Child Ode

It took me a year and a half to get pregnant. It took me half of that time to go officially crazy, which is what the Kid said I did and which is true. But looking back, I also see it as some subconscious shoring up for parenthood: whatever you expect to happen won't happen; it will make you crazy; embrace the crazy.

Expect to get pregnant the minute you go off the pill and because you have "decided" to? You won't. Expect to take the waiting each month and the subsequent invasiveness in stride? You won't. And then when finally the stick turns the right color and you think you will deliver the news to your husband with love and poetry and tears, you won't. Instead, in your crazy-induced shock, you  -- which means I -- I will literally chuck the pee stick at him from across the room. Throw it at him, hurl the good news into space, because I was so afraid to say or even show it to him Out Loud, In Person.

Also: She will be a He in my mind from the first moment the stick turned the color I wanted, a bloody-kneed, baseball hurling He. She will be a He until they hand Her to me, after 38 hours good god, and I will remember, even then in that haze, what the last 18 months PLUS another 10 have taught me: whatever you expect... forget it.

She is, she was the most beautiful, the most complicated, the scariest creature ever and when I caught myself in the mirror over my dresser, holding that chicken-legged howling three-day old bundle, I thought: I can't do this. Her belly button stub got caught in my overall buckle the next morning and was nearly ripped off. Naturally, I took this as a sign, as proof in fact that I shouldn't be allowed to have her. My mother reminded me, while I was sobbing and sitting on a bag of peas, that She was mine and I did have Her and that I would find a way. And lo and behold, I did. 

While I carried a backpack, she made old socks or plastic grocery bags into purses. She danced and pranced while we rocked and rolled but we cooed over her and were wooed by all her Princess. She was Disney to our Jim Jarmusch. We shot rolls and rolls of pictures of her in pink and purple clothes and sang more Elmo songs than Guided By Voices and we didn't care. I heard her try to speak first words for the nanny from my office upstairs. I was pregnant again (surprise) and I sold my business in 24 hours, shocking nearly everyone I knew but mostly myself.

I hung a PJ Harvey poster in the playroom, clinging to something I thought was cool I guess, and when she got older, she said she thought the broad was trying to look mean. She liked the Beck print though, a brain-exploding gory kind of thing, because she said at least it was funny. She was four when she made these critiques. I cocked my head and looked for the first time differently at art I had always loved.

First babies are the same in one really gigantic way: they wave a wand that changes everything in sight. And after they do, you expel your expectations of yourself (as a parent, as a person), and you give up how You Thought It Would Be or how you thought She Would Be, and then it's just Her and you and a clean slate of a world. A wobbly, terrifying, who-the-hell-am-I-now clean slate of a world. 

Bridget was 21 months when her sister was born; she was 4 1/2 when her brother came home. She was a cherubic "helper" then but she is mostly a jealous ruler these days. She doesn't fool me: she is the first one to sneak into their beds, the leader of the bed-switch every night. She loves them and needs them far more than she admits. 

She also needs to be with me all the time: of all the three, she needs the most attention. I sum it up to those rolls of film. She pours over the photo books that document an inordinate amount of her life, wanting to hear a story about what she was like then, why she was dancing like that on the porch in the tutu, who we were, who she was, her sister, all of us. (Her brother and sister get bored with this routine after seven minutes.) I tell her as much as I can remember, but truth is most of it is a blur. I fudge details; I tell stories; I leave out the parts where I cried on the side of the road, too tired and too frustrated to drive. She suffered through a lot of that; at least we don't have pictures to remind us both.

She wants to take acting lessons without singing, become a soccer phenom without training, be the smartest girl without getting grilled about spelling. She despises the thought of anything unknown -- food, places, people -- which kills me, and she while she doesn't like boys (yet), she wants to be pretty. I have found long-forgotten tubes of lip gloss tucked in her drawers, little treasures she has "borrowed" and that she will always love more than I do. Still, it's fun to play dress-up with her and indulge in a girlyness I usually leave behind.

Despite her twirls and whirls, her lack of freckles and her straight hair, she is more like me than I realize. When she didn't want to sit at the table with all the other kids in pre-school, I should have been more sensitive because I would've done the same thing, because sometimes I still do. When she drives me crazy trolling itunes and playing the same 15 second snippet over and over, I realize my own mother must have wanted to chuck my turntable out the window at least twenty thousand times.  When she gets angry and sad all at once, when she spends hours drawing pictures of her "dream room," when she tells the same jokes too many times, I should give her a break. She gets it from her mom.

She is the North Star to me. She is the guide to the person I became when she was born, to the person I have managed to become after (Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter, Friend, writer, volunteer wench -- in that order). I don't know what to expect of the double digits but I know that worrying about it or planning for it is useless. If I think she will be one way, sure enough she will be another; if I think I will be one way... She is a surprise party and a Galaxy Far Far Away, she is the Future for me and she is limitless, and no matter how I might try to predict or prepare, she is: She.