She was. She wasn’t. She will never be.
She lay in the antiseptic, clear bassinet in the clear, antiseptic hospital room I was trying so hard to avoid. I have always hated hospitals – their overwrought professionals, pink and blue hallways, a hand sanitizer around every corner. Yes, I never thought I would find myself crouching in the weight of her coming, death already come and gone. Pushing her out, her heart finished, no longer beating, my right foot crunched into the top of the toilet handle, two doctors with plastic gloves and I am so sorry, but that is all faces guiding her out of me.
Yes, I remember the smell of her. The blood. The blood. The blood. She, capped in a makeshift knitted white hat with a thin pink ribbon hem, not moving in the nurse’s hands. Not crying for me, for milk, for warmth. So still. So still.
The smell? Yes. It is of me.
She was, still. Mine. Mine, SiannehKorpoCorvah. Child of Liberia and America, child of losing one continent and gaining another, child of nighttime spirit visitations by your Loma grandparents, who called you Sia-Neh, “The Trip Was Good,” Sia-Neh in their language of the hills and deep brown soil of Lofa County, a kind of telling for the time when your father and I met, daughter, when he too, knew he was bound to leave home, perhaps too soon.
Your grandmother. KorpoCorvah. Raised four boys and two girls on potato greens and cassava leaf during the war, now lost her namesake … to nothing. Yes, they said, they all said, over and over, There was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong with her. Implied but never stated as such, your chest cutopen in autopsy, your blood spun in centrifuge to reveal the secrets of your demise. Still, you gave up nothing.
Ten days after you were due, seven, eight maybe, you turned away from my heart while you swam inside me, to say one simple thing only: No. And also, I will not.
How did I not know? I was your mother, after all, if only for nine months. Everyone says there are things that only a mother can know. What I have learned now is that the shape and content of her child’s life is not one of them.
This one last thing, then. This short list of things that I did know about you before you crawled back to where you had come from:
1) You always wanted your older brother’s hand on your crown, preferably in public.
2) You wanted no one to hear your heart. It was yours and yours only.
3) You knew too much of this world inside me, and did want to meet its cold cuttingness with your small, fragile body.
The Trip Is Always Good. Sia-Neh, they said in Loma and English.
And so.
And so.
She was.
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Shannon Gibney is a writer, teacher, and activist in Minneapolis. Her critical and creative work regularly appear in a variety of venues. Check out HANK AARON’S DAUGHTER, her Young Adult novel, on gazillionvoices.com.
© Copyright. Shannon Gibney. 2014. All rights reserved.