Invisible Fences

On a mother's fears and how, through writing, we get a second chance

Magnolia green, 35mm film. Taken by the author.

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Only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart. —Ocean Vuong

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Rolling down the driveway was my first stunt on the magenta bike. From the front porch, my mom watched me scale the curb, struck by the sudden confidence in my balance. My ankles spun down the cul de sac. I neared the invisible fence she’d put up to block off oncoming traffic and looped back, Flounder and Sebastian swimming their own circles in the spokes.

Soon, my mom knocked that fence down and let me leave for the park with my basket full of starfish, mermaid Ariel painted to wave goodbye on my bike’s frame. I promised my mom to stay on this side of Lowell, feeling that my hold on the pink handlebars was hers, too.

I was taking off my cat-ear helmet when some kids pulled up to the park on their bikes. Two older boys were sizing up my park, saying the one across Lowell was better. It had higher monkey bars. On the way home, I crossed my street and kept going to the stoplight on Lowell. My front wheel in the street, I looked far past the crosswalk and through the houses for any hint of those monkey bars but turned back toward home.

When I rounded the corner, my mom saw I was coming from the wrong side of the street. The next day, my bike was gone from the garage. I had never thought to run away but when my mom said she gave it away, I did.

If you slid open the drawer of my nightstand, as I suspected my mom did when I slept, you would find a notebook with the recollections of an immaculate world where I never burned the toast or fought with my brother. I was class president, and my crush down the street liked me back.

The late poet Louise Glück knew what I was just beginning to discover: “Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance — bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.”

To write was to lie about having a better life. But in doing so, I saw that it did make my life better. I began taking note of the sunflowers that peeped over the neighbor’s fence, swirls of color in an oil leak, a friend of a friend’s kindness. I’d need them all to build this idyllic world.

The bike was there, of course. In my notebook, I rode it headlong across Lowell, Ariel on the frame waving to stopped cars. I met no fences — or whatever it was my mom feared. I didn’t know yet what can happen to girls.

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