In previous centuries, life moved at a walking pace. Social roles were assigned by birth or by ritual ties to earth and tribe. Today, social roles include many choices, and seemingly few constraints. Today, our lives move faster than the speed of a car, and driving is only one of many dangers a child will face. So, while Will learns to drive, I am learning to release him into the world, a difficult place where he will need to create his own niche.
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Each time I pour the liquid into the nebulizer, hold the blue tube up to your tiny pursed mouth, I wonder: If I had loved you more, would this still happen? The 37 weeks I dreaded your existence. You sound like Darth Vader the way you wheeze, your jowls barely moving but chest heaving above that baby fat stomach. Do your lungs fill with longing to be loved?
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The fact was, I had a rock-solid plan to give our baby the perfect childhood, the one I wished I would have had, and I was eager to start putting that plan into practice. I would give birth to my baby naturally by the age of 32, 33 at the latest, so I could give birth to a second child before my fertility began to drop and my chances of birth defects and miscarriage began to rise. I would breastfeed on demand well into toddlerhood or beyond, carry and hold my baby constantly, and sleep with him or her beside me. Rather than parking my baby in a playpen or in front of the TV, I would build our relationship through plentiful one-on-one play and conversation. My promise to my yet-to-be-conceived child? "I will accept you exactly as you are."
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Clouds hang low and the snowy trail is flanked by bare gray limbs of alders. James lags behind, walking so slowly that I get far in front of him again and again. A snowshoe hare dashes in front of us, but James doesn't see it; with his downcast gaze and his leaden foosteps, he's too busy resisting being here.
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"What's the matter?" says my father, as if it isn't obvious. Since leaving the trailhead, we have been hiking upwards at a suicidally steep angle with heavy packs on our shoulders. It is hot. It is dusty. On a normal Saturday, Erica and I would be living the high life: roller-skating, reading books, or watching Brady Bunch reruns. Now, inexplicably, we are being tortured.
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She has not held him. She did not give him a gift or a card to mark his arrival. She has not felt his warm, milky weight in her arms. She has not looked at him with the wonder of a grandmother, seeing in him herself, or me, or my brother. She has not watched the expressions that flicker across his sleeping face, perhaps recognizing in them a glimpse of her parents, her grandparents or other long-gone ancestors. I have wanted these things so much that it aches sometimes. What I have wanted, I think, is simply for them to meet, to connect, to touch.
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