Page 186 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Exploring Mara’s home region with a local boy, Peru

I wrote a second draft, and after we came back to the U.S., started a third. By then I was gestating a

new big project requiring high levels of devotion—a baby. Two weeks before my son was born, with

three different versions of the book tangled in my mind, I decided to take a break and focus on

motherhood. Mara let me go. We were both sure I would come back.

***

We don't always choose the stories we wind up carrying. Like we don't choose the children we are

called upon to raise; they exist because of us and yet are independent of us.

I have often questioned why this woman—this spirit, muse, spark of inspiration—chose me to carry her

story. I couldn’t have been the first to pick up that pebble, but maybe I was the first to listen deeply

enough to hear her. The first one crazy enough to say yes.

Perhaps she chose me for my youth, knowing it might take a lifetime to write her story. For six years,

she waited—through my fractured nights with two babies, through exhaustion and distraction, months

when I hardly remembered her. When finally I had the space inside my head to return to her, I was

relieved and daunted to find she was still there.