Go as a River

by Shelley Read

Imagine a town silent, forgotten, decomposing at the bottom of a lake that once was a river. If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pain of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not. The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.

And kind—that is what I remember most about those eyes from that first glimpse until the final gaze—a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well.

love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise.

I wanted more of him, like a craving for sunshine hidden too long behind the clouds.

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

I had left the farmhouse that morning an ordinary girl on an ordinary day. I could not yet identify what new map had unfolded within me, but I knew I was returning home uncommon.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

Dozens of saplings pushed toward life, some barely tall enough to poke their bristled heads above grass stubble and snow, others emerging from the centers of decaying logs like infants from opened bellies. There was beauty to this chaos. Every piece of life here had its role in the eternal business of living.

Similarly, whether my plan to live out my pregnancy in the wilderness and bring Wil’s and my child into this world would work or not, I knew I had to continue on. I had to empty my bladder. I had to eat. Just as I had stepped into a motherless life, I would step into the life of a mother. I would heed the call of necessity. I would rise.

I walked with urgency and purpose, yet I did not know to where,

I’d always believed it was the men in this house who held the place together. It never occurred to me that I was more than housekeeper and hand, that the heart of our family and home had somehow become me.

“Our roots are strong,” I said. “Oh, this I believe,” he replied. “Your trees are legendary. But they are strong in their own soil. Displace them, and . . . well, I just want you to understand. We might lose the lot.” “I have to try,” I said, and I meant it.

“Miracle peaches from the start,” he’d say reassuringly.

I would leave my past behind and try to build my life again, hoping not for miracles but simply for strength in new soil. I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, then, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

It would be foolish to say the trees welcomed me, though I would have gladly accepted some reassurance that the move agreed with them and I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Instead, all I could glean from them and their replacement soil was that a new journey had begun. I had no idea what would happen now. I was wise enough to know only one thing: the land would decide my fate.

when no place will receive you, everywhere becomes a kind of nowhere, all ground as uncertain as in my frightening dream.

No matter how slow and arduous its course, no matter what trickle seeped through, I knew it would find a way to keep flowing.

“Why wouldn’t I want to talk about them? They’re my babies.

But carrying your sorrows all alone isn’t strength, V. It’s punishment, plain and simple. Whatever happened to you, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself.”

One or the other of my sons, or both, occupied my every moment.

I thought of the newspaper headlines in the shops I passed, the postwar years so restless and mad, and wondered what kind of world awaited my sons. But just as I’d put pen to paper to try to record my thoughts, a baby would cry, and I would close the notebook, stand, and walk again.

Eventually, I gave up the notebooks and novels I pointlessly carried in the diaper bag and stopped longing for the life I might have had. Instead, I surrendered to motherhood. The choice was motherhood or madness.

“but everyone is from somewhere or a mixture of something, half this, half that.

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay.

I tell you my story because Lukas’s story is not mine to tell. For his entire life I told him that he was one thing, and then I broke his heart by admitting to him that he was something else. My precious boy now believes he is nothing from nowhere. Only you have the answers he needs.

“You’ll be the only one I’ve ever told about him. And everything else that followed. But I’ll need to start from the beginning. I’m hoping you can just listen.”

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

“Oh, I deserve to have my babies. Let’s be clear on that. Every one of them,” she argued. “Loss has nothing to do with what you deserve or don’t deserve, for God’s sake.”

I looked around me at the birth and growth and death piled atop one another, at the open bellies of downed trees feeding new sprouts, all the life pushing through every crook and crevice and possibility for light. It was an ancient intelligence far too rich and complex to fully grasp but exactly what I needed to remind myself that it is in these layers of time that everything becomes itself.

what I had learned most about becoming is that it takes time.

Though I could not feel my legs beneath me, I took a step forward on pure faith.