On Anniversaries

Twenty-one years ago last February, my lover told me she had cheated, by telling me that she was six weeks pregnant. She had, she told me, just six weeks to have the first-trimester abortion she intended, if I left. She asked that I decide, and let her know, as soon as possible.

I stayed, and we decided that this link, between my decision and her continued pregnancy, made me a kind of parent. That I too, was responsible, for bringing her daughter to life.

Some years later, I had a brief relationship with someone else—a woman born in India and planning to return. Our relationship divided over our conception of the individual: she said a person never really mattered. Not in the face of culture, history, the crowd.

To me, this felt like dating someone who wasn’t sure that she existed. I could not abide, I told myself, her compliance toward her devastating future. After she finished graduate school, she would return to India and marry the man her parents chose. She would pack up her writing—some of the best in our department—and her lesbianism, and take up the roles she was assigned.

Last week, Girlfriend and I took an unexpected road trip. We skirted two Great Lakes (Ontario and Erie), gaped at Niagara Falls, and filed the paperwork so that we might be married, next month, in Massachusetts.

These were quiet days. Each offered miles of summer landscape, hours of companionable silence and deep conversation. The experience of these long silences—illuminated by the promise we would be making one another—leavened all my thoughts about forgiveness. I had, I realized, spent the summer pushing a great big rock uphill. Somewhere in New York, I let it go.

Forgiving, I think now, is more important as a way of being than as an action in between two individuals. I would like to be forgiving in the way that other people might be brave—it’s lunacy if they announce their courage at each moment, spend their days alert to danger so that they might leap in. And so I could be, so I might have been about forgiveness. Forgiving is something I would rather do than be, and that’s where judgment rears its ugly head.

It was a bit of relief to let go of this task, of tallying the sins of my acquaintances and rustling up forgiveness for them. The mountain’s tough enough to climb, even after that rock’s rolled away.

What I learned across my summer of forgiveness, in addition to my continued fondness for high horses, is that usually I’m caught by other peoples’ actions when they mirror actions of my own I’ve not resolved: work I’ve not refused, or that tangle of what it means to bring a life into this world—or not.

My ex-lover’s daughter will turn 21 next month. An adult by many standards, and the age I was when I first met her mom.

Sometimes I wonder if she’s still alive. She might have had an accident, leukemia. I wouldn’t know these things.

I left before her birthday, in the year that she was born. If I had been the father, courts and family members would have outlined our connection, my responsibilities and rights. If I had been a husband, even cheated on, the people in my life would have helped me build a standard: If you’re going to stay, you must…Because you stayed, you are expected…

But I was, somehow, disappeared. A mother and a father were in town, and I was just an awkward, helpful friend. I held a person, minutes old, against my heart, and I was somehow changed by that. I made her promises I did not keep. I fled before she knew the words to hold me to them, though her mother later said she looked for me, for weeks.

So next month, I assume, the baby will turn 21. I hope she doesn’t drink too much, I hope she has good friends.

She’s already had a future that I left behind. She’s got a future there, in front of her, wherever that might be.

And the woman that I cared about, from India. I wonder now, how much of my discomfort had to do with recognition: as much as I told myself, my lover, and my “daughter” that we might simply name a family, build it from sheer will—everything eroded when great-grandma came to visit, told me what a great, supportive friend I was—too smart to get knocked up myself. She would wonder where the father was, when he’d last come around, if he’d stand up and be a man around this precious baby girl. Even grandma—who knew of our relationship—agreed with my own mother, that everything would just be easier if we’d just let this child grow up “normal.”

I think, now, that I’d already found and lived through, there in Portsmouth, everything I hated in the India to which my short-term girlfriend would return. I’d already learned that everything you long for or believe is right can indeed be swept away by culture, history, norms. I think I didn’t want to be reminded.

Next month, a few days after that 21^st birthday, on the 6^th anniversary of our commitment ceremony, Girlfriend and I will be married. State by state, we are increasing the acreage of our commitment: jurisdictions where—in sickness or in health—the culture recognizes and upholds our deep intention: that we will be a family for one another.

© 2008 Melissa Capers