nostalgia

luckily most bad days are just bad days. easily remedied by watching henry sweep up underneath the table and then put the cheerios from his dusty little pile one by one into the garbage.

i was poking around in my old stuff this morning and found this little ditty i wrote a few months after joe and i got married. you know, the first time your period is late and you don’t think there’s any possible way that you could be pregnant but you buy tests anyway and get nervous and scared and who knows what all…

I am afraid of babies.  It’s not that I don’t want children, I do—but I think I want children in the abstract.  I want to watch other women’s bellies flutter with the flying of fetus hands.  I want to knit blankets for a neighbor, not my own distended belly.  I want to look at someone else’s ultra-sound and pick out the tiny floating phalanges.

            I have a recurring dream that my husband and I have triplets.  Premature.  We can’t afford a stroller so I push my babies through the supermarket in a wheelbarrow, pulling their oxygen tanks behind me in a Red Flyer wagon.  Each baby starts to cry, and I pick up the oxygen tanks in my arms, convinced they are my children.  I hush them, and when I wake up, I can still hear them hissing.

            I don’t think I’m afraid of the pain, or the mechanics of smashing my major organs into the upper third of my chest cavity, or even a head the size of a small melon pushing its way out of me.  I’m afraid of trenchcoats, concealed weapons, terrorists, soccer moms, plane crashes, junior high.  I’m afraid I can’t be a mom like my mom was—afraid I can’t name every bird flying outside the window, afraid I won’t know how to drive to school twice in one day with clean underwear, afraid I won’t know what to say if she doesn’t get asked to prom, afraid she won’t like eating chips and salsa for three hours in the afternoon.

            I was listening to the radio last night while knitting my nephew-in-progress a blanket.  Terry Gross was interviewing a pastor on Fresh Air; Father Boyle had been diagnosed with leukemia, but was still working seven days a week to help gang kids get jobs and mainstream back into life.  Gross asked him if he ever got tired of the pain, if he was ever afraid of death.  Father Boyle paused—he had such a gentle voice—and said, “All I want is a heart the shape of God’s.”

            I turned off the radio and closed my eyes.  Even though a baby is still a question, still a hypothesis, still someone else’s news, I knew I would give my baby the world, give her as much as the pastor had squeezed between his leukemia breaths.  I would pick up the estuaries, rivers, plateaus, temperate forests, oil lines, egrets, glaciers, lilac bushes, latitudes, longitudes, and the thick red equator, between my thumb and forefinger, and put them in a giant Tupperware just for her.

And maybe someday my baby, while sliding out the birth canal, will flutter her tiny amniotic soaked feet up to my heart, and pat it into a shape—maybe a shape like God’s.  And when I am holding her in my arms, pressing her chest against my own, letting our ion channels run in tandem, our valves will flap tissuey red kisses with every pulse.

 

 

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