Yesterday afternoon, as I was sitting at work, I started thinking about our plans for E’s birthday the next day. And as my thoughts started spiraling backwards from the birthday plans and started flitting through the last few years, I found myself thinking of where I had been exactly five years ago that afternoon and I was transported to that hospital room where I saw myself attached to a drip and a monitor, slowly moving around on a giant birthing ball to ease some of the discomfort between the flashes of deep abiding pain.
It was a Monday that year as well, and I spent a moment in the present trying to puzzle in my head how that had happened just five years ago, but I stopped trying to count leap years and sets of 365 days and slipped back into that weekend before her birth. M had spent it working on the house at a feverish pitch, painting and caulking, while I finally surrendered my paintbrush and gave myself over to being nine months pregnant and still. And in that quiet and rest we discovered something had changed. Still was the movement of this child, this former acrobat of the amniotic, and we turned our attention that Sunday afternoon to finding a way to coax this child to move.
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“Is there anything more you can tell me about before I was born?” she asks in the car as we pull up in front of our house. We’ve taken a quick ride to a craft store to pick out stickers and glow sticks to wrap up and take to her friends the next day in honor of her birthday. On the way home we’ve snaked down the highway along the river and stared out the window at the nearly full moon and thought back to that place five years ago and the days and weeks leading up to it. These are not new stories to her, but she never tires of hearing them. We tell her how each evening we would lay on top of the bed and as soon as I had settled myself into repose, movements would trace across the taut skin of my belly. M would select a book from the small pile next to the window and begin reading the sing song verses right to you and you would move and kick in delight. We tell her we could trace the line of her backbone, and cup her little bottom in our hand, then continue the journey down to a knee, a knee that when poked caused the thrilling reflex of a foot breaking the surface of this mound. Some days that little foot would push against its restraints so hard that we could nearly count the toes. We’d tickle it, push back with a little resistance, and those froggy legs of yours would bend again and replace the foot with a knee, or perhaps even do a complete flip of retreat. You’d settle in after a few moments and listen to the rhythm of the books transmitted through skin and organ and blood and fluid and you’d be lulled into a rare stillness that would allow me a few uninterrupted hours of sleep before the requisite tossing and turning of late pregnancy began.
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As that Sunday wore on, we stopped attending to the tasks of the house, and started trying all we could to get the baby to play along. We turned my belly this way and that, we read through those books, carefully turning each page even though the child couldn’t see the pictures and we knew those rhythms and rhymes by heart. We coaxed and tickled and traced the pattern of the spine, but the baby wouldn’t play, wouldn’t tease, wouldn’t even signal with a swift spin that it was tired already, and could you quit the poking? I drank long swigs of tart orange juice and consumed anything chocolate in the pantry. Through the night we lay awake, constantly testing and counting, relief coursing through us at the faint flutters, but no less fearful than we were before. By the wee hours we were on the phone and were told to come in. It was still ten days before the time, but our bags were packed and we slipped them, and our silent selves, and our unspoken fears into the car before the sun had made its ascent into the sky. The next few hours were a blur of controlled panic and forced calm as I was hooked up to monitors and we sat waiting, the three of us, waiting for that line that signals life and movement to start up. We waited for minutes, hours, decades while they repositioned and retried. We moved into another room so that they could look at pictures, and we waited and waited again for that telltale sign of pulsing flashing light. Low lines, low fluid, low numbers – I remember little of what they said except that this child was coming out today, that we were not going home to wait, and that we were going to be parents a little earlier than we thought. I heard that whoosh, whoosh, and I knew that the work was now beginning.
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“Tell me about the cord that connected us,” she demands, and we explain how long and snaking and purple and messy it was. How they clamped it off and her father cut it and she was free of me, save for that small stump that would eventually wither and fade and heal and be gone. You lay there in that small plastic tub with your father leaning over to within inches of your pink skin, brushing the back sides of his fingers over your body, tracing those lines down your spine, over your bottom, to your knee and then your toes. You are still again as you listen to those sing song words from that low voice that you listened to for months, and this stillness is okay because we can watch the rise and fall of your chest, stare into the inky darkness of your newborn eyes and catch them blinking, see the arching pinky finger moving in and out of your tightly grasped fist. You are out, you are healthy, you are tough and fragile and whole and moving and still and we can’t imagine life without you in it.
Five years later you are in constant motion, learning and doing and being more than we ever imagined you might. Your questions are endless, your chatter ceaseless, your ability to lose yourself in the moment is breathtaking to watch. I watch you in moments of concentration and I want that abililty to be connected to you once again, to know what you are thinking, what you are feeling, how you are processing every new thing around you. I want to know what is in your thoughts as you watch that moon over the river as we drive, and how your own mind weaves these stories of your birth into the story of you that you have in your head. I come upstairs to kiss you good night and I trace the line of your belly button and curl up beind your sleeping self and lay there remembering, until the moment of your birth in the wee hours of the morning. And then I take my hand off your belly and move downstairs, letting you dream your own dreams while I fall dreamless into my own sleep. Happy birth day, my sweet still girl.
