That long ago, nursing pillow hugging my body, a little one suckled in the odd hours of the night. The house silent, partner and pets perhaps dreaming of each other. During those marathon feedings, the early days of this arranged marriage when we were getting used to one another, books kept me company, prevented me drifting into the blackout sleep of the overtired.
Of those middle-of-the-night companions, I most recall Dervla Murphy’s Eight Feet in the Andes. It had been recommended to me by a woman I’d met while traveling in Guatemala—one of those brief, insignificant connections that still leaves its mark.
The book, a journey of the author and her nine-year-old daughter trekking with their mule in the rugged wilds of Peru, made me marvel. How I wanted to hand that confidence, that inner resourcefulness to the silky being curled against my breast. But it had only been a few years before that I’d found anything resembling such moxie, traveling alone to Guatemala where I stayed in comfortable if modest posadas, a plastic card ready to buy my way out of most trouble.
How do you give your child what you, yourself, do not possess?
It had only been a few years prior that a daykeeper read my Mayan horoscope. He looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t be afraid. Fear is a blocking energy.”
With those words, I had broken down in tears. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t felt afraid. Fear resided in every cell of my body. It had nearly kept me from traveling outside the country. Kept me from using my voice. From being seen. It had grown in me like a tumor that needed excision.
Yet fear wasn’t something you could surgically remove in one go—it required a slower process, a shrinking, so as not to damage all that was good. Within that year, I would return to Guatemala to study with the man who’d told me not to be afraid. I would begin my lifelong clearing of fear. I’d released enough of it to risk bringing a new being into this broken world, trusting my own imperfections to be a good-enough mother.
Nine years have passed since those hazy nights in the rocker. Neither my daughter nor I have the mettle to trek through the Andes with little more than our wits. In that, I have spectacularly failed. I have a child afraid of houseflies and new foods, a child who, like her mother, lacks the temperament to sleep in a tent on stony ground. I have my regrets. But what if the books we read heal the inheritance we leave for our children? I hold out hope that something of that story’s boldness leached into her milk dreams.
E.S. Fletcher holds an MFA from Hamline University. She has twice been a nonfiction finalist in The Loft Mentor Series. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Bohemian, Sea Stories, Confrontation and is forthcoming in Leaping Clear. She writes and teaches yoga in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Twitter: @esfletcher
