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
