A Letter to my ten-year-old daughter on the equinox

Dear Kyrie,
I have been dying to tell you.
I never wanted to be a mother.
I was so afraid of having a kid and then messing them up, the way I felt messed up. 
Right now, it’s your birthday.
You are ten on 3.20.20 and it’s the equinox and the middle
(beginning?) of a global virus, a pandemic.
And I think you are frustrated because you feel like you are always
put in a BOX, like you’re alone, the only girl, never celebrated, never
seen as much as you want to be seen. 
Dad had to go to the naturopath.
Your two older brothers are walking the dog
in the snow.  I passed a blood clot last night and have been distracted
trying to find my old pap smear results, like collecting PEANUTS for
elephants, trying to locate all these bloody remnant records of my
vagina so I can make sense of cramps happening in the middle of
nowhere and pain in my left hip joint.
I called the women’s clinic and they shamed me.
Because I haven’t been there since 2015 and I don’t have Medicaid or
Medicare.
They treat me like I’m GREEN, like I’m stupid, not getting my vulva
examined on the reg.
I tell her I’m trying to figure out if my symptoms are bad enough to
risk being out in public, to risk being touched with something that I could
bring home to your little brother who is two months in remission
from cancer, whose health is a CLOCK, ticking away towards
a sunrise or a sunset? I don’t know which or when but it feels
imminent and unrelenting.

I call my nurse friend who is no longer a nurse but an acupuncturist
but who decided to reinstate her nurse’s license today so that she might be
of help. I think of her FINGERNAILS which would rather be in the dirt of her
garden or in tea leaves or her children’s hair but instead she is
deep cleaning her clinic,
sticking needles underneath the skin of the elderly and the sick.
I tell her my symptoms.
I ask her why my left hip hurts, why my uterus is contracting, why
I passed a blood clot the size of a COTTON BALL?
She says maybe I’m pregnant?
I don’t think so.  Finally.  I can be pretty certain that’s a No.
Then she asked if maybe this is stress?
If this is an imbalance of hormones?
If maybe if I was watching the VIDEO of my life right now, there would be
no other character but the warrior. Only the Valkyrie with her sword
raised high, galloping on her horse back-and-forth across the screen.
No maiden with a flower crown.
No mother making soup in the kitchen.
Only the warrior.
I start to cry.
This BLOOD.
This blood in transfusions to your brother.
In four births I never planned on.
In gallons and buckets shed from a woman who never learned how
to track her own cycle
because she didn’t want to be a mother
and she wasn’t allowed to have sex
so what would be the point of inhabiting my own body?

Last week, while in an energy session,
I saw the up close face of a dark brown HORSE, her right eye,
deep and dark, with the longest eyelashes—she stared at me with
the most unending love and I thought about myself, in a vision I’ve held for
years.
I’ve been a black stallion in an endless pen, running from one end to the
other, craning my neck over the fence, waiting for someone to send me an
ENVELOPE with the memo that I can be free.
But no, I keep running.  And
every time I run, I pass the man sitting in a chair in the middle of the
pen with sugar in his hand.
I pass him every time.