For thirty five years, my mother has continued to run. Now she lives in rural Western Massachusetts, and our winter phone conversations often include her accounts of running on snowy roads, undaunted by icy winds. Years before I began running, I listened with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement as she told me how getting out for a run on a cold, grim day made her feel like she'd triumphed over the weather.
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Suddenly I'm crying. The mighty elm comes down limb by limb, and of course I think of my partner, who has had a rare and aggressive cancer cut from her neck. Despite her present good health we wake every morning to the possibility of disease: Hello, cancer. This being human involves a zillion relationships, each one fragile and in need of tending. The only way my heart can be big enough to maintain them all is if it's broken. I wipe my face although I know there's no shame in crying for a tree.
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In that moment, I felt suddenly that the calendar had been a terrible idea. My son had memories now, desires he could articulate and act upon. I had created a simplistic countdown with my husband's face at the end, presenting it as fact, as though I could be certain he would come back to us. Now I wondered. It was just a fall hunting trip, but what if his plane crashed? What if a moose gored him or a bear ate him alive? I had been a chronic worrier even before my son was born, but now the stakes seemed higher. My own potential for loss--the raw missing, the empty gape forever--paled as I considered my child, whose innocence made the threat of loss even crueler.
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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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