It is the eve of my son’s 4th birthday. As I do every year, I remember: the way I chatted with my sister-in-law shortly before midnight (the time I’m writing this, right now), feeling like I would definitely still be pregnant for awhile. The way I felt almost exasperated less than two hours later when my water broke dramatically all over the bathroom floor because I’d just gone to bed and was tired and was not particularly in the mood to be in real labor. The drive to the birth center after Morgan came over to stay with Suzannah, me singing “Float On” at the top of my lungs in between contractions:
Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on
Laughing less than four hours later as he was born into his daddy’s hands and lifted to my chest.
Holding him in my arms, kissing his nose, and falling in love.
Tonight he shrieked with laughter as he scooted his new Iron Man toy across the kitchen floor. He helped his Grandma Winslow make a pumpkin pie, and when Matt and I tiptoed into his room after our date tonight, intending to kiss our sleeping son, he opened his eyes and whispered, “Is the pie out yet?” He inherited his daddy’s big feet with the giant big toe, and he’s tall. But his baby fat -- the delicious chubby rolls I nibbled every day of his babyhood -- has given way to little boy leanness, skinny legs and knobby knees. But his belly -- that yummy round tummy! -- still pokes out underneath his pajama tops.
Sometimes when I see Matt’s socks crumpled on the floor in random places, I think, My house will be full of stinky boy socks forever. And then I can’t help but giggle at that absurdity. Someday, God willing, I will live with a teenaged boy who will likely be taller than I am. I won’t want to kiss his toes the way I still want to kiss them now, when he waves them in my face and hollers, “Smell my stinky foot!” I have these little flashes of hugging his stretched-out, grown-up lankiness and it is almost too much to bear, but it is also the thing I want most from this life -- maybe the only thing I really want. For my children to last longer than I do.
Last year, on the day my son turned three, twenty-six people -- most of them children exactly my daughter’s age -- were shot to death in their elementary school. I couldn’t eat lunch with my friends that day; I could only hurl my food into the trash and cry uselessly into my hands, trying to compose myself before turning on Ten Things I Hate About You for my seniors that afternoon and resisting, somehow, the urge to drive across town and take my children home and stay there. Forever. That evening, the kids and I drove to West Seattle to meet Matt after work. We ate a comfortable dinner together, the kids cheerfully oblivious, excited for weekend birthday festivities. I swung between desperate grief and desperate gratitude, and in a way, I feel I’m still swinging.
This afternoon I drove across town to meet my daughter at her classroom door, listening to news of another shooting at another school. This time it seems the only fatality is that of the gunman but I’m still shaken, and angry, and full of inflammatory thoughts that do not belong in a post about my son.
Last week I told one of my most trusted friends that part of me is terrified all the time because I see all the ways I could lose my children on an ordinary day. It’s not rational, and I know this. I found this tonight -- I wrote it when I was pregnant with Isaac, the day after I learned a former student had been killed in a car accident:
I've heard people say it's easier not to have children for this reason, and of course they're right. On so many levels. Birthing and loving and raising children is such a huge fucking leap of faith -- it's nothing I could ever have prepared for. Nothing I could ever have prepared my heart for. It's so hard. We screw up a lot. We can't ever go back to the "before" that existed before children, a time that seems so hazy and nostalgic to me sometimes (remember when we could just go out whenever we wanted, to a movie or to have a drink? Remember when we could stay up late to watch a movie at midnight and sleep in the next day? Remember when we could take off on a spontaneous weekend trip without worrying about where the baby will sleep?). But I wouldn't give them back for anything, and the risk of my heart breaking (my heart breaks every day) is a risk I'm willing to take, because this love is the thing in my life that makes me think I'm a little closer to understanding the meaning of it.
I don't always (ever?) know how to find meaning in loss, but I guess that's another leap of faith I have to take.
Motherhood is such an insane mix of grief and joy. Both, at once. I’m a little afraid all the time; mostly, I think, I have learned to gently remind myself that fears are not facts, but it’s there, under the surface of our lives. It’s not that I think about it all the time. But I’m also never not aware of what I stand to lose. I don’t know why some people have to, and I know there’s no reason it couldn’t be any of us.
This may seem morbid for a birthday entry, and it’s true that I don’t think I’ve ever written about Suzannah’s birthday this way, but she’s a springtime baby and so far her birthday has never been sullied with the darkness my son’s has now. And yet: I refuse to let that have the last word. My heart shattered last year, but at the same time I felt so full, full-to-bursting, of gratitude. Of that desperate grief, that desperate joy that fills any mother’s heart, I believe, on a cellular level.
Pray, said my friend. And I do, or I try, and I love my family joyfully and imperfectly, and I wonder why I get to have them, but tonight, tonight, I do.
Happy Birthday, Isaac.
Alright already we'll all float on
OK don't worry we'll all float on
Even if things get heavy we'll all float on
Alright already we'll all float on
Don't you worry we'll all float on
1 comment:
Somehow you've rendered me speechless and left me with the need to comment all at the same time. This is obviously a post every mother could relate to--the fear and the joy and digging deep for the ability to accept one for the other--but you managed to put it all into words I could never find. All while referencing one of my all time favorite songs to boot. Your post touched me. I'm not sure how else to say it. Thank you for sharing your fears so the rest of us have words to relate to. :)
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