It would have been a lot easier to have a master plan from the beginning-
But it wouldn't have been better. Just different, OK?
Easy isn't the only thing that matters.
And if easy really mattered very much to me I sure as heck wouldn't be doing this.
This is about spiritual values.
The objective was not to move in and have a place to live; I can do that anywhere.
The objective was to do something.
[robert bruno]
I spoke her name
a hundred times.
[mary oliver]
It's a Monday, and I get the call. You're here, for today. The doctor said you likely wouldn't stay.
I haven't named you, not in my heart, not in my head. You're feral, elemental. Little more than blood, a pulse right in the meat of me, sinless, saline, unfathomably small. Cousin to what dwelled the earth before trees or rivers existed, when the seas smoked and deep within them something began for the first time to stir. I wouldn't dare name you any more than I would call to any cave-dwelling thing that moved beyond me in the dark.
The first night you were in me, I dreamed about the end of the world. I flew along the coastline in a car, watching fire strike the ocean, the tidal wave rising up, darkening the sky. When the water receded there were strange sea beasts mounded on the sand, beheaded, bleeding.
The night before the second blood test that both confirmed your existence and cursed it, I dreamed of you. I held you in one arm, than the other, fed you from my body. You were so small. A daughter.
Are you female? We didn't test the embryos, so we don't know. You are only yourself. You'll likely never have to be anything else.
I watched a meteor shower on your second night here. I wanted to inhabit my body too while you were in it, sense my own spin through the universe, notice the ceiling of the world as the Perseids blinked and evaporated. We are on a rock flying and you were in me, safe that day- as the nurse so artfully put it- like a sesame seed flicked into a jar of peanut butter.
The next blood test comes and goes. You're growing, but too slowly, and you started too late.
After the blood draw, we go to the grotto in Portland. It's carved into the side of a cliff, the Madonna surrounded by candles. We light a candle for you, watch as the flame gutters and sways. Do you want to wait and watch? he asks. I say no. We walk away slowly, my hand in his. It's your last day.
The final blood draw happens and I check the results from my lab test as soon as they come in. I want to be the first to know, before the doctor, before my husband. You're gone, just like that. It's as though you were never here.
You were, though. Whatever happens, you'll always be the first- though the first what, I'm not sure. Sesame seed. Star falling. I imagine your flame flickering as the three of us walked away, you, me, and your father. I imagine night falling, the grotto darkening, all the candles bright but one.
Anything worth having has its price.
[joan didion]
Dear unclaimed souls, swirling in the ether, etc etc:
I know. We're cheating.
I'm sorry. I wish it had all been very magical too. Maybe you picked us, but the next thing you knew you were spat back out in the time before time. Maybe none of you picked us, and now we're doing the equivalent of deep sea commercial fishing: throwing out a huge net and scraping you from the swells and currents of the world between worlds, willing or no.
Who knows. But every morning and evening, when we gather in the kitchen and silently lay out syringes and band-aids and medications that cost the equivalent of a down payment on a Tesla (or, okay, maybe a Ford Explorer), I think about you, and I wonder. Do you exist at all, anywhere? Do you long to be here too?
There is a running list in my brain of all the names that have caught my eye in the past few years, their meanings. All the versions of you that might yet be. They pop into my head unbidden while I open the fridge, while my husband draws up one shot and I draw up another.
Sheridan, wanderer
The needle stabs into the rubber stopper, injects a tenth of a milliliter of air.
Hugo, heart-brave
Tip the tiny glass bottle upside down, draw the liquid up.
Merryn, light-hearted
Tap, tap, tap the side. A perfectly spherical drop grows, slowly then instantly, quivers, slides down the needle's edge.
Bede, prayer
Stall for a few seconds, then thread the needle under the skin. Slowly depress the plunger with a thumb "like you're holding a pencil," the narrator in the video earnestly says. I want to ask her how on earth she holds a pencil. Count slowly to five.
Merritt, boundary-gate
Meridian, midday
Miriam, drop of the sea, bitter, beloved, longed-for
Pull the needle out, paste the band-aid over the drop of blood. Recap the needle, toss in the sharps container. The second and third shots go faster. Medication back in the fridge. Can a child come this way too? From refrigerated dosage pens, syringes, a calendar in the kitchen carefully highlighted, years of savings, sheer longing?
One of my patients at my last job had gotten unexpectedly pregnant for the fifth time. I remember her laugh as she cradled her belly. I guess some of us were just meant to be mothers, she said.
This isn't simple, the way I wanted. I always thought the things that came the most easily were the ones that were meant to be. But maybe there's a magic to being wanted so much that you bend my body before you even exist.
In the bathroom at the fertility clinic, there's a poster of little cartoon babies diving in and out of a test tube. It reminds me, bizarrely, of swimming in the cenotes in Mexico months ago. Test tube babies, the poster caption reads.
I guess it's supposed to be charming, but I always think of the children Mayans sometimes threw into those subterranean lakes as sacrifices and it just makes me uneasy. There has always been so much ambivalence, so much joy, so much fear and control and love and loss in bringing in new people from the other side.
It makes sense to bide your time at that threshold, to duck the nets. There are reasons to cross over and reasons to stay put. Life is not simple and there are no guarantees- not that you will be born, not that you will live long or painlessly, not that we will live to see you grown, not that you will be able to bear children of your own if you so desire, not that you will have the life you may have wished for in a million different ways.
It's a lot of work, just to eventually get back to wherever you are now- where sky and water meet, the outer reaches. And for all the medications, the surgeries, the highlighted calendar, the money, the appointments and phone calls and ultrasounds, at the end of it all I'm not kidding myself. I know I can't choose for you.
But just so you know, when I'm standing in the fertility center bathroom staring at that poster, I think of something else too. I remember the sublimity of swimming in that cursed, sacred, subterranean lake.
The sunlight above, the way it lanced into the darkness below. The hundreds of feet between me, floating at the surface, and the floor of the world. The very bottom, where no light penetrates, silent, cocooned in black water for millennia, where gold and jade settle against the bones of ancient children and their unknowable stories.
The world is wide. I can't promise you that it won't hurt you, that it will always want you.
But it also isn't some formless ether, some motionless time outside of time. It is the opposite of in between. It is matter and it is myriad. Crags and sinkholes, mountains and mines, rivers wending through split canyons, ice settling in sheets, storms that lift trees from the earth, things to bend and mold and break yourself against. It is hot and wild and sweet and utterly irreversible, bound by bone and blood and gravity.
Here, from your first breath, you'll be found by Time. It will begin you and end you, order your days only forward, give you things you can't live without then take them back, make every single thing matter in a way that breaks your heart and then remakes it, like iron burst and battered and drawn again and again from a brimming forge.
And here we are too. Your family. We are bound to the world and we can't come to you. You can only come to us, to the world where everything counts and nothing lasts and it all really happened, somehow, just this one impossibly precious time.
Maybe that's nothing to you, as you do dives and flutter kicks in the sky above worlds, the mirror image of your maybe-mother fathoms below you earthside. Or maybe you're curious. Maybe just a little?
Come swim with us.
Love,
Mom
It is better to be whole than good.
[john middleton murry]
And then one day, it's your last home visit ever.
You don't realize it at the time- when you walk in and smell that familiar combination of milk and blood and baby shit, as luminescent and comforting as the pungent dirt under your feet, thawing with spring. You don't realize it when the interpreter line cuts off again, leaving you stumbling through small talk in Spanish with a tired couple who look ready to give you their newborn child in exchange for an unbroken night's sleep.
You don't realize it when the small dog tied to the front porch that you forgot about lunges at you and you dance away, swearing so filthily that you thank God afterward that there was at least a slight chance no one understood exactly what you said.
As you're driving away (first turning the wrong way, again, then making a U-turn back to the clinic) you remember how tiny the newborn girl was, how she gazed towards your voice with the blurred look of new babies, the specific weight of a person who has only been here for six days- and then, you realize it. It's over. This whole time in your life is over.
It just doesn't work anymore. It's not the same. You're not the same person that you were the first time you ordered a copy of Paths to Midwifery online and cracked its spine during your lunch break on the sagging couch at the struggling nonprofit where you worked for less than minimum wage. You're not the same person who read this book over and over again throughout nursing school, who journaled about helping women and delivering babies. This was before you learned that no one delivers a baby except the woman who delivers the baby.
Or rather, you are the same person- you just know that person better now than you did when you were twenty-five. It's good that you didn't know yourself so specifically then, because it's good to try many things that you aren't good at. What is life for, if not partially for that?
But it's also true that if you never sit down in the dark and hold your own hand, you'll never get around to doing any of the things you are actually good at either.
Here is what was hard: not sharing a culture or language with people you are trying to help. Not sharing any life experiences whatsoever with people you are trying to help. Being someone in the first place who sees your primary purpose as being someone who should help. What if helping is not the point? What if being someone with something to offer is not the point?
What is the point? I don't know, I just know that I couldn't do most of the things that come naturally to me in that job. I saw way too many nipples, and truthfully, I am someone who will always feel a little bit awkward about seeing someone else's nipples. I couldn't be funny, not really. I couldn't banter. I couldn't explain to you why those things are what I wanted when I had a job where I could hold newborn babies, but there you are.
Oh, the babies. Everyone always asked if that was the best part of my job, and my face curved into one of those automatic smiles but in my heart I knew that I could take or leave babies. I do not come from a line of baby cuddlers. The people in my family- men and women- look slantwise at babies, jostle them awkwardly, hand them back quickly. Even when I was a baby in my family, I knew that I was pushing it.
I do very much want a baby of my own, but I've held enough babies-that-belong-to-other-people for a lifetime. I want to drive with the windows down when it's almost summer. I want to paint. I don't want to save anyone anymore. I don't want to only ever be showing up to someone else's party. I want to turn the lights on in my own garden, lay the table with flowers, hear the first few guests start to arrive. I want to spend the whole night at my own shindig-selfishly, deliciously, unapologetically- and then fall deeply asleep. Maybe that's not the point either. Probably it's not. But it's what I'd like to try next.
Abyss has no biographer --
[emily dickinson]
I'm in Mexico. I'm thirty-four. You died a year ago today.
I dive into a cenote. Floating on my back, I watch the stalactites drip their way atom by atom ever closer to the surface of the water, anchored to the roof of this subterranean cave.
Millions of years ago, an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hit this part of the world, shattered it the way only a moving mountain can. The fractured limestone deep under the surface never recovered. It collapsed into sinkholes in places, crevasses in the ground that gradually filled with rainwater filtered through the ground above over millennia. The Mayans called them something else, but to the Spanish it sounded like cenote, sweet and sharp.
I flip over and tread the surface, the white flash of my feet fluttering so far above the bottom. The water is clear, but I've been in enough deep things to not be fooled. It's blue and green and lovely, but with a dark crevasse running straight through the center. Some of them are so deep that the bottom has yet to be found, if there is one at all.
When we were standing in the ruins of Uxmal earlier that day, our guide spoke to us about the Mayans, about what they believed about the underworld. El inframundo, where the spirits of the dead fall.
The Mayans believed in cycles, the guide said. Xibalbá is simply where you go after you have had your years in the world of the living, where the soul continues its journey.
There are several sacred routes to Xibalbá, thin places, where if the living are bold enough they can glimpse the next world. They say that walking the Milky Way is one. The other is in the bottom of a cenote, where the Mayans threw their sacrifices, their tributes, their beloved dead.
My feet churn, keeping me afloat. So far below them, I see the crevasse. I don't know how to walk the Milky Way. I hold my breath and swim down, down, as far as I can go. When the pressure in my ears builds past bearing I open my eyes.
It's so silent. I can only hear my own heartbeat. The water is warm, clear. It presses against me like a palm, like the wall of a womb.
I can't see the crevasse. I only see a blur of blue in every direction. I stay for one heartbeat, then another. But then, the ache in me is too much. I have to go back. I have to go back, Dad. I have to breathe.
You would have loved it here. The colors, so many things old and abandoned. I know that in a way, you're seeing it through my eyes, and that makes it a little better.
You were always afraid of dying, and I never was, but now I am. I think of you mingling with the desert you loved so well, and usually that feels right but today it just feels lonely, too. I just wish you were here. I just wish you had been able to see this, too. Your death was awful and it came far too soon and I haven't been able to stop being afraid ever since I realized you no longer knew our names.
I woke up today thinking that I'm the same age you were when I was born.
The Mayans understood death as a cycle, but that doesn't mean they welcomed it, said the guide. They mourned their dead long and hard. They feared death, and had rituals and bloodletting to keep it at bay. They dreamed that they would see their loved ones again.
At Uxmal, I just stared at the carvings on the wall of a pyramid older than Christ. For a moment I didn't feel the weight of time bearing down, all that had been lost or forgotten, countless lives lived with such alien beauty left to mark them. All I could think was that they missed their fathers, too.
