Five
First let’s take care of business, shall we? Things are going swimmingly today with both AL and the babe–for one more literally than the other. He tagged along as she left for her last day of work for a while. The word from the belly is he’s tired of the daily grind and could really use a vacation.
Yesterday on my way from work to work (North Philadelphia, where I see Spanish-speaking clients to our main office in Mount Airy) I biked past a man on the side of the road screaming and hollering about something … who knows what. More than the raging, he caught my attention because he was wearing a t-shirt with the word “SERENITY” blazoned in big letters acros’t the front.
Isn’t life full of such wonderful little moments? It made me think of the time I ran across a super-macho looking man who was winking and wolf-whistling at women … and sporting a big pink triangle on the front of his shirt. Or the K’ekchi’ Maya I met at a service of a Mennonite church with a tradition of non-violence, dressed to the nines in a fancy shirt announcing in English, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”
The closer we get to the birth of this child, the more we find our anxieties shift to what will happen after. It’s easy to start feeling quite heavy with worry. Given the experience with Javid, and considering that this will likely be the last time we try to breed, as my good friend Mark commented yesterday: “You’ve earned the right to be neurotic.”
It’s so intriguing to experience neurotic worries about a child. For a long time we thought it likely we would never try to have children. Before any of my siblings had kids, Ana Lisa used to half-joke with my sister Bev that she’d love the experience of being pregnant, but would Bev be willing to raise the child. My sister, whose weirdness runs in the other direction, thought back then it would be fun to raise kids but nice not to have to go through all the bother of pregnancy.
I like kids a lot, but never really thought I’d be any less happy without ones of my own. I do believe children provide a natural outlet for people’s desire to to be generative, to “pay it forward” as the book and movie of that name put it. But there are myriad other ways to do essentially the same thing. For example, we’ve both been incredibly grateful over the years that our jobs provide so many opportunities for us to love and learn from people, sometimes to help and sometimes to get way more out of the relationship than we can ever put in. It’s an incredibly privileged thing to get paid for, fulfilling as it does so much of the need we both have to feel we’re contributing something to the lives of others.
So when we began to shift toward entertaining the possibility of making our own little one, it was mostly out of a sense of adventure and finding ourselves at a stage of our lives where we felt, possibly, ready to take on a really big new challenge.
With Javid, we sure got our adventure. So much of it didn’t turn out the way we might have hoped, and there were so many losses in the process, it is now much easier than before to imagine vividly how keenly it would hurt for something really bad to happen to this one.
So that is now part of who we are. But not who we aspire to be. Like the furious man from yesterday, we’re contradictory, with impulses that flow against the current of our desires for ourselves and this child.
The sense that we should try again still feels like a good one, even though it could have gone badly. Or could yet. In the same way we undoubtedly are a little “burned” by the experience with Javid, we’re also trying to learn from it. If we’d have had any idea beforehand what would happen, we probably would never have gotten pregnant in the first place. That said, neither of us would undo the experience with Javid for anything. We got way more out of our time with him than we lost, for all that we lost an awful lot.
Since before, during and after Javid’s life I’ve been relating to someone who for many years now has been watching their child slowly die. Each excruciating step toward the end is wrenching, and to live the whole progression is almost more than I can imagine.
This week my parents went to the funeral of a young man who was healthy and whole and creative and curious … and gone in a sudden, terrible moment.
I read an article recently by a father whose son had just been in a pretty serious bike accident. The son was okay, but the father became curious about the actual risks of biking.
Two money quotes:
“Any activity that allows you to travel fast, unshielded, and unrestrained involves risk.”
“[Biking] does incur the risk of collision, but its other health benefits massively outweigh these risks.”
Isn’t it amazing that a process as complex as fetal development so regularly results in a healthy baby? And with all the potential hazards of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, isn’t it astonishing that such a significant number of people manage to become oldheads like you and me?
We’re about to welcome an infant who’s gonna travel fast, and resist shields and restraint. Our job is to protect and limit him. But not too much. This means he will be, sometimes, at risk. And it’s our job to let that happen as well, to believe that the benefits to him and to us massively outweigh the risks.
There. That’s our Serenity t-shirt, our “How’s my driving?” bumper sticker. Now I wonder who will be the first to catch us in one of those wonderful little moments, when our bones react and we neurotically contradict what our mind knows.
Just please let it not be my parents. I’ve already provided them with enough entertainment for one lifetime. :-)
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July 16th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
But Tony, we don’t think it is “enough entertainment for a lifetime”! We just keep waiting for the next chapter to unravel - ur, to unfold magically. Ana Lisa (and you) can do this! Hmm - babies really do just come! We promise to stand by with love and prayer - I could also use a serenity shirt! MomHelenNana