Moonwalker, Chapter One

I can’t say when it was I started to follow butterflies--if there was an actual moment when I was entranced by the promises of broken flowers and fractured light. I can’t pinpoint when I was seduced by pollen and mirrors, or when I became hungry for the golden promises I glimpsed in still water to be fulfilled. I do know I was afraid of the moon from the very beginning.
This is how my mother tells the story:

Each month, as the moon swelled, I cried in my crib in the room down the long hall where I’d been banished from her breast after one month. Nobody breastfed back then except hippies and my mom was definitely not a hippie, even though she sang along with the Mamas and the Papas on the radio. She was in the Army and didn’t know that Bob Dylan was the voice of her generation until I told her, and I’m pretty sure she’s never smoked pot, although I’ve never asked because then she’d feel free to ask if I had. Even so, I’m aware that I could have chosen the less emotionally charged word wean instead of banish, which conjures up images of orphan girls expiring on snow-covered stoops like the poor Little Match Girl. Well, at least it does for me, but my imagination might be more fanciful than yours, although I prefer to see it as more mythically attuned because that makes me seem special instead of paranoid and damaged.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I haven’t found it yet, which could account for my lifelong depression which everyone else I know has medicated or explained away with therapy. Call me crazy, but I know it’s more than just a chemical imbalance that’s caused me to sleep through a good two-thirds of my life, instead of the usual half of the rest of the population. Then again, I don’t see sleep as the proverbial waste of time you always hear people saying it is, because sleep is when we dream, and in dreams I pace the top of a tor in a swan-feather cloak that catches the breath of the moon that lifts me off the dense earth to soar on currents of starlight that I know will carry me to the truth—the reason beyond the reason that has called to me even before I was born.

Of course I always come crashing back down because like everyone else on earth, I have to breathe. The one therapist I saw (I was forced to go in high school when I got caught crawling up the front stairs drunk) said I must be afraid of death, but I knew it was life I feared. I didn’t tell her this, because I was afraid of her, too. She said I had “mothering” issues, which might be attributed to the fact that I wasn’t breastfed. She actually told me that one month was probably worse then no boob at all, because at least if I hadn’t had it I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. This didn’t come close to satisfying my curiosity to know the reason beyond the reason. I took her prescription for Prozac and never filled it. When she called to ask why I hadn’t kept my appointment I didn’t answer because I was in bed and didn’t plan to get out for at least a month.

Really, it was strange she breastfed me for even that one month. It was even stranger that I remembered. I even remembered how she cried as much as I did because her breasts ached and overflowed. I asked her why once--why she stopped--and she said because that’s what everyone did back then. I never asked her why she started, which was the really interesting question.

My mother was a southern belle who’d grown up in the segregated south who’d entered the Army after high school and served in Vietnam, although she didn’t talk about this phase of her life. She’d go on for hours about her favorite childhood dog that ran away and was never heard from again, about how she and her friends dressed up like Beatniks and had a party that scandalized the neighborhood, about the time Robert Mitchum came to town to film a movie and hit on her BFF who was only fourteen years old, about how her mother used to make her father flip over rocks and shoot the imaginary snakes she were sure were lurking there—you know—the usual stuff which makes up a life, stories we tell over and over until they become the myths that define us. Most of us don’t realize the gods and goddesses are no different than us. They don’t want to look too deeply into why they blasted a village off a mountaintop with a bolt of lightning or sank a flotilla of ships with a tidal wave. Not to say my mom killed anyone in Vietnam. She was a nurse. She was supposed to heal people who’d almost been killed. I’m sure some of them died, but she didn’t talk about the bullet holes or amputations. She liked to start the day with Good Morning America and a bowl of Honey-Nut Cheerios.

The only thing I knew about her time in the Army was what I could glean from the photo hanging on the den wall of my dad swearing her in. She’s wearing her white nurse’s uniform with those starched white caps nurses used to wear that made them seem both more risqué and more professional than today’s nurses dressed in floral print scrubs and crocs. You can clearly see what my dad is thinking as he administers the oath.

Within a month they were married and she was pregnant with me a few months later. Her only reference to the war that carried them overseas to the mythic jungles of Vietnam was, “Those were turbulent times. We made decisions that may have seemed a little rash.” I always wondered if I was one of those rash decisions, but didn’t have the heart to ask. I was here, that’s all that mattered, but I couldn’t forget the sound of her crying as her breasts overflowed.

I remembered. I swear I did. I remembered my mother wriggling out from under my father’s arm and running down the hall to my room. There she found me, pinned on my back by the moon, pierced by white light, slashed to the bone.

She picked me up and unbuttoned her nightgown, cradled my head with her hand as I latched on to her nipple, even though she wasn’t supposed to. I still remember the taste of that milk, sticky and sour on my cracked lips. I still remember the moment my mother’s breast became the whole world. I forgot the months of weeping as I lost myself in suckles and murmurs, eyes wide open to the glow. I emptied one breast, then the other as my mother finally got some rest too, nodding off as the moon sunk beneath the earth’s horizon and the sun rose to trace the outline of her cheekbones, and the shadows which had gathered there as she’d listened to me weep. I remember this. I bet if you try, you can remember things like this, too.

We went through whole lifetimes together, watched the sun cast shadows on our surface as we waned in the sky which didn’t seem so empty any more, played with the rabbit and the man who lived there who passed his time holding up mirrors so the stars could see how beautiful they were.

We accepted we were half of what we once were; then a quarter, then a crescent, then a sliver of ourselves, until finally there was nothing to us. We couldn’t even reflect the sun anymore. It was a relief to let go of mirrors.

And then, the mirror broke, shattering the peace between us, ripping us back into the instruction manual which said I was supposed to be weaned before I could walk so that I could grow up to be strong and independent like the astronauts who that very night—July 20, 1969--walked on the moon.