Once

Guarded

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?

American Thanksgiving

On the drive across town on Thanksgiving Day, the streets of Washington,DC, where I live, were near empty. Some people would say the city was dead. But it wasn’t dead. Not alive either. A pendulum pulling down, silent, ready to be set going again, everything in suspension. So. Still.

But amidst this half-emptied city, there was activity. Visitors rolled suitcases down the sidewalks to get to their hotels or friends’ or families’ houses; dogs begged at the doors of their houses and got taken out, tongues wagging in thankfulness, into the small urban parks here and met other dogs. Owners exchanged pleasantries and wished each other happy holiday, gone strangers again only in the parting.

Then there were the few shops, businesses doing business. Pink neon “Open” signs. Wide glass windows lit up from within that seemed like a flashlights amidst buildings gone dark in their closure.

And all those workers. Just in my short trek, I saw policemen, gas station attendants, taxi drivers, security guards, doormen, and bus drivers on duty. I passed by hotels and the hospital filled with people working their way through this holiday--tallied up the registration clerks and the cleaners and the doctors and nurses and orderlies alike. If it was a holiday for any of them, it was a delayed one, set out of joint by employment and its obligations.

Several years ago I visited a local Pentecostal church as part of research for a story. During the prayer and thankfulness section of the service, a teenager thanked God for answering his prayer after so many months and finally giving him Sundays off, so that he could come and worship. It doesn’t matter what you yourself believe about religion to come to understand the weight of a boy’s belief that it will take divine intervention to allow him to have a say in his own work schedule. I thought about him just as he described himself--down on his knees time and again, praying hard. I thought about the part of the story he didn’t tell as much. All those weeks the schedule went up with a thumbtack on the corkboard, a white sheet marked up with a chart of the days and hours and his name, penned in, again on Sunday. All those times the answer came back to him: No.

Most people working the holiday in this city didn’t choose to do so. They’re the newest or youngest or most elderly or lowest ranking--whatever it was that allotted them the least choice in the lottery of working days. Whatever bad luck had become ordinary life.  

A friend from Canada takes pains, when she discusses this holiday, to announce it as American Thanksgiving. She explained to me that Canada celebrates its own holiday on the second Monday of October, as a harvest celebration.

I write this to check myself from getting too much on my high horse, too fast into my American bravado-as-pity snit about what the day should mean. After all, Washington is an international city, so for many workers, that Thursday was just that--just another weekday workday rather than any special day of celebration.

It’s not just different national Thanksgivings across different days, then, but wildly different experiences of holiday on the same day--from sidewalk to gas station to rooftop to basement to the wide open air of that chill day, that I need to reconcile. The workers, the disgruntled, the yearning, the unthankful. God bless the latter. I fear there is so little room for this that the whole idea of thanksgiving becomes one more indignity for those at its mercy.

Some of the blogs in the arena of infertility, loss, and parenting (in all its forms) I love most honor the necessary act of gratitude. They capture green cuttings--the meet of the blade with the flesh of the stalk that marks a replanting--those surprise offshoots of our days that, if not recorded and celebrated and tended, through the thanking, are lost and go dry.

But I’m not writing here, sweet ones, about such sweetness and light. I’m writing about mandatory gratitude when you least feel it. The forcing of meaning--of family, togetherness, fruitfulness and bounty--that can make this not a happy, but a hard day for many. Here is the risk of American Thanksgiving.

Not just across the city, but across the country, these are times of great difficulty. A terrible economy, high jobless rates, fledgling businesses hanging on, barely. People are still recovering from storms that set houses to timber, fires that set houses to ash, finding shelter where they can in the most makeshift of ways. One day before Thanksgiving Day as we celebrate it here, violence in Mumbai took people under, shook the bones of survivors in India and, around the world as well as in the United States, of those who survive those killed in the attacks.

Over the past 10 days, my brother has spent his days digging out the ground to try to repair a water main he busted on his property when he decided to fix the fence in his backyard. He’s busied himself with household projects, as he is unemployed and has been for several months, with no good leads in hand. His yard erupted in a geyser; the estimates came in at impossible numbers. Five thousand dollars might as well be five million. He decided he’s got to fix it himself. His bills mount. He can’t catch a break.

Isn’t that how it is? Bad luck feeds on bad luck. The writer Raymond Carver used to use the phrase all the time--in his fiction and reportedly in his life as well--about people who “can’t win for losing.”

I’ve certainly felt that, and I felt it especially at times that were mandated as celebratory. “I’m getting married.” “I’m pregnant.” “I’m pregnant again.” “I got the job.” Don’t all these pronouncements amount to “I’m lucky. Just lucky. Girlfriend, am I lucky. SO lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

Which, if you’re lucky, too, means a shared celebration. But honey, if you’re not…. Well, then those are hard-as-hell things to hear. And the strident, biding, biting hope that one day your luck might change? It doesn’t go away, even if your luck does change for the better. Just hearing someone else’s good news, when it hits right on whatever your own war wound is: it just seems to slide in like an injection of ice into the body--one prick from the outside, then your whole soul gone cold.

November at its hardest: empty, not full; lonely, not complete; desolate, so far from fertile, impossible to imagine what the word could mean. November and then December thereafter. The hard ground that keeps refreezing just as you’re trying to dig your way into repair.

Trust that I am so thankful for what I have. Trust that I know it. Trust that my deepest thankfulness means I will not proclaim it here but keep it private, lest it seem like admonition against those who have something else they felt on that day.

On Thanksgiving Day, before any festivities, I heard noise only because it was a disruption of such quiet. The city bus barreling down the street outside, and then nothing but the sound of the keyboard as the letters got pressed out into words, the scratch of chair against hardwood floor, the swallow down of water and the slight ting the glass made against the desk in the setting down. 

In the hours before I travelled to where I'd celebrate that day, I conjured another gathered table. Here, at this other table's center, is a cornucopia of want and need. Its surrounding leaves, true to fall's succumbing into winter, are the last, last hint of fire orange, taken over by burnt brown. The table is full. It’s a feast. No need to starve. There’s bounty enough for all. But I promise--no one here has to say what she’s thankful for. No one here has to pretend. The meal might be heavy; still, it’s made by loving hand. We know around this table there is need for sustenance no common ritual, no expected rite, will provide. This is no American Thanksgiving in its falsified heart. It’s a holiday stolen back from its bad beginnings and history. It asks you only to come as you are and, if you meet the task, demands not your thanks, but offers you the kind thanks, deep thanks you may need to sustain yourself throughout the hard season to follow.

(Images from Norman Rockwell, Official Website, CMG Worldwide)

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.