Bone Mother

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Bone Mother” by Danna D. Schmidt. Danna is a ceremonialist and Medical Aid in Dying mixologist living in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, Okay Donkey, and Bending Genres. She’s working on a speculative memoir about family secrets, the prices we pay to keep them, and the power of wishcrafting to shapeshift our lives.

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“We are all children of blood and bone. All instruments of vengeance and virtue.

This truth holds me close, rocking me like a child in a mother’s arms.”

Tomi Adeyemi

I remember the numbness when she died. It floated down on me from the dark December sky as a gossamer cloak. One day she was there in the outer spheres of my life, and the next day she was gone forever.

To speak of my birth mother, I must explain the hunger that lives inside me. My hunger was once a small seed of longing, she blew out onto the wind with the stork all those moons ago. It lives inside me now like an unwieldy perennial in need of a sunlit window, pruning shears, and solid roots.

To tell you about her, I need to talk about the invisible container between us, which is where we’d place everything, like those plastic bins at the airport that would journey along the metal rolling conveyer belt only to disappear from view behind a small black curtain. We set it all down there as though it might be examined, deemed prohibitive, and eventually confiscated.

To conjure her now, I must acknowledge not just the space between us then, but this new absence now. Close your eyes and hold out your cupped hands, I whisper to any who lean in, so I might scoop seven and a half tablespoons, a small funeral pyre of cremulated bone bits, clenched teeth, failed dreams, and tender liver marinated in a red wine reduction, which is ultimately what killed her in the end.

Watch out, I warn. She’ll try to sneak past you so don’t let her slip between your fingers, just as she did with me for the first 33 years, and then again, those last six.

And yet I was the one who did the ghosting. Six years before she died, I hung up the phone and rubbed my hands together, as if to spellcast the friction and space between us into the abyss.

There is no spellcasting the inheritance of disease. What lives in her, lives in me and vice versa. The phenomena of microchimerism hints at this, wherein babies pass cells to their mothers via the placental cord during pregnancy. The cord is cut at birth, but is it ever truly severed?

My birth mother had been slowly drinking herself from a place of functionality to bone diminishment for years. Making peace with her means making peace with the potion she consumed to fill this primordial wound. My maternal grandmother did the same. This, too, is a kind of microchimeric pact, a family trade route of unspoken traumas and sorrows we’ve shepherded back and forward across time and matrilineage like old-world merchants.

My birth mother and I spoke a few times after I severed contact with her in December of 2015, but it was always the same. She’d feign confusion about the contents of her plastic bin that so quickly rolled behind the curtain of our last phone call in those days before Christmas that year. One bottle of rye, the fresh grief of her mother’s death, and all the things left unsaid.

Six years later, she phoned and for reasons I still don’t understand, I answered her call. This was before I knew she was in late-stage liver and renal failure. This was before I knew this would be the last time we’d speak. Forty-five days later, she was dead.

We talked for an hour or more that October day. I didn’t admit how her alcoholism eventually poisoned our relationship. She didn’t mention how hurt she felt when I posted my father’s death on social media twelve hours before calling her, mere weeks before I cut ties. And there was no talk of her disdain when I didn’t attend her mother’s memorial later that same month. Nor did she talk about her failing health. Unbeknownst to me then, she was dying. Did she know? Is that why she called me; to try to reach out to her grandkids one last time?

After our awkward start, we segued into the real conversation, placing incrementally larger issues in the bin. Her indignation at being cut off from speaking to her grandchildren. My argument that no relationship with them could ever be authentic if the two of us are estranged. Her anger that seethed just below the surface. My resentment that even after nearly two decades of being reunited, I still didn’t have anything in the way of family history, stories, photos, truths. Our chat eventually wound its way down to its last spiral. To speak any more words would mean saying what neither of us had the courage to voice.

Before we hung up, we each said I love you, neither fully believing the other meant it. I sat there alone in my chilly basement family room for another few minutes, digesting our exchange and trying to make new meaning. Were there new words? Was there new meaning? Or was it all just a master class in linguistics with our series of relinquishments, regrets, and reunions; and all the performative utterances of hellos and goodbyes on permaloop?

At the time, I didn’t make much of her latest plea to get the kids’ phone numbers and addresses. Even the next day, when she left another voicemail, which was framed in a clipped tone and prefaced with the words, “if you would be so kind, dear,” as though to infer that I was anything but kind or dear.

I look back now and see how we, perhaps unfairly, passed our threadbare trust back and forth to one another, along with years of resentment, confusion, and dreams for a better past or future; an entangled pile that even now sits unclaimed in the baggage storage room behind closed doors.

Since the estrangement, the story she would tell – to my mother-in-law and other relatives – was one she had made up to make sense of the severance.

My mother-in-law called me one night, a few months later.

“Your mom phoned me today, you know, to ask about the kids. Oh, and she thinks you’ve relinquished her.”

“What?!” I was livid that rather than reach out to me to try to mend things, she chose to manipulate my mother-in-law instead. Her tactics worked because my MIL sounded happy, as though she’d gained a newfound confidante. And her tactics worked because in some twisted way, they both found a way to poke the bear. I wasn’t just mad at her anymore. I was equally mad at my MIL for answering her calls, despite my repeated pleas to let them go to voicemail.

“She seems to have it all figured out,” my mother-in-law confesses in a sing-songy voice. “She said to me, ‘I gave her up all those years ago so now, I guess, it’s her turn to do the same to me.’”

I laughed when my mother-in-law told me this, incredulous at how my birth mom reduced our story to such a tidy revenge trope, as though abandonment had a kind of quid pro quo clause.

Thoreau insists you must “know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.” The bone every adoptee knows is that of abandonment.

Abandonment is the bone we have chewed on since that first day of relinquishment, and abandonment is the bone the morticians will have to pry from our mouths upon death.

For me, carrying this bone means making sense of both its harms and its gifts.

As a young child raised on a farm, I learned how to be a bone unearther, burier, and collector. I was as much a hunter and gatherer of dead frogs, birds, tree critters, and larger mammal carcasses as I was a purveyor of weeds, mud pies, and birch branches.

Bones were oracles to me and still are. I didn’t know how to sing over them as a child, but I knew how to fashion a hare-shaped ringlet of dandelions, daisies, and field stones around a dead rabbit and sever her furry foot with a rusty saw blade because I always felt devoid of luck. I could divine which crows had dissected the cow skull in the back pasture. I knew how to make an earth altar and how to play cemeterian for the creaturely ones.

I have a proclivity for dried bones. The night I snuck out as a young teen to make out with the cousin of a famous NHL hockey player, I saved the fried drumstick bone as a talisman of luck and longing. I saved that bone for years.

The closest I come to praying over bones is when I save wishbones from the holiday turkey carcasses. For the longest time, I kept the larger half of a broken wishbone, hoping it meant my long-held wish would come to fruition and that I would finally be reunited with my birth mother. I don’t hold the same beliefs about bird bones as the Etruscans, who were the ones to originate this divination rite, but I’ve always felt loss and longing in my bones. As a modern-day ritualist, I have learned to pair intention with ritual action. I even know the sound cremains make when they are tossed to the ethers and cradled by the wind before returning to the earth to live on in new form.

That, too, I’ve come to learn, is a wishbone ritual as old as time itself.

Not long after the Alberta government partially opened birth records in a pay-to-play way in late 1997, I wrote a $500 check to an adoption agency to locate my birth mother. A few months later, they did. She lived an eight-minute drive away from me.

We met anew on April 22, 1998, less than two years after I became a mother myself. Somewhere in the background of that late Wednesday morning mind’s eye film clip, Paul Simon could be heard singing our reunion into being and promising us a veracity of hope. We were mutually smitten and determined to make up for all the lost years.

Two weeks later, I found myself surrounded by an encircling of new family members as I opened 32 belated birthday presents from my birth mother. It was a grand gesture that overwhelmed and confused me.

She presented gift after gift in elaborate bags adorned with colorful tissue and fancy ribbons tied in meticulous bows. One for every birthday she missed, she said. There were presents like jewelry and P.D. Eastman’s picture book Are You My Mother? and perfume and scarves and all manner of things a mother might bestow upon a daughter through the years. The biggest of all the presents, however, was a large porcelain doll which she had saved to present last.

I don’t remember if she bought the doll or if it was an item she had regifted to me, but there it was. A beautiful doll for her beautiful daughter.

I unpacked all the gifts when I returned home that night. All but the doll, which I kept on my table. I had never owned a porcelain doll and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It felt both fragile and significant and like maybe I should preserve it. I would end up packing it from home to home three more times before tucking it on an upper shelf in my bedroom closet.

The doll beckoned me one late winter day following my birth mother’s death in late 2021. I stepped upon the small stool in our closet and took it down from the highest shelf. My view was shrouded in a layer of dust, so I grabbed a nearby scarf to wipe the polypropylene-encased box clean.

Where once it held an heirloom promise to pass down to my daughter and so on through the ages, it no longer carries that energy for me. I remember staring into the doll’s unblinking eyes that day and feeling a shiver move down my spine.

In the end, my Bone Mother died as she lived, ambiguously. If it’s possible to insist she had nothing to declare while sneaking a suitcase of secrets, lies, and half-truths behind her as she journeyed from this place to that other one beyond life’s final security checkpoint, then she surely did that.

She went to her ex-husband/lawyer a few years after we became estranged to disinherit me from her will and leave everything to their only child, my half-brother. The pragmatist in me wonders what took her so long or if she had an inkling even then of her impending death.

Given the cursory health updates my birth brother would send my way about her newfound sobriety, worsening COPD, inability to walk more than a hundred feet, and her hopes of moving into an assisted living facility, I question if she intended that to be her last will and fuck-you testament.

A few weeks after she died, I arranged to have my in-laws, who lived close to her, go pick up my half of her cremains from the funeral home. Soot to soot, sediment to sediment, bone to bone, porcelain to porcelain, memory to memory. From mystery she was born and to mystery she returned.

The first four years after she died, I left the cardboard box unopened. I finally mustered the energy to open the box and transfer the plastic bag of ashes into an iridescent blue vessel that once served as an Anthropologie candle holder with a metal lid. Like the doll she gave me all those years ago, my birth mother resides in a new, albeit fragmented, form on a high shelf out of sight yet still lingering like a ghost or a shadow on the edges of my psyche.

I have vague ideas about what to do with her cremains, depending on which inner child I ask. My innocent child wants to bring bits of her back to the family motherland, Ukraine, and fling other bits into the North Saskatchewan River that divides north from south in Edmonton, Canada.

My nurturing child feels tempted to house a trace amount inside a hidden reliquary tucked within a new cloth doll I would stuff, stitch, dress, swaddle, and cradle. My crafty child wants to make a mixed media painting, blending ash, paint, and a scrap copy of her signature from my falsified birth records all those moons ago. My wounded child wishes to place a scoopful into a steppingstone mold embellished with a mosaic of the broken porcelain doll pieces. My angry child feels moved to place teaspoons of her cremains into a helium balloon, to then shoot at with a high-powered Nerf gun.

And yet I know that, all of these rituals of release aside, I am meant to hold the weight and grey remains of her for a time, and to whisper words of forgiveness to her, to me, to us before letting her slip through my fingers and find home in the earth, the river, and upon the four winds.

But the last seven and a half tablespoons? Those I plan to save and transfigure into smooth, cold touchstones I can hold in my hand or carry in my pocket like a womb bone.