LIT ANGELS, #22
MOTHER, GRIEF
Table of Contents
A Letter To My First Son by Kara Mae Brown
Poems by Shaina Semiatin
I Bought a Flogger Today by Beni Tobin
Night a Memoir - Excerpt by Em Rio
The Container by Caitlin Gorman
Sahara Stars by Felicity Landa
Edited by Felicity Landa
Art by Rachel Zarrow
Assistant Editor: Sophia Quinto
A Letter To My First Son
by Kara Mae Brown
To My First Son:
In the spring of 2021, after a year at home isolated and afraid, your father and I conceived you in a flurry of hope. We’d recently driven through the hospital parking lot, stuck our arms out the window for the COVID-19 vaccine, and a new kind of life seemed possible. Your life seemed possible. Still enjoying the little perks of working from home, your father and I slipped into bed in the afternoon and began the process of creating you.
Your big sister was only four-years-old. We’d brought her into the world so we would be less alone. We wanted to bring you into our lives so she’d be less alone too. Sometimes, in the bathtub, she’d look up at me and plead, “When are we getting a baby?” We’d never even mentioned having another child, but she’d watched her friends’ families grow and she wanted hers to grow too. I would give your sister anything. I wanted to give her you.
Forgive me, I peed on many tests that spring, so I don’t remember yours. But I do remember the joy and relief of those two pink lines. I was already 38-years-old, so you were what’s called a geriatric pregnancy—meaning I was too old, by some people’s standards, to carry a child. Your father and I had worried it might be difficult, given our age, to make you. It wasn’t.
When you were fourteen weeks in the womb, we flew to Ohio to hold a belated memorial service for my father, your grandfather. He’d died a year earlier, maybe of COVID-19, though there weren’t many tests back then. He called me and your Uncle Greg from his doctor’s office. They recommended admitting him to the hospital; his oxygen levels were dangerously low, and they feared there was already fluid in his lungs. We begged him to go, but he refused, droning, “No more hospitals.” A week later, still struggling to breathe, his partner snuck into the back room of their house and called 911. Your grandfather called your uncle again from the hospital and said, probably for the first time in his stubborn life, “I should have listened to you.”
