[Fiction] Mother Again

Mother Again is available to download in full here (free). Below is a brief description of the novella and an excerpt.

Desperate to escape the disintegrating United States, a failed singer, her husband, and three kids (and one irate cat) follow the advice of NPR and rematriate to Denmark—never mind that they have no family or cultural ties to the country (where is anyone from, really?). All seems to be going well, at first, until Ericka and the rest of her family have to confront what it means to find a new home in a world that has increasingly incompatible visions of what it means to be alive.

Chapter 1

The first time Ericka Wills, mother of two and failed singer and dreamer, heard the word rematriation was during a heated San Francisco school board meeting. It was the first meeting of the school year, and an angry public commenter called in to sing—literally sing—a demand that White Americans give back their land and “rematriate themselves.” As history books would later note, the essential point of the comment was lost when the school board proceeded to spend two hours debating whether they should use the word “repatriate” or “rematriate” when discussing a motion to set up a committee to explore the issue. Nonetheless, the wheels were set in motion when the conversation was picked up by Fox News and then Twitter, thanks to a slow news week, and it quickly went viral.

Ericka didn’t follow those media developments, which she would later find embarrassing. She wasn’t on Twitter and, music teacher that she was, she’d mostly been captivated by the fact that the public commenter had such a resonant alto—and the item she’d called about was continued to the next meeting (keeping funding for music programs). It was the tune that haunted her and blew the word into her mind. Zoom was surprisingly good at picking up upper harmonics, and she liked to put on headphones when her school PTA sent out emergency notices about disappearing school funding and tune into podcasts in foreign languages to listen to the voices wash over her as she made dinner for her three kids. It was far better than her kids’ repetitive Minecraft music or the digital snake-rattle of her husband’s constant Slack alerts; also, she liked to feel like she was improving her language skills, even if she wasn’t.

She’d later remember the smell of the burnt fish she’d made that night—she would insist it was fish, though it may have been chicken nuggets. Ericka hated cooking and domestic responsibilities in general, too.

Things did progress, though.

Within weeks, The Atlantic had written an article, The New Yorker was working on a major, illustrated series, and even Travel & Leisure had published a much-shared article on “Top 10 Luxury Experiences for Repatriation.” The hot question: Was it a permanent vacation, was it radically anti-racist, or was it genocide, but, like, in a good way?

Ericka, who had shut down her Twitter account in 2021 in favor of more time on YouTube and then Instagram reels of singers she was jealous of, managed to miss all that during her stolen phone moments. Instead, it wormed its way back into her life in a more authentic manner. She, like so many women her age and area code, loved to fly around Red Fin at night after the kids were finally asleep, looking at 4BR, 3B $5M+ properties that they’d never be able to afford. Like a personal real estate opera. That was how she noticed a tiny uptick in properties in certain parts of the city. It made her wonder if it was a sforzando or the beginning of a long and unprecedented crescendo—and so rematriation officially reentered her life.

Then, in a much-vaunted podcast that whipped around moderately progressive social media feeds in early October, NPR asked: Was it okay to be defensive about the prospect of European-American population reduction in the process of rematriation, all things considered? 

This, Ericka found increasingly present. Some friends had gotten into a massive fight on the issue on their neighborhood Facebook mom group—a client had responded to another mom’s comment with a derisive crying laughing face emoji—and had tagged her in the thread in expectation of backup, sending her into a minor panic. She didn’t even want to be in the Facebook group, but had been forced to be when she was looking for a babysitting swap after baby two was born. Ericka had no idea what the right position was. When she thought about it, all she could think was that she was from Schaumberg, Illinois; was she supposed to move back there, where it snowed?

Nonetheless, Ericka reluctantly shut herself in the unloved and barely functional second bathroom of her family’s sagging Mission neighborhood house after dinner on a sharp, blue May Wednesday to listen to the debate. She didn’t like feeling so uncertain about the right political views, and it was good to take her mind off her imploding singing lesson business; the pandemic had been brutal to her already fragile career (and mental health—having kids should not be a spontaneous decision, it turned out). Practical people didn't get music degrees.

“… experts to debate this question of whether it is the only ethical imperative available to European-Americans to move back to their overseas ancestral homelands …”

The bathroom resonated on a G#, Ericka noticed, not for the first time, and the G made her think of Germany; not that she was German—or was she? She’d gotten a C in German diction in college. She hummed lightly up and down the core elements of the scale to confirm the pitch and closed her eyes to feel the tiny pulse vibrations. Overseas was a good word for a pure drone, she noticed.

“… furthermore, does accelerating climate change and the unwillingness of this administration to act with urgency create an upside to willing rematriation for European Americans? …”

Ericka paused her humming and listened more carefully, snagged on that bright word, climate, as she stared at her dry, ringed tub. The drought in California had been so bad that year that they’d already had a few weeks of invasive water restrictions, leaving the neighborhood notably on edge and food shockingly scarce. The wildfires were expected to be catastrophic, and they hadn’t even started. It was hard to wrap her head around as a child of the abundant ‘80s cookie-scented shopping mall.

Her cat, Isildur, scratched at the door, thumping the wood with his paw, and she sighed and cracked it open just long enough to let him in, then quickly eased it closed again, straining to listen. At least he wasn’t dragging in a rat, or worse. And more importantly, her kids hadn’t noticed where she was hiding.

“… Our line is now open. Call in and tell us: if you’re a White American, will you be rematriating?”

“Isildur, sit!” Ericka sighed, feeling no clearer about what to write on Facebook.

The cat was waving his butt in her face as he circled in her lap. She was uncomfortably perched on the chipped toilet. But he was also purring, which was a plus. Ericka sighed, nuzzled his brown head with her knuckles, and sat back against the cold porcelain, mollified by the rippling pulse of his vibrations. Isildur was a street cat who’d wandered over to her while she was high and singing to a violently entrancing sunset at Kezar Stadium. The day she’d also met her husband, Gray.

So, no, Ericka didn’t feel any clearer about what she thought of rematriation as the podcast began to wind down with a series of long-winded callers. But she appreciated the rare quiet time with Isildur’s roiling purr, even if it now sometimes made her eyes prickle with something sharp. Ericka tuned the podcast voices out and focused on the cat and the calendar for the next day. “If we moved, you’d be too scary for the cute little European rats, wouldn’t you?” 

Isildur dug his claws into her legs in response. 

“Ow!”

In response, Isildur bit her finger.

When he’d first come home with her from Kezar Stadium, he had declared himself her husband, Gray’s, cat, and now he belonged to no one—pointedly so.

Ericka turned up the volume on her phone and tried not to take it personally. Lord knows she already had plenty of babies; she wasn’t sure how she’d ended up with so many babies. She’d liked the idea of being a mother, in theory.

She was going to turn on the bath and maybe slip into some illegal water, but the voice of a new caller resonated in the small tile room, and Erika found herself distracted by the overtones of the woman’s mezzo-soprano. It wove through the words and carried them across the air, layering into Ericka’s tired brain like music in a grocery store, and her shoulders automatically relaxed. Her eyes turned away from the dirty tub and to the ash-grimed window. 

“Maybe you’re shaking your head right now, thinking it’s impossible. But ask yourself, can you really be happy in this country anymore?”

As predicted, she shook her head. Ericka stared at her cat, remembering the feeling of that golden day on the stadium track, and imagined leaving. “That’s insane. I love this city too much.”

A drop of drool formed at the corner of Isildur’s graying mouth as he settled into her head rubs. Gray didn’t believe that Isildur had found Ericka and instead claimed that he had found him curled up in a patch of grass just outside the Kezar Stadium bike path and had been unable to resist the kitten’s tiny mews.

That had been back in 2007, another lifetime ago, and Ericka had been too high to rely on her memory, so she always let it go out loud. Though, of course, not in her mind.

Ericka eyed the tiny window next to the sink again, noting the layer of permanent black and red grime on the open sill—the new permanent. Times had certainly changed in the 15 years since that day. Ericka had given up on her solo singing career altogether, was down to one student in her anemic music business (hence the need to get this Facebook post perfect), and the school district had recently cut her part-time teaching job, along with the entirety of the music program. In fact, her kids’ school was down to just four days a week in person now, and Ericka had never been more tired and less inclined to do more than hum; she had Irish triplets in kindergarten, first, and second grades. (Was that OK to say?) 

Then again, was a chord a chord without three notes? That’s what she always told the people who knew her from her earlier days as a rising music star. The people who had long since eclipsed her. She’d recently begun to think about starting a YouTube channel just to, you know, build her own audience again; people did that now, right? Maybe make some money?

Ericka knew she shouldn’t complain. Other people had it much worse. But sometime in the last three years—when? how?—it had become tacit that things were never going to get better again. People were abandoning the public schools even more rapidly than before, but Ericka and Gray couldn’t afford private school. So, that was one of the many uncomfortable series of realities extending her time on Red Fin these days. What, was she going to homeschool her kids forever? Live locked in their house whenever the wildfire smoke lit up the sky (more often than anyone expected now)? Would she have to get a regular job, too, not that anyone would want to hire her with a music degree? She and Grey were hemorrhaging money.

The whine of the white noise of the tiny bathroom grew louder in her ears. It was no longer a G-sharp. Or was it? That couldn’t be possible; she had to be losing her mind. She closed her eyes, and a familiar heaviness fell back onto her.

The voice persisted. “Can you honestly say you’re doing the best for the future of humanity by staying?”

It felt good to be still, Ericka realized. To stop listening to the vibrations in the world and shut down completely. When had she become this tired, this listless? Their garage was littered with an embarrassing number of Amazon boxes and GrubHub bags. She’d caught her kindergartener playing with Isildur’s emergency litter the other day. It was too depressing to even complain about on the one group text she kept going with her former conservatory friends.

Would moving let her be the woman she wanted to be again? Or the singer? She was a terrible mother. And so dramatic, right? Total soprano.

The podcast ended, and the white noise of the bathroom hummed back at her in noncommittal static along with Isildur’s snores.

And then it faded. 

Gray found her two hours later and woke her up long enough to help him find his missing computer dongle and then stagger together into their unmade bed.

Erika never did comment on the contentious mom group thread, settling for putting bright red hearts on her client’s posts, past and present. The topic, nonetheless, had most certainly cast a show in her brain; she began to feel feverish. She settled into a pattern of liking a lot of Instagram posts on the topic and occasionally wading incautiously into heated discussions on her other, citywide San Francisco Facebook moms group with long, circular rants. Maybe the podcast had a point, she thought over and over as she sat with her children at their tiny table, trying—and failing—to get them to watch their Zoom classes on their overloaded wi-fi signal. She’d already lost her voice from screaming that morning at breakfast. Was that so bad to say? It was something that people really did need to talk about, she secretly thought.

Besides, it felt good to feel like she was thinking about her future seriously again; like she was still the beautiful young singer who had captured so much press not so long ago. It was much better than the endless rejection she was getting in her new, desperate job hunt (no, no one wanted singers to breathe all over them, thanks, even if they were understaffed). Still, in truth, when she did her nightly Red Fin search after she’d put the kids down for the second—and third—times, Erika never expanded the search parameters any further than coastal Maine or, if she was feeling wild and particularly bitter, Miami; it was where she had sung her last major role, to huge acclaim. It had been Dido in Dido & Aeneas, a dramatic role that suited her blazing and hypnotic soprano. Her once blazing soprano.

Her former dreams.

As proof to herself that she had once been almost-someone, Ericka created a YouTube channel but left it fallow as the weeks dragged on. It was a better place to dream than do.

Then, on the tenth anniversary of her last show in Dido, which was in late November of that year, she did join a few ex-pat Facebook groups online for England, Italy, and the Netherlands; she still wasn’t entirely clear where her family was from, but those were the easiest groups to join when you were a little too tipsy to read the group entry requirements closely. The forums turned out to be wonderful distractions during the four days the kids were at school and she was supposed to be job hunting and cleaning the house on an increasingly shrinking budget. Ericka had always hoped that becoming a singer would mean lots of international travel. If only she could break into that market. If only, all things considered.

So went Ericka’s last year in the United States of America.

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