July Nineteen (Poem by Heather Smith)

JULY NINETEEN

Today you were cut from me

like a tumour I grew myself,

three pounds of accusation

swimming in my blood.

 

They say I tried to set you free with glass.

The scar agrees—

a smile across my belly,

laughing at what mothers do.

 

You were born in red,

baptised in your mother's madness,

pulled from a wound I made

because love felt like dying.

 

Luke, bringer of light—

what light can live in this?

You breathed despite me,

small fists fighting for the air I'd stolen.

 

They cleaned you, wrapped you,

took you to machines that could mother

better than this body that rejected

its most basic assignment.

 

Thirty-four weeks you stayed,

uninvited guest, beloved parasite,

making me remember being seven,

making me feel occupied again.

 

Now you're twelve years old,

calling another woman Mummy,

and I write you poems you'll never read

from a distance that keeps us both safe.

 

This is your birth story:

Your mother loved you enough

to try to cut you out

before you drowned in her darkness.

 

This is your inheritance:

Green eyes that see too much,

hands that reach for what they can't hold,

a scar that matches mine.

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From Heather's unmailed letter to Luke, found in her papers after her death, dated July 19, 2001:

Luke,

Today you turned seventeen. I wrote this poem on your twelfth birthday but have never sent it. Every year I think this will be the year I explain, but explaining would mean you'd have to carry what I carry, and that's not inheritance—it's cruelty.

They told you I was sick when you were born. That's true. They told you it was hormones, post-natal depression, a temporary madness. That's less true. The truth is that some women aren't meant to be mothers, but biology doesn't care about meaning.

I tried to free us both that day. You from me, me from you, both of us from the terrible binding of mother and child when the mother is already broken. The glass seemed like honesty—sharp, clear, cutting through all the lies about natural and beautiful and blessed.

You survived. I survived. We both carry scars.

Maybe someday you'll understand that my greatest act of love was letting your father raise you, letting you grow up without the weight of my damage. Maybe you'll hate me for it. Both are fair.

Your father says you're doing well. That you're kind, that you're smart, that you sometimes stare at nothing with my green eyes. I hope you got the parts of me that work—the poetry, maybe, the ability to see beauty in broken things. I hope you didn't get the parts that made me reach for glass.

This poem is your birth announcement, seventeen years late. This poem is my apology. This poem is the only way I know how to love you—from a distance, in words you'll never read, with a honesty that would destroy us both if spoken aloud.

Your mother (in biology if nothing else), Heather