Recalling My Jessica

Let's just say I gave birth to an eleven-year-old, but only after her mom let me. My stepdaughter's name was Jessica and her mom's name is Marilyn. Marilyn gratefully and gracefully allowed me to be a mom in the areas she knew she could not--so I got to have a daughter. The word stepdaughter from here on won't be used. Marilyn would agree; there was no STEP in our relationship.

I met her for the first time, when she was six, and huddled with her brother on top of a picnic table because of a BIG, black, scary dog. They were friends with other children I knew, back when I was the traveling surrogate aunt to all my friends' kids. I calmed down the dog and led him away and, for some strange reason, Jason, Jessie's brother, began calling me Santa Claus. Back then, I was not fat, nor particularly jolly. NEVER had a beard, not even now, at 58. But he liked calling me that. He was not yet 4.

Jessie had hair to her waist, and loved to run and to skate, her hair streaming like one of those banners behind a prop plane. "I am HERE!" her hair proclaimed. Most of the time, she was too shy to let people know she was there at all, except when crossed. Then her nimble brain came out in sarcasm and few kids crossed her more than once. The second time was to see whether the first was a fluke. I got her when she was hitting puberty. Some might think this was a mighty tough time to get a child. They would be right; yet Jessie didn't test me the way I've heard others test stepmoms.

The one time she tried to play her mother and me off one another ... Marilyn was picking up the kids from our apartment at dinner time, and I had made Jessica do a couple of chores. This was in the first months of marriage, and I was in a body cast. I needed help with things, and I was the primary caregiver most days. My ex-husband worked late from the first week we were married through that first year. I picked the kids up from school and sometimes fed them if Marilyn was late. This day, Jessie was annoyed that I had made her--dare I say it--empty the dishwasher.

She hugged her mother and was overly affectionate. Jessie's normal greeting was, "Yeah, Mom. I'll be ready in a minute," rather than, oh, say, "Hello." Today? "Oh, Mom, I missed you. I'm all ready."

She buried her head in her mom's body and Marilyn looked at me. I had a smirk plastered on my face. "Yes, she's ready. I made her empty the dishwasher."

Jessie came out for air, glaring at me. Marilyn took a step toward me and we looked at our child, together. She was so confident. "MOM. She makes me do chores. YOU would never do these things to me, right?"

I felt Marilyn's arm around my waist and I rested an arm on her shoulder. Jessie took her favorite pose. Hip out with a hand on it, the other hand behind her back. "Well. I can see THIS isn't gonna work at all!" And the smile broke across her face like dawn, and she giggled her way down the hall.

This was the thing about her. Her fears were enormous as was her anger. Yet she could find the humor as an escape almost all the time. Almost. We used to play "What's the worst that can happen?" with her fears, and it always end that she was homeless in the parking lot of K-Mart, without money for a Blue light special. And so it would end with us laughing.

When we had the "Feminine products" talk--that she would HAVE to learn to get them herself, and, to her absolute disgust, she realized that even grown women still felt a little ooky buying them from teenage boys, she said, "So growing up does NOT make all this stuff go away?"

I said, "No, we just learn to cope with it all better, that's all."

"Well THAT'S just peachy. What on earth is the point?"

"Beats me, Jess, but at least you won't be in it alone."

"In the words of my stepmother who shall remain nameless, BIG WHOOP." And she got out of my car to buy her first box of that which will not be named. I wrote this for her and left it on her bed a couple of nights later.

Jessica's Lullaby © May 5, 1989
Tears my heart, when cries her soul in the night:
Her tongue too loose
Too stiff her walk;
Her passion too slow
Too swift her mind;
Her courage too faint
Too stout her convictions.
All new woman feeling all wrong
In this wrong-feeling all new place;
Alone, afraid,
Hush.

Soothing words and enfolding arms,
Small comforts in her night:
Rest.
You are enough as yourself --
More than enough, though less than all,
A symphony in yourself,
Sleep.
Now stroke her hair and kiss her eyes: You are enough as yourself,
Dream.

Then rests her soul in the night,
With enfolding arms and soothing words.
But how long will comfort last
When she wakes to find nothing changed? Hush.
We are enough as ourselves,
Rest
Dream
Believe.

Jessie knocked on our door at about 1:00 a.m. the night she found that poem. I went into her room, and it was clear she'd been crying. She loved the poem, but there was something bothering her. (It seemed to me that Jessie had a law that nothing would hit her until after midnight.) I sat there and, as was our custom, I gathered her in my arms and rocked a while. Finally, she came out with it. "I can't seem to keep a grandpa and they are both dead now, and even my grandmas are dying."

My parents had died in 1987 and 1989. Her dad's dad had died in 1984. For some reason, it was getting to her. "What are they doing? Is there Heaven and if there is, maybe GRANDMA wouldn't mind flying around with a harp, but that would be kinda boring, right?"

"Well, what would their ideas of Heaven be?"

She thought and thought, then said, "Cards. First all three of them play and Grandma beats the pants off them both, but she gets bored and... she has a huge, enormous garden and she goes in it with the elves and a swing."

"Sounds about right. But the grandpas?"

She had an evil smile, that child. "Okay... The grandpas still play cards and tell very bad jokes to each other and Grandpa Jim tells Poppa stories that have no end, just lots of big words... and Poppa beats the pants off of HIM!"

We both loved that, because my dad had an ego the size of Milwaukee. But then Jessie took my hand and said, "But, you know, maybe Grandpa Jim LETS him win because, you know how they played with Jay and me every New Year's Eve? Grandpa let Jay win at least one game. I asked him why and he said, 'Because Jay's the littlest and I want him to like coming.' And I asked why did it matter so much and he said, 'Because you two are Heaven to me.' So... But we aren't in Heaven, so..." And then she cried more.

I said, "I don't know what Heaven is, but if there is any possibility for him to do it, my dad is seeing this and he's shaking his head at you and telling you, what?"

"None of this SCHMALTZY STUFF!"

Bits and pieces of my daughter. Her life. Her walk. Her gestures. They all seem profound now and so precious. I cling to them all and retell them in my head at night this time of year. Jessie talked backwards. She tried out for drill team FOUR times, until she finally made it. She was content to understudy for the musical and then got to be in it, finally, because a girl broke an ankle. She felt guilty being glad that she was in it. She wrote stories when she was eight, about Albert the Hippo who lived in a house on top of a flagpole, and whose mother would tuck him in after an adventure, and feed him chicken soup.

"As you may imagine, the climb up to home was not easy for a Hippo to make," she wrote.

She died when she was just 21. Her heart gave out from bulimia and alcoholism--she knew she had not licked the problems. She promised me to get help in September, but died in August. My amazing girl. My young woman so close to finding her niche in life, her reason to be.

Don't try to tell me she was not extraordinarily special. That her gestures and fears were just like those of other children. Oh, no. Don't try to say that Jessie was average in any way. Only superlatives fit our children. Period.

Mother and Child Reunion © August, 2005
Entering her empty room, I pause.
I hear her heart cry,
See her in her chair, long hair to one side
so she won’t catch it as she leans back,
arms bracing bridged body.
She struggles to retrieve a pencil from the floor,
Fully stretched, big toe reaching without leaving her seat.
Giggling, prehensile victory as she contorts,
Her knee pointed sideways, penciled foot chest high,
she grabs her prize,
looks up at me with tilted head and smiles.
“I guess now I’ll have to work,” she says,
More laugh than whine, and turns away.
I touch my chest at the dimming light of her hair,
Translucent image floating, still.
I reach.
I hear my heart scream.
“I guess now I’ll have to live,” I say,
More sob than sigh, and turn away.

My Jessie talked backwards, but she lived too full-tilt forward I think. There will never be enough superlatives to capture Jessie's heart.