Back on the seafloor. Again in a liminal place, neither here nor there. An unborn place, perhaps, the water becoming more amniotic fluid than ocean. My thoughts floated to my mother, my original Red Sea. My inhalations were no longer my own but someone else’s breathing entirely—huge lungs expanding all around me. The slow bubbles I exhaled were the gurgle of intestines and the murmurs of other red-brown organs, swishing and swaying like soft corals and sea fans in her water body, where I too lived, tethered to her alone and not yet the rest of this world.
At the bottom of the sea, everything seemed to drift toward origins—toward my parents. The builders of my body. The people who got me here. My dad was my mom’s college professor, and when they first got together, he was 42 and she was 19. He was married at the time and had been for longer than she’d been alive. The story always went that the reason they split up shortly after I was born was because their 23-year age difference had finally caught up with them. That while my young mom was beginning her career as a midwife, my dad had decided to retire early and became depressed and aimless. Their lives were no longer compatible, so they separated. Simple as that.
It wasn’t until more than 20 years after their divorce, shortly before I packed for Malta, that I got the rest of the story. My older sister, Chloe, was going through a divorce herself, and she, our brother, Will, and I were at our mom’s house one night, supporting Chloe as she threw her world into turmoil, knowing it was what she needed to do to live the life she truly wanted. It was late, and we were in the dimly lit living room of my mom’s drafty wooden house. Chloe was crying, knowing that she was being painted as the villain by their mutual friends and her in-laws, that they saw her ruining a perfectly good thing, never mind that she was miserable. We were all a little drunk, having moved from wine to whisky, when my mom spoke.
“I was the villain, too, when I divorced your dad,” she said. “Everyone thought I was crazy for leaving such a good man and cruel for putting you kids through all that when you were so young. But no one knew why I actually did it.”
She told us that everything we already knew about their divorce was true—their age difference and his depression—but there was a piece she’d left out. Around the time I turned two, my mom had gotten pregnant again. She wanted to have the baby, but my dad insisted they get an abortion. He was almost 60 at the time, with three young children and three grown ones from his previous marriage. He was done having kids. But my mom wasn’t. She felt the embryo growing inside her and wanted to hold it in the warm sea of her body until it grew and grew. But he won the argument, and she never forgave him for it.
“It was my second abortion,” she told us. “The first was after the very first time your father and I ever had sex, when I lost my virginity. And the second was after the very last time your father and I ever had sex.”
My family is staunchly pro-choice—my mother’s career was in childbirth and advocating for women’s reproductive rights—so there was no antiabortion sentiment present that night. Yet there was a feeling of being anti-this-abortion. We all felt it, because our mother, the carrier of that embryo, did not choose it. And although our father had a strong case for why he didn’t want another child, he still ended a life that was wanted by its mother, where it briefly lived, tethered to her alone and not yet the rest of this world.
Was I the only one who suddenly felt the abyssal emptiness of another presence in that room? The presence of someone who might have been? A whole other lifetime flashed before my eyes in which there was one more of us, another member of our family. Will and Chloe, twins who are four years older than me, are the two people closest to me—they have defined my life since the moment I was born. To think I might have had another sibling, that I might have been a middle child instead of the youngest, always trying to keep up, would have changed everything. It would have been an entirely different life.
Mom told us how our dad hadn’t wanted the divorce, how he’d begged her not to leave. And when she wouldn’t budge, how he had resorted to using the three of us to gang up on her. She said that when I was a toddler, I avoided her, and when she’d ask me what was wrong, I’d reply: “You’re bad for making dad sad.”
She was crying, telling us all this, and it was clear the pain was still alive. I went to sleep that night with turbid, unsettled thoughts, but when I woke up the next morning, they had drifted someplace deep inside me where I was glad to let them rest. It was too confusing. I wasn’t willing to accommodate the fact that my father hadn’t been perfect. That is, until I went to the bottom of the Red Sea, where it was all waiting for me.
Inhale, lift; exhale, settle. How could he be so careless? I had always let their significant age difference just be a fact, and never examined it too closely, but now I couldn’t help but see it in a whole new light after learning she had gotten pregnant the first time they slept together. He was the experienced one, and she was just a teenager. He never should have let that happen. What was he thinking? And the way he turned the three of us against our mom during the divorce? It was unforgivable.
None of this felt like the man I had known, who was so loving and sensitive and careful with the feelings of those around him. Even after the divorce, when mom got into Yale, he moved from California to Connecticut so he could stay close to us and help her juggle school and parenting. Then he moved back to California when we did, after she graduated and got remarried, because all he cared about was being our dad.
