What Came Before

Her life began on the day she became aware of herself as a person. She had discovered analytical thinking, although she didn't call it that. What four-year old would? But it pleased her to think, so she engaged in it most of the day, wondering about herself, her feelings, the people who shared her life, and what came before.

She had memories prior to this age, bursts of disjointed capriccios accompanying a series of short complicated dances, a flutter of tiny feet that went suddenly still, waiting for the music to begin again. She vaguely knew that time continued to pass during the silence of the music and constantly sought the lapse, hoping to figure it all out. She remembers having feelings in these memories, but she doesn’t remember having thoughts, like she had now.

She remembers being in the garden with her sister, cutting the grass with a pair of scissors. She held the grass while her sister cut. Only her sister cut her finger instead and made it bleed, and she ran into the house and cried. Her Uncle Freddie was there; a nice man. He had come over to visit that day and was sitting on the couch with her mother. He chuckled when she told them what had happened. And it hurt her feelings that he did this. Thinking about this memory, she knew it wasn’t a mean laugh, because her Uncle Freddie was a nice man. But she doesn’t remember much about her mother, only a vague disapproving shadow sitting on the couch.

She remembers eating dirt behind the house, and the memory of that dirt was so wonderful. It tasted better than anything she had ever eaten. But she knew she wasn’t supposed to eat the dirt, and one day her mother found her and beat her and she didn’t eat the dirt any more.

She remembers asking her mother for a drink of water. Her mother was doing the dishes at the time. But her mother had become cross, and impatient, and had handed her a glass of water with an angry, “Here!” Only the water had soap in it and she didn’t want to drink it. Her mother yelled at her and made her drink it anyway, and she got sick and threw up.

She remembers taking a bath in the porch sink where they did the laundry, and that the soap burned her skin. Because of this, she dreaded the bath. She wanted to cry and tell her mother, but she didn’t because she knew her mother would be cross again, and she didn’t want her mother to be cross.

She remembers her mother playing Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White on the record player in the front room, her mother’s favourite song, and dancing around the coffee table with her mother. She remembers the exquisite happiness of this moment, and how sad she was when her mother didn’t want to dance anymore.

She remembers when the Man and the Woman came to live with them. Later, she was to learn that the Man’s name was Jesus, like the baby Jesus, and she thought it was strange that they called him that because the baby Jesus was so pure and holy and she somehow knew that this man was a bad man. But she was to call him Jess, which some people did, and she was to call the woman gramma, because she was her mother’s mother. They lived in a room made for them in the garage. She has a memory, before she knew he was a bad man, back when they were still the Man and the Woman, before she learned their names, the Woman had gone into the house, and she had wandered into the garage and into the room, and the Man was sleeping. And she looked at the Man. And he woke up. But that’s all she has of that memory.

She had a memory that didn’t have any pictures with it, only feelings. The memory was illusive, vague, but strong, overpowering. It was a memory of happiness, of love, of feeling safe, and of how suddenly all those wonderful feelings went away. At four, she spent a lot of time by herself. And she would cry. But sometimes the tears were sweet and comforting. And being by herself, instead of playing with the other children, gave her all the time she needed to think about this memory, to try to figure it out. She decided that it must be the memory of when she was a baby, of the time when her mother held her and paid attention to her, the way other mothers do with their babies, and that when she wasn’t a baby anymore, her mother stopped holding her or paying attention to her. Later, when she was a young girl at Catholic school, she would believe that she held within her the memory of the Garden of Eden and that her terrible loneliness was God’s punishment to his children for having defied him.

Much later in life, when she was a grandmother, and on the path to healing, she would learn, from her mother, the truth of where that memory came from.

As a newborn, she was told, she had been sent to live with her father’s people, a Pueblo tribe in Northern New Mexico. But when she was a toddler, her mother had a change of heart and wanted her back.

'I had to send your father to bring you back,' her mother had told her, so casually, as if it was of no consequence, as if she were discussing last year’s rose bushes. They were having coffee at her mother’s house in the high desert, out on the back patio. They were huddled together in their night robes, two ladies, one very old, the other on the way, trying to keep warm in the early morning desert sun.

'They wouldn’t give you back,' her mother had explained. 'They wanted to keep you, so that’s why I had to send your father to go get you. And oh, you cried! You just would not stop crying. Oh, you made me so angry, sitting in the corner all the time crying for your Nana. Your Nana, your Nana! That’s all I ever heard was your Nana!'

This thing that she just said, this truth she just revealed, does she know? Does she in any way comprehend how it reached into my very essence and brutally grabbed forgotten memories, images of a little snot nosed girl, huddled in the corner, weeping for her Nana, alone, devastated. How can you sit there, so casual, as if you didn’t just tell me that it was you who had destroyed my soul? How could you have been so stupid? How could you have been so cruel? Oh, that poor little girl, that poor innocent devastated tiny little girl.

I said nothing of these thoughts. I kept them to myself. What was the point? Why beat up an old woman who, in her own perverted way, did the best she could?

‘Well, it’s cold out here,’ my mother said in time. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed and read my book. Are you coming in?’

‘No, Mom. I think I’ll stay out here a bit longer and enjoy the sun.’

I sipped my coffee, gazing out at the cold blue desert. I heard a piercing call, poignantly lonely in the still silence. I looked up and saw a white hawk circling overhead, tipping one wing and then the other as it made minute adjustments in its flight.

I’d heard a story from one of my mother’s neighbours a few days before, a Hopi woman who lived in a trailer on the other side of the wash. Her name was Mary. I had gotten to know Mary over the years during my visits to my mother's house. She was short and squat, with the high cheekbones and broad face of her people. She lived with Howard, a 60 year old child with blue myopic eyes that looked huge behind the think lenses had needed. Mary had adopted him as a young boy when he was abandoned by his parents. He was expert at making a pot of coffee, though not much else, and was always pleased to do the honours when I came to visit.

Mary had told me that a white hawk had recently been seen in the high desert foothills. She explained that the white hawk used to live here, many years ago, long before her time, but that it had left this place along with the grizzly bear and the Serrano Indians.

'This is a good thing,' she told me. 'A very good sign. It means that these mountains and this desert are healing and that balance is returning to this world.'

But that was all she would tell me, waving me off and claiming senility when I wanted to know more.

The hawk called again. Its call was smooth and full, nothing like the scream associated with other hawks, but instead a gentle soft whistle that found places in my soul. I was enthralled with this hawk and thinking of Mary's words. Something was floating around in my head, tendrils of a memory that I was struggling to grab on to.

A picture came to mind, of a central fire and the smell of wood smoke, of a feeling of delicious mystery as well as safety, of love and belonging, and the voice of my grandmother, my Nana, as I sat in her lap. She was giving me the story of the Stone Child, a little boy who was an orphan. He was so lonely that he had wrapped himself around a stone. She said that this was my story, a gift from her to me, and that I would remember the story when I needed it.

She told me that the child would not let go of the stone, not to eat, or to go into the tepee to sleep, or the play with the other children. Some of the people kept making fun of the child, and this had only made him cling all the more to the stone.

“What, are you going to marry that stone?” they taunted. “Are you going to make it your wife?”

The stone drained all the warmth from the child and made it sickly. My grandmother told me that if the child did not find the courage to let go of the stone, that it would never find its true mother, which is the mother that resides in the heart. This is the mother that we take with us when we leave our childhood home and go out into the world. Although the child did not have a real mother, it was important that he find his true mother, otherwise, he would never find his true self, and his spirit would wander, weeping and never finding a place to call home.

Sitting there, gazing up at the hawk, I went back to that horrible place that my mother had shown me as we sat there having our morning coffee, on her back patio, in the early morning desert sun. There was a terrible weeping there, and I didn’t want to get any closer because there was so much pain and grief and such bitter loneliness in it. But the hawk had sent me on this journey for a reason and I knew I had to search for what I was sent here to find.

I found the child, a little girl, wrapped around a huge cold stone. Gently, I pulled her arms from the stone, holding them firm although she struggled and fought.

‘No, no, no,’ she wailed. ‘Give me back my stone!’

‘There, there, there,’ I told her. ‘I am here. I am here. Don't cry.’

‘Nana?’

‘No, not Nana. But close enough.’

I embraced the little girl, held her to me. Her hair was a dark brown, like mine without the grey, and her eyes were the colour of my father's. I thought of a the promise that had been made to this little girl, a very long time ago, by someone who loved her more than life itself. The promise was sincere, but could not be kept, because life was like that sometimes. Could I fulfill that promise?

I looked into those eyes, identical to my own, and told her, from my heart, that we were together now, and that we would always be together, no matter what, and that she would never ever ever be alone again.