ESSAY CONTEST RUNNER-UP
“My Moment On the Bus”
by Suzanne Scanlon
There was a moment early on when I realized just how deeply my own pregnancy would connect me to my mother, who died 27 years ago, when I was nine years old.
It is November and I am 11 weeks pregnant with my first child. We are in Istanbul, Turkey, where we’ve lived for the past year, in what has been a challenging, exciting, and fortunate experience of its own.
I am on the service bus, leaving work and heading downtown to meet friends. Maybe it is the pregnancy, maybe it is ongoing culture shock, but I am feeling very far from home. I ride the bus through town, from the working class district of Sariyer to the cosmopolitan center of Taksim; slowly we creep along the Bosphorus, through the busy districts of Besiktas and Ortakoy. Looking out at the vagaries of the city, I am overcome by how strange it is to be here, how I couldn’t have predicted I’d be here now, in this moment of my life, in this foreign country. In the first of many moments to come throughout the pregnancy, I think about my mother at my age, pregnant like me; I want to know: Did she feel this way? Did her life surprise her as much as mine surprises me? Did she expect to be married to a doctor, living in the suburbs? I wonder.
I feel strangely close to her; I imagine that yes, it may have been the same for her, however different the circumstances of our lives. I imagine asking her these questions; I imagine what it would be like to have her here, to talk to her about being pregnant. I haven’t imagined her face or her voice in years (and at this point, twenty-seven years after her death, how can I even know what her voice sounded like?), but suddenly it is as if she is sitting next to me on the bus, telling me about her own life. It surprises me that I can fantasize this way, imagine her here after so many years. It is painful yet deeply comforting; I feel closer to her than I have in years.
About to become a mother, I imagine myself again as someone’s daughter; I recall what it was to know myself through her eyes—something I’d forgotten. Our lives take on a kind of symmetry, a certain conjunction.
In the uncertainty, anxiety and joy that has accompanied these many months of waiting for my own child, I return to her and to this moment on the bus. I will return to her as I watch my child grow; I will return to her memory as I grow old, and surely, I will think of her when I face my own mortality. In her absence, I have become who I am, and in my memory of who she was, I have learned how to live.
I’m still learning.
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