Always Wrong - Xyla Turner Page 0,42
courage, I wanted to know right then. These things did not work like that, but I decided to take up pottery making. I watched a few YouTube videos and ordered a pottery wheel, clay, and a tool kit. There were many messed-up pieces I’d designed, but the more I did it, the better I got. Eventually I was able to make a magnificent bowl, which took nearly seven days. It was smooth and free of blemishes. As I admired my handiwork, I thought of my life. When I messed up the other bowls, I was able to have a do-over. There was no prior indication that the twenty bowls before the final one, the perfect one, had cracks. There was nothing to show but a perfect bowl. It made me wonder if that’s how we can be. Where we could make a mistake and get a do-over. This also reminded me of Jacquez and the words I’d spook to him, about getting it always wrong.
We’d tried so many times, but there was always something. The damn man tried to propose to me, but damn – that was the ultimate wrong. We had the same interests, but marriage? So wrong.
Yet what did all of those imperfections lead to? Something perfect. The bowl experience was a fleeting moment, but it was only when I was sitting on beach, under the umbrella, living my beach life, that a mother and son walked past, and unlike the other times, when I thought about the miscarriage and my quest to have a baby and the need to let it go and not enter into fucking impossible relationships to have my way. I didn’t think about any of that. I thought about the perfect bowl and all of the times that I’d failed before creating it. Those failures led to perfection. A child, my child, would be perfection. In my spirit, I knew that he or she would be. Even if I adopted, which was something that my Life Coach and I discussed. Well, she didn’t really advise me. She had this thing about all the answers I needed in my life already being within me. I didn’t disagree, which is why I liked the result. I actually took a leave of absence. Never in my life did I think that was something I could do and I did. I was getting back to Sheryl. The me before the drive, ambition, and the fast-paced life. The little girl who felt different, and wanted to prove, if only to herself, that she would be somebody. That striving for something different. The hope, the dreamer, and the person to make it reality. Nobody could stop me, and if they doubted me, I always proved them wrong. This is what led me to this path. My coach kept challenging me to talk to the ten-year-old Sheryl. I already knew what she was going to say, but the conversation should still happen.
The tears fell from my eyes as the mirage of the mother and son disappeared as they were out of my sight. I wanted a child so bad, but …well, there wasn’t a but, just a not yet. When I felt whole enough to come off of sabbatical is when I would look into adoption. That was the agreement that I made with myself. There was nothing wrong with adopting a child. My life would change, but I was ready for it. Hell, I was on the beach at eleven in the morning. My life had already changed. I didn’t have to work another day in my life. That wasn’t bragging, but a reality. I enjoyed what I had built, but I didn’t have to keep managing it. For some reason, I’d had tunnel vision around that work and felt as though I needed to be there forever. I don’t and I won’t.
A week passed, and they said they had the results. I did not want them over the phone, because I wanted to be around people for some odd reason. Not that nurse that took my blood, but people.
It was one thing to know a thing, but it’s another to know a thing. The envelope was handed to me, and the doctor said he’d mailed me a copy too. Originally, he wanted to discuss it with me over the phone, but I chose to come to their offices. He also brought a counselor with him, which made sense. Good, bad or indifferent, this was an emotional situation.
“Sheryl, the