A mother eats an apple
Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest.
-Prayer for Good Humor, St. Thomas More
The woman held a small paper bag filled with pink-red apples gently at her hip. Tears welled up from the depths of her being. The bundle’s heft was like a measure of the life she believed she had turned away from. Walking home, clasping the fruit tenderly, she inhabited her regret like parishioners singing in the ruins of a bombed cathedral. For decades life had been growing up around the catastrophe of her choice, ever so slowly restoring her.
In that time, she had come to see that it was not really a choice she had made but an error committed as the result of neglect. In fact, she had never had a choice. A choice presupposes being informed. “Nobody ever corrected your faults,” a haughty, overbearing nun pronounced to her at one point.
It had taken years for the truth of that statement to become real for her because it was offered up so sharply. But as she found her way to calmer healers, priests of the very best, anonymous kind, she understood how the lack of nurturing in her development had primed her to become prey; a tool for someone else’s satisfaction rather than an instrument of Grace.
The night, so many years before, that she had surrendered her “yes” to the intruder, was fraught with the kinds of blunders that children who have been ignored and spoiled make. First, she turfed out a visiting friend in favor of what her lust demanded. Then she invited the devil in to impress
him. In the end, evil impressed on her a throbbing pattern of scarlet bruises. The violation introduced a life uninvited.
In the present, her daily here and now as a woman on her way to buy apples, she often stopped to dance with a gypsy child in the street. Little Sara had become her daughter by desire. Partnering with the happy urchin always eased the ripening ache inside her. But the events of the past remained embedded in her consciousness. Numbed by alcohol, she had proceeded in utter shame, accompanied by her husband, to stop the seed invading her.
At the clinic, she sat next to a well-to-do couple. The pair were sobbing in each other’s arms over the election they conceived to be practical. On the other side of her sat a weary Hispanic woman who shrugged as she confided “This is my fifth time here… I’ve already got too many children.”
Inside the examining room, a glib doctor informed her that she had a tipped uterus. “Ha. They used to think that stopped you from getting pregnant! You wish huh?” He quipped nervously. She wondered why she had never known this detail about her anatomy. Some hours later she was wheeled out of the operating room. Nausea enveloped her like a cold fluorescent blanket. The newborn ache, like an echo, pulsed in her being.
Her husband took her to a Spanish restaurant afterwards. She stared at the platter of paella they were to share. All she could see were body parts in the torn orange meat scattered on yellow rice. Still she had never eaten Spanish food so she made the best of it. The exotic meal didn’t ease the agony. Why had she and this man come to this? How could he seem so forgiving? Had he been with another person too? Betrayal emboldened by guilt, fuses lost souls.
Eventually her despair drove the husband away. As her desperation escalated, she grabbed at more and more of everything outside her to cope with the increasing pain. Precious years were gobbled up as she grew more hollow.
Then, one day, at the nadir of her gluttony, she stopped. She stopped gulping alcohol. She stopped gorging on empty foods that were easy to regurgitate –as if throwing up might hurl the horror out of her being. Still later, she stopped clinging to other people.
Alone, finally, in the healing arms of solitude, she connected to the spirit that is present even in absolute darkness. One evening walking in her own world of quiet on a busy street, she came upon a vagabond holding an old accordion like a baby. He played a tune called Oblivion.
As the melody developed, she found herself imagining the son she had believed she had chosen to abandon. She felt him near. She heard his voice, she began to know how it might have been to hold him.
So it was that she relaxed enough to feel the weight of a child in a few pounds of shining apples. Then she was free to love the children in the streets, like her little flaxen haired Sara. They cavorted together in the long afternoon shadows while other souls were hurrying by.
One soft overcast Spring evening, as they joined laughing and clapping in the rhythm of an improvised tarantella, a friend who behaved like a husband, stood nearby. He was attentive, yet respectful of her need to be unfettered.
His reassuring presence freed her into forgiveness. Whirling on the pavement holding Sara’s grubby brown hands, the woman blessed every person involved in the apparent tragedy. Her ache slipped away with the past that had formed her sorrow and her heart opened enough for regret to rest with joy. When she waved goodbye to Sara for the last time all she carried was compassion.
Just so, it occurred to the woman that bringing apples home was all she had to do. To be present in the simplest act of gathering sustenance. As she took the apples out of the bag and rested them on the kitchen counter, another perspective was opened.
She felt strongly a sensation that the mercantile atmosphere in the clinic all those years before was due to a racket. The on-site pregnancy test administered by the harried staff could never be verified. The New York city rent for the location must have been high. The $300 dollars she paid for the procedure must have been one small part of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the business earned by helping women execute their supposed choice… What if she hadn’t actually lost a child?
She picked up a gleaming deep pink apple. “Every soul becomes a parent, eventually.” she thought, as the newer memory of little Sara haloed in the day’s fading light filled her mind. The image of the dancing child blowing kisses at her gave way to a gentle calm. Her maternity was inescapable.
“I love all of you” she whispered and bit into the fruit, truly tasting its sweet flesh for the first time.