When she was awake, I was purpose, I was a soft domestic prowling of goodness—only when she slept was I free to think the thoughts of one in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just someone’s mom, but someone, some one. Yet I know that this work that I did with her lay at the heart of what mattered to me—was that heart. And still there was a part of me left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain by mothering. And when she slept in, I smelled the husks of olive rind on that slope, I heard the blue knock of the eucalyptus locket nut, I tasted the breath of the wolf seeking the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the bending of the cedar under the sea of the wind—while she slept, it was as if my pierced ankles loosed themselves and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy of the unattached. Girl of a mother, mother of a girl, I paced, listening, almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me, next to the small motions as she woke, light and wind on the face of the water.
