COME TO MY WINDOW
(Published in The Womanist Literary Journal)
Spring 2005
In the Spring time of 2005, when my mother died, in Central Florida, in a huge retirement village on Maiden Lane, at the blue, ranch style house, #40, a blue jay Mama built a nest on the bottom portion of her front door wreath. There were three perfect, blue-green eggs inside. By the time it was her memorial service, four days later, those eggs hatched. As all her new retired friends gathered—from Jazzercise, from water aerobics, from the soup kitchen, from the NICU, from the Make-A-Wish office—those baby birds chirped and chirped and chirped.
As my two Aunts, my mother’s younger sisters, as they fluttered and cried and stretched in the generic wood pew, front row, VIP seating, I kept my eye on Mary, my mom’s best friend, unofficially. It was Mary, who pointed out the bird nest, saying,
“Oh! well would you look at that? Oh, Vianne would have been so pleased.”
Both my mom and Mary had become avid bird lovers. Just another weird hobby she picked up in her retirement, that spun her farther away from the mother I knew. She lived in the Villages for five years. She saved up all her money from 30 years as a New Jersey State Librarian to retire early. At the age of 60, she was born again. She couldn’t wait to transform back into a teenager, while I couldn’t wait to become a full-fledged adult. Not her little girl. Not dependent on her approval.
And now Mary does the breathing motion they must teach in yoga, if I ever had taken yoga. Mary shows her love through action. Not words. Just like my mother.
Just breathe.
You’ll be ok.
You’re doing just fine.
Just breathe.
Mary reminds me. As my mother takes off and flies.
*
Winter 2018
In the winter of 2018, my 18-month-old daughter Emmy, with her wispy, barely there hair and cat leggings is jumping on the faux window seat. This is technically her second home although Fort Greene, Brooklyn is the only place she’s known. She’s back lit by pinks and oranges and gold, in her glass castle in the sky. It’s magic hour, post nap, pre dinner, bath and then bed. She’s swaying and I grab my iphone to find a song.
I need a song. She needs a song. We need our song.
I tap Melissa Ethridge’s, Come to my Window and now I’m swaying and cackling:
Come to my window
Crawl inside
Wait by the light of the moon
Come to my window
I'll be home soon
*
Fall 1995
In the fall of 1995, I’m 18 years old, staring out the window of my dorm room, on the second floor. The sky is pink and orange and gold about to duck under the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’m a freshman at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, not the famous UNC Chapel Hill campus in Raleigh-Durham. It’s a tiny, liberal arts campus in Asheville, that sounds like Nashville, a hidden gem city that will be compared to Brooklyn, where I will wind up 23 years into the future.
It’s 5pm and I’m so hungry with a homesickness that keeps my voice trapped inside my flaming pink cheeks, making me appear mute. I’m afraid to go to the cafeteria by myself. I’m not exactly friendless. But I don’t yet have my person, a best friend to make freshman year, or the entire college experience one to look back on with fondness and longing. I hum,
Come to my window
I don’t want to sing out loud because my roommate Rebecca might hear. She’s a perky blond sophomore, a native North Carolinian and former prom queen, who had never seen an Asian girl before. Her football star boyfriend Matt likes to come in on Friday afternoons and ask me,
“How do you fold those noodles in wonton soup?”
This is before the frat parties, so he can’t use being drunk as an excuse. He’s a sober racist. And instead of being attacked at school, I’m on my bed. There is nowhere safe to hide.
I’m painfully conscious of my flat, ugly, yellow face, that holds slit eyes under mono-lids. Being transracially adopted from South Korea at the age of almost three as a clean slate is beside the point since it’s my face that makes me a target. Foreign. Doesn’t speak English. My face, my race is something my white mother never considered when she pushed me to choose a college in the mid-south that at least had pockets of Democratic pull, and not the deep south that was blood red Republican. All she cared about was the overabundance of sun exposure. And the cheap tuition. She was a planner. And the south was where she wanted to end up when she retired.
We started in my freshman year of high school, turning the annual family vacation into research. Always by car. First Virginia, then Georgia, South Carolina, and finally North Carolina. Once we spiraled and scrolled our way through the blue ridge mountains and landed in Asheville, North Carolina—that was it. I was home. I found the mountains, the ridges, the different levels so interesting. So deep compared to no name New Jersey. Compared to the boring, flat ranch level home I grew up in; I longed for stairs. I wanted to go up a level, even if it was just one. I wanted to yell from the top the way my neighbors did.
“I’m here. I’m up here.”
I wanted to be anywhere else than always traveling in the same spot.
As my freshman days fly by, I desperately seek out other Asian faces thinking like pain would match with like pain. I’m done chasing white light. I count only six Asians on campus and that includes the international ones. Like Mayumi from Japan who by spring semester will become my UNCA best friend. Because she reminded me of Kelly, my Korean adoptee friend from 7th grade. I coincidently met Alice, the only other Korean adoptee on campus, who played volleyball. No. And smoked pot, absolutely not.
I also fall in love with my first Asian American boy. His name is Jay Chan. He’s Chinese American, the president of the International Student Association, but also the Christian Club. Yes, to other countries. No to God. He was also our orientation leader and I’ve never felt such heat consume me.
I would dial the numbers, just to listen to your breath.
And I would stand inside my hell, and hold the hand of death.
You don't know how far I'd go, to ease this precious ache.
And you don't know how much I'd give, or how much I can take.
Just to reach you. Just to reach you. Oh... to reach you. Oh...
Jay was a photographer. He carried around a Nikon point and shoot, always a roll of film in his back pocket. I took Photography 101 because I had a genuine interest. And I thought if I needed help developing, he’d be there. To guide my hand. To make me go from blurry to in focus. To not crop me out of the picture. To rub toner, then fixer solution. So I stayed. So we would be frozen in this moment forever.
I’d play Melissa Etheridge’s Come to My Window on high volume on my Walkman. And scream at the top of my lungs, at the highest point on campus.
I don't care what they think. I don't care what they say
What do they know about this love anyway?
Come, come to my window,
I'll be home, I'll be home, I'll be home
I'm coming home
The place where every Friday night the astronomy club would point their telescopes to Orion’s belt. Star gazing, like a perfect romantic date. If you had a date. Which I did not.
I’d go as high as I could, sit on the bench and watch the fog weave and tumble onto itself. I’d suck the cool air in. I’d breathe in the smell of burning wood smashed against the impending winter chill. I’d think about my liberal arts required Humanities class—fate vs. free will. I’d wonder which is more true—Aristotle’s “Happiness depends upon ourselves” or Socrates “To find yourself, think for yourself” from my Philosophy 101 class.
I wanted Jay to come to my window and wait by the light of the moon. I wrote bad poetry about my unrequited love. My Creative Writing 101 professor named Tommy, who was a dad to toddler kids, would just raise his eyebrow and say,
“Lynne. I just think it’s too abstract.”
But Tommy I wanted to say—does love have a color?
*
Winter 2018
The sky is pink and orange and gold. My daughter is laughing and bouncing.
I’m 37 weeks pregnant with baby #2 that still doesn’t have a name. Because if I give her a name, that will give her an identity. That will make her real. And anytime I’m in grief, I go straight into denial. Nope. No baby baking in my womb.
The truth is—I didn’t want her. This second baby. My first baby—wanted. I fought with my husband for a year and a half on how much I wanted a baby. Because I wanted to leave a legacy, create roots, have someone who looked like me. I wanted a quick fix to my adoption issues.
But once I had the baby, I wanted to stuff her back into the Tiffany’s box from where she came. Because even if I birthed a pink diamond that was priceless, motherhood sucked. No one talked about the horror, the complete shit show, the body at war, not at rest. No one told me. And so, all my family and friends who were mothers, I squinted at in suspicion. What happened to having my back? Only my best friend Nikki had the guts to tell me I was too emotionally unstable to become a mother. And we stopped being friends because the truth hurts.
When Emmy turned 9 months old, when we were kind of sleeping and the reality of what our lives had become sunk in, I started to feel hopeful. But because of the careless use of the mini pill, I got pregnant again. And thought—how the fuck do I still have eggs in there? I was 40 years old. Eggs did a suicide cliff dive at 35, or so everyone claimed. I took six pregnancy tests and still. It was true. My life was over. Because no one survives having two kids.
And so, I seriously considered aborting this mistake, this accident. I’ve been pro-choice since the age of eleven when my mom voted for Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election. And in 2016, I would vote for Hillary Clinton because she was pro-choice, but also, because she was so much like my mother.
However, after researching how long you could go—twelve weeks to abort, it banged up against knowing how much has developed, by twelve weeks. When Emmy was a growing fruit salad, I’d obsessively read about each new human development. Fingernails, smell, I don’t remember everything, but it’s a lot. And on its way to becoming a viable human, not just nameless, non-identifying cells.
I wasn’t in dire straits. And although we were struggling financially, maybe I’d have to give up cable or two cups of coffee a day. Or eating out all the time. In the end, I couldn’t—abort. I also would never give a baby up for adoption. So, the only true option was to keep the baby. But that didn’t mean I was ready to be a mother to two under two, an actual Facebook support group. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. This motherhood gig. I was already failing my first. And now a second baby would ruin my life in an endless, delayed, I will never be free again.
But for now—we have this song—Come to my window, I'll be home soon.
*
February 2, 2018
In this one you are in a see-through plastic bubble home. You have no name on your incubator. Just FC Connor. Female Child, Connor. You are 39 weeks and 3 days old. You are full term. You were breech, so scheduled c-section even if your existence was not planned. Your birth was so easy, eerily so. But then on the first night of your life, you stopped breathing. Turned blue. And ever since, the NICU is the only home you’ve known.
In this one you are naked except for a newborn size diaper. And the tubes up your nose, on your chest. Wrapped around your tiny foot. Next to all the tiny, sad, see through, baby bird preemies in the NICU—you are huge.
When my father-in-law saw your picture and in a sweeping disregard for the grief and fear that radiate on the edges of the frame, he said,
“You are strong. You’ll be fine.”
And even though this is all we hope. All we want. I see the truth behind this false positive. This non-emotional support. Even though that’s all I expect from my husbands’ parents.
As you keep breathing or destating—the term meaning your breath drops below 90. Destating if you hit 80. Bad. Destating if you’re below 70. Well.
Just breathe.
“Oh, this one. She’s a cutie. I sneak in extra hugs for her. Hope that’s ok?” a cheery, high ponytail wearing brunette nurse chirps.
It’s Friday and I know with the weekend coming, there will be no tests, no updates from Dr. Pak. No chance of my new baby going home. I’ve stopped asking what the nurses names are since their shifts rotate so much. But this is the first nurse who’s treated my baby like a baby, not FC Connor.
I somehow manage to say, “Please do that. Please visit her and hug her as much as you can. Please.”
This after the loud rumble of a screen going up to give the family with twin preemies, born at 28 weeks old, privacy. This illusion doesn’t matter since we never talk or make eye contact if we happen to be visiting at the same time.
There is a strange collective feeling of witnessing our greatest fears, the grim reaper like cigarette smoke, hovering, dense, circling, waiting. All the incubator beds attached to monitors that beep, steadily like heartbeats. And then like piercing ambulance alarms signaling danger. Reminding us nothing is sacred. No baby is safe.
I stop talking because the tears are threatening to break the false rainbow bubble of hope that keeps this wing going. Tears will surely ruin the unspoken rule of no sadness, no black hole thinking. It’s completely normal to have babies live inside a plastic bubble and not be touched. Only every three hours when its diaper changing time and feeding bottle time.
I stop talking because if she knew I was an orphan and the worst trauma I can think of is not to be hugged every second of the day as a newborn. And this NICU setup is like an orphanage, sort of. I just stop talking and hope this nurse can read my mind. And know how grateful I am for her.
Life at home continues on.
Emmy keeps climbing on the ottoman by the window that looked down on Fort Greene Park, where Remy our pug loved to sniff other dog’s butts. Where Remy’s tongue hung so far out of his mouth people liked to say,
“Wow! His tongue is so long, I’d like to smoke that.”
Emmy does not understand what is happening out of sight, out of mind. We keep saying she’s a big sister now. We read the Book, I’m a Big Sister Now.
“Pat pat pat, I burp the baby.”
“Shhhhhh. The baby’s sleeping.”
In this one—you are not yet Rainey. You are not yet home. But you are in the family. And soon this photograph will be part of your birth story.
In this one, you are on the cusp, you are about to take flight, you are gone, and yet, this metamorphosis translated from han means:
Just breathe.
You’re gonna be okay.
사랑해요 (saranghaeyo) I love you.