A Small White Box Bound in Ribbons of Regrets

   It’s not an enormous, excruciating, heavy regret. Rather a comfortable soft-sigh kind of regret that merely passes by from time to time and bumps against me.

   I usually don’t think of it unless my eye catches a pair of 3-inch Nike shoes in the mall, displayed next to the monumental Size 11 New Balance. I can’t help running my hand over them and picking one up to examine the heel or to punch the insole to check for softness. Support is so important in baby shoes. But $24 is outrageous. I wouldn’t pay that. But, then, why would I? We don’t have a baby.

    It’s not that we couldn’t. We decided not to. I don’t have the stamina for one. There is a pleasantness in not being overtaxed physically and emotionally, as I know I could be with a child. Then there’s that deeper reason. One good regret deserves another. Perhaps I wouldn’t be very good as a parent. I’d constantly have to be begging others to  come get the child and take care of it because of my poor health. My mother was dead and my father was a full-blown alcoholic.  I myself was up-for-grabs for being cared for or not, depending loosely on whoever was around or not, at the time. I did not want our child raised in a flimsy happenstance environment also.

   I hardly ever think about it. Just certain moments in the mall, or when I clean out the closet and remember that small white box that I had. 

   What folks say about jailbirds is true. Little victims grow up to be villains.  That’s the real tragedy of abuse. I might hurt my kid.  Physically or emotionally. That’s the truth of it. Not that I wouldn’t love him too. I would. I do not believe I would be a horrible parent. But history is powerful. And coupled with a lack of physical stamina there may be limited resources to ward off my primal learning.

   My story is not the worst, nor the best, and not in the middle.  Simply mine.  I was thrown away in our neighbor’s sticker bushes, molested, beaten, scalded, starved, strangled; no great shakes in the abuse world. What was great shakes, at least to me, was emotional neglect. And nothing can be undone to the degree that it never existed. I don’t trust the insidious indoctrination not to repeat itself. Some element of permanence is nature’s way. Slice any thousand-year-old redwood and see how yesterday is only inches away.

   It has been about a year since I last thought about the small white box.  I’d had it around for about five years—a regular department-store box tied twice with a string.  I had packed it for our move from the East Coast. In it was a white-and-blue baby outfit with a train across the chest. The tissue paper still puffed out the pants. With it were a pink rattle and two yellow baby-clothes hangers. Just a few things that I had collected, half in fun and half in dreams, when we were newlyweds. At that time Mikey and I had planned to have children after finishing our education.

   Then came an illness that brought me close to death. The surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital raised his voice, shook his finger pointedly to my face, “Don’t get pregnant!”  We changed our plans. The doctor’s initial prescriptions included 60mg of prednisolone per day for six months, followed by another six months of decreasing doses to zero.  Recovery, including bleeding, extended 13 years, and further recovery forever. 

   In 1982, I gave the box to the Salvation Army. It seemed too personal to be put out with the loot for garage sales. Every now and then I miss having it fall off the closet shelf and hit me on the head. But it’s no big melodramatic thing. Just a pang and a flashing memory of the train and white tissue paper.

   I had pictured a little Mikey in that suit, with Mikey blue eyes, and a Mikey smile that would broaden when I’d scratch the back of his neck in his sleep.

   Sometimes I wonder if I should feel bad that the family will end with us; then I remember: I don’t do guilt anymore. Sometimes I wonder what Mikey missed because of his choice in wives; then I remember: I don’t do guilt anymore. Sometimes I forget that I don’t do guilt anymore, and I fall apart. But it’s nothing that two Kleenex can’t handle.

   It seems that some bumps to the body come with cushions. Some don’t.                                                                

                                                                            Mary Leary Roderick is a writer in the Los Angeles area. © 1985