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.