For My Daughter

I discovered Ashley McBryde's music early this year after Stephen Thompson talked about it on NPR, and her album became the thing I couldn't put down.  I listened to it more or less non-stop for about two months; those two months happened to be the first months my husband and I were trying to get pregnant.

There's a moment during the second chorus of "Radioland," just after the second line-- just the other side of the dashboard lights-- where there's a mandolin pick up.  Maybe it's ever so slightly syncopated, maybe it's that I hear it as an upstroke on the strings (and I could be wrong), maybe it's that it's this tiny little breath in the chorus-- whatever the reason, my mind made a little space there in the middle of this amazing, rocking song.  And in that metaphorical space, across all the boundaries of logic or sound or whatever, I put my hope that I was pregnant.

During the two weeks that I was waiting to find out either way, I finally said to myself that every single moment that I didn't know that I wasn't pregnant was a good moment.  In retrospect, that kind of feels like a cynic's way of obliquely approaching hope.  That's where that hope lived for two weeks: in the breath of a mandolin pick up, and in the vibrant red of two cardinals I saw in that period of time.  I had to contain it, tuck it into its own pocket universe, because I knew how powerful it was: it could bloom into the thing I had wanted so desperately for so long, or it could, quite simply, break my heart clean across its meridians. 

I've written before about grace, particularly from the perspective of a cradle Episcopalian, though my understanding of the grace concept is actually a bit less ecumenical than you might think.  For me, grace has very little to do with any sense of organized religion-- holy spirits and the like.  For me it's some combination of a piercing sense of wonder and the uncanny sensation that you've come in contact with and become part of something bigger than yourself.

When I was a teenager, I took guitar lessons from a man who was like a big brother to me.  We laughed at a misprint in one of my first music books, which rendered an old spiritual as "Will the Circle be Unborken."  (It was like the Swedish chef's version of the song.)  We also talked, me with a fifteen year old's self-conscious profundity and Michael with the kindness of someone who didn’t make fun of me for it, about existential threads running between songs: how the “better home awaiting in the sky, Lord in the sky” might be the same one James Taylor sang about in another one of my all-time favorites and first time guitar attempts: in “Sweet Baby James,” after all, "there's a song that they sing of their home in the sky."  Likewise, Gonzo the Great sings of the same home that he's going to go back there someday.

Like Gonzo, I have made peace-- indeed, made friends-- with the fact that, at the end of the day, I'm a bit of weirdo, such that I can tuck hope into pocket universes and find meaningful strands across a weird range of music.  That's the funny thing about grace as I understand it: yeah, it's really weird, and really random, but it can really make you feel like your smallness is actually kind of meaningful, because it's part of a bigger whole; that wonder and uncertainty can coexist, and that there is such a thing as coincidence, but you can still take comfort there.

As it turns out, my pocket universe proved fertile nesting ground for my hope, and at the end of the two weeks, I found out I was pregnant.  Four weeks later, on a truly horrible morning that turned into a very exhausted but relieved afternoon, I looked down to see blood in the toilet.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the specificities of that day: what the blood looked like (similar to red shavings of wax), the calming and guiding tone of one of my best friends when I called her, folding up against my husband in absolute despair, and how I kept thinking I had run out of tears on the way to the hospital, only to realize I had just hit a sandbar in a river that was much longer and deeper than I had known.

I will also always remember with a kind of body-enveloping gratitude the moment, maybe an hour or so later, that the ultrasound tech turned to me with her hand on the side of the monitor and asked me if I wanted to see.  There, nestled against the lower right side of my uterus, was a little blob at the center of which was a tiny, speedy, steady flicker.  My weeping went down a different fork then.

The tech went out to process my results and, I think, to give me a few minutes.  I sat up on the bed in the dark room and started rubbing my hand across my lower belly, back and forth, back and forth.  And I started singing to her: an impromptu playlist of the songs in which I have found grace, starting with “Sweet Baby James” and including Ashley McBryde.  Before I had gone to ultrasound, I sent my husband home to let the dog out, both because our poor Hank needed to be let out and because I knew it might help Mark to do something rather than watch helplessly as I wept.  I texted him immediately to let him know she was still there, flickering away.  He texted back that, while he was outside with the dog, a cardinal had landed on a branch above him, and he had taken it as a good sign.

So what’s the through line?  To be honest I don’t know: I’m in more or less uncharted territory here.  I’m terrified and elated pretty much all the time, and still (to be honest) afraid of looking down every time I pee.  My husband and I will fold music and weirdness and Muppets and love and hopefully a sense of wonder into the life of our little one.  And maybe someday she’ll intuitively understand how she came to be as an act of love, an act of biology, the result of no small amount of luck, on the wings of cardinals, and in the space in the breath of a mandolin pick up.

Nest

On my way to work this morning, I saw that our neighbors were taking down several trees—I only thought about in passing, hoping that they weren’t diseased and that the rest of the neighborhood trees weren’t at risk.  I gave it a lot more thought when my husband texted me:

“They’re taking down Isabeau’s tree.”

I should note that by “gave it a lot more thought,” I actually mean “hit the damn ceiling.”

Isabeau is a beautiful, enormous red-tail hawk who lived, with her mate, in a nest in one of the old growth trees our neighbors were cutting down.  Mark said that both hawks were circling all morning, and at one point, Isabeau landed on her tree, which was getting its branches hacked off in preparation to be felled, and looked as though she was searching for her nest. 

I wept at my desk and then took to the phone.

My first call was to the tree company: did they have a policy about checking for eggs and chicks before they chopped down trees with nests?  The woman who answered the phone said she didn’t know but would check; she said it in a way that made me sure that she would do no such thing.  Next stop: our city’s conservation office.  The man with whom I spoke took me seriously and said he would swing by the site; he also said he would alert the tree warden of the city. 

About an hour later, Mark texted me again: the conservation guy had stopped by our house.  He couldn’t tell if there were eggs or not and apologized for not being able to do more.  Since Mark had told me about Isabeau’s tree, I had spent the morning trying to negotiate the moral weight of a nest against, say, diseased trees posing a risk to the whole neighborhood or even clearing trees for solar panels to reduce carbon footprint.  It turned out it had been unfortunately unnecessary head work: they were clearing the trees so they could expand their garden.  As the conservation guy noted to Mark, “They should have bought a different house.  Even with the trees down, they still won’t get much sun.”

I found myself wishing fervently that their tomatoes wither and they get rats.

Even for someone who likes hawks, this may seem like an incommensurate reaction.  Let me explain. 

First, we love Isabeau.  We named her for the ridiculous, marvelous ’80s fantasy flick “Ladyhawke,” in which Michelle Pfeiffer plays the eponymous… well… lady/hawk, Isabeau.  We could hear our own beautiful hawk bating from our living room, and sometimes we’d go outside just to marvel at her.  We would joke that our neighborhood outdoor cat, Fred, keeps himself rotund from sheer self-preservation.  She would buzz our street, sometimes coming within ten feet of our porch.  The size of her was breathtaking, her coloring subtle and sublime.  I practically got high on the elation of seeing her so close that the residual part of my lizard brain that shrieked to run for cover.  Her mate joined her two years ago, and after we misidentified them as Cooper’s hawks, we called him Cooper.  We later realized they were red-tails, but the name stuck: Isabeau and Cooper, our neighborhood hawks. 

That someone would take down their tree without even checking to see if there were eggs or chicks strikes me as blatantly barbaric.  Why—why—would you destroy small, helpless lives if you didn’t have to?  If you could wait until they were mature and gone?  Or better yet, leave the bloody tree in the first place—it’s older than any of us, for crying out loud.  Why is it that something wild and beautiful and so very alive isn’t even taken into account?

Clearly, this struck a deeper note than simple conservation.

My dad told me once that every generation thinks that things are going to hell—except with each generation it’s some version of “yeah but for real this time.”  That may be true, but my admittedly cynical response to that would be that some generation some day is going to be right.  As we edge closer and closer to Margaret Atwood territory, I can’t help feeling that it’s us.  But for real this time.

Elementary schools and houses of worship have to conduct active shooter drills, and the second amendment is still enshrined like the eleventh commandment.  Babies are in detention centers in a country that still somehow calls itself “the home of the brave.”  My body is being legislated so that my making decisions about my own reproduction can be criminal.  It is in many cases a capital crime to have a skin pigment any darker than a Northern European.  The appalling has become the mundane.

And into this world—into this dumpster fire—a child will be born.

In fact, many children will be born.  I’m actually speaking about one child in particular, though: our daughter is due in November.  I’m pregnant.

One of the questions Mark and I spoke about deliberately and repeatedly before trying to get pregnant was, in all seriousness, how we could rationalize bringing a child into this world.  What we decided, and what we continue to decide every day, is that we will raise our kid to be a force of good in the world.  It sounds naïve, and it’s certainly something rationalized from a place of privilege, but down in my marrow and in my gut, it’s something I believe. 

But what does that actually mean?

I was batting that idea around this morning, among other things.  Since we’ve started to tell people about the baby, one of the zingers I’ve like to use is: “In our house, we pronounce P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S as ‘senator.’”  While I do truly believe that it is important to avoid aggressively gendering children from the get go, I pulled myself up short and wondered if I had swung a little too far.  Isn’t it just as limiting to pound into our daughter’s head that she has to SAVE THE WORLD?  I mean, shoot, I wouldn’t be a senator (or any other government employee) for love or money.  I want her to make her own choices, to be comfortable in her own skin.  She’ll be welcome to choose a tutu or a gavel (or even better, both); the point is that the choice is hers.

So what does it mean to hope that my daughter will be a force for good? 

And, in a moment of grace on kind of a crappy morning, a quiet voice in my head gave me the answer: I can hope that she’ll be like Ben.

Ben, with the scar above his eyebrow and the lemon yellow Alpha Romeo, which was held together with paperclips and prayer.  Ben, whose friendship came to me freely given and with breathtaking ease at one of the loneliest, most miserable stages in my life.  Ben, whom the people I knew remembered after he had died as someone who was fundamentally kind: he was simply good to people.  Even people like me, who were, in truth, peripheral in his life, bloomed in his warmth and, I think, never took it for granted.  In fact, it was impossible to take it for granted: it was just too special not to know as something amazing.

In the grand scheme of things, Ben wasn’t in this world for a very long time—only about twenty years.  And while I cannot state with certainty the impact he had on the larger world (though I’m pretty comfortable guessing), I can assert with absolute conviction that he changed my life: shifted my foundations, altered my physics, just by being my friend.  Even as a selfish, tragic fourteen year old, I understood that I would always, always be grateful for him, and almost twenty years later, I still am.  Even now, it’s still hard to articulate the breadth of it; it’s like how there are no words big enough to describe the depth of an ocean: you can pile as many Empire State buildings end to end as you want, stack the football fields—nothing quite covers it.

And what it was, in its simplest form, was one human being really good to another.

Which is I think a really, really important thing to hope for my daughter.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I have so many people who have changed me.  That in this dumpster fire world I have known so much amazing love and so many amazing people. 

I hope for her Ben’s kindness, but also Kate’s honesty and steadfastness.  Brendan’s humor, Cal’s sarcasm, Jeremy’s sheer cheek.  Abbie and Christine’s respective thoughtfulness, each unique and each miraculous.  Bryn’s conviction; Carrie’s calm under fire.  Kathleen’s loyalty; Carol’s warmth.  Rachel’s confidence.  And though it may sound weird, I hope she has the chutzpah and charisma to flirt alongside the best of them, namely Justin and Allison.  And I hope she has her father’s stunning compassion, and above all, my luck for having found all of these humans to love and be loved by.

In a strange way, I hope for her that she both has and can give this kind of love in her life, because at the end of the day, that’s all it comes down to: loving someone enough to show them your greatest strengths and your greatest frailties, your sapphires and your gum wrappers, and be able to laugh at stupid jokes together. 

I hope my daughter feels comfortable to be whatever, and whoever, she wants to be. 

She doesn’t have to save the world.  But I hope to God that she can put some really good love and kindness into it.   

And I hope she’ll always check for eggs.