No One's Mother

I spend several hours on most days staring at Lake Michigan. This has gone on for nearly a year. It is very big, and I have the stupid good fortune of unobstructed views of it from my rental apartment in The Windy City, City of the Big Shoulders, Chi-town, The Second City, Mud City, City in a Garden, The City That Works.

If I’m at home and I’m writing, or eating, or texting, or meditating with my eyes open, or tidying up, Lake Michigan is there too. It’s always in the foreground, or the background, of my view - sometimes partially obscured behind my phone or laptop screen, a book, or a set of window blinds; sometimes seen in all its unpolished, wild beauty - as wild as it can be when regularly patrolled, landscaped, studied, visited, and hemmed in by 18 miles of the lovely Lakefront Trail, which runs from Ardmore Ave. in Rogers Park to 71st St. at the South Shore Cultural Center.

It’s dark now - it’s dark around 5 p.m. these days, and it’ll be darker earlier soon - so I can’t see the lake as I sit here, typing away in my living room. It’s not really “my” living room, as I don’t own this place, and even if I did, would a space inside a tall building really be “mine,” with a mortgage from a bank and a ceiling that’s really somebody else’s floor, and a floor that’s really somebody else’s ceiling? It depends, I suppose, on how one defines “mine.”

I will say it is mine for now, and I’m grateful for it. I wonder if the guy in the nearby building who plays video games all day is grateful, too. I say “the guy” as if I know the gender of the person, but the truth is, I do not. I’ve never seen their human face or even the outline of their body. I just see their gigantic screen, really impressive, and the movements of the animation based on their first-person shooter game POV.

My boyfriend’s son, who loves video games, was visiting once when I pointed the gamer paradise out to him. He tried to figure out what the guy was playing. He was pretty sure he knew, and I have forgotten the name of the game, even though I keep meaning to download Steam again so I can play old-school games like King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella and show the ancient graphics to the kid, as he’s shown me lots of Minecraft. (To be fair, there is a lot of Minecraft to be shown.)

I am not his mom or trying to be, as I do not want to be anyone’s mother. I have made that clear throughout my adult life, when people told me I would get “baby fever” or that I just hadn’t met the right person yet. I have taken steps to ensure I would not be a mother, and the steps were successful.

Only once did I get pregnant, at least that I can recollect, and I did not know I was pregnant until I wasn’t. The physical pain of the sudden loss was breathtaking, a comprehensive takeover of all my bodily systems, seemingly out of nowhere. I did not understand what it had been until years later, and then I knew what I know now: it was not meant to be, and I am grateful it never was.

I am no one’s mother, and I am not trying to be. However, I am trying to be a decent adult who hangs out with interesting people, and he is interesting people. He was visiting my place after a free day camp nearby where children who’ve lost a parent work together in different creative disciplines to make art. He had done the camp in another part of town the previous summer, before I’d moved to town to live nearer to his father. The camp sounded exactly like the kind of thing adults in Chicago put together to help kids in Chicago.

Weirdly, months after I moved to town, into the apartment in the building with the view of the lake, we found out the camp was moving to my neighborhood. From my building, I could even have a distant view of his father walking him into the camp facility every day, if I chose to look for them. I chose not to, even though I could’ve told them to text me when they were nearby and I could see if I could take a photo long-distance to show them, almost like a drone shot, and they are goofy guys and would’ve done goofy poses and laughed.

I had the idea, but dismissed it as bizarre and invasive. I wouldn’t even be around if he hadn’t lost a parent, and who wants dad’s girlfriend proudly snapping photos of you going to grief camp from her unmarried lady den of sin in the sky? Maybe it was cool for a not-too-old kid, but what about when he’s a teenager? How would he look back on that? What would it mean? Would I feel foolish and embarrassed? I wouldn’t do it.

It felt more normal to take a million photos of him and his dad when we were on a beach vacation with my folks, where he touched the ocean for the first time and fed berries to a weary, thin doe and her baby.

It bothered us both, that we could see her ribs and that her fur was ratty. He’s a city kid but has spent plenty of time camping and fishing in the countryside. He knows when a deer looks a little unhealthy. Neither of us expected to see a cartoon Disney creature prancing through the yards of New Jersey, but she was clearly tired and eager for food.

“I don’t like how skinny she is,” he said, and I said maybe it was because she was still nursing, and would fatten up for the winter once her baby was weaned. I had no idea what I was talking about, so I was improvising, which I am told is what actual parents do 99% of the time.

Deer usually have twins, and I did not see a second baby, but it’s common for other members of the herd to help raise each other’s kids.

Then again, maybe the second baby was dead, like the fawn my mother ran into once when driving me to therapy. A nervous breakdown had sent me home from college - or was it an escape from a bad relationship? It’s hard to remember, but I knew I had wanted to die and that’s why I came home to be a child again, a kid whose mother drives her to therapy and accidentally hits a fawn in the gloaming on the way.

I lived, but I’m sure the fawn didn’t. We watched as it pulled itself, agonizingly, off the road, and as we drove away my mother looked back and cried out, her voice choked with tears, “Oh, its family is coming back!” She moaned with guilt and grief and anger - all one emotion, I think - and I looked and saw the herd rushing to their fallen child.

Last summer, with somebody else’s son, I found myself automatically calling to the malnourished doe - “Here you go, Miss Mama, we’ll toss some blueberries over to you, we won’t get too close” - and then he called her Miss Mama, too. Cautiously, blinking her giant eyelashes slowly, with her healthy-looking fawn nearby, she ate the blueberries. The baby did, too.

My mom told us this deer had become a frequent visitor, and sometimes slept beside the baby in the yard. We liked that.

The deer visit was ultimately more exciting to him than seeing the ocean for the first time. He said the Jersey Shore wasn’t so different from Lake Michigan, really, and if you think that’s an unrealistic assessment, consider this: Lake Michigan has a surface area approximately three times the size of the entire state of New Jersey. It is the largest lake by surface area to be contained entirely in one country, although national borders are merely a fancy of the violent human imagination, and if Canada decides to invade at last, this particular Lake Michigan factoid may be moot.

From the hydrological perspective (and I try to only write from the hydrological perspective), Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same. To quote the playbook of some of the most successful invaders of the local region on a separate topic, they are one body, one blood, world without end, amen. When considered not as separate individual units but as one entangled, enmeshed, codependent whole, Lake Michigan-Huron is the largest lake by surface area in the entire world.

Lake Michigan has waves - I see them often, and I can’t see them now, because it is dark, but it is raining and windy and I can picture the chop and the white foam slapping the lighthouse-bedecked piers that dot the Lakefront Trail. Lake Michigan has beaches, with sand created by erosion and wind and all the other shit that makes a beach a beach, even though they aren’t oceanic beaches and thus maybe don’t deserve the “beach” title after all. They have dunes. Indiana has an entire park devoted to those dunes. If the sins of your past lives have led to some unholy task in which you are required to go to Indiana, I recommend a visit.

“Michigan” itself is derived from the Ojibwa word Michi Gami, which itself means Large Lake. Lake Michigan, therefore, means Lake Large Lake. If it were salty, we’d call it an inland sea, but it isn’t, so we don’t.

I see families down by Lake Michigan all the time, and joggers, and unhoused folks who set up tents until the tents are cleared away, and soccer players, and baseball games, and sculptural installations, and birds of all sorts. The lake sustains the city, the state, a huge swath of the entire region.

The Midwest was the one part of the country I never wanted to try out as a place to live, and now here I am, with all this fresh water right out in front of me every day. It moves and changes color and mood and temperature. I see the shadows cast by clouds. It is grey, then green, then turquoise, then slate, then navy.

In the past year, I have learned how to sit and look at a lake. I have learned other things, but mostly I have learned how to do that.

I don’t know what to tell you about these days. I am no one’s mother, including yours. Doesn’t a mother know how to fix, or at least to comfort? Isn’t she supposed to? I never got everything I wanted from mine, and I know she didn’t from me. But was she even mine? Or was I hers? What about you? To whom do you belong?

I have gone back to New Jersey a few times since last summer, and every time, I have seen the doe and her baby. She looks healthier, thicker. The baby is bigger. They are running with their herd and eating different things and trotting around a neighborhood where no hunting is allowed. Nobody gets close enough to pet them - that isn’t right, and even feeding them rides the line of what’s acceptable - but they know the yards where they are welcome, and they keep to their routines.

I see them most often at sunset and in the hour after, in the twilight, in the gloaming. Even the brightest day ends this way: quiet, dusk, a cessation of activity, the hushed long breath of night not yet let loose upon the world. So many things happen in the dark, and yet we often act as if it’s all one long pause before the real action commences at dawn. If this is the belief, then the hour after golden hour is the waiting before the waiting.

This is when the deer come out, Miss Mama and her baby included. It is a blurry moment, especially for those who have trouble with focus, with judging distance, with rapid response. And of course even the sharpest eyes miss things sometimes. There is peace and quiet way out there in the country, sure, and also the not-infrequent sound of collision, of crunching glass and steel, of beautiful bodies dragging themselves into the ditch to die.

I hope they’re safe tonight, back home, Miss Mama and the fawn who is getting bigger all the time. The rainy Chicago night disappears, and the lake and the sound of wet tires on wet pavement, and I see them, those two, out in the country back East. They are never apart, and they do not want to be. They move and eat and sleep and breathe, intertwined, ever-connected, destined for whatever is coming for them.