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When I left his office, I went into the clinic bathroom. I pulled my pants down and peed. I kept sitting there. Then I began to shred the white form he’d given to me into tiny pieces of paper, and I ate them, crying without a sound.

The person I hit was a brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English. She sat on the dirty silver guardrail and cried. I watched her shoulders shake. She buried her face in her hands. She said words I didn’t know into her own palms. She held her belly and rocked and wept. When they took me away I was so relieved I almost thanked the cops-strange saviors. In my head I thought take me away from this woman. I can’t be near her. I can’t look at her. I can’t even accept that she exists. The image of a grieving mother is one that could kill me.

How to Love Your Mother After She’s Dead

I FIRST MET MY MOTHER WHEN SHE WAS BORN WITH one leg more than six inches shorter than the other. A scar running kid-eye high up the length of her outer leg. From knee to hip. Stretching upward like wide pearled and waxen tracks. The eyes of a child fix on things. In the mornings while she dressed I would put my face so close to it I could feel my eyes shiver.

I first met my mother when I was born cesarean. Babies wouldn’t fit through the tilt of her hips and birth canal without their skulls caving in. When they reached in to slice the caul - that amniotic membrane between her body and mine-my eyes were already open.

I first met my mother in her childhood. In the operating rooms and hospitals that were her home for years and years. Inside the body casts. Next to the ridicule of hordes of gremlin children. Hobbling atop a shoe with a four inch wooden block attached.

I first met my mother the day my father threw a fist intimately close to her head just missing her cheekbone and instead opened up a gaping mouth in the kitchen wall that stayed like that for years.

I first met my mother the day my father’s mother said in her presence, “I don’t know why you had to marry a cripple.”

I first met my mother when she told me the only man who ever loved her right was gay, and he died “a death that laid waste to his body, Belle.” Before anyone knew what AIDS was.

I first met my mother the day she told me she could see things that weren’t there, except that they were, like armies crossing the freeway at night, like sea serpents over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, like a UFO in the sky above her house in Port Arthur, Texas, like rabid poodles in the pear tree of our house at Stinson Beach. I was 12.

I first met my mother the night I had to wipe her smear of a 55-year old self off of the casino floor in Biloxi, Mississippi. The skin of her face was as soft and pelted as a baby’s head.

I first met my mother the night before my first of three marriages, when she turned to me and said, I almost married a rodeo man. His name was J.T. The next morning at my wedding, out on a beach in Corpus Christi, in the stage of menopause wherein your periods go nuts, she bled, a giant red wound blooming behind her if she’d been shot in the ass.

I first met my mother inside the fury of our arguments - matching each other’s rage all through my puberty and her middle age, how strangely glorious her never backing down, no one ever winning, just two women’s voices like claps of thunder drowning out the world.

I first met my mother inside her lifelong leg and hip pain. Underneath the arm length scar where a steel plate masqueraded as bone. A body in pain for the duration of a life. Every hour of existence.

I first met my mother when she signed the scholarship papers setting me free.

I first met my mother her singing I see the moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees everyone I want to see, god bless the moon, and god bless me, and god bless everyone I want to see. Her voice carrying me to dream. The weight of father lifting, lifting.

If I close my eyes I can see her.

I remember the first time I saw her swim, joining me in the deep water, leaving my father standing