Continued evolution of a paragraph
My mother’s first lesson shortly after birth: deep attachment is followed by corrosive loss. The Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers is filled with the bereaved. Somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through its gray halls. They will soon join the other inmates, shell-shocked new mothers, swaddled newborns clutched in ambivalent embraces, jiggling, shushing, jiggling, shushing. This is how I picture her birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” My biological grandmother holds her freshly-bathed daughter, names her Lois. Over the next six weeks she feeds, diapers, jiggles, shushes. Her daughter calms to her warm, familiar scent, the intimacy in their gazes is bone-deep. But ephemeral. When the time comes, she signs the adoption papers, hands her wailing baby to the waiting nurse. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.
The next paragraph is much harder -- how can I describe the mix of my mismatched grandparents, pushy aunt, and guilty-from-the-get-go mother? Without getting too deeply into it? Do I devote a paragraph to my grandfather's accident? What about John the Murderer? Or Jim the Laminator? We'll see.