For what is happiness but growth in peace.

[may sarton]

You're two months old as of one week ago. I counted in my head while rocking you to sleep early this morning, in the silent lull between crickets and birdsong.

We are well acquainted with the night, you and I. The sounds, the shades, the precise hour when the heat from the late summer day turns to true cool, the way the stars look from every vantage point in our yard. You are serene and bundled in my arms as I carry you through the dark house, like some kind of penitent. When I put you back in your crib I palm your head and your rump, holding my breath as I lay you down oh so slowly. Half the time you kick and open your eyes and we begin again.

Somehow you slipped from one stage to the next. At the beginning we knew exactly how many weeks and days you were, always, because there were so few of them and each one mattered so much- it meant the difference between needing one ounce of milk or two, needing to be up every two hours instead of three or four. Now, we sleep and trust you'll wake us up when you need something, feed you and trust you'll stop when you're full, and you do. 

You're so sturdy now compared to when you were newly born. When people comment on how tiny you are I almost look around for who they mean. It couldn't be this strapping child, almost fourteen pounds, the whole length of my arm.

Earlier in the summer it rained, the first rain in months, and Ivan bundled you up and took you out on the porch. An Oregon baptism! he proclaimed, and walked into the scattered shower for several moments before ducking back inside. You looked surprised more than anything, the drops melting into your hairline as we dabbed at your face. 

Several nights ago our group of friends passed you around, everyone wanting to hold you while we ate and laughed and talked outside. When we were all back home I pressed my nose against the top of your head and you smelled like campfire smoke for the very first time. Another baptism. 

The film festival was a week ago, or was it two? I held you and walked away from the group when you let loose several piercing cries. I held you in the middle of the street and we whirled and spun to the music, the black lace shadows of the trees above us patterning your upturned face, you watching the stars and the moon. 

Last night was the first time you laughed in your sleep. I couldn't believe the magic of it. What were you dreaming of? You've smiled since you were a week old, and you began laughing just over the past couple of weeks, but the only thing that makes you laugh is looking at our faces. Were you dreaming of us?

During the day I hold you and we walk through the house, through the yard. These are the dear familiar gods of home. You are so much more alert now, straining to hold your head high, watching the world. You are not interested in the dog and she is not interested in you, but everything else passes under your careful eyes- the changing light through the windows, the collection of ceramic mugs on the shelf in the kitchen, the leaves of the monstera plant. But none of these delight you like our faces do.

We huddled over you last night while you looked up at us, laid on your little sleeper on the kitchen table. Your muddled seafloor eyes, every color and no color at the same time. The raw matter of creation. You smiled and chortled, raised eyebrows and pursed your lips, while we cavorted for you. 

These are the first fruits of your life, the necessary baptisms. The prayer we say a hundred times a day, silently, aloud, with our smiles, with our bodies, with our hearts. May you be well, may you be happy. may you grow in peace.

 Places choose you.

[margaret atwood]

Cicadas hum. It's the end of the day, maybe the tail of the afternoon. The light is golden, its harshness only just tapered off. There's a caliche road. Battered mesquite trees writhe themselves into knots. The cactus is everywhere, beginning to encroach on the trail. The smell of heat on dirt, heat on metal, heat on skin. The cicadas pick up the volume, rising to a drone, driving to distraction, then suddenly dropping off. 

I smell the sun on my scalp. The backs of my hands are starting to burn. I think I'm a child, or maybe I'm just ageless, what I'll be most of my time here, just hot earth under the sun. In the silence just after the cicadas I can almost hear the heat itself, waves pulsing from the cracked ground.

When I was small, I remember a fire. My great-grandparents were burning some belongings in a trash heap. There was a birdcage, black as pitch, and I'd never wanted anything so much but I couldn't have it. The fire is behind me, off to my right. I keep walking.

There's the old pickup truck from my grandparent's farm. I don't see it, or turn to look at it, but I know it's there anyway. There's a beehive embedded in the springs of the rotted seats. I could never see it through the cracked windows, but I can feel them humming in my teeth.

The heat, most of all. It smells like hair just about to burn, the flat non-scent of dead dirt. It smells like hell. The heat beams relentlessly from above but I feel most of it under me, rising. If I was only a little lighter I'd spiral into the sun, like ashes flying up toward the night sky over a bonfire. 

It's so flat here, broken only by mesquite shrub and distant mesas. The sky is almost everything there is, like it must have been at the very beginning. Nowhere to hide. The cicadas start up again. 

Why do I have this dream? Nothing happens. It stretches the way dreams do, untethered, pointless, languid. It releases me gradually into the cool grey before waking, gripped by a homesickness I understand not at all.

You must know every contour of yr emptiness 

before you can know whom you wish to invite in.

[taisia kitaiskaia]

I'm in another healer's office. I know I shouldn't be. I know that I am about to fork over a hundred and forty bucks for someone uncredentialed who reeks of lemongrass to test the upper limits of my pain tolerance.

These women are different, but always the same in the same ways. Old enough to be my mother, arms like iron, accents that are slight or strong. They hail from somewhere in the Eastern Bloc or central Mexico, and from childhoods spent watching wide-eyed as mothers or grandmothers ushered barren women like me into their homes. 

Is this something that I really want? How does anyone know what they really want? I wish I had someone I could talk to this about, a friend that I wasn't worried about putting off by talking about ambivalence. Nobody wants to hear about ambivalence. And yet. I dream of having a child, and I also really love putting breakable things on low shelves, always have.

Years of insomnia have left me no illusions about how well I function under sleep deprivation, and my fiery desire for codependency would surely seem distasteful even to an infant. My restlessness is the most constant companion of my life. The varicose veins developing on my left inner ankle would swell like balloons with pregnancy. Like balloons! I already Google "varicose vein removal surgery" at least every other week. 

I talk to pregnant people all the time and I know too much: their hair falls out, they have stretch marks like tiger stripes, their teeth loosen in their gums. I am too vain for any of this.

But what I hate even more is that if I have a baby, then one day they will grow up and leave me. A discerning reader might point out that this is exactly the point, and they are right and I don't care.

But these women never ask, How is your temperament? These women never say, You know, most of the childless women I know are very happy. Great legs also.

Are there healers who just sit across from you and let you spew every misanthropic thought you've ever had? No, I'm not talking about a therapist. I don't want another white millennial woman with a chunky scarf and custom glasses in my head. Be honest: has a white millennial woman with a carefully curated, tastefully eccentric wardrobe ever healed you from anything?

I'm talking more like a bog person. I want someone small, bent with age, smelling like soil, who blinks at me through eyebrows that droop like weeping willows, who croaks Of course you're sad. People are terrible and that includes you. It's fine. Who cares. I hate everything too and all I want to do is take naps.

I want someone who says You want to make more people? Why? Just enjoy your naps!

I want someone who isn't broad, strong, confident in her world and her place in it, surrounded by her daughters, taking my cash. I want someone who doesn't know what's going on, doesn't care, and doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out on my own life, and demands for payment a secret I've never told anyone, including myself.

But I have not been able to find any healers like that. Instead I'm here, my abdomen smeared with ointment that is definitely not FDA-approved, trying to Google the Spanish ingredients on the pills the curadora gave me because I (a nurse!) am too embarrassed to ask. I'll feel the bruises for days from the sobada de matriz when I put clothes on or take them off. 

Inflammation, they say. Scar tissue. You shouldn't have gotten your gall bladder removed, it has unbalanced you. Or, It is built up sadness, your body is telling me it has been disrespected (duh! Whose hasn't?) Well, we don't have time to take care of all this today, but we'll do what we can. We will need more sessions.

I think of the childless women I love, with wonderful lives: My beloved aunts. Frida Kahlo. Baba Yaga. 

But then I let myself imagine a baby, an actual person, and I am undone. It's just like that. I don't know why. I have no humorous or snarky response to this. 

I just let myself imagine this thing until it drifts away. I put my shirt on. I hand over the cash and limp out, knowing in my bones that there is no real Baba Yaga out there for me, because something really is wrong and I have to find out what and I'm running out of time. I'm haunted by this image- whether it's true or not- of our baby out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find the path connecting us.

And so, I'll keep my mouth shut. I'll keep my secrets to myself. And I'll be back.

 We don't get a lot of things to really care about.

[pig]

I couldn't sleep that night, so I rose quietly and tiptoed to the study past my mother dreaming her dreams and my father dreaming his. I sat in the creaking wooden chair that was pulled up to the roll-top desk and settled my tailbone right in the middle. There was nothing else to do, so I opened the bottom right drawer and began.

It was all maps, absolutely stuffed full of maps, most of them new even though they weren't. I felt a jarring sensation when I saw several of them, the 2010 one of Flagstaff, the one of Boulder a year or two newer, even one of Paris from the same year I spent a semester abroad there. I was touched to see my special places here alongside all of his, that he'd wanted to understand them too. 

The drawer was impossibly deep, swallowing my arm almost to my shoulder like I was a farmer midwifing a calf, one bag filled with maps to throw away and a small pile next to it of ones to keep. 

What is the strongest force in the universe? he used to say when I was eight, twelve, seventeen, then answer himself before I could crawl out of the bottom of my yawn. Entropy! Everything always breaks down! We have to fight it!

When he said this, it was usually a cue that we were supposed to join him in cleaning the house. Even now, when I watch him on Wednesdays and Sundays, the most common things he does are pushing a broom around the floor or drawing an old hand towel mechanically across a countertop, over and over. I look at the piles of junk in my home and think about how even now, he's fighting it, the thing that has so easily overtaken me.

Were the maps a way to order, understand, and then combat entropy, or were they a symptom of it? So many of them never even cracked open, mailed to him by people with jobs in city halls and tourist centers. I read so many of their typed, attached notes, eager for a feature from a beloved local columnist. Dad's twin emotions of exhaustion and guilt with their requests showed in how they'd been shoved into this neglected corner of an inscrutable filing system, but not thrown away. I read about bluebonnet tours and new restaurant openings from years past, First Fridays and car shows, Historic Route Whatever drives. 

Mom joined me when the sky had just begun to lighten. She didn't say anything, just pulled up a chair and opened the next drawer. There was the typewritten deed to the house, from 1992, for just under $90,000. An envelope with the key to the Renault, the faithless French car, the subject of so many disastrous stories. The actual hospital notes from our births- did the nursing staff just give copies of these to the parents in the eighties, or did Dad ask for them? 

I don't know, and Mom doesn't remember, and both of us are too tired to care, yawning as we trade stacks of yellowed file folders whose labels have nothing to do with their contents. One is labeled Ideas but only has medical receipts stuck in it. Another says The Girls but all I find is a rubber-banded ziplock with mismatched keys in it. It could be an interesting mystery, except we only have about forty-eight more hours to clean out the entire house so it isn't. It hits the discard pile with a hollow thump.

We work, mostly in silence. Old bills go into the shredding pile. Old notes from medical providers about blood pressure, cholesterol levels. It's the detritus of a life, of our lives. Occasionally Mom leans back and laughs while holding something at arm's length to read, or I wave some inscrutable piece of paper and ask for the story. Finally the morning is mostly gone and the desk is empty, the contents sorted into orderly piles on the floor- trash, recycle, shred, keep. Dad has slept right through this dismantling. 

Mom stands and closes the roll top, locks it. Miraculous that for all these years- the desk has to be almost a century old- the key has never been lost. We go to let Dad out of the bedroom. More mornings than not these days we find him standing in the room, hands at his sides, unsure how to use the doorknob to let himself out.

The key is here, against all reason. The desk is empty, for the first time in my life or hers. We may have won this battle, but we both know that entropy- inevitable, irrepressible- has won the war. 

He will walk by his desk today without recognizing it, the site of so much dreaming, the Annie Dillard quote he printed off taped to the side, about our galaxy is a flung thing, loose in the night, our solar system one of many campfires. What shall we sing? he would always finish the quote with a flourish.

This beloved quote. We would write it on the cover of the bulletin for his funeral. It's been stuck to the desk forever. I love that he loved it enough to print it off, carefully cut around it, tape it up where he and we would see it every day. 

I pull at the tape until it comes off. I put it in the pile of things coming home with me to Oregon, along with high school photography projects, old journals, all the things you can't bring yourself to let go of yet. 

It's so strange that life goes on, that someone else lives in your childhood home, that the next time you come to your hometown you have to find an Airbnb because none of your people live there anymore. My memories of home feel like one endless, hot summer- the hum of cicadas rising and falling, my parent's voices calling from another room, school and summer camp and canoe trips and church and college and lying on the floor to write, dog claws clicking, the way the screen door sounds when it slams closed, the way the house itself smells like dust and stucco and our skin. Then it's gone. Did I remember it right? Did it happen at all? 

When I opened the box three years later in the attic, the Annie Dillard quote wasn't there. I looked and I looked, tripping over piles of junk, sweat beading around the band of my headlamp. But I couldn't find it anywhere, a flung thing, loose in the night, one more piece of the past that only exists in memory. 

 We live in between what we choose 

and what is chosen for us.

[john green]

-

What couldn't this cure?

[junot diaz]

-

It's morning, again. I hear rustling. On the monitor I see you sleepily lifting your head, so I crack open your door and swing you up from your crib. You tuck your forehead under my arm, just flashing the corner of your smile. Big primate holding little primate. Joy.

You're nine months old today. She's been out just as long as she was in! your dad jokes. We make pancakes and pinch off tiny chunks for you, slice some strawberries that you cheerfully squish to oblivion in your small fists. 

On our walk to the library, you squeak and chirp and shriek for all the world like a winged thing, twisting around in your stroller seat and laughing your head off when we imitate your wild strange birdsong back to you. The creek is running high and your dad breaks into a run alongside the riverbank, pushing you fast, your eyes as wide as your toothless grin. You're hardly ever afraid. 

I think about you all the time. I think about your life now, whether we're doing it right, whether we're taking care of you in the ways you need. I think about your childhood, how to keep you safe and bring you delight. And, I think about your future. 

I'm an optimist, it's true. I tend to take more after my mother than my father in that way. Mom used to conclude her classes at the university by saying Go Forth, and Achieve! and I inherited every ounce of this earnestness, this unironic buoyancy. Mom always has faith that things are going to be fine.

Dad had his own kind of lightness in the world too, but it was always tempered with a pessimism that was surely part temperament and part occupational hazard. From a young age I felt the weight of his anxiety for us almost like it was a third parent. A heavy presence that dampened requests to go on overnight trips with friends or the impulse to strike up conversation with strangers.

By my mid-twenties, his anxiety was starting to feel different, unmanageable, his reasoning dismantled more by the day. One morning Mom and I took the bikes out to go downtown, and I remember so clearly Dad walking out on the lawn as we wheeled them on to the street and mounted up. He clutched his head in distress, cried out You're going to die!

Dementia had long been at its dark meddling in his mind by then, and we would learn that soon enough. But in that moment, it seemed to me like his anxiety had finally broken free of him entirely, was able to voice the thing it had been trying to scream my whole life. You're going to die! 

While I biked away, anger crowding out my fear, I flashed back to being twelve years old and watching him carry jugs and jugs of water down to the basement for Y2K. How, twenty years later, we had to pour all the dozens of forgotten gallon jugs out on the lawn, to the consternation of our neighbors.

I thought about graduating college at the peak of the great financial crisis, Dad spending the whole drive to Arizona trying to convince me to turn the U-Haul around. What am I going to do in San Angelo? I asked him, as we crossed the New Mexico state line, and he perkily responded Just keep working at J. Wilde's!

That was the most frightening outcome of all, but he wasn't ever going to see that. For once instead of arguing I just drove. 

So many years later, I was in labor with you. I remember swiping a line of spittle from my mouth, dragging a pillow from the edge of the bed and biting it, screaming anyway through my gritted teeth. I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing a trail of my own blood. 

I felt them alongside me in that moment, the ghosts of all the women and infants who have ever died this way. I thought of wild animals, having their young in dens, in the woods, in the rain. I thought of you inside me, your walnut-sized heart hammering away beneath your tiny ribs, wondered if the merciless grip of my womb was annihilating you too.

It was the first time I'd realized my father's words were true. I knew something was wrong. It felt like I was trying to kick down an iron door, that I was fighting something that would never give. I sensed death like an event horizon, its gravitational pull and presence, my third dark parent finally here, hooded and scythed, to reap me. I'm going to die. 

And from that, you came. The first moment we met, they were soldering shut the rictus on my lower abdomen, and the burning scent of my own cauterized flesh filled the room. The specific weight of you on my chest, your cries, you being here for real. So awful and so transcendent, mixed together in a way I still can't figure out.  

Dad never thought to warn me about birth. How could he? That one was not on his radar. I thought a lot about that in the weeks and months afterward, as you grew quickly and I healed slowly. How Y2K never happened, and the AmeriCorps job I got that paid four dollars an hour in the midst of the recession ended up being where I met my husband and found my life here. How most of the things we fear never come to pass. How the best things often come from the worst times in our lives. How the things that spell the end for us are usually not the things we saw coming. 

What am I trying to say here?

At the end of the day, Dad wasn't wrong about the big picture. I am going to die. So are you, little daughter.

And those who worry about the world today are right to do so. There is a lot to fear. There always has been.  

I guess I just want to remember my own limited perspective. Your childhood and your life will be different from mine in so many ways. You will be of a different time. I can't predict what disasters will befall you, not only because I can't know the future but also because I'm blinded by the experiences of my generation- 9/11, the Great Financial Crisis, the pandemic. Who could have imagined those things? Your mayhem will be just as singular, surely.

It's also true that even if I somehow could predict these calamities and circumvent them, I would rob you of everything that matters. I would block your life itself from unfolding, change or taint every good thing that you would have learned or fought for or wrangled from them for yourself. After all, the day we were both closest to death is the day we met.

Even if I somehow restrained myself to only fretting about you endlessly, you would still sense it, I know. It would dampen your joy. 

My father's fear makes more sense now to me than it ever did. But even as I pull you back from running into traffic and give you curfews you will roll your eyes at, I want to remember that it is not my primary job to keep you safe. My primary job is to love you, to have a good relationship with you, to show you what I find meaningful and let you find what is meaningful to you in this world.

Life is inherently unsafe. It is fleeting, regardless. To fear this, to rage against this is not the thing I want you to learn from me. I want us to have better things to do.

I'll keep reminding you of this too- history shows that progress is always uneven, often incremental, rarely dramatic, but over time it's exponential. The world has continued to get better and better. There is no other time I would choose for you to be born, and no other place. Even now, this is still true.

I wish Dad could have met you. I think he would have been blindsided by his joy. I think it would have been easier for him to accept that your life and future were out of his hands, and that would have left him free to enjoy you for who you are, in whatever time you two had together. 

I'll talk with you more about this, and him, and everything else someday. Hopefully, there will be countless conversations in the future, stretching over the long years. 

But for now, the shadows are lengthening through the windows. You rub your eyes, almost a caricature of a tired baby. It's been another wonderful, once-in-a-life, utterly ordinary Monday. 

We rock you and feed you your bottle, read you your books, sing you our song. Dragons in the sky, flying with their golden treasure. If you catch their eye, wishes granted, more than you can measure.

You push the bottle away when you're full, climb up my trunk, settle into my chest with a sigh as the rain drums the window. Big primate, little primate. This, at least, hasn't changed for millennia.

Tomorrow, the sun will rise. While the tea kettle starts to sing, I will listen for rustling. And when I open the door to your smile, you will be nine months and a day. 

I can't wait.