Excerpt
Excerpt from
Awake by Elizabeth Graver. Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth Graver. Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
If I were a different sort of person, this would be the story of my son and the sanctuary we found for him. It would be a tale of healing—if not of the body, then of the soul.
But what if a mother gets an itch, a yen? What if she tires of the tending, loses faith in the healing, needs a break? People in the paid workforce get vacations. Daycare providers get them, and nurses. Teachers take sabbaticals and leaves. What if the mother, who for years has checked and checked and checked her sick boys skin, watches the boy run off with his new friends and starts to notice her own skin again, the way it keens for something, wants? What if she finds herself split down the middle? Now she is two people, or even more—two mothers, two women in love with two men and with solitude itself, a person at once meshed and floating, coming and going, here and there. It should be disturbing, but it isnt, not at first. Shes too happy. Brimming. Her love is wide and generous; shes got more than enough to go around.