Such a cold, icy rain ought to chill me through when I huddle against it and roll the garbage cans down to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup. But instead, I feel the great rush of warm from the bungalow’s radiator heat when I come back inside.
I ought to be afraid--if you listen to both my mother and mother in law--home by myself for a few days while my husband is on a business trip in Chicago. They each call and tell me to set the alarm and lock the doors tight. It’s true that I live in the city, that at any given time you call me you might well hear police car sirens wailing down the street. But instead, tonight, I feel so safe in my up-and-coming neighborhood, bolstered on each side and across the street by good neighbors.
Maybe I ought to feel scattered, taking care of Squiggle by myself, in these last days of winter break, as I get ready for the new semester. But instead I feel settled, quiet, happy. That small body is tucked in for the night into her crib. She’s lying, as she loves to do, cattywonkered at a ridiculous angle that tells me she is well and truly deep into sleep.
The slick ice of rain keeps coming down. The hour is late. I feed myself soup out of a can--Chicken Noodle, nothing fancy. The house is a mess, strewn with new toys that Christmas earned us. It ain’t a perfect house, for sure. I ain’t no perfect mom. But it is something of a kind of perfect to feel so safe and warm, to feel as if that small child is a kind of sentry, ensuring protection against the outside world.
To be fearful in pregnancy--the state of pregnancy after loss--is to worry minute-to-minute that the baby will be taken from you. My grief counselor told me that for some women in this position, it doesn’t stop with birth, and that she’s had clients who conjured up all the things that could go wrong during and after birth, into infancy, toddlerhood, and beyond. That to one woman, who kept reading about childhood diseases and would come to sessions and enumerate terrible ways with almost unpronounceable names that a tiny body could go wrong, she had to just say, Stop.
I thought I would be that woman--always worried, always wary in my mothering. It’s not all gone. I still have this strange fear of heights with my daughter, so that when we were hiking in the summer in Rhode Island and hit a turn where the rise of the bluffs cut straight down, perilously, to the beach far below, where vertigo hit fast and hard, I kept both of us far from the edge of the path. (It turns out I’m not completely crazy--the bluffs at parts of Clay Head Hill Trail rise 150 feet above an ocean you peer right straight down onto with a sheer drop, if you’re brave enough to look.) In the first weeks of bringing her home, I had this strange fear someone would kidnap her, that now that she was here I might turn the wrong way and lose her to someone else. Women I know who’ve gone through loss and then gone on to have children through birth or adoption have admitted similar strange worries, that arrival doesn’t guarantee any such right as that to stay.
Danger is always with us.
In my neighborhood, we are mourning for a family whose house was consumed by fire on New Year’s Day, killing six people inside the house, three of them young children. This family--they’ve had their share and more. In December 2007, their 15-year-old daughter was killed by a stray bullet shot in a DC nightclub. And now? More terrible news: the newspaper headline reads “New Year Brings Fresh Grief.” By all accounts, this was a loving family, always with their door open to friends, who took the work of community seriously. More than 100 firemen rushed to the scene, answering the emergency call within a minute, to no avail. The word Tragedy doesn’t begin to describe what happened down the street, that house now opened to this cold night, empty, with broken windows and charred debris--the burned and now soaked ruin of lives lost.
It takes everything I have not to gather Squiggle up from her crib and hold her close to me, tell her everything I want her to know for the rest of her life, in case one of us gets lost to the other.
But I wait and settle into the quiet as the night turns over its hours to earliest morning. I think hard about those dangers that are out there so that I can appreciate with my whole heart the hard-earned right to feel some measure of safety. That is its own special blessing, because it never comes taken for granted.
Ever since she was in utero, Squiggle has created an insistence around her that things will work out. Not--and pretty much not ever--how I’d planned. (Hence her perseverance, for example, in standing straight up in the womb, refusing to turn head-down to prepare for birth, and requiring a cesarean birth for her full-on, footling breech position.) She holds on tight to me with a grip tighter than you might imagine possible out of those small fists, but then she ventures with absolute purpose the second that she’s ready. She is curious, but careful. Equally fierce in her determination and her stubborn right to try things out. But she also watches first, taking it all in, learning. Making sure she can step firmly when she does finally decide to step forward.
Children learn by gesture to learn meaning. Squiggle picked up on how I raise her to my shoulder and pat her back when she’s upset, taking this to mean, as it’s intended, comfort. It breaks my heart gently, so that I laugh a little out loud, when I raised her a few days up from the floor after she stumbled, and while she cried, she patted me on the back, as if to comfort us both through her tears.
Come down, cold rain. The front door is locked; the heat rumbles on. Today I circled the house, checking the fire alarms, the fire ladder under the bed, rethought each window and door that could provide an escape route to get ourselves to safety. But it’s the child who calls my name as “momma” in the middle of the night, who is my watchman. She, even in heavy sleep, is the one who watches before she dances, exquisitely and with wild feet. She is the one who keeps saving me, bringing me out of fear into surety, who taps her sweet fingers on my back to soothe me, to tell me that life skirts the edge of danger, looks down when it can bear the view, but keeps walking forward into itself. And how, with such a partner, could I not want to dance?
Comments