{"id":43,"date":"2018-04-17T23:31:47","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T23:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.illinoisstate.edu\/euphemism\/13-2\/?page_id=43"},"modified":"2018-09-15T20:49:45","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T20:49:45","slug":"losing-blue","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/losing-blue\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing Blue"},"content":{"rendered":"
Billi Casey (Bio<\/a>)<\/h5>\n

For she had eyes and she chose me. – Shakespeare<\/em><\/p>\n

“Your eyes are light-blue,” my granddaughter announced as she went around the room assessing everyone’s eyes, duck-duck-goose style.<\/p>\n

“Brown, hazel, chocolate…”<\/p>\n

I heard her continue as I got up and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Meeting my gaze were not the dark, almost violet, eyes that I remembered myself having, but a paler, washed-out version. Looking back at me were my mother’s eyes.<\/p>\n

My mother brought me home when I was eight months old. Eighteen months later my adoption was finalized. However, from the moment she got her hands on me it would have been impossible to convince her a certificate with a judge’s stamp of approval is what made me hers.<\/p>\n

She and I were having lunch at a sun-lit restaurant overlooking the Atlantic Ocean one afternoon when I was in my early twenties. My oldest brother, who was thirty years older than me, had just had his first in what would be a series of many heart attacks. I think it had taken her by surprise that having a fifty-year-old child who was seriously ill was so similar to having a five-year-old child who was seriously ill.<\/p>\n

“Maybe it’s because you carry them inside of you for nine months,” she said, searching for an explanation. “They’re part of you for that time and, I guess, that’s what makes them a part of you…always.”<\/p>\n

She looked up from the food that she’d been picking at and met my eyes. I’m sure that I had a look of shocked confusion on my face \u2013 I’d make a lousy poker player. I hadn’t been carried inside of her. I had never been part of her body. I hadn’t even been found during a desperate search for a baby to make her life complete. She’d ended up with me after a woman she knew had had a baby and then, after eight months, decided she wasn’t ready to be a mother. I’d been an unplanned pregnancy and then an unplanned adoption.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to make this right. She’d just eloquently explained, in a way that excluded me entirely, why she was so connected to my brother and my other siblings. I was trying to decide if I was hurt or mad. I was trying not to cry.<\/p>\n

“Oh,” she simply said. “I forgot.”<\/p>\n

She had four children whom she’d given birth to. And me. Any question I’d ever had about whether she saw them any differently than she saw me had just been eliminated. In three words.<\/p>\n

Reaching across the table I squeezed her hands. And I looked into her beautiful, pale-blue eyes.<\/p>\n

I was very familiar with those eyes. I’d been looking into them for as long as I could remember, and I assumed that they’d been this soft shade of light blue for her entire life. Now, I realize, I may have been wrong. She was fifty-one when she acquired me by delightful default, two years younger than I am now. When I returned home from visiting my granddaughter, I went through some old pictures. I was right. My eyes had once been a more vibrant, dark blue. The pictures I found of my mother as a younger woman were either in black and white or were faded to a point that made it impossible to see her eye color clearly.<\/p>\n

Turning fifty-three earlier this year was not as traumatic as I thought it might be. Sure, there is circumstantial evidence of age as it creeps into my daily life. It’s harder to get out of the car after a long drive, I have to use reading glasses or guess at dosages on pill bottles, and it takes me longer to recover from a night spent with my lover than it used to \u2013 although maybe this says more about him than me. And now there is this. An unmistakable dimming of what I consider to be my best feature. It startled me, initially. The idea that, although I’m still here, parts of me are beginning to fade away is disconcerting. I don’t know if my mother’s eyes were darker when she was young. I suspect that they were.<\/p>\n

She died less than a month before her ninety-eighth birthday. In the last few years of her life I watched something both tangible and intangible come over her eyes. Something like a curtain closing gently after a fabulous performance. Something like a screen fading slowly to black after the best movie that you’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Billi Casey (Bio) For she had eyes and she chose me. – Shakespeare “Your eyes are light-blue,” my granddaughter announced as she went around the room assessing everyone’s eyes, duck-duck-goose style. “Brown, hazel, chocolate…” I heard her continue as I got up and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Meeting my gaze Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-43","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":731,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/43\/revisions\/731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/13-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}