The Goddess Epiphany

I was well past my developmental years when my mother gave birth for the fourth time. Psychologists say that at age seven the cement of our minds begins to set. During pubescence, it hardens steadily as it nears a final shape. At thirteen, I felt like I had been carrying an anchor on my back for a million years. As I neared my final shape, I felt that this burden was as natural a part of me as my own arms. I kept these feelings of burden to myself. Conversing about my emotions was not my way. As a child, while I was made to understand that my feelings were important, I was simultaneously made to understand that they were not that important in relation to the feelings of everyone else. I was a match in the face of a forest fire. It was Rachel’s way to shout and demand. My way was to crawl away into small corners and hide, until growth demanded I find other refuge.

Before my parents divorce, their fighting had been awful. Afterwards, I found that my mother and Mike fought in ways that were barely human. The only comparison I have to their fighting was the period of time at the peak of my sister’s attacks. There had been a time, before my grandfather’s interference, when I had no longer been able to feel her pulling out my hair or scratching my face. I bled without pain, because there was nothing left inside of me to register hurt. It was as if the receptors had been bombarded one too many times, and surrendered their right to function. As I spent every night in my basement room, listening to my mother and stepfather fight with one another, I could feel the same thing happening to my emotions. Flake by precious flake, the bedrock of my humanity was being chipped away.

During that awkward period, I became an adept actor. I acted because I knew instinctively that to stop pretending to be normal was dangerous in ways my young mind could not yet fathom. I could be neither moved to joy nor outraged. I lost the capacity to experience shock. At times, I expressed indignity over a trifling incident. At others, I acted overjoyed at something that deserved no comment. I did these things with the mindset of an actor. I pretended to feel them. I did not. My one rule was to stop before I engaged in any action and ask myself, “Is this what a normal person would do?” I mimicked the effects of humanity because I had forgotten how to be a part of it.

I was without an outlet. I had no television to sink into. My books were constantly disappearing into Mike’s chuckling hands, only to later turn up in the garbage. I had become too old to play with action figures. I never had any friends. I was close to a tipping point. I felt like I was one scream in the face away from becoming a total sociopath.

Then my mother became pregnant again. For eight months I felt nothing, and said nothing, as the baby grew inside of her. Finally the day came in September when she went to the hospital to have labor induced. She didn’t want to repeat the difficulties of my birth.

I was neither happy nor sad about this event. My mother was going to have a child. Mike’s child. The only thing I could think about this was that it meant, hopefully, they might become too busy to bother me.

I was in the waiting room for over six hours with my grandfather, doing my math homework from school. He was looking at me oddly. I was a good actor. Good enough to escape the notice of my mother and stepfather. Most of my class thought I was hilarious. My grandfather was the only person who could see through it; he understood that something was terribly, awfully wrong. More than once, I’m sure he asked my mother if I could live with him, though such conversations always took place outside of my hearing.

“Brandon, you know your mother’s not going to have as much time for you with the new baby, don’t you?”
“Yes, Grandpa. I understand. Don’t worry.” I wasn’t worried. I was looking forward to it.

“BC… if you ever want to talk you can just call me, you know that?” It was the closest my grandfather ever came to telling me that he loved me. I nodded and that was the end of our conversation.

How do you tell someone that your mom’s husband likes to pull over next to prostitutes on the highway, while you’re in the car? How do you explain how he waits for them to get close to you in the passenger’s seat before he floors the pedal and laughs? How could I tell the person I respected most in the world that the man from Ponape had farted in my face? My grandfather was a respectable man. I could have told him no such thing.

A doctor came out and spoke a few words to our family. The baby had been delivered. It was a girl. She was healthy and we could see her.

I put my math homework against a book and followed my grandfather through the hospital like a robot. I finished by the time we reached the room, and tucked the book under my arm. The door opened like a stage curtain revealing a menagerie.

I am not a religious man. I do not believe in God. I do not believe the alignment of the planets or the stars has any particularly significant effect on the people of Earth. I do not believe I am a pawn moved back and forth in a game of chess played by angels and demons. I have no belief in predestination or the supernatural, whatsoever.

I simply believe that sometimes a number of random events can suddenly mesh together in ways that could not have previously been predicted, like puzzle pieces tossed into the air only to fall to the ground in the shape of a portrait. These moments don’t always have to do with life or death. It can be as simple as a moment in time whereupon feeling the crispness of newsprint under your fingers causes you to reach a startling conclusion about every moment in your life previous. I believe in the power of the random to blossom with sudden, startling order.

I saw my mother holding a fragile, crying child in her arms. I saw my stepfather laughing his hyena laugh into a cell phone. In my mother holding my sister, I saw my own childhood. I saw every abuse gone by without justice. I saw every hug and expression of love. I saw to infinity, as though I held the twin mirrors of good and evil and followed my many reflections past the curvature of the universe to the moment of creation. In the innocent face of my newborn sister, I saw my true self for the first time in my life.

I moved forward by an impulse that acted with the force of a prime mover. I put my hand on my sister’s. It was small. The fingers looked like baby carrots. She closed her eyes and cooed. Very suddenly I remembered what it felt like to be human again.

September 16, 1998 I fell in love with a little girl that barely weighed eight pounds. I have never stopped loving her.