Jelsa Mommy Chapter 2

I am playing around here with a fiction story about a new kind of heroine, one whose heroism derives not from fighting or invisible planes or swords but from her very powerful feminine energy. This is all in a very early rough draftish sort of phase, so it is by no means polished. I am just trying to get a feel for the story and see what others think. It's my story, so please don't heist it in any way. If you do, I will hex you or something.

In case you missed it: Part I

When she got home from the dead zone, her kind and amazing children had cleaned the house and gotten Aubrey down for a nap. It must have been roughly noon. Jelsa still wasn’t sure what exactly to tell Aubrey. She was going to have to figure it out fast because Aiden’s body would be arriving in the next few hours. Well, she figured she’d wing it. Like she usually did. Jelsa was an amazing mom, and her children were brilliant and kind and thoughtful, but she was often stabbing in the dark. Parenting is far more guesswork than most parents would like to admit.

They decided to begin the process of picking out images to show while people were visiting the family and saying their goodbyes to Aiden. The kids were flipping through the projector marking their favorites. Aiden was a ham, so there was plenty to choose from. They were alternately laughing and crying. Jelsa was sitting with them for a while. She mostly let them do it, though. She felt pretty certain this was all far harder for them than for her. For one thing, she simply had so much to do that she didn’t have time to really think too much. Normally she believed her children lucky to have such free and open childhoods. Her own childhood had been far busier with school and activities. Her younger years had been spent with her attentive and loving mother, but after her dad had left, her mother had had to work. A lot. The kids had a few activities, but for the most part they had a lot of time to just be on their own and discover whatever they wanted to. It was an unfortunate thing at this point, though. Now they were pretty thoroughly immersed in the depths of grief and guilt and love and loss. It’s something we all have to learn to deal with, but it’s a lot to unravel in your childhood.

Jelsa remembered suddenly there were actual physical pictures somewhere in the basement. Back when she and Aiden were young and had first met, there were still photographs. This was an incredibly exciting thought. She was thrilled about the idea of a collage of pictures on the kitchen table. God knows they never ate on the damn thing anyway. She might even glue them all together and frame it. Jelsa loved projects, and she loved immersing herself in old pictures and letters. It was the kind of thing she could absolutely lose hours of her life doing. She was lost in her own zooming brain, and the kids were laughing hysterically at a charming picture she had taken some years back of Aiden passed out on the couch in his boxers with a half full beer slowly spilling. She wasn’t 100% sure that was appropriate for a death gathering and ceremony, but she decided to let them do whatever they needed to do to get through the day. In the chaos, they didn’t hear the quiet knocking at first. Jelsa told them to please move on to another pic as she headed to the door.

It was Jayna. In magical Jayna form with a stack of 3 hot casseroles. She was followed by her oldest daughter toting an enormous container of cookies. Or perhaps brownies? Jayna read her mind and said, “it’s both, dear. That’s how much I love you.” She took the container from Felicia, who headed to the couch o’ kids, and made her way to the kitchen with Jayna. She set down all the casseroles and immediately wrapped Jelsa, who was shoving a brownie on top of the cookie that was already in her mouth, in a big hug. “I’m so sorry, honey. Please tell me if there’s anything I can do. The meal train is already going, and everyone knows what to bring for the ceremony tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey. Thank you so much. I am so glad to have you in my life. I’m pretty sure I would have forgotten to feed them. Hopefully they ate while I was gone this morning, but Alydia is probably having a harder time than I am.” She fell into another hug and finally had a good cry. It just seemed that things getting better was constantly just over the horizon. She was feeling a muddled mess of emotions. She was so sad for her children. She was so angry that things were so hard. She was so depressed that this pointless war was dragging on forever. She felt so guilty for not feeling more sad about Aiden. Deep underneath she was feeling ancy. An old, slightly familiar itch to do something, but what was it? She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She let go of the hug and slunk down to the chair. Jayna offered to put a broccoli casserole in the oven. Old school comfort food. It’s good to have someone who knows you really well. She looked over her shoulder as she opened the oven door and said, “Listen. You know I love you. Please don’t do anything stupid. Your kids need you.” Jelsa laughed and assured Jayna that she would not be running off to join the resistance. “I’m too old for that shit now. Besides, what’s the fucking point? Nothing is getting better. Just more killing.” As she sat in the chair, she caught a wisp of muffled whispers outside the kitchen door and remembered that she desperately needed a word with Felicia. She quickly told Jayna about her photo collage idea as a way to excuse herself to rifle through the basement.

She nearly knocked the two of them down when she opened the door. They were in a heated discussion, and Jelsa thought it best not to ask. They didn’t look angry. Just passionate. She moved them away from the kitchen door to keep the conversation away from Jayna. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the resistance. She just didn’t support involvement in it. Felicia was a totally different story. She was 15, super cute, outrageously brilliant, and a fantastic liar. She wasn’t officially resistance yet, but she was probably their best underage spy. She had her own damn mom fooled. “Look, honey. I really need you to get a message to Jack. Do you think you can get something to him tonight? I’d really like him to come home tomorrow. Please tell him his siblings need him. That will bring him home.” Felicia looked at her with compassionate wisdom far beyond her years. “Of course, Jelsa. I think I can get something to him. I’ll use one of the old drones that are better at moving under the radar.” Alydia quickly forgot whatever they were bickering about and kissed Felicia on the cheek. “You’re a treasure, my love.” Jelsa shook her head and laughed. “You two are a mess.”

She shockingly actually remembered that she was on her way to the basement when she looked up to see Aubrey giggling at the top of the stairs. He was letting the tip of his finger just barely touch the force field which tickled him. He spied her quickly and jumped up and down, giggling louder, arms stretched up. “Mommy, mommy, Jelsa mommy!” She fake groaned and slogged up the stairs pretending to be a monster. “Monster mommy! Monster mommy! Don’t eat me!” He giggled and ran back to the bedroom and slammed the door. She scooped him up and munched his tasty little belly before changing his astoundingly nasty diaper.

She had fed all the children and finished her own lunch before remembering the photographs once more. She took a load of laundry down with her because multitasking rocks. With a 3 year-old, you never know how long you have before chaos hits, so she hurried to scoop out a few photo albums from an old plastic bin that she thought might have some good stuff from the early days. As she headed back up the stairs, she got that ancy feeling again. Now it was like she was forgetting something that she needed to do. She had forgotten to close the damn door to the washing machine, but that wasn’t it. When she went back down to close it, she took another peek into the bin and saw that a large picture had fallen from the album. It was a group photo that had been taken at a large protest rally shortly after she and Aiden had started dating. They were all red faced and sweaty. Several were sporting some nasty bruises, but they were all smiling. They had won a battle shutting down a nazi rally, but good lord they had lost that war. A heavy weariness bore down on her yet again as she began counting how many people from the photo were now dead. Of the 30, 7 were gone before they even left college. Aiden made number 17. She noticed the ancy and forgetful were now accompanied by rage. She half stomped up the stairs and was even muttering under her breath but managed to get a grip before returning to her children and the planning of a death ceremony.

The children had clearly grown weary of the picture selection game and were engrossed in some cartoon. Shalisa had her head in Jade’s lap, and he was running his fingers through her hair absentmindedly. Alydia had her head on Jade’s shoulder. Aubrey was stacking blocks and regularly swearing at them. She wasn’t sure how she had gotten so incredibly lucky. They were amazing children. They were bright and kind and loving. Most importantly for Jelsa, they loved each other.

She quietly slipped into the kitchen like a ferret with its treasures. She really wanted to peruse these on her own. She was feeling ornery and a bit off and just needed some time to herself. She placed the Antifa photo in the center rather determinedly. Surely there wouldn’t be any police or government folk at the ceremony. If someone else wanted to tell, let them. That was about a million years ago anyway.

She was utterly transported. Each photo brought a flood of memories of people and events that she had long ago forgotten. Or stuffed. They had met at a time when hope was still alive. Things were horribly dark, but the resistance was strong. A whole lot of situations seemed to explode all at once. Of course most of them had been going on for ages, but when it started affecting middle class white people, the shock had been substantial. The crack down had begun, of course, with people of color, LGBTQ folx, and anyone who wasn’t Christian. And there was the usual game of playing people against each other. The media had long been a joke and was getting worse. As millions of jobs went to bots, the crackdown on the poor got worse. The government was in shambles. They had spent stupid money bombing people for no reason and ceased to be able to afford any kind of assistance programs or even basic infrastructure.

For one brief moment people started to come together. Antifa provided bodyguard for United Front, Black Lives Matter, and any indigenous protest. War veterans, disgusted with what had been done in their name and the way the government was treating its own people, did the same. Poor whites who had fed into the racist bullshit fed to them by the elite began to realize they were being had. Of course it had taken the total loss of the social safety net and hundreds of illegal police shootings before they caught on, but it happened. Everyone began to rally around the LGBTQP community, especially black trans women who were dying at a shocking rate. The communities came together to help rally around each other, providing financial, emotional, and physical support in whatever way they could. A woman could make a call day or night and be escorted to wherever she needed to go by someone that wouldn’t be messed with. Crypto had still been decentralized then, and people who understood it were able to support themselves fairly easily, and the word was spreading. Even feminism was making tiny bits of progress, though it was still a dirty word and most resistance movements had men at the center. Pictures from this time period of her and Aiden were absolutely radiant. She looked at them with a sweet reminiscent fondness. She remembered how much she had loved him, but it was like it was outside of herself. She felt incredibly separated from that passionate love and adoration, and that just made her sadder.

The elite began to get a whiff of what was happening. The stench of their imminent demise filled the air. They acted swiftly and brutally. They started regulating cryptos. They stopped fighting wars and then closed all the borders. This saved them a fortune, so they were able to throw a few bones to the moderate left. Renewable energy, universal basic income, and universal health care were the big ones. From here, they began a media campaign to turn that moderate left once again against the poor and the marginalized. With their little bones to chew on, they turned their backs quickly and went back to pretending they had some actual disagreement with the right. Somehow the media campaign began dissolving the tentative bonds between various marginalized groups. Then there was in-fighting. Who suffered more? Who should be at the center? Who should be the leaders? Should there be leaders? Anarchy? Socialism? Who were we actually fighting? The state? Patriarchy? The police? ICE? The so-called religious right? And the big kicker: would they choose violence or non-violence? With the media campaign strong and infighting at its peak, the military and police came together. Raids happened daily. Information was destroyed, and people were murdered. Of course the media had played all her dead comrades as domestic terrorists. As she flipped past picture after picture of friends who had been murdered by the government, tears streamed down her face and rage filled her chest. Beautiful pictures of young, smiling faces taken sometimes hours before their deaths. She remembered the articles and news stories portraying them as violent criminals while the police were getting off scott free for actual murder. Meanwhile, the elite were sucking as much money as they could without upsetting the moderate left. Then again, at least half the elite were the moderate left. She and Aiden had both fought long and hard to protect the marginalized. Aiden was willing to fight. Jelsa was non violent, but she had no problem putting her body on the line for others. She had been beaten and arrested more times than she cared to think about.

Then the pictures started to change. When she got pregnant with Jack she had to remove herself from violent situations. The pictures now were more of her with her hands on her belly in the mountains, on remote beaches, and in the rivers. There were groups of women who moved around in the wilderness with pregnant women, young children and their mothers, and injured and dying radicals, protecting them from the increasingly violent conflict. Aiden had still been fighting at that point, so the pictures were of her with other women. She remembered the time period fondly. She loved moving about in a community of mostly women. She also loved helping care for the injured and dying, and the movement appreciated it too. They were well provided for. Growing the next generation was also seen as important work. Her mother, who adamantly supported her beliefs and activities, had told her many times, teary eyed, how lucky she was and how hard it had been for women who chose to put their life and heart into raising their children, how they were seen as wasting their lives away. Jelsa couldn’t imagine seeing anything else as more important. The next generation was everything.

Jack’s birth had been beautiful. In a lovely meadow near a river. The midwives had burned herbs to keep the bugs away, and she had danced and rolled about on blankets, held in the arms of her sisters. Someone had gotten some really amazing pictures of her labor and Jack’s birth. She really wasn’t longing for Aiden at all. After Jack was born, though, she had begun to miss him. Becoming a mother is overwhelming, and though she loved all her sisters immensely, she had longed for his presence. She had eventually convinced him to leave the resistance. The movement fractured and in chaos under the oppressive thumb of a no-holds-barred, fully fascist government, she had convinced him that there was no hope under the current resistance anyway. They would all have to retreat and reorganize. They had moved quickly and quietly through back routes to a different part of the country to start over and raise the next generation of revolutionaries. In the last picture she had actually managed to print out and put in the album, Aiden was holding a toddler Jack and Jelsa was pregnant with Alydia. They were standing in front of the earthbag home they had built with their community of friends in the hot backwoods of southern Louisiana, the same house she sat in still. God knows they would have much rather gone to Mexico, but it was almost impossible to cross the borders, and as many times as they had been arrested, they had no chance.

She looked up and noticed it was starting to get dark. She pulled another of Jayna’s dishes from the fridge and moved it into the oven. She peeked under the lid to see lasagna. Fuck yes! Enthralled for just one moment and then hit by the terror that only a mother knows, the terror of realizing that it’s dangerously quiet. Shit. Then another wave of terror upon remembering that she hadn’t told her 3 year old that his father was dead though the body would be arriving any moment now. Fuck. She creeped her head slowly through the swinging door between the kitchen and the living room as if moving slowly might somehow mitigate the damage she was certain to find. Sure enough Alydia, Jade, and Shalisa were sound asleep. She couldn’t blame them. It had been a harsh 24 hours. And there was Aubrey, marker in hand. He had drawn all over himself, his siblings, the couch, the walls, and the projector. Fuckety fucking fuck. “Hi Jelsa Mommy! I drew you a picture!” She sighed and smiled, too tired to scream. “I see that, sweet boy. That’s a very beautiful picture. Why don’t you tell me all about it, and then we’ll have to clean it up. Remember. We draw on paper.”

“Well, it’s a dragon chasing a purple ninja dinosaur. Then they flew to the forest, and the dinosaur, his name is Elosiosus, he went to find his ninja friends. See, over there on Jade and Alydia and Shalisa, I drew his friends the monkey, the unicorn, and the centaur. Then they ninja trapped the dragon and hugged him until he became their friend.” “Wow, sweetheart. That is such an amazing story and a beautiful picture. Let’s start cleaning up now.”

She woke the other children and sent them upstairs to take showers. She got two cleaning pods and started on the couch. She decided now was as good a time as any to tell Aubrey. “Sweetheart, I have to tell you something kind of sad. You know how we talk about the spirit world?” He nodded hesitantly. “Well, daddy has gone to the spirit world.” He looked at her as though she was a bit thick. “I already knowed that, Jelsa Mommy. Daddy already told me!” Tears were streaming down her face. Of course he had. “He’s coming back, though, right mommy?” “No, sweet baby. He can’t come back, at least not as daddy. He might come back as a different person or animal, though.” Aubrey sighed, frustrated. “That’s what daddy said too, but I don’t like it. I want daddy to come home later. He said he would visit me, though!” He smiled brightly at this thought, but he looked a little uncertain. “I am sure daddy will come to visit you. You will feel him, and you might even be able to see him. No matter what happens, daddy loves you very much, and he didn’t want to go to the spirit world, but he had to.” There were about 27 more “why” questions after this that got increasingly esoteric. Right at the last minute she remembered to tell him that Daddy’s body would be coming to the house, but that Daddy really wasn’t in his body anymore. She told him he could go see him but that he didn’t have to and that he would then be buried in the ground under a tree out in the woods. It seemed to cheer him that Daddy would be a tree. They were finishing their conversation, though they had made little progress on the dragon/dinosaur epic mural, when the doorbell rang.

Jelsa thought she was just in the nick of time and was headed to the door when her mother swept in like a powerful wind of love. She wrapped her strong, larger than life arms around Jelsa while Aubrey screamed, “Nana, Nana, Nana!” Jelsa sank in to her mother's arms and melted away. She could barely hear the children. She was pretty sure she wasn’t even bearing her own weight. The only thing that was real in that moment was the sweet sound of her mother’s voice. “It’s gonna be alright, baby. Mama’s here, and I’m gonna take care of everything. You don’t have to worry about anything at all. Are you okay? Of course you’re not. I’m sorry I asked. Do you want to go to bed? Do you want me to order some food? Are you hungry?” It was the sweet, sweet sound of someone who wanted to take care of Jelsa. It was like being handed infinite money, joy, and bliss all at one time. She could finally rest and know that someone had shit under control. Her mother was a force and could certainly drive her crazy, but right now this was exactly what she needed, even though she hadn’t known it until that moment. Her mother was studying her face closely with one hand on each cheek. “I am so sorry, sweetheart. Just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.” “Um, help Aubrey clean up his masterpiece mural? I'm so glad you're here. I love you so much, mama.”