up the vomit, to give up the bottle, to stop my shoulder from twitching. I try. I pay. I breathe. But the little girl runs from me and turns into a monster. I try to tuck her in bed and her nails turn to claws, her face to a screaming, melting mask.
I think hard about my own daughter, now 11. I think hard about not letting my past/anger affect her. I drink in front of her, but try not to get drunk. I don’t smoke in front of her. I let her eat what she wants and I talk to her about her body. Tell her it is her own. Nobody gets to touch it unless she wants them to, and she shouldn’t want them to for a long time. I tell her she can tell me anything and I will take care of her. I say, I will not do to my daughter what my mother did to her.
My therapist interjects: her? I am ashamed. I have just referred to myself in the third person, which is beyond the pale of cliché. Now I am frightened. Now I am sure. Now I start defending my mother. She is so good to my daughter — a far better grandmother than a mother (these things take practice, I guess). She did the best she could do to raise me at the time. She was too cool to be a good mother. She was too young. She was too selfish. I love and hate her. She was and is my mother. Who knew it would end up like this? Love is such a strange animal.
And the bear, too. The bear is strange, doing what is necessary — what comes naturally — to keep living, to survive. I feel the bear in me — his will, his power, his claws. Bears don’t hurt themselves, even to escape. I feel the bear in me and I am not afraid. I am becoming the bear — his big body, whole and heavy — his big body moving forward, walking away.