If my service didn’t become a part of me, did it matter? If I can’t remember the way my daughter’s laugh sounded when she hid her head underneath the covers, or the way the morning light striped my son’s face when we peeked through the curtains in his bedroom, will motherhood just be another grainy feeling-flat and shrinking? Just a time in my life that happened, and ended?Įnjoy this time! they tell me, those older parents whose children no longer creep into bed with them in the night. My memories slide away like trickles of water over stone. He can’t separate his service from who he is.īut I am a forgetter. For him, like most of the vets I know, his service has grown into part of his identity as rock from different geologic ages melds into a smooth cliff face. About all-night planning, break-of-dawn workouts, friendships and brotherhood forged in the crucible of combat. Stories about missions, about near misses. My husband is made of stories from his time in the military.
#Meet your toothfairy full#
There are no conversations, no full and funny stories I can trot out at parties, around fire pits more than a decade later. The anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I drive to a prison in Georgia, rehearsing what I’ll say to the airman arrested for child sexual assault to get him to talk to me. Lying on the ground in tears after my back gives out during hand-to-hand combat training, the weight of my body armor forgotten in the pain, my commanding officer’s head momentarily blocking the sun as he walks past me without a glance. Riding in a bread truck in Djibouti while the Marine I’m across from pulls out his penis just to see what I’ll do. The little I do recall leaves me with a vague sense of awkward incompetence, confusion, and shame. I spent four years in the military and remember it in fuzzy flashes. Maybe I fear this loss because I’ve forgotten before.
Some are tinged with tears and some still make me laugh out loud, but will I get to keep them? When I leave this place, will my memories stay behind, tucked into its corners, echoing faintly from its bare walls? Photo courtesy of the author.Įvery corner of this space triggers a memory, a feeling. It’s that silent,” writes Jennifer Brookland. The spray of the running water will drown out the loss. “That room with those books and those children, it will disappear one night while I’m doing the dishes and scrubbing that old table. Seven years later they ask me when the moving trucks are coming, whether we’ve packed yet, and what route we’ll take across the country to a rental home devoid of fruit trees. When the card game and gossip were ending, someone helped me clip my nursing top back into place and someone else helped tie my shoes as I held my sleeping infant, and I thanked them profusely, feeling awkward and inept. I was a tear-stained mess with a three-week-old baby and the lurching fear that I was doing a disservice to this tiny creature by being his incompetent mother. Hers was the first house I went into when I moved here.
#Meet your toothfairy portable#
“You pick them.” Her English is staccato, but I wonder if the shortness is just her personality.Ī few weeks after that encounter some moms in my neighborhood are sitting around the portable fire pit my friend Sara has set up in her driveway. The taste makes your mouth feel like all the happiness has been sucked dry.” “No,” I tell her, “These are the kind you have to let ripen on the branch until they’re practically mush. She’s holding a spackle brush and her hair is tied up.
“Your persimmons are ripe,” she says the second time we meet. My neighbor Airong, who recently moved in and began scrubbing, painting, and scraping with abandon. To suddenly find our tree absent its cherished fruits is shocking. Now anytime a bird lands on the tree he throws open the sliding glass door and screams. My oldest son watched, surprised one fall morning as I leaped up to yell off a murder of crows that had landed peckishly on the top branches. Some we find on the ground, gnawed or nibbled, half-ripe and too late. “Don’t pull them off the tree! They take a whole year and they don’t just grow back.” I squeeze the fruits gently while reprimanding the kids. “There are leaves on the persimmon tree!” Later, “The persimmons are turning orange!” We go outside to test the firmness. “You guys, look!” I’ll call to them each year. I can’t remember it,” writes Jennifer Brookland.
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