Jacaranda Season

Names and identifying details have been changed.

“Can I push?”

My gut clenched.
No question had ever scared me more.

We were alone in the house.

Anna’s face strained even as her laboring body sank into the overly soft mattress of the dark corner bedroom.

I wasn’t the midwife.
I prayed she’d arrive soon.

I was the father, not a husband.
We were no longer a couple.

The contractions were longer, closer together.

From obsessive reading, I knew—
when she felt the urge, it was time.

“Yes.”

I called the midwife.
Again, her answering service.

We’d arrived an hour before.
Upcountry Maui.
A house loaned for the birth.

I got her settled—comfortable, as if that were possible.

Then I filled the birthing pool on the lanai.

During the last fifteen minutes of the drive, as the Haleakala Highway steepened, all I saw were jacarandas.

The amethyst blooms—surreal surges of life force.

They blossomed up and out, rounding skeletal trees into bursts of blue-violet.

I held Anna’s hand
and breathed beside her, inside a violet trance.

For days afterward, every glimpse outside—
an oxytocin wash—
a world awash with purple pollen.

Nine months prior:

We met in Bali, where I lived and she was visiting.

I was in the role of yoga teacher. She had come as a student. I wouldn’t cross that line.

She was from Maui, a place where I’d nearly put down roots. Then I was sent elsewhere—Bali.

Both our mothers had recently died.

It felt like kismet.

Six weeks later I saw her at a cafe, just before she flew home. I decided not to let my teacher’s rules be a prison — something larger was at work.

One magical night.

A night when I watched my body choose something I never would have.

There were forces beyond us in motion.

My email the next day. Even as the sweetness lingered on our skin, part of me knew:

“Of course we were both responsible. Yet, if you’re pregnant, it affects you in ways that I can barely comprehend.”

Her response that same day.
“Of course I’m not pregnant.”

Three weeks later:
“I’m late. I’m freaking out.”

A pregnancy test. The confirmation.

Me: an unmistakable, unhesitant yes to this new life.

A hopeful glow that Anna and I might be a couple. I’d also lived enough to know how vision and chemistry can fade.

Her: wrestling with it all. A baby was not part of her plan.
Nor mine.
Not like this.

I tried to be clear.

I’m all in for parenting.
I’m all in for us finding out if we’re a couple.

How do I tell her the truth—without overly influencing her?

My mother’s voice. A national leader in the Women’s Liberation movement. A woman’s body. A woman’s choice.

Every day for months I gazed through the jungle toward the crevasse beyond the house.

Impassable.
The bottom lost in darkness.
So much of my own life now out of reach.

Yet I could hear the river below gurgling up from the darkness.

Through the dense canopy, I could just glimpse the rice field beyond.

A large dark bird swooped in daily, perching in the mango tree. As it looked at me, and I at it—

It felt like our child’s spirit watching me back.

Stay with me.

Every day the powerlessness pounded me.
Weak internet. Rare and spotty calls.
I felt cut off from my own growing heart

I stayed.
I prayed.
I sent love across the waters.

I’d sobbed the day Anna went for an abortion.

Yet, the image.
The sonographic blip of that miniature peanut.
That—plus her stepmother saying, “Anna, I know you. You would regret it.”

She’d aborted the abortion.

Then she was all in on the baby.
All in on us.

Back in Bali, back to my home, where it had all begun.
Playing house, getting to know each other amidst the strangest of circumstances.

At seven months, I knew.
I knew what I did not want to know.
Did not want to be.

Then I couldn’t unknow it.

But knowing didn’t tell me when to say it out loud.

During pregnancy?
That would be cruelty.

She had put her faith in me—traveled across the Pacific to create a family.

Hold back the truth for two more months? Two of the most important months of our lives. Live falsely?

And worse: let her keep believing in a future that I knew would not be?

An impossible choice: tell her now—or lie by silence.

Cruel either way.

For weeks I turned it over like fire, only to at last admit, I didn’t know which was worse.

So I admitted it. To myself. Then to her.

We’re not a fit as a couple.

Certainly some part of her must have known too.

Yet…

Pregnancy hormones.
Youth.
The fairytales we’d all been fed.
Whatever greatness she projected onto me then.

A month prior I’d bought us a mosaic-framed mirror.

She threw it from the house.

Her scream.
The crash of glass on the stone path below.

I leaned over the rail to see the walkway strewn with glass and tile, splintered reflections flashing back up at us.

She was — understandably — enraged.

My fault.

As much as I wanted to whip myself,
to sink into shame
to acknowledge to my dead mother that I had become yet another man who hurt a woman—

Time was ticking.

Despite flights, fights, oceans and islands, we held together—
a raft between islands.

We were now locked into at least one trajectory.

Birth.

The midwife arrived just moments before our daughter emerged.
We never got to the pool.

Pushing became peace.
The veil was parted and my breath was gone—
the greatest portal into the sublime I had ever known.

I left three days later, returning to Bali to lead a training scheduled a year before.
Fifty people were waiting. A commitment I had made before any of this existed.

Leaving Anna was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Leaving our daughter—harder.

With the two of them on Maui, every mile I flew stretched something in me that was never meant to stretch.

The birth was no ending—though it brought relief from our first-time fears.

Success. Natural. Healthy.

The storm had broken.
Now came the drift.
Rafts don’t have rudders.

In Bali, I spoke to the trainees as if my life were whole.
Part of it was across the Pacific.
I had to—to lead well.

Anna wanted a Z name.
She proposed “Zaida.”
Arabic.

I loved it.

Abundant, overflowing, flourishing.

When the training was nearly complete, I said it out loud:
My heart is on Maui.

After the birth. After the training. New questions.

Custody?
Location?
Would Anna’s disappointment and anger dissipate?

Not yet. Understandable.

For a time, I thought I was supposed to let go — Anna, Zaida, being a father.

What did it mean—Maui, Bali, all of it?

A scripture I’d read—misread—
leave your father, your mother, your brother, your sister…

I believed it.
Or tried to.

When I got back to Maui, every cell of my being knew:

I had to be in her life.

Whatever the cost.
Even if it meant moving there.
Even if it meant leaving the life I had built in Bali.

In time, Anna saw it too:
The life she’d have if she didn’t accept my invitation.
A single mother. No skills or money. Maui cost of living.

She didn’t want to come back. For her, Bali had become a place of heartbreak.

Yet in Bali I had built a beautiful life.
On Maui, it would have been a struggle—for all three of us.

For Anna to land on Bali again, now as sanctuary, was its own work.

The three of us flew together.
I paid for her food and shelter. We had a nanny.

Still, it was so hard for her.

Despite community living. New friends. Other mothers.

None of that was sufficient.

I’d seen the signs, but wouldn’t admit it to myself.

Motherhood, Bali. She tried.
But she did not want that life.

Still, we did okay. Our baby went back and forth between us.
Pumped milk. Bottles. A rhythm.

As much as I loved my daughter, I didn’t love being alone with infants.
Not for long periods anyway.
Their neediness I could handle.
The guessing exhausted me.

I knew the benefits of cosleeping. Some say fathers shouldn’t sleep with babies—they might roll over and suffocate them.

I had no fear of that, but I was scared she’d roll out and hit her head on the teak floor.

So I had someone build rails around the king size bed.
The biggest crib I’ve ever seen.

When she cried, I held her and paced a U-shape in that tropical cupola—singing Jai Ganesha, inserting her name. Zaida Shazandra… Gopala.

A phone call that changed everything.

Anna, across town in Ubud.
Crying.

“She was just playing. You know the chili plant on the lanai...”

I nod, forgetting that she can’t see me.

I know the plant.
Where is this going?

My pulse already pumping.

Kadek’s voice in the background, soothing Zaida—still gasping.

“She must have gotten it on her fingers, then her eyes. They are so red.”

Breathe, I tell myself. Don’t react.

Cinta, our dog, stares at me—alert, unmoving.

“I couldn’t get her to stop crying. I didn’t know what to do.”

Now sobs from Anna. I wait. My leg twitches. I want to get up, run. Electricity floods me.

“I shook her.”

My breath catches.

“I didn’t mean to. I just… I’m losing it.”

Now I know. We hit bottom.
And then, strangely, I’m calm.

My breath slows on its own.
As does time.

The panic in me pauses.
A strange serenity takes its place.

One slow step at a time.

“Don’t worry.”

I sink my fingers into the rolls at the rottweiler’s neck, pull her into my leg.

“I’m coming over.”

A devastating admission.
The world I’d been living in collapsed.

She admitted it to me — that in itself was a miracle.

Despite the resentment, the anger—she was honest.

Maybe she didn’t even know how bad it was, how serious.

Whatever the case, I’m grateful.

My eyes opened.
At last, I saw what I’d refused to see.

Anna didn’t want to be a mother.
Not now.
Not like this.

The shaking. That woke me up.

I wouldn’t call that abuse.
Not to her then.
Not now.

What would that say about my willful blindness?

My self-blame rose again and again.
Still, I fought to focus on the future.

It’s not the same as hitting.
And it didn’t matter what I called it.

Or—and this question tore at my belly for days—
what if the shaking wasn’t that big a deal?
How normal is it?

And what parent doesn’t have moments of longing for the freedom they once had?

Part of me wanted to believe all that. Going back to the way it’d been looked so much easier.

There was no certainty.

Yet, what my gut finally settled into: I had to do something.

I didn’t know what or how—only this:

I won’t let that happen again.

An angel.

Rachel—my employee, my friend, also Anna’s friend. She had a mother’s heart—even then, before her own children.

She confirmed—a line had been crossed.
Shaking a child.
Something had to be done.

She counseled me.

Don’t say that.
Go slow.
Be artful.

She helped me move past the primal protection instinct.
To find compassion for Anna.
I did love her.

Her life had been interrupted. Whatever her part in that, the question now was how best to love this child.

Beyond labels—abuse, neglect, shaking—

I knew the real damage was resentment.

As much as my own mother loved me—her fifth child, eight years after the others—I was an anchor, holding her in a life she was trying to leave.

I knew parental resentment—
the feeling of being a weight on someone else’s life.
I could not bear that for Zaida.

Nobody wants to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with them.

Except maybe a baby.
With their mother.

Rachel helped me find the phrasing—the truth:

Anna, you don’t have to.
I will be one hundred percent responsible for her.
You can be with her only when you want to.
If you want to.

Zaida would ask me: “Where’s my mother? Why isn’t she here?”

I had vowed not to do what my parents did.
I would never speak about Anna in a way that hurt Zaida’s love for her.

All I knew to say to three-, four-, five-year-old Zaida: “Your mother loves you.”

It was true.

All mothers are part angel. Anna, especially.

She may not remember that I offered her the freedom to leave our daughter.

Or that it was prompted by the shaking.

A young mother’s resentment thudded up against the limits of what she could offer our child then.

Infants are hard.
Parenting is provocative.

But shaking one—that was too much.
I could not let it happen again.

For more than a decade I wanted to be understood. If not thanked, at least not vilified.

Invisibly, in my own mind, a toddler’s tantrum.
Flailing, screaming, protesting.

I don’t ask how she recalls it. It’s not my business.

Eventually I stopped wanting to correct the stories.

Her perspective was:

His baby.
I was just the means to that end.

In the mind of our daughter:

He kept me from my mother.

I was not willing for Anna to appear as the villain in other people’s minds.
Not that I could stop it.

But when she told me what other mothers said to her—

How could you leave your child?
I could never do that.

I wanted to protect Anna—to shake those women awake.

The courage she summoned to make such an agonizing decision.

The honesty to listen so deeply to her own heart—beneath the very real maternal instincts alive in her then—
to face the judgment of those women,
to trust her deepest desires:

freedom, distance from Bali, the knowing that her time for mothering had not yet come.

It was a miracle that she trusted me enough to admit to the shaking.

Another—that she trusted me when I released her from obligation.

Relief was one stream coursing through me.
We’d found a way through for us all.

Another current: fear.

Our daughter not yet turned two, and I, an orphan, with no ties to past or family, now fully responsible.

For the next eight years, the three of us formed and reformed—a family no one had taught us how to make.

Yet rivers run unstoppably—and our daughter blossomed.

Now. 2026.

Zaida and I sit in a park a couple miles from where she was born. In front of us the West Maui Mountains are greener than I’ve ever seen them.

We moved here from Bali when she was ten. Her mother’s time had come.

It’s two weeks until Zaida’s nineteenth birthday. She asked for new sneakers—the indigo Nike Swoosh.

“What was the thing you used to say to me at bedtime when I was young?”

With most anyone else, I’d say, “You’re still young.”

I smile.

She let me read to her in bed until she was thirteen. Then I would close the book, turn out the light and speak the words:

“Que sueñes con los angelitos.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I remembered it right.”

We both turn at the sound of her little brother’s voice—her mother’s second child, with the man she’s still happily partnered with.

Five now, and he’s learned that if he sits at the center, he can spin himself on the carousel.

Behind us, three huge jacarandas claim the sky. They’re not full, yet their authority is already resplendent.

I add the Indigo Swoosh to the mountain’s magic purple.

I am forever wedded to May on Maui.

Jacaranda—
always blossoming in my heart.