It started out small like that. Just a little something for those moments when I couldn’t protect myself from scary memories long enough to walk to the corner and get some fresh air. It was harmless. Nothing I couldn’t put a lid on whenever I wanted.
When I would take a hit, it would just ease the rawness of everything. Make the rough edges of all these callouses not scrape so bad against my heart. It’s like, I could just breathe, finally. Hear my own self breathing, but without the hammer banging in my head, without the siren ripping through my blood.
With the drugs I could feel like a soft woman again. Access that lush, cloudy part of me that was able to give and forgive. The part of me not consumed with hate and rage, so easily set off by the slightest of triggers. To this day I still can’t sleep with any clothes on, no sheets neither. No matter how deep into winter it might be. Warmth ain’t nothing if you don’t feel safe. And I always keep at least one light on. I need to know that I can see and be seen, even when my eyes are closed. I need to trust I can find my body at all times.
So it began just with these little getaways for when I couldn’t go nowhere. And with it flowing through my system, I could dance again. And I used to dance all the time, you know. Before the incident. Before I couldn’t feel the fleshy part of my thighs without bursting into tears. And if you understood anything about what happened, you know it’s not my fault I lost touch with myself. Once a counselor told me that it’s the detachment I need to heal. It’s that’s need for connection leading me to abuse myself. But I tell you, it didn’t feel like abuse at the time. It felt like relief. Like something had to give, else I’d explode. I’d be dead. And what would you choose if you didn’t really have a choice? Dying, or getting high to make it through a long night.
Actually, it’s a miracle I could even become somebody’s mother, the natural way I mean. That I could even allow a man inside of me without shattering to pieces. I mean the nerve of some of these fake-ass people who want to hug up on my baby but talk shit about me. This baby came from some deep soul healing, from my own courage. I still can’t put into words how I made a way for any type of love to take root in me. But for Isaiah, I found a way. We found a way. A sweet and lovely way, and that’s where this baby girl came from.
And I did too stop when I got pregnant, before I got pregnant actually. Four months before she was conceived I had a dream one night of being surrounded by flowers on all sides. I was resting in a sweet field of pink and purple hydrangeas. Softness and beauty were all around me. My fingers seemed to be the petals themselves, my body a vibrant sea of stems. And I don’t even understand flowers like that, but in the dream I knew what these flowers were, and I knew what they meant. It was a sign that my daughter was coming, a message from my forward potential, a fracture of light in the dark that would never, could never, go away.
This is how I know motherhood saved me. I had this new urge inside of me, I wanted, needed, to feel again. To feel life for myself again. I didn’t want to escape reality anymore, didn’t want miss out on anything. It’s like I had a new tongue, new hands, new eyes. I woke up from that dream and could sense a greater life waiting for me beyond the walls of my addiction.
The next week I was in a treatment program my mother and aunt helped find for me. My mother dipped into her retirement to pay for half of it and my aunt covered the rest as a gift to me. They believed in me. And so I was believing in me too. I didn’t tell them about the dream or the baby that was coming. I knew they would think I was crazy and wasn’t ready to be anybody’s mother. But I knew. I was already communing every morning with my baby. Writing her letters. Talking to her about the recovery process. She became my strategy for temptations. I had a sponsor to call, but really, it was my baby that I called on first. Her sweet spirit, lifted me. Kept me safe inside myself.
I met Isaiah on the first Tuesday in April, at a tea shop I had discovered a few weeks earlier on one of my morning walks around town. I could feel our connection, our future, even before he told me his name. It’s like the baby nudged me forward, whispered to me, That’s my father.
There weren’t that many tables open, so I grabbed a seat by the window even though it hadn’t even been fully cleared. A few inches away sat a professor and his student, engrossed in the review of some document. Later Isaiah would tell me all about one of his students and how he was encouraging her to not limit herself because she was finishing an undergrad honors thesis. He would tell her to act as if even this paper was her doctoral dissertation. Go all out, be thorough, in all things. You don’t have to have a PhD to be an expert, he would always tell his advisees.
So absorbed they were in their back and forth, they didn’t know a stray paper that had slipped to the floor and under my table. I reached down to pick it up for them and my eyes fell on the cover page of her thesis. I read the title, and smiled at the one word that seemed to mean the most to me in that moment: Remontant Flowering Potential of Twelve Hydrangea Macrophylla.
I don’t care what anyone says. Nobody else was there inside my amniotic fluid but my baby, and she’d tell you if she could. She’d scream it from the mountaintop if she could: my waters were clean! I was eating all that damn kale. I was drinking coconut water, taking probiotics. I read stories to her, went to all my prenatal checkups, did yoga, rocked all around on that birth ball. And so what if her father wasn’t there in the end. He was there when it mattered most. The only time I ever made love in the dark and didn’t have a panic attack was the night she was conceived. Our daughter, Holy. The loveliest creation we could ever have made.
So all these assumptions that my baby must’ve been a drug baby are baseless and just cruel. Look how perfect my baby came out. Healthier than all the other babies. Her pediatrician told me so himself. And I breastfed her, exclusively, well past the recommended 6 months. She didn’t even start having a bottle until my mother had to take her for me. Until the day I picked up a needle again. But you go ahead and check if you don’t believe me. You go back and look at her records. You won’t find a trace of heroine in her system. They making this shit up as they go. Picking away at a mother who had a relapse. Like I’m the first woman in the world to ever lose her mind and mistake her devil for her savior.
But I am not going to let them just rewrite our history, and make me out to be some sort of unfit mother. I know who I am. I know I’m a good mother. I was not using! Soon as I felt her spirit coming I put that shit down. And she was almost a whole fucking year old before I felt like I needed my protection again.
I first met Coretta as a child in a short story I wrote. I have been playing around with who she becomes as an adult, given the traumas she survives in her childhood. Listen to more about my character development process in “Finding Coretta,” a selection from our Library’s Sound Bites archive.