Dear Especially After Breaking: What If You Decide With The Full Force Of Your Own Formidable Wisdom?

Lit Salon on whether to subject our tenderest, most vulnerable and heart-soaked material to the "brutality" of publishing + the magic of milkweed, crow & moon + a possible middle ground

Dear Jeannine,

Many years ago, I won’t tell you how many, except to say the world was very different then, and quieter, I gave birth to a baby girl.

I want to tell you the whole truth about it, which is that I was a teenaged mother, unwed and terrified. But, also, I was—strangely—a little bit happy about the circumstance of becoming pregnant, for reasons that I did not understand then and still do not fully understand now. I was not particularly, prior to my daughter’s birth, familiar with or enamored with babies, as some friends of that time were wont to be. I was more interested in the physical world and its workings: the silken mystery of the milkweed pods in fall, the behavior of the homebody ravens that roosted in our rural Minnesota trees, the shape of moonlight on snow. But, as with the surprise of my small, secret happiness over the pregnancy, I discovered, once my daughter actually came into being, with her dark eyes and hands that curled open and shut like flowers, that I was …