The Woman Who Cried a River

The day Angie arrived at storytime, no one in the village noticed.

Maybe if this morning were a folktale, that is how it would start. I had a beautiful morning with my daughter. First to the cafe to buy some coffee beans. Then we drank coffee, pulled out crayons and paper to draw. I brought my pencils and drew too. Bea and I do this thing where I have her tell a story and I draw it. We drew a story today about a girl who jumps in a puddle with her doggie. Her mother watches her with a happy face, and then her daddy comes too. We took out some gnomes and mushrooms, and played. We talked about whether gnomes have doggies too, and whether apple juice is better than milk (It is not.) When it was time, we headed over to the bookstore for storytime. All morning, Beatrice has been jumping up and down and yelling "YAY, Storytime."

I found the loveliest folktale book written in both Spanish and English about a woman named Lucia. It is called "The Woman Who Outshone the Sun." Outshone the sun, indeed. I needed it as part of our collection, if simply because Lucia is the heroine. It is just a lovely, heartbreaking story about a woman not accepted by the villagers because she is different and strange. When she bathes in the river, the entire river is absorbed in her beautiful long hair, hair the villagers accuse of blocking out the sun. The people call her cruel names, and one day she leaves, and takes the river with her. Of course, the villagers realize how mean they were, and that they want Lucia back. She eventually comes back, combs out her hair, and all the fish and otters and water goes back in the riverbed for the village.

Storytime starts with a handful of kids, and then, in the middle, a woman walks in with a baby in a sling. She was in my prenatal yoga class, and she greets another woman, also in my prenatal yoga class. Her baby was a few months younger than Lucy would have been.

It took my breath away. Sharply. Abruptly. And my beautiful Beatrice looked at me, not knowing anything but that my heartbeat quickened. She hugged me tight, "Okay, Mami. Okay." I held back my tears for the entire reading, and tried to focus on my Beatrice. She loves the stories, and the other children. This is about her. Let this hour be about her.

Neither of them acknowledged me, like most people who know and never said I'm sorry. She just pretends she doesn't know me anymore. I am persona non grata. The accursed dead baby mama. We talked, her and I, often in class. She looked at me a few times, and then away. The other woman, who may or may not have remembered me, walked her seven month old over to us. Thoughtless new mother enamored of her precocious beautiful baby. Maybe she thought I wasn't paying enough attention to her baby because I couldn't see him well enough. I braced myself. My Beatrice's eyes lit up. "A baby." And I, trying not to cry, said, "Yes, mi amor, a baby."

Swallow. I just thought over and over, all tense shoulders and clenched teeth, "Please leave. Leave. Just leave. Leave."

It didn't work.

She made him wave to us, then dance. I changed my tactic. "Please, Angie, kindness, compassion, love. Be love, Angie, be love. Forgive, Angie, she doesn't know. She doesn't know." Polite smile. He was an adorable baby, even if he was the same age as Lucy would be.

Sometimes our growth is measured not in paragraphs, but in small sighs. I stayed for storytime, something that simply would not have been possible four months ago. But as I developed my hundred yard stare through "If You Take a Mouse to School," I imagined myself in the folktale. I wanted to release my hair from its rubber band, and let it flow down my back, suck up the river around these women, and walk out of the village with the river and the fishes and the otters, leaving a dry winding riverbed of sad.

When I left, I sobbed in the car for about 15 minutes, head in my hands, as Josephine Baker sang through our car. Couldn't drive. Couldn't go back in. My goodness, how I miss the life I never got. That is what I cried for, my arrogance, my ignorance, my life. As I sat sobbing, I apologized to Beatrice who just said quietly, "S'okay, Mami." I saw people pass my truck, and look in, wondering if they should help me. And I wanted to just say to someone, anyone, "My baby died that's why I'm crying, because my baby died. There are still other babies in the world the same age, even though mine died. Cry with me, please, cry for her."

And so the tears pooled at my feet, and rose in our car, until they cover the seats, and our toys floated by us, out of the cracked windows, until the river ran back to the village, surrounding the babies and their mothers, guiding and protecting them from a sorrow they do not know.