.

“We were unable to locate a heartbeat.” Was what I remember hearing. I couldn’t believe it. I had literally yesterday just gotten to the point where I could accept that I was going to have another child, and now this? Are you kidding me? What kind of joke is the universe playing? I was powerless in this situation. I had a corpse inside of my body now. There was an actual dead child inside of my body decomposing by the minute and there is no escaping or fixing or bargaining my way out of this situation.

All of the expected reactions occurred, of course. Crying, wailing, pleading for another check, which only confirmed the initial diagnosis of fetal demise. I called my mother, she wasn’t home- she was at church. I called my grandmother, and she also was at church but grandpa was still home so through the sobbing, I was able to convey to him that my baby had died and that I was in the hospital. Grandpa, though I was closer to him than the other grandkids, was not a very emotionally evolved man, but he was able to express his shock and sadness and said he would pass the word on when everyone got out of church. I didn’t bother calling anyone else. The Dr on call said he was going to check me into one of the maternity beds and go ahead and induce labor. It was happening fast, and for that, I am grateful. I cannot imagine how horrible it must have been for mothers who have been forced to carry a corpse to term; I know that’s historically been a consequence for some women who don’t properly birth a live child. 

I was wheeled into a room, drugs were administered. Morphine was one of them. I had a self-administering button I kept pushing until I couldn’t remember what day it was or why I was there. I looked out the window to the left a lot. My husband made arrangements for Oscar to stay with a friend of his for the day. He stayed with me the whole time, but I don’t recall much about his presence at that time. At some point, my regular OBGYN came in and offered his condolences and held my hand while I wept helplessly. We discussed what could have possibly gone wrong since I’d seen him last- he wondered about the bacterial infection- did it somehow penetrate the sac and kill the fetus? We didn’t know why she stopped living.

 I don’t remember how long it took to squeeze out my dead daughter. It was less time than my son- he took 26 hours and a set of forceps. This birth was different, obviously. When she emerged, her skin had already started to slough off as a natural process of death, and baby skin at that point is very thin and fragile. The bones in her skull had not grown enough to fuse together yet, so the top of her head was weirdly sunken in.  Her coloring was pinkish-purple and mottled from lack of blood flow. She had tufts of caramel-colored hair on her head and all the most perfect fingers and all the most perfect toes, but they were just very tiny. Babies at this point haven’t fattened up in the last weeks of being in the womb, so she was spindly and frog-like. The nurses had brought me a special box they keep on hand for all women who don’t have a live birth. They told me that I would be glad to have it, that they would collect items like a clip of her hair and all her documentation, and there was a disposable camera with black and white film in it so I could take pictures of her. At first, I thought it was absurd. They even had little white caps and gowns just for this situation, small for babies who don’t get big enough for a newborn’s clothes. They said I would want to have her dressed and photographed. So I did that. The other women in the maternity ward were made aware somehow that there was a stillbirth happening and the nurses told me that they donated some of their congratulatory flowers as condolences for my tragedy. The nurses took Ruby’s small little body and placed her in a bassinet with flowers all around her and took photos of her in her white cap and white long lacy gown with her tiny hands clutching a daisy. 

                                                   My Daughter Ruby Rose 1998

Her eyes never opened; little Ruby never saw the world into which she was born. 

I was allowed to hold her, they took pictures of me and my husband mourning with the tiny cold being wrapped in the universally identifiable pink and blue striped hospital baby blankets. I wept. I took more morphine shots. I was just so helpless in this situation. When you’re in an avalanche, all you can do is just experience it and hope for the best. There were conversations about what to do with her now that she was out of the womb. The umbilical cord where it connected to her belly was smaller than normal so maybe she was nutritionally starved as a result, one nurse speculated. I rejected the idea of an autopsy; I felt like she was so little, and I didn’t want her flayed open like a pig just to find out why she was dead. The “why” didn’t matter to me- she was already dead and there was nothing anyone could have done, so what was the point in finding out why? I knew why she didn’t live, and it wasn’t going to turn up in an autopsy. You can’t detect unwantedness in an autopsy. I opted for what I could afford, which was cremation. St. Vincent’s Hospital was run by religious people, so surely they would see what I was experiencing and help me not also have to pay more than I had for the death of my child.

Her body was transported to Young’s Funeral Home on Highway 99, just 2 miles up the road from our apartment, where she was cremated. She never wore a diaper. She never was breastfed and she didn’t ever take a single breath.

I’ve heard there’s medication you can be prescribed that stops milk production. I wasn’t given any, so immediately after birth came the swollen milk ducts that were not going to feed anyone. I had returned home to recover, with full milk and still bleeding from an empty birth. I’d been in touch with my employer who still considered me to be a probationary employee still within 90 days of hire, so I didn’t have any paid time off available to heal from this birth/death. We couldn’t afford any maternity time off to begin with, so having it happen 10 weeks early, and totally unpaid would have put us out on the street. I still had a job to hold onto so I returned to work after only 2 weeks. I was told I was lucky to have been given even that much time, since usually at the start of hire, there’s less tolerance for absences of any kind. My supervisor did me a kindness, I guess.

I don’t remember all that happened in that 2 weeks I had off, but I do remember some things. When a dozen red roses showed up at the front door, there was a typewritten note with them, offering condolences from “mom” so I’d assumed it was my mother who had thoughtfully gestured a gift of flowers that were the same as my daughter’s name. I thought it was a strangely warm thing for her to do. I called to thank her for being so kind and expressed much appreciation that she’d done that, and she accepted my thanks and reiterated that she was too busy to come out to see me. It was about 2 hours later that I found out it was actually my mother-in-law who had sent the flowers, not her. But my mom was still happy taking credit for the thoughtfulness that she lacked. I also remember that Abby unfortunately decided to come to Oregon and “support” me during my loss. The happier part of that was she brought Oscar’s cousin Ashtyn with her, and we tried to focus on that. Abby arranged a funeral of sorts; she was the one who picked up Ruby’s ashes and she bought a glass vial necklace and put some of the ashes in it for me. Yes, that was very thoughtful. I still have it.  We drove to the last place I knew Ruby to be alive: Cannon Beach. I scattered the rest of her ashes into the surf and cried and cried while my milk throbbed and ached for release. Abby finally left at some point and then I was just left to myself. It was like my skin was burned off and it was screaming with pain that nobody could see or hear. People could see me and think I was a normal person, but I was actually emitting a guttural wail every single moment I was awake, and it was not heard by anyone because I was so good at making it look OK.

I never drank much before then. But shortly after returning to work, I remember coming home and heading right to the freezer to take a swig of icy cold gold schnapps just to dull the constant agony of grief, and not just any kind of grief, but the kind that comes from suspecting deep down that this atrocity occurred because of my ambivalence towards her. There’s such a thing as pain so huge and overwhelming that it takes up the entire sky so you can’t see anything without it obstructing your view, the kind of pain that sucks up all the air so you can only take shallow breaths. A hole in the world so large it presses inwards into your ears so you can’t hear anything over the din of a never ending internal scream. It’s the searing torment of having a mother’s body and no baby. It’s the crushing self-loathing that sets in because you honestly didn’t want that baby in the first place and now you selfishly got your way. It’s the sinking suspicion that this was why she left. Perhaps she knew she wasn’t wanted, and what kind of mother is so flawed that she wouldn’t want her own child?

When you can’t escape your circumstances, you’re surrounded by other people’s constant needs, and no one is coming to your rescue, that’s when people start using alcohol for relief instead of for fun. I didn’t drink heavily immediately as a result of my daughter’s death; that took years to develop, but this was exactly when the purpose for drinking changed. Besides the morphine, to this day I don’t know of any other drug that can quell grief and hopelessness and lull a person into a state of tranquil surrender as quickly and as effectively as booze. There’s a lot of this kind of pain in the world so no wonder there is so much alcohol to accompany it.

Even after weeks of bleeding, I was still oozing a rotten smelling brown fluid and feeling generally unwell. I couldn’t tell if it was grief or if I was actually ill, but eventually I went back to the hospital and was told I had a uterine infection and required IV antibiotics to clear it or else it could affect my overall fertility and perhaps spread. That was the first time I considered asking for a hysterectomy because my uterus was not my friend and I didn’t ever want allow the possibility of this happening to me ever again. They wouldn’t have done it, anyways. I was only 25.

Since I was not insured when Ruby died, I was served a massive hospital bill to cover the costs of her death. I was unable to even imagine paying for my daughter’s demise, much less actually capable of paying. It was tens of thousands of dollars, on top of our considerable debt and the paycheck to paycheck existence and my husband’s inability to hold a job for any length of time. We eventually filed for medical bankruptcy as a result of the unplanned uninsured hospitalization because there was absolutely no hope of getting finances under control. We entered the courtroom, passing security with my child on my hip, wearing my husband’s bomber jacket and sat down, waiting for our lenders to write us off legally. I pulled my husband’s jacket off and out spilled 3 baggies of weighed out weed onto the floor. It was from my husband’s illegal activities the night before- his dealing weed had become an even more important part of his life, and when I had the audacity to accuse him of putting me in direct danger of being arrested for his crime in a court of law, he shrugged and told me I should have checked his pockets first before entering the building. That was my marriage.

You really want to believe that there is a reason or a purpose for great loss, but there isn’t any. Shit just happens. I was able to do the planet a favor and convince my husband to get a vasectomy. If there’s nothing else I ever did that was good, getting his tubes tied would be enough to make me feel like I did one right thing. I also later had my own tubes “occluded” and bought my son a bike with the research money I was paid to verify that it took. I wanted there to be meaning for her existence. I thought about what I would have wanted for her if she was my age. Would I want her to hate her parents, be socially isolated, obese and often inebriated, in a terrible marriage with a reckless, feckless tool, financially destitute and hopelessly stuck? She never even had a chance, and I could also argue that I didn’t, either. I was born and raised specifically to be little more than breeding stock for the Mormons, so both of us were damned at the outset.  I worried about even having a daughter because my mother was so awful to me. I didn’t want to be like that, yet my modeling was to be withholding, cold and authoritarian with daughters. I wasn’t confident that I could mother a daughter very well anyways, so over time I started feeling more thankful that I had been relieved of that possibility.

I decided that if Ruby wasn’t going to get to live, that maybe I could assume the life I would have wanted for her. I had to keep this revelation to myself for a long time because part of that meant leaving a man who I knew would not let me leave easily, especially with Oscar. I would have to resort again to secretly planning, plotting and saving up to get away from him. The plan was to wait things out until Oscar entered kindergarten, which would free me up to work during the day. Since I wasn’t able financially to leave, I focused on my health. I was 225 pounds when I got out of the hospital, so I got an elliptical machine from Craigslist and started counting calories and generally being more active. The weight fell off of me. I lost 90 pounds in 11 months. I was in better shape at that point than I ever had been, despite the continued, and escalating discord at home. My husband at first was supportive of the rapid weight loss, but what came with it, he could not help notice, was new attention from other men and a burgeoning self-esteem that was increasingly stronger than his ability to break me down verbally. My parents accused me of having a drug problem, because there’s no other way someone could lose weight that fast unless they’re on drugs. I cut all my hair off, shorter than a short bob. I plucked my eyebrows so they were thinner and more sleek. I looked like a completely different person when Ruby’s first birth/death anniversary came around. My own mother walked past me at the airport when I took Oscar to visit in Utah- she didn’t even recognize her own child, and I delighted in that.  I’d resumed the painting that I’d abandoned when I married. I created an art car, and spent many hours in the garage, escaping my husband and creating driveable art. A rolling painting- The Cosmos was a VW superbeetle I glued and painted into something that looked like a sparkly spaceship. That silly vehicle was like a child I’d created with deliberateness and with joy and I loved it like a child, too. It was mine, not my husband’s.

I also quit my miserable job sitting in a cubicle and became a baggage handler at PDX, which was probably one of the most fun jobs I ever had. I was the first person to touch a giant aircraft after it had been in the clouds, and I was able to use my body with a physicality I’d never experienced and used my flight privileges to take Oscar on trips that normally I would not be able to afford. Throwing and stacking luggage was very empowering and surprisingly therapeutic. I was also able to finally get that apartment in SE Portland like I always wanted. Of course it was me who had to do the work of finding a new place and put in the effort to make it happen. My husband was never any use in practical matters, but I made it happen despite the drag of his incompetence and unreliability. I even bought a drumset and taught myself how to play them. This was more like the life of what I would want for my daughter- that she would feel good, do good and use the talents she was given to bring happiness to her life.