The news that the baby has been born comes by email. There are exclamations around the office, like neighborhood fireworks whose rhythm of release is never quite mastered. There are gaping silences, then an “Oh!” and a “Baby!” I hold myself quite still and reread the email. A baby has been born to my coworker and his wife. It was a long delivery. A successful delivery. As they say, Mom and baby are doing fine. But I am looking for something else. I am sniffing for a hint. A hint that maybe not all is fine, and maybe I am not alone in having my idyllic dreams snuffed and reduced to smoke. I feel terrible, certainly. Write to a friend, the only one who understands: “Envy. It’s evil.” People use the phrase “murderous rage” as if it is the worst emotional pool a person can drop into, a force that will make a person do unspeakable and unforgiveable things. My envy may not cause me to kill, or maim, but I understand how it can because I feel poisoned by it. There was a murder here a year or two ago that was as horrifying and bizarre as any you’d read in the 14th book by a mystery thriller writer who has upped the ante with each book until she has ultimately run out of even semi-reasonable plots. A woman, desperate to have her own baby, murders a pregnant woman and removes the baby from her belly, hoping I suppose to keep it for her own, but kills the baby while performing the gruesome surgery in her basement. I would never. I know this. But I understand the pickling that spoils the heart, kills off empathy and human kindness like alcohol destroys bacteria. I want no one to ever be happy with healthy babies and fulfilled dreams. I must actively work to flush these feelings, drain them with a flood of self-talk to drive them like cattle back into the perimeter fence. The envy lives in me like a child. It grasps for someone to come and join it in its misery. Oh yes, misery loves company. How can I feel so alone among the rubble of my dreams? Won’t somebody come and play, somebody come and play today, I hear in my head the Sesame Street song that my now 8 year old son still listens to. He should be watching Star Wars or Disney films that I was all prepared to hate in all their lack of sophistication and misogyny. But I would kill to watch Aladdin for the umpteenth time, if only Noah’s mind could develop enough for him to fall in love with something new. There is so little new in a life set on repeat. Some parents write about how glorious it is when their kids with whatever kind of delay spit out a new word, or show a new interest. And it’s true. So true! There was a spark of joy when I asked Noah last night when he was playing in the bath with small animal figures who jump and splash into the water (a game he has played for 6 years made all the more fun when you accuse the figurines of being “bad” and not allowed to go the mall, which is Noah’s greatest fear) who the Bad Penguin was? He held him up over the lip of the bathtub and said, “Him!” It’s cute the way he said it. The way he says a lot of things, like “Day Du” for “Thank you.” And I celebrate it. Tell the story to Mark when he comes home. And we laugh as though we are happy and really feeling joy. But there is no true joy to be had in hearing your 8 year old son say a word that most kids master both verbally and grammatically many years prior. There is no true excitement that this work, this “him” might lead soon or someday to a sentence, or a story, or even, a glimpse into his inner life, if he has one. Does he? Does a child who has watched the same Elmo’s World episode 50 times have an inner life? Or is it like driving on autopilot? Sometimes I think being Noah must be like being a bit drunk all day, every day. His ataxia and nystagmus have him listing from side to side, and he trips and falls more times during a day than most of us in a year. But he shakes it off like a drunk might when pushing through the door of the bar the wrong way, or stumbling off a curb, or hitting a shin against the corner of the coffee table. He fumbles for words, spews emotions like a sad drunk who moves from giddiness to sadness between sips. He moves through is world with the same haze that I do when I’ve had too much to drink, but drive home confident that I know the way, that I will stick to the deepest worn grove, like I do when I get home and careen through the house to get water, Advil, let the dog out, stuff something salty in my mouth, brush my teeth, dress, not thinking keenly about anything. Everything is just a movement that leads to another movement that leads to another movement. And I hope I haven’t truly hurt myself in the process, and I’m certain that I will feel like shit the next day. How does Noah do that? How does he spend each day in some kind of quasi-coma that just leads to yet another day in that same fog and stumble and keep your head down kind of living. I know it is assumption. That I have no idea what his life is like. That none of us as parents know who our child will be. And for most parents that’s what’s so damn exciting. That’s the novelty. And that’s where our hope lies: it lies in potential. And my friend, the one with the new baby. He looks at her and sees the embodiment of all she can be. While I look at Noah and see what he will never be. How can I not be envious? Not of my friend’s good luck. But of his new daughter’s life? How can I not be envious of that life for Noah?
Tag: loss
The Lottery
A urine collection bottle shaped just for bedridden men
leans in the bathroom sink, this time
collecting the drip-drip of a broken
faucet, the water bloody with rust.
An over-stuffed blue Lazy-boy,
arms dark where food-dirtied hands
rested while the television blared,
cups stained and frayed towels in its cushions.
On the drop-leaf table next to the chair,
a stiff and yellowed doily lies drunkenly under
a glass serving bowl offering up the remnants
of a last meal of chicken noodle soup.
Also on the table a copy of my mother
and father’s wedding bulletin and a picture
of his father and two other men dressed like 1920’s gangsters.
Numbers and notes doodled on paper scraps.
A lottery ticket, its corner trapped
beneath the soup bowl. Maybe the fruit flies
know if it held a winning number, if my father,
after death, became a winner after all.
What We Found
I didn’t want to go in. That was obvious. Even in less disastrous times than these, the occasion of my father’s death, I never really wanted to enter his house. The smell for one thing. When you first opened the door and the odor of mold hit you in the face, you wanted nothing more than to pull your t-shirt up over your nose and mouth, prevent that smell from entering your body. Or maybe you wanted nothing more than to turn and leave, find sanctuary in your car, your oh-so-clean car, even with the lingering smell of a quick McDonald’s lunch after your long drive. The smell was easy to explain. Numerous years of basement flooding had destroyed the drywall throughout the downstairs rooms.
But it would not be until later that day, when my husband and I, and my brave 70 year old uncle who should not have volunteered to help with this task, descended the wooden stairs that led to the basement from the front door of my father’s rectangle ranch house, that I would realize the extent of the damage. How all of the toys—a baby carriage, a Lite Brite, one of a pair of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots–, the boxes of school papers, the stacks and stacks of books my mother collected from years of teaching first grade, the antiques she had collected from her travels to Europe before she met my father, had been slowly drowned by the creeping water and nothing ever salvaged.
The bugs were another problem, but you saw those before you even entered the house. The decaying front entry way that I remembered being added to the house when I was 7 or so, was covered with Japanese beetles that looked like harmless ladybugs but were carried their own particular stench if you touched them, daddy longleg spiders having weaved their homes into the corners, and the boxelder bugs, strangely menacing with their black and white armor.
The evidence of rodents was obvious immediately there too. Holes chewed into the walls, causing insulation to seep out like dirty cotton candy. If you were brave enough to enter the house and look, for example, a water glass, you would see more evidence of mice, maybe rats, creeping in and out of cupboards and Tupperware as they perused the kitchen looking for scraps of food amid yellowing boxes of Morton’s salt, Hamburger Helper, and amber bottles of pills long since emptied.
When had he given up? Maybe he had long-since decided that if he couldn’t make things what they once were, keep a material sort of shrine to keep my mother’s memory alive, then he would shut his eyes to the decay and dreams of days when my mother’s collection of tea cups say washed and gleaming on the dining room table, awaiting the women from Ladies’ Aid, but he had time to steal just one more date cookie, the same kind his mother had made when he was a boy coming in from the fields.
Rough Drafts Only 