little nugget is what she called some prospective offspring swaddled in lush affection.
i daydream on the words. little nugget some minuscule oblong shape that reshapes the future.
not mine, of course. or mine only by a degree removed. or two, really. grand mother i've never been either, of course.
…but to hold that little nugget in my arms (do they sleep?) safe and secure (if it squirms i'll return it to its mother) the product of my dearest boy…
a father a dad
a stranger who lived at home sometimes, who crushed the breath from me, who ridiculed me, mocked me, slapped me, threw me into a corner of the kitchen, laughing (he wouldn't remember) because i couldn't fight back. i didn't fight back. i don't fight a father a dad
the unexamined assumptions of third-wave feminism plated my abraded flesh at fixed points "Men don't want to be fathers." my armor in perpetuity over scars of rejection abandonment dislocation the primal fear of being exposed helpless devoured by wolves.
thirty years later bright eyes met across the gap of a generation (he could have been my son) and i can no longer retreat unchallenged to the cave of intellectual authority and sacrosanct belief.
a man emotionally invested in a fetus unborn, aborted.
he could have been-- he still wants to be.
words would have left me unpierced, dull darts against an armored heart. but in the depths of those eyes, in those unfiltered pools of honesty, i saw reflected the broken bud of grief.
maybe he loved me once, i'll never know. a man's world is encumbered by a silence he bears to the grave, his eyes creased by a folded bruise of unspoken loss, a wound trodden upon by careless wives, daughters, girlfriends, partners, an unblotted stigmata that blooms through my own life, weaving father to son, son to brother, brother to friend.
i understand, for one brief moment, the shadow cast by female privilege over long years of unhappy womanhood. i want to say 'i'm sorry' but find i cannot forgive.
i meditate instead upon the words little nugget and imagine some minuscule oblong shape that reshapes the past.
(maybe he loved me, once.)
February 5, 2021
