Excerpt from Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
In the end I was so grateful. I wanted my mother finally to know it.
Now I tell my birth mother I’m grateful, too. I tell her I can’t imagine how hard this must have been on her. I tell her what my mother, my real mother, the mother who raised me, used to say, “Not flesh of my flesh, but heart of my heart.” I tell my birth mother she did the very best thing by giving me up to this woman who loved me and who I loved.
My birth mother responds the next day with a short e-mail that says: “I’ve thought of you often. It’s just too much after all these years. What’s done is done.”
***
And then, later, she sends another e-mail that says she wishes she’d aborted me.
She says she would have, had she known.
This selection comes from Lori Jakiela’s book, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe available now from Atticus Books. Purchase your copy here!
Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoirs The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press) and Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette), as well as the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist (Turning Point). Her third memoir — Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe — is forthcoming from Atticus in 2015.
She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize many times, is the recipient of a Golden Quill award for column writing from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, performed at Lollapalooza and won the first-ever Literary Death Match/Pittsburgh.
A former flight attendant and journalist, Jakiela now teaches writing. She lives outside of Pittsburgh with her husband — author Dave Newman — and their family.
Her website is http://lorijakiela.net and she occasionally blogs about writing and other stuff she likes at http://ljwritesbooks.com.
Sarah Einstein is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press 2015), Remnants of Passion (Shebooks 2014). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK and other journals. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the prose editor for Stirring: A Literary Collective and the special projects editor for Brevity Magazine. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
