Genesis
By Jennifer Zeuli
I’ve never wanted you to know that your DNA is almost certainly the reason you were abandoned at two months old; in China it’s neither legal to surrender a baby nor feasible to keep one with your 47 chromosomes. You would have been a stigma, an insurmountable financial burden, an outcast. I’ve spun a bedtime story about a gentle world that granted you safe passage into my arms when the time was exactly right ten years ago. Would I want now, imagining a mother’s anguish, to chart that same DNA and follow where it leads?
The whole thing, the sky breaking into pieces directly above you, the moment the languageless past unfurls, will strike you as just another Tuesday and I’ll wonder why I did the testing for the Chinese databases, why I stored away the possibility until you knew how to spit, why I wrote the email, why I conjured her from the darkness of prehistory, just to know that I cannot translate the most important experience of your life, cannot graft this prelude onto your story.
And by the time the word “Mother” cracks in two, refracts at crazy angles, shakes the ground beneath our feet, I’ll have known for decades that your language is that of immediacy. I ask you if you had fun today and you answer on the basis of whether you’re having fun right now. I’ll ask you about the lady: did you like her? You won’t really grasp that you were once a baby in someone’s tummy. If I say that tummy wasn’t mine, I’ll be speaking in tongues. The woman in front of you, her tears alone answering volumes of questions about your prehistory, will just be a lady who is crying. “Sad,” you’ll comment, and I’ll want to apologize for your limitations but will realize that I, too, lack language or schema to name her tears.
She’ll have your brown eyes, your dimples, your elfin chin, and I’m afraid that in the face of those things the story we’ve built together, the fabric of our connected lives, will unravel, a little, but a lot. And here’s the thing: you won’t have a clue. YOU WILL NOT HAVE A CLUE that I’ve been telling you your story since before I met you, that I wrote it on airplanes and whispered it as you drank your nighttime bottles, but it always began with the unknowable. How was our world created, and what was there before there was me, and now the formless void will be given light and substance, and this part of your story will not be mine to tell.
I’ll absorb the momentousness that you cannot, even though it will threaten to drown me. I’ll hold your hand; your hand in mine is the deepest thing I know, but maybe when she touches you she’ll hear the music of the spheres. She last saw you in a basket, a scrap of paper bearing your birthdate as her very last gift to you, and maybe I’ll feel the peace of knowing, and maybe I’ll feel the disquiet. I’ll never uncomplicate my name, Mom, or Mama when you really need me. Months, an eternity, your genesis, will have been added to the dawn of your life, and it will be Tuesday, and you’ll note her tears, and you’ll ask for chicken for dinner.
Jennifer Zeuli is a single mom and high-school English teacher who writes between classes and while her children are watching way too much bad TV. She is beginning an MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College despite currently having absolutely no free time. Her work can be found in Oddball Magazine, and forthcoming in Porcupine Literary Journal.