Forgiveness is the cash you need

by Alma Vargas

I’m standing in the South Carolina heat, sun pushing down like gravity. I’m wearing my avocado green tank top. My skirt has tiny purple flowers all over it. It hits just below my knees normally, but today it’s pulling to almost above. 

We’re almost in the third trimester, and the weekly email from a website I can’t remember tells me that my baby is the size of a melon. Her sister, Julia, almost two, is running in and out of the downtown fountain. Her little sandals make a sound I’ve waited my whole life to hear.

I know I will name my baby Dahlia after my mother, even though my mother does not want me to name the baby after her. I know I will love the way the name tastes in my mouth, soft and buttery and then that final ahhh. I know I will tell the story of how nobody liked the name but me, but that it was a gift that I would give myself every time I called her to me as I do now, internally. 

I will pay for this moment for the rest of my life. There is so much to forgive, and I don’t even know if I am capable of forgiveness yet. Forgiveness has always felt to me like climbing a mountain by fingernail with no mountaintop photo. Just the quiet satisfaction of knowing a job well done. For a long time, forgiveness felt like generational wealth—nice if you were lucky enough to be born with it and handy when things got rough but not technically necessary. But now I know forgiveness is the bird I saw alight upon my friend Jenny’s shoulder in Brownies at a picnic. Amazing, I thought then and still think today. 

I will forgive him for alcohol, the recklessness of each red Silo cup, for getting Child Protective Services involved when his daughters refuse to visit him anymore. I don’t know yet that Child Protective Services will say his accusations are insubstantial. Exhale after holding everything in for so, so long.

Julia takes off her shirt and then her shorts and then her training underwear. She’s running down the length of the quad, buck naked, and I’m chasing her with one hand on my belly. When I catch her and put on her bottoms, her curls brush against my lips. 

Julia kisses her little sister Dahlia when she is born. Then she runs circles with excitement. When I look at that hospital photo of the four of us, I can only see my daughters and me. When I look at the picture of myself in the hospital bed, holding my baby, Dahlia, with toddler Julia beside us, I can’t even see their father. I can’t see him. I can only see the three of us, complete. A unit. The team. I can only think, Look, look. Look at what I’ve created. I suck in and think, Just look at that.