This is an excerpt from an email I sent to one of my best friends about my recent visit home. I went there to meet my new nephew, who was born this summer. Historically, I have been alternatively put off and terrified by children, and have feared that they would somehow make me mutate into the thing I feared being the most- the shadow of my mother's violence.

But this is what actually happened....


I have decided that I would make a good mom. I told my dad that and he said, "I always thought so. I'm glad you've accepted that about yourself." And later he said, "it would be hard. It is for everyone. And it would be hard sometimes for you too, but you wouldn't screw it up." And I actually, for once, agree. I wouldn't screw it up, and I would do a good job. That made me feel really differently about myself. I wonder, if in some way, the last vestage of the concept of myself as someone potentially dark and dangerous has crumbled and quietly dropped away. The last piece of me blaming myself, as seing myself as somehow irreversably flawed or at fault seems lost and floated away.

I heard something on the radio this weekend, in which a woman said this about any act of recovery- "there is a point where recovery becomes an act of faith. Where you say, 'Okay. I will lay down my sword.' And you trust that something good will happen to you."

I wonder if I have finally laid down my sword. Am I in the middle of my leap? Suspended in mid-air, excited and uncertain? Am I myself laying down my own body, spreading my legs, and trusting that the miracle of life and love with inspire itself within me in this vulnerable posture? And if that is so, I wonder: How do I now live my life as a woman finally made whole, soft and open.