This weightless warmth, this amniotic fluid, is my home within a home within a home, and outside, people walk and talk, unaware that their sounds penetrate, that I can feel.
My cells absorb sounds like sponges. My arms and legs, my hands and feet, my brain, all of me is shaped by my mother’s emotional chemical rushes. My heart has roots drawing up. I am knit together as words spat by my father in anger hijack my mother’s hormones, sending a wash of fight-or-flight chemicals through her body, through mine. She is afraid.
I thrash from side to side, then suck my thumb. Soothed, I quiet myself and sleep.
I do not know what kind of world I will enter next. In just a short window of time, I will be forced from my home. I’ll come out writing and wild, swimming from blood stained water into the arms of trauma. I’ll be under the influence of drugs even as the water and blood and chemicals of my mother’s lineage course through me.
I will be naked as first creation and armored as Eve after the fall.
I will be named.
God responds.
Papa comes, catches me, His hands gently bring my hands from a flailing hallelujah, tucking them together in tiny prayer, quieting me, having moved from union with my mother into painful separation.
He gazes into my eyes as he swaddles me with his words, marking me with his love, ushering me to sleep in heavenly peace, even as I am brand-new to this earth. He lifts me, whispering, “Little one, there is something like the instinct of a tiny bird living inside you. It aches always for home. It is a homing device meant to lead you back to Papa. Listen and follow the sound.”
**For the next 53 days I’m posting a chapter from my memoir, Misfit Table.
So we can reference, resource and track from it. This is the introduction.
The beginning of my story.
take care of each other
it’s the work and the way,
Tiffini
11.14.22