A Light in August

 

We named him August because he came in the late summer of our late thirties – in part a private joke about how my snarky grandmother called my uncle, born 12 years after the last child, “her fall crop” — but also because it was true. We named him that because he was our harvest.  A yield we didn’t expect, born out of a fallow season, a crop we weren’t ready for, didn’t quite have capacity for, but still rushed around to gather, amazed.

August was such a surprise, that it only made sense to think about his arrival as something preordained or magical, a blessing for the hardship that had come before.  I joked with my friends, saying, “you know, I wasn’t clapping my hands together and thinking, ‘Okay! The twins are finally in kindergarten, I’m anxious to finally re-focus on my career, my husband and I have just reconciled after a four-month separation following his relapse, rehab and recovery –  it’s a FANTASTIC time to get pregnant!’”  Friends were calling, wanting to know how Steven was, how I was, and were we back together. And to them I would reply, “Not only are we together and in a strong recovery, but guess who’s got a bun in the oven!” For someone who has has always had what Anne Lamott calls “teeny tiny, little hardly worth mentioning control issues,” this felt unsettling and even embarrassing.  I felt like a knocked up prom queen, a good girl who had gotten herself in trouble. It took my best friend reminding me that I was actually married to the father of the child, that it wasn’t my dentist’s baby, to help me snap out of that.

But the unease persisted, this sense of conflict around the feeling that the timing was all wrong, with so much uncertainty and fear fresh out of the turmoil of recent months.  And I also felt a great weariness. Having twins within DC’s beltway while Steven finished his doctorate and postdoc internship, and I patched together consulting jobs, exhausted me. Having a baby six years after that, six years older, felt strangely like a generation later.

I felt old and tired and scared.  And so in the private whispering room of my heart, there was a great ambivalence about this baby.  I then layered tremendous guilt on top of this, after the years of infertility, the desperate longing for a baby, the rounds of IUIs and IVFs that ultimately brought us our twins.  So I cried often, usually when I’d go up to check on the children on my way up to bed, whispering I’m sorry into their sleeping heads. I’m sorry I won’t be able to give you as much of me. I’m sorry I’m tired all the time. I’m sorry that I never even intended or planned this.  I denied myself the celebratory aspects of pregnancy – I wouldn’t let anyone throw me a traditional baby shower, even though I had long since given away baby things. I didn’t think I deserved that kind of attention since I wasn’t exactly glowing and gushing about this new life.

All I could do was circle the drain on trying to make sense of it all – What did it mean? Some days, my better days, I could read it as new beginnings, as an incredible gift born of our healing – and other days it felt like the unraveling chaos of the past year was taking a new form.  I spent half of that last trimester napping or waddling after Henry and Charlotte, wanting to wear a T-shirt that read, “I’m damn near 40 and 7 months pregnant in a Louisiana summer: Do. Not. Fuck With Me” (which, sadly, would have easily fit on my girth.)  And the other half was spent on a hamster wheel in my brain, trying to untangle the Gordian knot of meaning within this quickening. Making sense of it felt so critical because without it, there was only randomness and entropy and my raft floating out on some uncaring sea.

During my 38^th week of pregnancy, against the advice of my OB, I went to a 4-day silent retreat 200 miles away. It was hosted at a 300-year-old Jesuit monastery in South Louisiana, where they send the old Jesuits out to pasture.  Between sessions, I walked the halls behind an elderly father, our gait the same, slow and shuffling, both with a lot to lose if we risked hurrying.  One of us exiting, stage left, the other a vessel for ushering in new life, stage right.  It was there, in the quiet and under the live oaks, that I learned to let go the need to make sense of the pregnancy, and instead work to hold out a little space for August’s birth, a space for the inexplicable wonderment of it, without having to analyze it.

The retreat leader read Martha Postlethwaite’s poem, “Clearing,” and it rang a bell in me, clear and deep.

Do not try to save

the whole world or

do anything grandiose.

Instead, create a clearing

in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there patiently,

until the song

that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize

and greet it.

Only then will you know

how to give yourself

to this world

so worth of rescue.

I met with Paula, the retreat leader, privately, where she told me more about her own experience of ambivalence and sorrow surrounding the pregnancy of her second daughter, when her older daughter and husband were killed by a drunk driver in a car accident.  Paula didn’t try to fix my discomfort and uncertainty, nor talk to me about the sacredness of motherhood or the incomparable joy and meaning of a new baby and how I would love him instantly. She seemed to know that that would only compel me to berate myself for not already knowing or feeling those things.  Instead, she simply and profoundly held out a greater space of love and compassion, encircling me, and told me to stay authentic to whatever I am feeling.  And that that would be enough.

To stay present with my own self and feelings when walking out an especially hard path is enough.  Create a clearing in the dense forest of your own life…

Maternal ambivalence is a forbidden topic, a third rail unless it’s couched within a wry wink and joke about “needing some mommy juice” or the old Calgon line.  If we reference this dark doubt or resistance, then we need to quickly do a kidding/not kidding grapevine-shuffle step with a little Dios Mio! ending, lest the judgment “bad mother” form. And why? Why should they be causally connected? I suspect it’s because we’ve elevated motherhood on a pedestal of sanctity.  And from this tiny, suffocating nose-bleed section of the rafters within our culture, actual 3-dimensional mothers are likely to layer on guilt or loneliness or a sense of inadequacy when trying to square the circle with whatever is calling them: more time and focus, an intellectual life outside the home, the decision to have a child or not have a child.

It would be much more equitable and save a great deal more energy if we could dismantle the pedestal thing entirely and talk frankly and bravely about the ambivalence of motherhood that is both completely unrelated to how fiercely we love our children, as well as just as characteristic of the station as its joys and heart-achingly sweet blessings.  Rather than leading with “mothers” in the subject line, if we could have a conversation about people who wear, among many other garments that make up their identity, the scarf of motherhood — then we might be might be more open to holding out compassion for women’s difficult feelings and choices before, during and after pregnancy.

In my own case at this time, the question wasn’t whether to have the baby, but how to interpret its meaning in my life, how to be “expecting” in the face of such uncertainty, and frankly whether I would be okay in the aftermath of an surprise pregnancy. My heart found comfort in final week of pregnancy when I discovered it was enough to create a clearing for the wonder of it, the total baffled amazement of this baby after so many doctors had said “might as well adopt” — without understanding, without really knowing what the future held.

During the delivery, my OB – who had forgiven me – knew I wanted this birth to be a VBAC, a more positive experience than the surgical delivery of my premature twins 6 years before. I’m not sure if she also knew how much I also needed to feel connected to this baby.  She asked me if, in the final push, I wanted to reach down and pull him out myself, so that my hands would be the first to touch him.  “I CAN ACTUALLY DO THAT??” I remember serenely screaming.

When I caught August by his little shoulders and pulled up to my chest, he opened his eyes, clear and knowing, and looked at me. He looked directly into me.

Annie Dillard, who wrote as finely as if she were discovering the whole world for the first time, spoke of her visits to an obstetrical ward in For The Time Being, observing the babies who had just been born as they were taken to the examination table.  She talks about witnessing the few moments before the soul fully inhabits the body, and the eyes become shuttered within murky interior life of a newborn. There is a small window when the babies’ eyes are open wide and alert, an untethered soul looking out, frank and intentional, the startling democracy of a one human regarding another.

That was how it felt with August, this little light that wanted to be born, looking directly at me, into me, miraculously despite my fears and doubts, even my dread.  My ambivalence and dark thoughts – which I validate as real and forgivable –  didn’t sink me, and my unknowing didn’t undo me.  August approached anyway, moving closer towards the clearing I had made, growing stronger and more radiant, like an approaching friend on the nighttime road — someone dear, but as yet unrecognized — swinging a strange, but welcome lantern.