Two young women in our extended family of friends have given birth in the past few weeks. In honor of these new children's arrival, I've sent this short piece from The Persuasion, Chapter 18, to the new mothers (photos by Priscilla Harmel, left of Benjamin Israel, right of Ava Lester):
Perhaps the world of the newborn, in my case, newborns, was familiar terrain to the billions of women who’d come before, but the two six-pound bundles of body, mind, and spirit that I was shuffling from breast to bath to back were portals to a universe unknown, never even considered, with its own rivers and storms, its own unsolvable mysteries.
With the births, time forgot the concept of moving forward. It went horizontal. Where even a week earlier, the hours clicked me along from my writing desk to the garden to the dinner table to the living room for a meeting, now they sent me sideways, depositing me in the after-birth where time advanced so peacefully that I could eavesdrop on the long conversation between the cardinals nested in the juniper on the northeast corner of the garage, follow the scrape of Tonin’s pencil across his big white sheet of butcher paper in his studio up the spiral stairs, vibrate to the tingle of chimes in the mountain laurel on the patio below, all background music for the babies as they suckled, working milk from my breasts, building muscle in their chins and cheeks for all their jawboning to come.
I constructed sentences whose words I’d always known but whose peculiar sequencing I’d never before considered.
What lives lay in front of mine? How many generations would our family endure into the future?
Who would populate our babies’ worlds? Who would become their jewels, their lifelong companions whose secrets they kept?
What confusions of the heart, unintended slights, self-doubts, and disappointments would chafe their routines, pull rugs from under their precious feet?
Were my babies’ cries despairs at the plight of human existence or were they little thespians practicing for their dramas to come?
How would they solve the riddles born with their souls?
What foods would the people who grew in me crave? Would they love beets?
Had they, my little daughter and my little son, had they enough to eat? Would they always?
Would Tonin’s intuition and my logic short-circuit the genetic wires in their brains?
Would Andy write? Would Zivvy build? Would she lead an organization; would he be a rock star?
Or would they move to another planet entirely, another solar system, a universe far beyond the second floor of this eighteenth-century house where they were born? Where would I be then?
Where was my edge limned and where did their selves begin?
I explored their mental caves, twirling fragments of cognition gelling in their small brains. I could see through their fleshy foreheads, rippled with the tracks of the birth canal, into the arithmetic of their minds, observing ideas dividing and multiplying, memories stored, the two halves of Zivvy’s brain rushing toward each other at twice the speed of Andy’s (my facts were never far away). I tried to perceive from their insides, from their points of view, watching them opening their eyes to acquire mental snapshots of their new world, and assuming that, when they closed them, they assembled what they’d captured into panoramas of their dawning worldviews.
And who was I on this journey?
I’d been piecing my own reality together for almost three decades, my own world, and now my own included two more people I’d never expected, twin shocks whose arrival toppled my balance and sped me into new territory.
They were Tonin’s babies before they were mine, he wanted them long before I was entertaining thoughts of children, he needed them to be who he wanted to be. Now I was the mother, not the child without one, I was protector, provider, materfamilias, once and forever humanity’s first face to these two of its progeny.
These thinkings, these awes, these terrors unsettled and delighted me as baby-time ticked by, every moment, the one after and the one before, changing Zivvy’s diaper, wiping away Andy’s spit-up. I circled the whole of Zivvy’s round back with my thumb, working the bubble of air up her digestive track until she could expel it in a belch louder than she was big, and then Andy cried out and my chemistry called back, rushing oxytocin to unlatch the milk locks, trickling out through my nipple even before he started sucking, on to his cheek as he turned his head this way and that, searching for the spigot with its hindmilk, the honey settling at the bottom.
Twenty, thirty minutes, two hours passed this way, me trying to recall how long we’d been lying there, which one I’d last changed. When had I most recently eaten? Had I eaten? Me, no longer simply me.
Andrew. My father’s name, his genetic material, his head in the palm of my hand, my little boy’s body stretched out along my arm, his face wrinkled and splotchy, and, though the same weight as Zivvy, six pounds, one ounce (I did know how to carry them to term, as I would prove again astonishingly soon after this), rounder, an integer shorter, he, a foot and a half, she plus an inch.
My son with the magnificent feet. I’d never been much of a photographer but, as a gift to mark the pregnancy, Janos had put a 35-millimeter Pentax in my hands. Over the course of the past months, I’d practiced, taking pictures of Treasure pounding down her sourdough loaves and gathering up her squash blossoms, of the granite Buddha Tonin had set by the mountain laurel. In early February only Buddha’s crown peaked above snow and we called him Snow Buddha; in April, he was Tulip Buddha with pink ones at his feet. And of Tonin, many pictures, of Tonin examining a bevel he’d just made in an edge, smoothing his palm across a board he’d just sanded, standing at his drafting board jotting notes on his big white sheets, cracking eggs into a bowl for our omelettes aux fines herbes.
I learned to set the light meter, adjust the shutter speed, snap, snap, snap, thread the film across the sprockets, and wind the reel in an instant. Now, I was focusing the 105-millimeter lens down on Andy’s perfect feet, his long wrinkled toes crimped into the soles.
Zivvy, born longer, was smooth. Where Andy’s feet captivated me, Zivvy’s head did, delicate in its proportions, crown to forehead, eyebrows to chin, nose to cheeks, precise. Her little symmetrical face. Eyes even, equal, wide, intricately edged lips, pursed, small fist by her cheek waiting to wave (or punch). She didn’t sleep the way Andy did, not that she fussed; she came out of me with her eyes open and stayed awake a good deal of the time. When she did sleep, she woke quickly, alert, ready to go, my daughter. My daughter.
No longer just a daughter, now the mother of one.
Of two.
