A Letter to My Children's Father

an introduction to the birth of Butter Moon Bake Co

I can’t write about the beginning of Butter Moon without first telling you about the ending of a marriage. This is the introduction to what will be a four-part series for paid subscribers— recipes and the stories from what became my micro-bakery, Butter Moon Bake Co, that was brought to life four months postpartum during the middle of a worldwide pandemic in an effort to leave one of many lives I’ve lived behind.

I wouldn’t do it all over again.

Doing it again would mean going back to my eighteen year old self— a runner and you know how I ran. I ran from homes, hearts, security, and self. I was taught that in order to feel love I had to endure scarcity. If I wanted a house with a yard and three squares; if I wanted siblings and camping trips, I would have to trade love— the curse of my father. If I wanted love I had to fix, hold, and carry, and as hard as I did all three it was never enough to keep her, my mother. I would eventually learn that it’s not enough to keep anyone, not you, not even myself. Remember the first anniversary of my mother’s death? You didn’t know what to do with my sadness, you never did. You couldn’t fix it and when you realized you couldn’t fix something, you broke it further. You screamed at me until my mascara ran rivers and dripped onto the white lace of my dress. “My dad died when I was seven,” you said. “Get the fuck over it.” I told you he was better off. We learned one another’s blind-spots and did the only thing we knew how— to cut until there was nothing left to sever. If I wanted to be loved I had to count on the inconsistencies to be my constant. If I was to be loved, if I was loving, the energy around it would have to feel uncertain like the ground I often ran across. I’ve often thought about how static you were for so many years; you were my best friend. I still roll my eyes that we had only ever talked online and through text and occasionally talked on the phone for three years before we actually met because you were afraid, yet every time I experienced another break-up of my own doing I could find you there, tea leaves in the bottom of my cup.

You were my before-times. Before our children were born, before my mother died, before I felt the need to say out-loud what I had always known— that I’m queer. Before I knew how to still. Before I understood liberation. Before I learned how to stop running. Before I knew that I was never going to find myself at the bottom of a you, a glass, a bag of powder, a scale, or a cross-country move. We didn’t have the means to work. We didn’t have the materials to fix a thing that was broken almost beyond repair— ourselves. We took our collective grief and built a hornet’s nest. We were both too drunk, too traumatized, too angry to really be able to build much of anything else.

We taught each other to love the same way my mom used to slice tile quarters for the washing machines at the laundromat. There was love, no doubt, but what we held in our hands was a pile of sopping sheets with no money for drying. We kept doing what had been done. To us, to our mothers, and the ones before them. To say I never loved you would be a lie. But so would me saying that I would do it all over again.

Our lives were so insular when we met and throughout most of our relationship. Filled with both horror and privilege, our time primarily spent attempting to trick the world around us that we were okay. That we knew what we were doing. It was me, me, me. you, you, you. I didn’t yet have the language for collective freedom and when my world expanded you viewed it as a threat. Do you remember that hoodie I had with the Colorado state flag built out of assault rifles? My cousin and their friends had one— I was twenty-three and knew that the easy accessibility to guns, these guns, any guns, was tragic and yet there I was. Wherever I was, I was there. That is what I gave you. I wanted to be accepted and loved by whatever I could get— not just you. A child taught to code-switch that turned into an amalgam of devastation. I jackknifed myself into whatever role I thought I was supposed to play in order to fit into whatever version of a life I had attempted to create at the time. I was made up and I’m sorry for that. Don’t you see how I had to let go of that deceptive wanting for our children? You resented the times I was able to still and began to reckon outside my reality. “You’re more worried about other people than your own family.” What you really meant to say is, “you’re turning yourself towards something else and it isn’t me, it isn’t us, and I’m scared.” We were both scared, for same but different reasons. It’s okay to be scared. When the protests for the murder of George Floyd rang through our city you were so upset that I would dare “put an unborn child in danger” that I resigned and stayed home. What I should’ve said is that we already were— that lack of safety is everyone’s lack of safety. We were unsafe to one another. But there I was. There you were. Have you changed your mind yet?

I can’t write about a decade-plus without first writing about us, to you. A man and a woman. Two jobs. An apartment. A cat and then a dog. Two kids. It wasn’t just you, you know. I thought if I loved you hard enough I could keep you and I know you tried the same. I introduced you to the word phenomenal, Houston rap, and you swept me off the kind of feet that had no business being swept. We fucked for our lives— I crawled underneath you like the countless bodies I had encountered before in search of something real. I did this because it was what I knew how to do and so I taught you. I used sex as a shield and a weapon. You weaponized your being my shield when you knew I needed it most. You took me back to my eight year old self, cowering in the closet with my hands over my ears. I made sure you would suffer when I built an impenetrable wall around me— reminding you of your ability to be insignificant (to me) at any given time. You were a liar and I a romantic. I thought if I could just fix you— if I could just show you how good you could be. That’s what kept me there. With you, with them, with her. I replayed this so many times before and even after you, you know. And you do know— when the weight of thirty-three years of much of the same collided with a woman so different but so like you— my having to prove to her her own goodness, you drove across town to put me in your lap and rock me like a baby before you took our own for several weeks so I could get better. I wish the story ended there— that somehow we had been able to find a way to be good to one another at baseline but on your worst days you remind me, “You were so fucked up over some bitch your kids weren’t even enough to keep you alive.” I was never far behind to be clear. You, I would hiss through my fingers into a screen, are no better than your own father and you never will be. Our sadness was no match for our rage and we kept from each other what we both so desperately needed— ourselves.

So you sometimes said things that were right and sometimes I said things that were right and yet neither of us was ever right. It was never really about you, I hope you know that now. There are fundamental reasons why we’re not together, why I didn’t want to raise our children under the same roof, and that isn’t even the answer either. I had to stop doing the same things I had been doing for more than thirty years. I had to stop what had been done to us.

It took our firstborn for the clouds to part. It took our second for the flood.

We tried, I think, in our own ways. We tried to better us, we tried to read, we tried to drink less. We tried therapy, we tried building a hobby out of weight-loss together. We tried road-trips and delusions of grandeur. I wanted to talk about our future and you never could. You refused. I was two bottles of Prosecco deep while Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” moaned into the Colorado mountainside the day we were married. The moment I stepped under the arch with you, the wind chime placed in the center for my mother began to scream against a sudden rush of wind, wasn’t that wild? I tricked myself into believing it was my mother’s blessing, we all did. I know now that it was a warning— that I was about to play out the same fractured and dysfunctional type of love I know she was desperate to leave behind and never could.

It was never supposed to be because I wasn’t real. I’ll only speak for myself but I have a feeling you know what I mean.

If I had never been found, why was it you I was searching for?

I love you. Thank you.

I call you by your name. I refer to you as the father of my children. I do not call you my ex-husband because I do not hold possession of you, or over you. I do not want to and I mean that in the softest way. You gave me two kids and the key I’ve used to lock some of the doors that needed to stay shut. I think it was the tea leaves all along, you know? I think our bodies always knew what we couldn’t ever say.

with tenderness,

Sarah Ava