Nonfiction from Abigail Myers

Photo: Simon Berger

Transfiguration

Motherhood did not imbue me with radiant strength or peace. Mothering meant that my days and skillset drastically changed but I was shocked to realize that my many human frailties and vulnerabilities remained, despite the fact that I’d attained Madonna status.
—Sara Petersen

Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him!”
—Luke 9:35

I.

I was twelve when my then-stepsister’s boyfriend, a man of probably twenty-four, picked me up and hauled me over his shoulder, carried me up the stairs, tossed me in the shower, and turned on the water. Why? I don’t know, and the only useful information that comes from asking is noticing that I still ask this question, and that I shouldn’t. There is no rationale for such a strange, specific act of casual cruelty beyond a desire to shame and silence a girl child.

If this happened to my daughter, my voice would quaver with barely controlled fury while I called the cops. I would squeeze her hand while she gave her statement until our knuckles turned white. I would take her for ice cream and say everything or nothing while we scooped chocolate mint chip with plastic spoons. I would sit with her until bedtime or well past it, I would quit all my nice progressive parent Facebook groups and sit on my porch with a shotgun, I would find out where he lived and slash his tires and film myself doing it, for my girl child.

I don’t remember if I told anyone about this particular incident or not, but it doesn’t matter. More, and worse, things happened, and no one was filled with rage. If someone addressed these things at all, it was with sighs and eye rolls. Dramatic. You know better. Grow up.

I was twelve. A girl child.

I am forty now, and I have a three-year-old daughter, and in me is a soaking wet twelve-year-old girl child, unavenged.

II.

Mama, will you play with me? I will. I will click the magnetic tiles together into a ramp for her toy cars, again, while I take in the very sound of anemoia that is Saint Sister’s first album. They played the Pepper Cannister Church in Dublin when I went overseas alone for the first time at thirty-six, on my own from beginning to end with only my passport to back me up. The next day I walked through Glendalough, an hour south in County Wicklow, alone for five hours. Beside the Lower Lake I ate a tuna salad sandwich and an apple purchased from the Centra down the road from my hotel. I’d just learned I was pregnant, a week or two earlier, and the same doctor who told me I’d lost my first pregnancy shrugged and said Sure when I asked if I should still go to Ireland. Even she knew: Do what you want, this will be the one that sticks. This will be the one who changes you, this will be the one who will turn into a little girl who can walk and peel a banana and say Mama, will you play with me?

No one told me, when I was half the age I was beside the Lower Lake, to study abroad or take a gap year or backpack the Way of Saint James. No one even suggested that I could. I assumed such things were for the rich kids, the ones who hadn’t been tossed in the shower. I think about this in my daughter’s playroom on Long Island, think about how to explain it to her without sounding bitter. I never got to take advantage of the student rate on the Eurostar. What a problem to have. Still: I am bitter sometimes, a petty Scorpio to my marrow and fooling nearly everyone.

I left my career in education when she was a year old, though I didn’t think I had. I assumed I was taking some time off to retool, to focus on her. I thought I’d find a job with a more forgiving commute, or a more flexible schedule, or both. Two years later, I sit in a poorly-conceived stew of idleness and overwhelm, Googling unfamiliar terms in job listings while chasing a trail of paper and crayons that wraps around three rooms and occasionally jotting half-remembered thoughts in my journal to be excavated extremely, eventually.

Three years after becoming a mother, I am not unfamiliar to myself. If anything, I wish I was. I wish I was less anxious and more forgiving. I wish I had, upon giving birth, been replaced by a version of myself wiser, more sparkling and thrilling. Instead I am the soaking wet twelve-year-old, the thirty-six-year-old grasping for one more night alone in a cheap Dublin hotel, wrapped up in an underemployed forty-year-old who will build one more magnetic race track, again and again and again.

III.

In the story commonly called the Transfiguration, Jesus and three of his disciples go to the top of a mountain, where Jesus (literally? in a vision? both?) takes on an ethereal appearance: clothed in dazzling white, his face shining like the sun, conversing with the patriarch Moses and the prophet Elijah. The voice of God echoes and remixes the words first uttered at Jesus’s baptism: This is my son, my Beloved; listen to him.

Peter, always the disciple to casually ruin a good time or worsen a bad one, suggests taking up new domicile in this holy place. He goes so far as to offer to build three dwelling places there. Jesus declines, of course. He knows what comes next.

They say that Jesus saw every sin that ever had been or would be committed from Calvary, and died on the cross anyway.

In the Transfiguration, Jesus becomes both something new and something he already was: the bridge between heaven and earth, the divine presence of God as a mortal among mortals. But he also gives us permission to move on: to leave behind that which is dazzling and pure, to realize that perhaps such states of being are ecstatic visions and way stations, not dwelling places, here on Earth.

IV.

One night when I was fourteen, my then-stepfather threw a phone at me and called me a cunt. I still ask why, even in this essay in which I’ve already said I shouldn’t, because there is no answer. But I’m still asking.

My mother finally left him, two years after that incident, but by then, I’d assumed I would have to find my own allies. I had a twenty-one-year-old boyfriend. That kind of thing would throw up giant red flags these days, even though I look back on my time with him as peaceful and safe. He was gentle and gentlemanly, and I was lucky to know him. I was safe with him but not with the fortysomething ‘pillar of the community’ who preached from the Bible at campgrounds and threw phones at girl children as he called names I hesitate to repeat in an essay that has a lot of Jesus in it.

In those moments, in the shower and beside the dining room table where I was called a cunt for the first but not the last time, I changed. Not on a mountaintop, not into anything dazzling, but, for the first time, I changed into the person who knows how to love her child, who lived inside her even then as an egg that would take shape over twenty years later.

Something in me spoke up and said, I will never let such things happen to you.

And in those moments, Jesus loved me.

V.

The Jesus of the mountain and the Jesus of Calvary loved children, even and especially children who needed someone to embrace them without question or judgment, this I know. And so he loves me, the mother writing essays instead of filling out applications for jobs I won’t get. He loves me hunched over the thirty-six-year-old with a decent job traveling to Europe alone. He loves me crouching above the soaking wet twelve-year-old girl child. He loves me trying to make space for the three-year-old who has never heard the word cunt in her life.

My spine is sore and my arms are strained, but I am doing my best to shield all of us. I tell the frozen career woman to play nicely—I know, it’s super boring, just do your best—and the soaking wet twelve-year-old to untwist herself and play—you could use a few minutes on the floor with some toy cars—and the three-year-old, well, I tell her we all love her. This I know.

Jesus loved Martha, too, the woman at the end of her domestic rope. You can picture it, her starry-eyed sister Mary gazing up at Jesus while Martha furiously washes and cooks and plates. I can feel it, the pressure building up in my forearms and chest. I’ve been there. And while I see where Jesus is coming from when he urges Martha to chill, to emulate her meditative and adoring sister, I wish the gospel writers had let us see the scene where Martha chucks a towel over a chair and everyone happily eats yesterday’s pita bread for dinner so she could sit and let the stars that fell from the top of the mountain where Jesus had been transfigured gather in her eyes, too.

The darkest days of the pandemic whittled me to my barest parts and exposed the strange tension between my power—protect this child from this deadly virus that cannot be prevented or treated—and powerlessness—show her the world and the other imperfect people in it who nevertheless love her. Leaving work cut me off from the clear sense that my days had purpose and direction, had deep moral meaning even at their most pointless and frustrating. Leaving the city pulled me away from anything else that contributed meaning and purpose and direction: going to MoMA and Shakespeare in the Park, signing ballot petitions on the subway, wheeling groceries home in reusable tote bags, dropping compost off at the farmers’ market and recycling my cereal boxes, attending friends’ shows and birthday parties. Now I am Martha, with a child. Suffer the little children and their exhausted, irritating and irritated mothers.

And yet: Loving this little girl as much as I do and as well as I do, even on dull and difficult days, puts lie to everything awful I’d been told about myself in my teenage years. When I rebuild the racetrack with the magnetic tiles and gamely run tiny cars over it again and again, I know I am not monstrous, not irredeemable, not merely a bottomless maw of demand. I am a cunt in the best sense of the word, deep and life-giving. In that sense I have not changed, only become better known to myself. And in myself I am well pleased.

VI.

I do not have Jesus’s vision most of the time, twenty by infinity. I cannot know the next chapter of the story and the next, cannot know the valley from the mountain or the other way around. But I bore new life, moved to a new home, took up with new people. I will find new work and new purpose outside the walls of this home and the embrace of this child. I will step out of the shadows of the soaking wet girl child and frozen career woman, put comforting arms around them even while seeing the space open up enough to move around and past them. I will accept, if only for a moment, the dazzling white robes and the devastating light and the voice of God calling me beloved, telling me that in me God is well pleased.

And in that moment, I will fold that light into the pocket of my robe, the one that will again become the pilled and polka-dotted labor and delivery gown I still wear around the house. I will pull it out and let it sit on and around the face of my beautiful girl child when I need to say I have never let such things happen to you, of course I will play with you, we love you, I love you.

And if Jesus can leave behind what is beautiful and transcendent, I will follow his example in small ways, wrapping the pain and tedium and bitterness in words. I will let myself walk through the valleys of crayons and paper and magnetic tiles and toy cars, through the troughs of job applications and dishes, through the desert of blank pages.

And in that moment I will know, once and again, that I, too, have been transfigured.
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Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Her fiction has recently appeared in Milk Candy Review (Best Small Fictions 2024 nomination), Rejection Letters, and Roi Fainéant, and is forthcoming from Stanchion, Tangled Locks, and Cowboy Jamboree Press’s MOTEL anthology. Her essays have recently appeared in Variant Literature (Best Spiritual Literature 2024 nomination), Phoebe, Pensive, Tiny Molecules, Willows Wept Review, The Dodge, and The Other Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Icebreakers Lit (Best of the Net 2024 nomination), Amethyst Review, Full Mood Mag, Sylvia, Hearth and Coffin, Resurrection Mag, and more. Keep up with her at abigailmyers.com and @abigailmyers on Twitter and Bluesky.