Arrival

Squiggle arrived, a full-fledged baby girl, six weeks ago yesterday.

You might think it strange that here, the most remarkable thing in my life has happened, and yet I kept it secret from the people I'd been writing to about fertility and pregnancy and birth, the very things that made her. Her delivery over a month ago frankly qualifies as old news, but it's still new to me every day that she opens her eyes out in this world.

I want you to know that it wasn't an intentional hiding, but it also wasn't an oversight. It is about being turned inward and then outside and then back in again, and now, not knowing where and how to wear my skin. 

Infertility and loss struck me dumb. Though, in real life, I am a loudmouth and say things I shouldn't, for a long time I did not speak to much of anyone about what I was going through. I found solace on a bulletin board of women who had known loss, who logged onto their computers at all different hours of the day and even in different parts of the world, and talked silently, only in the click of the keys, to them. I had never before joined an online group like that. The blinkies and icons and avatars had kept me away, because I didn't speak that language. Until I needed to. I joined and unjoined a few boards, dropped them when I found them oddly competitive about who was going to get pregnant next, who could carry a child to term and leave the rest of us behind, but ended up finding one where the women were smart and didn't mind me being smart-alecky or angry or irreverent or emotionally mushy, as the day demanded. Through all of this, I also dallied among blogs, and finally, when I realized I was writing posts far too long for bulletin board hi-how-are-yous and wanted a longer, more sustained conversation with myself and with the world as an infertile woman who'd experienced loss and was trying again to conceive, started my own.

And that was a way of stepping outside into the world and speaking to it unapologetically on my own terms, of coming out of muteness and taking back my broken-down body and womanhood and shaking my fist up in the air and shouting and talking back and asking why and, not hearing anything back (not that I expected anything, heathen that I am), started to own my own skin and self again and give my own answers and push myself onward to ask even harder questions. 

This writing place has never been a sustained narrative space—what other people do so well, with their reporting of each step of visits to the specialist and blood levels and quips from their husbands or partners and recipes that capture the concoctions of life, and with the detailed ups and downs that make a continuous story that readers want to follow and so check up on every day, greedily. Instead, for me, it was a place of the essay—in the lowliest sense of to try, as I did just that, try.

Then when I found myself pregnant after two losses and a chemical pregnancy, the noise in my head clamorous with worry and fret, the only thing to do was to write—put that cacophony out there, out of my mind and onto the page and screen, on those days of ultrasound and dailyness where the pregnancy seemed most threatened or real, to come to terms with that small thing roiling inside, turning and bobbing and stretching into itself—because all I could think was that if I sustained another loss, I might just not be able to make it. I might just die. 

But as the pregnancy progressed and the news was good, I suddenly didn't want to be a public voice, even anonymously. My body did all kinds of speaking for me; it is all but impossible not to announce yourself as pregnant once you reach a certain stage—the bow of the back and the way you walk approaching a shuffle, the hips clicking loose in their joints and each step taken, even if in a hurry, with a sense of steadying yourself, determindedly, in relation to the hard ground below you. With so public a body, I wanted a more private mind. What had seemed before like a voodoo against trouble, scribbling down words as a kind of keeping, now seemed like writing that belonged to other people and not to me.

The day I took my daughter, squinting, out into the May heat, past the hospital doors after the birth, there was another kind of public role that took over, that of Mother. When I carry this baby out in the world, people ask all kinds of questions—how old she is, how much she weighed when she was born. They get quickly personal: I've had at least two strangers in the past week ask me whether I was breastfeeding, without the slightest blink that such a question might be untoward. While I'm happy to answer (yes), and while there's a sure sense that comes with breastfeeding, anyway, that one's breasts are no longer one's own, it's still a situation that calls up once again that question of public and private, outwardness and inwardness. What I say—vocally or physically—and what I mean and what I keep, necessarily, guardedly to myself. 

Because there's another factor here: that of the girl herself. She has her own story that's begun. And in the telling of mine, I risk robbing hers and her right to fashion her tale out to the world, especially given the head start I have on her, as she has no language yet other than the simplest peeps, most urgent of cries. The utter insistence of her own tiny body, growing into itself with a flail of muscle that propels an arm, a leg. The tightening of her fist is a word only I can understand.

I suppose this is always the trick of writing: what to give away and what to keep close. A kind of magic stunt--that show of silk flowers brought out of thin air; this puff of smoke that disappears a whole woman in a box—versus what gets kept under the cloak or back in the dressing room, readied for no audience to see. 

So what I'll be doing here in the coming weeks is telling the story all wrong, out of its proper order.  On purpose. Tracing back to her birth and then far back before that. Rethinking beginnings. Essaying, again. Trying a different kind of birth: navigating this question of what and how to tell. How the life that undeniably is has always, also, a second life, covering it as the finest of blankets, worked with the most careful of hands, in the telling about its facts, its truths, its lies, its wants, its coming.