Today was an odd sort of day in which I continually flipped through the different versions of the story of my life, rather like changing channels with a remote. I saw my stories ebbing and flowing like the colors in a kaleidescope. I noticed that sometimes I felt quite peaceful and pleased with my life, and others I felt like an enormous failure. These dramatic shifts and swings in my view of my world I attribute to reconnecting with my beloved niece, whom I spoke to today for the first time in three years. It was a joyous thing to hear her voice, to learn about her life and all that she has created for herself. But in opening the door to her, a few little wispy black imps snuck in, scampering past her feet.

They are the little imps that used to always inhabit my thoughts, the ones that whisper that I am ugly, stupid and no good. They are the ones that inhabit any interaction with my mother and sisters, poking their bony fingers in all the old painful wounds.

I had no idea, until I stopped interacting with my family of origin, just how much pain I was carrying around, tightly packed away in the various corners of my mind. In the small hours while Sam sleeps, I have wandered back to the past, following the trails of the pain I feel now, back to its various points of origin. This is sometimes a horrifying process, for it means sitting still with things I have avoided for sometimes 40 years. I sometimes feel punched and pummeled by what comes up, literally feel the pain in my chest as the full impact hits me.

My mother left me. Because I was stupid and ugly and no good. And she left my sister, too, who must also have been stupid, ugly and no good. Because our mother took the other sister, who was pretty and clever and wonderful, with her when she went and left no forwarding address, just a bundle of food stamps and rent paid up until the end of the month.

And as a stupid, ugly and useless girl I presented myself to the world--a cracked and broken vessel into which no amount of love could be poured and ever reach the top. And I attracted very little love into my life, very little at all. Mostly, what I met with out there was desperation. I understand now that what I met was a match for what I carried inside--desperation.

Walking in the desert this evening with Sam I feel the perfect heat, the moment when the outside temperature matches my body temperature and the sun is low enough not to scorch, high enough to give the most lovely light. More and more lately this moment in a summer evening has tugged at me, gnawed at me. There is something I want from it, but I don't know what, and I remember that feeling of desperation.

Sam is roaring and chasing me and I can barely remember where I am going, that I am running, or why. I am having trouble remaining in the present, I am only here in this desert by the slightest thread of connection.

I want something, but I don't know what it is. I see hot asphalt and a Slurpee at 7-11, summer evenings, warm air, something lacking, something painful, something I want. It's back in Concord, where I must have been maybe 11. We lived there for a few months, I fell off a skateboard and broke my ankle. Construction workers brought me home, my father wasn't around so my sister called an ambulance.

I want something from that hot day, that memory, I want something that I can't have and I don't know what it is. But I notice for the first time that sense of wanting, it is something I carried with me for most of my life, so familiar that I never noticed it until I experienced the absence, and then return of it. That reconnecting with my niece, despite her own sparkle and loveliness, awakened old memories of my family, and of that feeling of emptiness and want so entwined with a dark sense of self loathing.

We are heading home me and Sam, the darkness is gathering, our foot tracks becoming indistinct. We reach the road--hot asphalt--and Sam trips over the toes of his new shoes and goes down on one knee hard. I am there in an instant, moving with that superhero lightning speed that eludes me in any other moment in time. I scoop him up in my arms and blow on his knee and give him kisses and snuggle him while I carry him home. Home is a long way away now, now that this heavy child is in my arms, but I carry him and he cries until he's done and hugs into me and as my breath comes heavier he pats my arm to comfort me.

And suddenly it hits me, I know what it is I want from that memory. I want this. I want someone besides a man in a hardhat splattered with tar, a man I don't know, to pick me up when I fall and break my ankle. I want someone to notice that it hurt. I wanted someone to hold me and love me up. I wanted someone to carry me safely home.

And no one did. Not then, or in all the years following when the injuries were so much more sinister than this.

And so later, I sit with that. And I'm sitting with it still, and writing it out here and tying off the end of this little helium balloon and sending it out into the sky. Get along little memory, go find a happy place to play. I release you now.

There was no one there that day, that year, that lifetime of mine, so long ago. But now, here I am. I am here. And suddenly, that is enough.

I scoop up my boy, I examine my heart, I look back at that child that I was. In the cool comfort of our home, we patch Sam's knee with an enormous bandaid and draw on it with magic markers. And then we play dinosaurs, start to yawn, go to bed, fall asleep.

We are safe, we are loved, we are home, we are whole. And, at least for now, the desperation has subsided.

Bless you Mom, bless you my sisters. I'll see you out there on that field, the one I read about somewhere the other day, the green meadow out there beyond the place of right-doing and wrong-doing, beyond the place of judgement, pain and hurt. I don't know when, but I will see you there one day.