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By Root 92 0

to watch the speech at Grant Park, and I had to explain why so many people were crying and shaking their heads and saying they never thought a black man would be president even though you guys kept saying, “He’s brown.” The day after the election, some moms were talking in the school-yard about how California banned gay marriage and you asked me if that meant our friend Joann was divorced now and all the moms jumped in to say no, and I added, “Someday, that’ll be fixed,” and I was mad at myself for not doing more to stop that from happening. I often feel like I’m not explaining things right to you, probably because half the time I don’t understand them myself. How can I explain why someone would weep because the new president is brown or protest because a woman married the woman she loved?

Dad and I talk over each other to tell you stories about teamwork or ingenuity or resolve—Venus and Serena Williams playing each other at Wimbledon, the anonymous men who made the Golden Gate Bridge and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Hoover Dam, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. I remember driving home one night under a full moon. You guys were in the way back arguing about which was larger, the sun or the moon, and after that was settled, Dad told you about Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. “They were all the way up there,” I said, tapping on the car window, hardly able to believe it, as proud as I would’ve been if I’d managed the mission myself. “They walked on that moon right there.”

Some of your questions have gone unanswered, or rather, too answered. When you asked why we only go to church when we’re with Greenie and Jammy, I must’ve started and stopped six times. As I stammered on about world religion and the gods people worship, Georgia, you wiggled out of bed, strapped on a pair of my high heels, and limped over to see yourself in the full-length mirror. Claire followed you, saying, “My turn, now it’s my turn!”

That night, I asked Dad if he considered himself a spiritual person and he surprised me by saying yes unequivocally.

“Really?” I said.

“You know when I feel spiritual?” he said. His lips got all puffy, which for him is like falling to his knees and weeping. “When I’m with the girls.”

We were quiet after that, but I reached over and found his hand under the comforter and squeezed it. So much of our intuition and apprehension and belief about the world turns out to be impossible to communicate, but he had told me something big, something defining.

You are sacred to me too.

We wanted more kids. Well, I did and Dad was willing. But after my first year of breast cancer treatment, something popped up on my left ovary. It did not wax and wane, as cysts do. It just sat there. Then it started getting bigger, and Dad was adamant that my ovaries come out, regardless of the consequences.

It was a simple procedure that left me with four tiny scars. And it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. All those periods and backaches and Midol, and then it was over, the most essential components of my reproductive system whisked away in a bio-waste bag.

A couple months later, we packed up all the baby stuff for our friend Teresa. The BabyBjörn, a handful of binkie leashes we’d clip to your onesies, the ladybug infant nail-clippers.

“You might as well take these too,” I said, handing her two mobiles. Teresa was so grateful as Dad carried the collapsed crib out to her car.

“Now we can turn that room into an office,” he said, as Teresa drove away with your infanthoods in her trunk.

“Great,” I said. “So we can stop raising babies and get back to work.”

Dad hugged me. Georgia, you saw me crying and said, “Mommy, don’t be a Weird-o.”

I can’t say yet how sudden menopause changed me, us. I looked at you differently, I know that. You became more and bigger. But the thing that utterly altered the way I look at you was not the cancer or the hysterectomy. It was Aaron, Cousin Kathy’s lanky, broad-shouldered boy.

It was raining that night. A lazy summer rain. Kathy wanted Aaron to stay home but he said, “I’m just gonna swing by and