full-grown Irish setter. “That letter you wrote had the word tiny in seven places,” a friend tells me.
So I bake cookies and stare for half an hour into the tropical-fish tank, watching a cobra-skin guppy circle a plastic model of a scuba diver, who endlessly raises and lowers a piece of plastic buried treasure. I fold laundry and sort old baby clothes, bury my face in the little T-shirts, remembering the one (my “middle child,” “the older brother,” people have already started calling my toddler son) who wore them last. And I read to Charlie the story of Babar and His Children —chronicle of the triple birth, to Queen Celeste, of baby elephants named Pom, Flora, and Alexander—and try to explain an illustration that shows Babar watering a flower and seeing in its center the image of a baby elephant. (Babar sitting down to read and seeing, on the pages of his book, a baby elephant. Poised over his royal stationery to write proclamations and producing a drawing of a baby elephant. I know the feeling.)
The strange part is what follows. That what this is, really, is the original calm before the storm. That as the full-term pregnant woman sits, face to the sun, in a calm tidal pool, staring out to a sea with not a whitecap in sight, suddenly, she never knows when, there comes a tidal wave. I have known plenty of women to dread the birth and afterward to curse the agony they went through. For myself, I look forward to the event with the anticipation of a passionate surfer. More accurately, with the anticipation of one who never could surf, or ski, or stay on a skateboard, even. The last one chosen for every school field hockey and basketball team she ever played on. Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in my gym class failures. And discovered instead that I’d finally found my sport.
My son Charlie was two days overdue the night a call came from Canada to tell me that my father, in a Victoria hospital with pneumonia, was not likely to live through to morning. Not much to be done about it: He couldn’t have heard me if I tried to speak to him, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I put down the receiver and told Steve, who had been watching the Boston Celtics play Los Angeles. Then I felt the sickest I have ever been in my life, and my legs began to shake so badly that I lay down on the bed and he lay across my shins to steady me. We had seen a baby of ours born, on that same bed, four years before, and still I didn’t recognize the symptoms I was feeling as the transition stage of labor. Just to be safe we called the midwife, a forty-minute drive away, suggesting that she come over. But things happened very fast then, and five minutes later I heard a sound in the room, coming from me, that I had heard only one other time in my life—when I pushed our daughter out into the world. Steve felt for the cord around the baby’s neck and guided him as he corkscrewed out—our ten-pound boy. The next morning when our daughter came downstairs to find the top of her brother’s head sticking out from under the covers of our bed, where he slept between us, what she said was, “My dream came true.” And the thing that always strikes me with amazement is how, in a house where there had been three people a few hours earlier, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.
I think of my children’s births—carry them around with me—every day of my life. Sometimes it will be just a fleeting image: My friend Stephanie coming into the room, the day our daughter was born, with a bagful of oranges I’d asked her to bring over; seeing them spill out in all directions on the bed. Steve holding out a towel he’d warmed on our woodstove to wrap around a baby who would be born before the towel had time to cool off again. Audrey’s thick tuft of black hair that I saw and touched before I even knew the sex of the still unborn person it belonged to.
So I bake cookies and stare for half an hour into the tropical-fish tank, watching a cobra-skin guppy circle a plastic model of a scuba diver, who endlessly raises and lowers a piece of plastic buried treasure. I fold laundry and sort old baby clothes, bury my face in the little T-shirts, remembering the one (my “middle child,” “the older brother,” people have already started calling my toddler son) who wore them last. And I read to Charlie the story of Babar and His Children —chronicle of the triple birth, to Queen Celeste, of baby elephants named Pom, Flora, and Alexander—and try to explain an illustration that shows Babar watering a flower and seeing in its center the image of a baby elephant. (Babar sitting down to read and seeing, on the pages of his book, a baby elephant. Poised over his royal stationery to write proclamations and producing a drawing of a baby elephant. I know the feeling.)
The strange part is what follows. That what this is, really, is the original calm before the storm. That as the full-term pregnant woman sits, face to the sun, in a calm tidal pool, staring out to a sea with not a whitecap in sight, suddenly, she never knows when, there comes a tidal wave. I have known plenty of women to dread the birth and afterward to curse the agony they went through. For myself, I look forward to the event with the anticipation of a passionate surfer. More accurately, with the anticipation of one who never could surf, or ski, or stay on a skateboard, even. The last one chosen for every school field hockey and basketball team she ever played on. Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in my gym class failures. And discovered instead that I’d finally found my sport.
My son Charlie was two days overdue the night a call came from Canada to tell me that my father, in a Victoria hospital with pneumonia, was not likely to live through to morning. Not much to be done about it: He couldn’t have heard me if I tried to speak to him, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I put down the receiver and told Steve, who had been watching the Boston Celtics play Los Angeles. Then I felt the sickest I have ever been in my life, and my legs began to shake so badly that I lay down on the bed and he lay across my shins to steady me. We had seen a baby of ours born, on that same bed, four years before, and still I didn’t recognize the symptoms I was feeling as the transition stage of labor. Just to be safe we called the midwife, a forty-minute drive away, suggesting that she come over. But things happened very fast then, and five minutes later I heard a sound in the room, coming from me, that I had heard only one other time in my life—when I pushed our daughter out into the world. Steve felt for the cord around the baby’s neck and guided him as he corkscrewed out—our ten-pound boy. The next morning when our daughter came downstairs to find the top of her brother’s head sticking out from under the covers of our bed, where he slept between us, what she said was, “My dream came true.” And the thing that always strikes me with amazement is how, in a house where there had been three people a few hours earlier, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.
I think of my children’s births—carry them around with me—every day of my life. Sometimes it will be just a fleeting image: My friend Stephanie coming into the room, the day our daughter was born, with a bagful of oranges I’d asked her to bring over; seeing them spill out in all directions on the bed. Steve holding out a towel he’d warmed on our woodstove to wrap around a baby who would be born before the towel had time to cool off again. Audrey’s thick tuft of black hair that I saw and touched before I even knew the sex of the still unborn person it belonged to.
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