The Story

We’ve all heard the story: the crazy mom who named her kids Lime-Jello and Lemon-Jello. My mom was nearly that avant garde, at least for her own time. She did not name me Moonbeam or Karma as other mothers of the time were want to do. She didn’t, thank god, name me Kathy or Nancy. Imagine: my mother, sweat dripping from her brow, furrowed in pain and concentration. As big as if she were having octuplets, round and filled like Violet Beauregarde with my brother and me. Splashing forth in a torrent, as my mother describes it. Fluid like the ocean puddling around the doctor’s feet, rising up to his knees and thighs. If you listen to how my mother told the story, the doctor who gave us life was swimming in the lake she made, only his big gloved hands and bald masked face look over to her.

My father just smiles and says, “there was a leak from the third floor, Martha.”

He cannot corroborate my mother’s story. He actually cannot fathom my mother’s story. But, he knows now after years that she will tell the story. The story told as my grandmother tells her favorite granddaughter story.

“This,” she says “is India she is my favorite granddaughter.”

Then, without missing a beat, I say, in exactly the same words as always, “that is because I am your only granddaughter.”

Last, and with a smile toward me because we both know how it ends from untold telling. “If I had lots you’d still be my favorite, I just wouldn’t tell anybody.”

So, there we were twins, not like the circus of babies my mother describes, born to Martha from La Jara, Colorado in 1969. My mother, salty not psychedelic, named me India and my brother Boston, both equally obscure in my mother’s mind. Both places that she’s read about only in books. Reading through every book at the library.

As I fly in to meet my sweet Martha.  My mother who has been gone from La Jara since she was old enough to read and yet never stayed away for longer than a week’s vacation with dad. I know she only sees her dreams of far off places through me. Boston, still near by, only made it one county away. My mother, though, named me well. Since I was 16, had an abortion, and moved to LA. I have never stayed grounded. My mother’s ambition born through me fed through the waters of my birth.