Wednesday, 13 May 2009

• Mother

  Dear Erin,

   

              I was so glad to read your newsy email, gladder still to hear mostly good news.  I’m trying to picture your sister as a pregnant lady, and I can’t, and I’m trying to picture you rocking your own adopted baby, and I can’t–no matter how much those images suit both of you, I can’t quite make those pictures in my head.  It’s a chronic condition I seem to have, this shock and awe that we are, in fact, grownups, constructing our own lives and capable of creating new ones, and responsible for seeing both of those through.  Do I need to remind you that you were five, like, yesterday, and I was recently in diapers?

              Seriously, though.

  My world at twenty-three-nearly-four is now full of newly married folks and new mothers.  To me—single, transient, jobless, homeless, free as a bird and floating—this is both hilarious and creepy.  In a weird way, it’s like I’m kneeling here in the center of my life, awkwardly untangling my arms from my legs from my pigtails from my big girl britches, struggling to stand and become an adult, and off to the side, there, all my friends are happily playing house. 

  All things considered, though, I’m learning a great deal about growing up, and I’m experiencing vicariously some of what the people I love are experiencing. 

  There’s that bit about motherhood, right?  I spent four months living with, Donna and Stu, the parents of a college buddy, learning bit by bit the particular pain of a homemaker, wife, and mother who is dealing with a newly and profoundly empty nest.  Her daughter Diane graduated from Ball State last summer and married right after.  They moved to Indy, where they are much too busy to visit often.  The son, Kyle, just graduated from BSU this spring.  He told me he wants to spend the summer rolling around the country with his guitar and car, playing music on the street, playing for change—playing for a change, really.  We’ll see what comes after, but the chances are good that he won’t go home. 

  Suffice it to say, their mother, my friend, is lonely in a big way.  On the one hand, it was a pleasure to know how much she enjoyed having me around, having someone to look after.  On the other hand, it took us awhile to come to the delicate balance where I could allow myself to be a cherished, looked-after adopted kid and also assert myself as an extremely independent, capable adult who was just grateful for a room to stay in.  Likewise, she learned to offer to take care of me without treating me like her child, realizing that was not a relationship I’d signed up for or one that she had earned.  At the end of four months with her, I feel like I understand a woman’s heart a little better, particularly a mother’s heart.  And she’s a good woman, a good mother with a very, very good heart.

  Soon after I moved out of her home, just before I left for Zambia, I met the first baby born to any of my high school buddies: Ella Grace Stewart, born to my lifelong friend Liz.  Born perfect, Erin–completely flawless, as babies can be but usually aren’t.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: Liz, cross-legged on the bed in front of me, beaming, a woman and a mother.  She was cuddling a little girl not so very much younger than Liz and I were when we met on a pool deck.  I wasn’t around for any of those transitions.  She had happened while my back was turned.

  I realize that these are universal moments, the sugary, flowery ones in Hallmark movies and Christian romances, but seriously?  There’s a lot of truth to the sweetness and strangeness of them, and I felt privileged to be present.

  I also wondered if maybe I’ve been skipping out, somehow, on some of life’s most ordinary and heroic moments.  I suddenly felt penniless, like I’d turned the pockets of my own existence inside out to reveal nothing but clean white cloth.

  Then, very quickly, I came to my senses.  I could love Ella for what she was: a miracle.  Someone else’s miracle.  That warmth, like a balloon rising in my chest, was a response to what she was, not to motherhood itself.  Thank God.  It was a close call.

  I can marvel at mothers.  I can appreciate them.  But because I’m not yet ready to be someone’s mother, because I’m still struggling with the concept of being someone’s life partner, there are deep places—terrifying places, magic places—mothers can go where I can’t follow.  I can’t begin to understand. 

   There’s a woman here, Sharon, who works for Kafakumba teaching the God’s Kids classes with Vivan each week.  Sharon has had several miscarriages and stillbirths in her young motherhood.  Not one live child yet, until this last baby, a girl.  The child had been sick since she was born, but she’d lived eight long months.  I arrived here a few days ago, though, to whispers about Sharon, the mmm-hmm kind, the poor-baby kind, the well-meaning kind: Sharon lost the baby, did you hear?  Made it to eight months, then died mysteriously.  Mmm hmmm, poor woman, poor baby, mmm hmmm…  Debbie’s face was dark when Caroline told her, and I couldn’t read it, but I felt such a strangely familiar sense of grief for a woman I’d never met. 

    I met Sharon the other day as Patricia and I were walking through Beluba village.  She’s a tall woman, very thin, with a face scrubbed flat by sadness—that kind of sadness, like yours, Erin, that I can’t sing, the kind that I pay so much attention to and hate.

  Liz, Ella’s mama, is a nurse.  She’s worked in OB and loves it, but when I visited Ella, Liz told me that eventually, she wants to work in oncology, with terminal cancer patients.  Over the body of her sleeping baby girl, I blinked at her.  “You’re in for some really painful, sleepless nights, love,” I said.  “That is a very difficult job,” though I know she knows that.  Liz is a nurse, though, and in a cancer ward, unlike any other ward, a nurse can really come to know and develop relationships with her patients because they’re in there all the time.  Pain is simply part of the gig, and to Liz, the caretaker, the nurse, the keeper of this brand new life, it’s worth it.

  Then I thought of you when I heard about Sharon’s baby–you, wanting to be a dula and a midwife, your intense passion for women’s lives and stories, your need to involve your love of women in your spirituality and in the work you love.  You, like Liz, are in for some really painful, sleepless nights, my dear.  Of course there’s a particular pain that comes to anyone who works exclusively with men and men’s lives, but to want to tangle yourself up in the world of women—this is an act of bravery.  If you’re willing to endure the often-sadness, you are going to be so privileged.  You’ll be present for the very holy, most intimate moments in life.  I mean, there are less than a handful of people who are witnesses to a baby’s first breath and a first-time mother’s first tears.

  In all of this, I miss you, Erin.  I wish for you tonight, a cup of tea, and your perspective.  You always seem to see things that I don’t see in a situation. 

  At least, if I have any kind of clear understanding on my own here, I always have the perspective that relativity offers.  Perspective isn’t comfort, of course, but then comfort isn’t the point.  Relativity isn’t vision, but I welcome the perspective. 

  See, I’ve cried many times over seven days for ordinary love:

  I’ve wanted to hold my niece so much my arms have throbbed; I want to hear “Aunt Daisy.” I want my sister’s cooking and her bossiness, I’ve wanted Ben’s scruff on my face and his hands in my hair.  I’ve wanted my father’s hugs and my mother’s worry. 

  All those are exactly what they seem, though: they’re the elements of a healthy dose of homesickness, a clear and classic case of wanting exactly what I can’t have and wanting it now.  I would settle for their voices on the phone, but even tonight, I can’t have that because I made a particular choice, and that is always when we want something most. 

  Perspective, at the end of the day, says this more of an old, old ache–the dissatisfaction of loneliness–and less of a pain.

  I made a choice that requires barefootedness, a willingness to walk on broken glass, if that’s what’s ahead, and this is the first choice I’ve made in quite some time that requires me to grow up and commit to and learn to live with its consequences.  To do otherwise would be shameful.  I could say that I’m proud of myself for making the choice, and to an extent, I am.  But then perspective, at the end of the day, says I don’t really have to live with anything.  Remember that—barring any unforeseen craziness, barring the possibility that immigration will love me so much that they decide to make me stay rather than kicking me out when my visa expires—I’ll get exactly what I want most in just under three months.

   

  All of this is because, very simply, I wonder:  what kind of love and horror does the woman feel who’s lost every child she’s ever conceived? 

   

  I know that folks ought not to go around comparing their lives to the most awful situations simply to feel better about their own or to avoid facing their problems altogether.  That’s not healthy or realistic, and that’s not the point.

   

  But.

   

  There’s something to recognizing the spectrum of what is possible and endurable.

   

  Also, there’s something to the fact that for every year this old rock has been turning and sustaining human life, women–rich women and poor women, women of every color and class and country–have borne babies and have lost babies. 

  It’s really nothing new, and there’s nothing selective about it.  There have been women of every color and class and country there to witness those moments.

   

  I’m not trying to oversimplify anything.

   

  I am, however, making the argument that whatever we do or don’t agree on in this world, women can, on some level, understand each other, feel each other.

   

  If we could bottle that power up and anoint the world, it seems to me that the kingdom of God would have come, and we would have done God’s will...

   

   

              Just a thought, and at the end of it, I do love you dearly,

   

              Sarah

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