The Bright Years

by Sarah Damoff

I’ve learned how big of a dream it is to have a small life. That the cost of ambition is high.

Let’s leave behind what we need to leave behind.

She lost everything and then gave all her reserves to her son. He, in the way of a child, did the same for her. All of a sudden, my six months with him are a drop in the bucket. Now that we’re here in his mother’s house, I hardly know him at all.

We’re here at the beginning. It can be anything we want.

He clenches his jaw and opens his eyes. Part of me wishes he’d close them again. Looking into their dark, heavy need is like being at the bottom of an ocean. But the other part of me will stop at nothing to heave him up to the surface. I

I shake away the linger of pain. His. Mine. No need to think about Lillian Wright or Ryan Brighton. We are now proud canvases of a new name, a new life.

But if perfect understanding of our own motives were a prerequisite for action, the world would be motionless.

Sometimes a woman’s choice is between impossible and impossible and impossible, and she just has to make it. Survival calculations become more urgent than rightness.

She wiggles and squirms and shifts, and fear hums beside me as I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping the sky—always with me but never mine.

In many ways, Jet saves us. But salvation is not erasure—it’s a redistribution of pressure.

Babies kill dreams but resurrect family.

One of the most disorienting parts of parenthood is how it can warp your sense of time. Or maybe not warp. Maybe what children do is straighten time out. Like clock hands, they keep us ticking forward even as we try to apprehend the lines and circles of it.

But he’s their son now, and to see that would kill me. I gave him over to the hope of a happy life I couldn’t offer at the time. Knowing whether he is or isn’t happy would destroy me, either way.

It strikes me that somehow Disney is fashioning the marriage story in her mind rather than her own parents, who definitely didn’t “stay together forever.”

we walk home under a dimming sky, stubborn streaks of pink slashing through the gray like happiness through grief.

There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn’t.

If there’s any liar bigger than an alcoholic, it’s the alcohol, saying, All there is is now and It won’t hurt anyone and This is the last time. Ryan’s problem is believing the lies, and I will not do the same.

“You have parents, friends. Someday you’ll have lovers and maybe kids.” That’s how she spoke to me then. Lovers. “It’s not that you don’t need anyone—just that you don’t need everyone.”

“Listen”—she looked pointedly at me—“I’m the first person you needed, but I’m not the only or the last. Lisa was a good friend for a time, but she’s not the only or the last.”

“You can’t control anyone else’s choices, but you start with what you’re given and then you make your own.”

Time is broken glass, and I’m stuck in one piece of it—the piece where I still have her.

His problem is that he loved Mom too much. When I do see him, he can barely look at me because his eyes overflow with her, crowding out everything else. Her absence blinds him. She’s haunting me after all, but instead of knocked-over furniture it’s a knocked-out dad.

Time can wash dirt off a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.

We begin to say goodbye as soon as we say hello. Death is a corollary of birth, and to welcome life is to guarantee loss.

Eight years have passed, and time is no healer. A mother stays even when she’s gone, like a muted moon in the daytime sky.

“It’s my greatest fear, losing you. I might not survive it.” Her voice wavers again, but she pushes on as though turbulence is to be expected. “Nobody can promise me it won’t happen, but now I understand that this isn’t a risk to eradicate. It’s a risk to embrace.”

Whenever he’s drunk on a Sunday, I turn my back on him and chase the sun alone. Sometimes I declare to my empty passenger seat that I’m done trying. But always by the next Sunday, I’m ready to risk it again. I won’t give up the six times for the one. Mercy isn’t a onetime event with an alcoholic.

Her heart is buried in the darkness of the earth, but it is also buried in the darkness of my body. Everyone says “gone but not forgotten,” though it’s ultimately the other way around: generations later, a mother is forgotten but not gone, a pulse in the bodies birthed from her love.

I talk to Lil, telling her I miss her more than ever. She’s in every camera click and smile of the bride, every pollen sneeze of her grandchildren. The blackbird flies off, its wingbeat steadying me like a liturgy.

My mom advised, “You don’t need much. Babies are simple.” She looked at us pointedly over her bifocals and said, “Not easy, but simple.”

She should hate me. I should be excluded from her wedding and exiled from her life. Instead, grace upon grace, now we’re here. Here, there and everywhere.

I nod understanding and blow into the air, trying to scatter her words like dandelion seeds, make them go away. It doesn’t work.

Mistakes are choices too.

The thing about alcoholism is that there’s sickness on both sides. Drink, you’re sick. Don’t drink, you’re sick. A blurred line between medicine and poison.

Let me put it to you this way: alcohol made me feel good. A relationship with my kid made me feel good. And I had to choose. Question was which pain I could tolerate. I’ll be the first to say that an easy decision don’t make for an easy action, but I’m doin’ it. I thank my lucky stars that I was given a chance.”

It is our thirst that drives us. The heart thirsts for comfort like the stomach thirsts for nourishment, and the discomforted move the drink from one vessel to another. That is why I started drinking. My hope for you isn’t to do with whether or not you drink. My hope is that alcohol will be but a peripheral detail in a life drenched with so much comfort that, a thousand years from now, people will still smell the aroma of it.

Through choices made and not made, you entered this world like a starburst, and you let me ride your trail of light through the sky. There is goodness ahead of you. I know this because I know you. You don’t hide from pain or from play. Your joy is obstinate, yet you are brave enough to break. You have open eyes and an open heart—a rare combination in a world where one of those usually closes the other. You are your mother’s daughter, who is her mother’s daughter. You are, and you will always be, radiant.

“I will be here.” I move my hand to the life in her belly and say, “There.” She closes her eyes and tilts her face upward, a lone tear trailing down as she whispers with me, “And everywhere.”

I’m afraid of the unknown. It’s all that remains, this forced unburdening. This chrysalis room. My breath snags. Air hurts. I’m a dwindling mass of bone and water and memory.

“You said the sun shines on the other side of the world when it’s night on our side. So somewhere else there’s sunshine even though I can’t see it from here.” Her father nods slowly. “That’s right.” “I think too somewhere else there is Pops, even though I can’t see him from here.”