On Trying to Not Try to Try

A body knows when it’s in wait--anticipatory or resigned. Combustion like a firework inside--bright lights, the world all possible, and then fizzle into pale night and the usual sky. Show’s over, month’s over, hope’s over.

When a man and a woman love each other, sometimes…
When a man and a woman love each other, and work too hard, and love fiercely the one child they have, and give extra time and love to troubled family and friends around them, sometimes they are too tired to…

The clock is wrong. Or the clock is right, but the eye ignores the time until it’s looped its hands around and around the hours and days, denies the thing until it’s too late. There is lovemaking, sweet or rambunctious, cleaving, important, rushed, slowed, hot and heavy, sideways and on top and on bottom and a few positions in between. But always at the wrong time. In afterglow and at the in-between times, then the clock’s hands catch attention, those heavy black hands that push time forward relentlessly or that hold it back mercilessly, all the while pretending the steady keeping of even measure each day. I know it’s a lie. The clock moves by its own will, and seemingly against mine.

So now I’m fighting with clocks. With calendars. With marking. So much for just seeing what happens. Sex and bliss--that couple’s timing is no better than my couplings.  What luxury the fresh bride has if she doesn’t yet know years of wait and fail, months of loss. In the fairytale, here’s the other story--the old crone, hunched and withered and bitter. The one the reader believes to deserve her bad ends.

Once I was part of a conversation with two colleagues--a man and a woman, both parents. The man talks about his third child being on the way. The woman says, “I’ve wondered whether we’d regret not having a third.” She, with a daughter and son. Just then, I was newly recovering from my second loss--ducked out with quick words of needing to get back to work, all but ran to my office, and cried and yelled, muffled against the hard wood of my battered old desk there. Hated them in that moment for the casualness of their talk. For their greed. Their selfishness. Their cruelty to not know how lucky they were.

Here I am, talking almost daily to them now about their children, about my child. Too blithe some days. I catch myself. I catch myself here, selfish.

To just have made a decision--yes or no--as if it were that easy.

If only to have made a political decision. More than one child is bad for the planet. Even one child is pushing into a crowded world of need. That comfort wrought of solid policy stance.

But even the writer who stands for one-child families-Bill McKibben, in Maybe One--steps back, stressing the need for conversation rather than imposed polemic.  “No decision any of us makes,” he writes,  “will have more effect on the world (and on our lives) than whether to bear another child. No decision, then, should be made with more care.”

He’s right, of course. But so wrong in that he forgets the utter lunacy of having one child in the first place for every reason he argues against two. The planet, water, food, clothing, shelter, money. If you thought about the world, really thought about its calamity, how could you bring a child here to meet this place?

 At some point, there’s no room for reason.

 At some point, if you can't decide, you beg the body to make the decision for you. And when it doesn't, or can't, there's a different kind of lunacy that comes in. Questions. Furious words. The old doubts and superstitions. Everything you'd lived through but tried to live past.

Sometimes, when a man and a woman love each other, they talk and talk and talk until they can’t stand to talk anymore and merely act.  
But here again, consequence.

Not the lucky surprise, an encore of more fire and light. Instead, the dark, dizzied hands of spinning time, the maybes, the might bes, the nos, the possibilities, the aches, the wonders, the foreseen regrets, the worry of last chances, the sadness of the sky, last smoke drifted up and gone, that moment of quietude, the day’s promise unmet and lost, a long month ahead. That kind of wait.