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.

Hyphenate This

The information simply didn't compute for my husband's friend. Let's call him Bill.

"What, did you lose a fight with Cait?"

No, he didn't lose a fight with me.

"Do you just not like your last name or something?"

No, my husband is perfectly fine with his last name. Well, half of his last name, now.

Mark and I came to the decision to hyphenate our respective names separately, which is unusual for us. He and I tend to talk about everything-- in a good way. In such a way that when he had to go to India for two weeks on a work trip, I would come home to our empty house at loose ends, brimming with those dumb little nothings that happen in my day and not having anywhere to put them. The cats, suffice to say, aren't great listeners.

My not asking Mark about hyphenating springs from an unfortunate, though rapidly waning, tendency I have: sometimes I assume that Mark will respond to certain cues in the way that other people have typically responded in my life. Even though Mark has unequivocally proven that he is nothing like anybody I've ever met before (including and especially the guys I've dated before), it's like a muscle memory to unconsciously project those less than stellar expectations. I'm trying to break the habit, because it's wildly unfair to him and just plain inaccurate.

Speaking specifically, I spent a very regrettable (literally-- I regret it a lot) portion of my twenties if not apologizing for being a feminist, then certainly not leading with it. I outgrew that habit in graduate school for two reasons: first, a feminist methodologies class changed my thesis and my life, and second, I got really tired of pretending to be anything other than who I am, even if that meant being alone. And based on that pesky previous experience, being precisely who I am would mean I would be going it alone.

My best friend, who never lost faith, told me once that all the things about me that scared all the boys away would be the things my man would love the most. She was right: that I was a scotch-drinking, pixie-haired, Doctor Who-watching feminist put off almost every guy I met on any dating site. And really, truly, thank God for that, because when Mark came across me and all of those characteristics, it was like the universe yelled, "YAHTZEE!"

Mark himself is an amazing feminist. Injustice of any variety-- including gender injustice-- makes him viscerally furious. He believes that all people are people and that no one gets the right to force their stupidity or prejudices on anybody else (also: amen).

So that I was nervous about asking this man, my then future husband, if he'd be willing to hyphenate, says a lot more about me and my baggage than it does about him.

The subject came up while we were out to dinner with some friends at a speak-easy type restaurant in Back Bay. One half of our dinner pair was one of my oldest college friends, who had changed her name when they got married. Carrie casually asked in the course of conversation if I would hyphenate, change my name, or none of the above.

"I think I'll hyphenate," I answered. I had already planned on doing so.

"Yeah, me too," Mark chimed in from my other side.

There was a nearly audible clonk as my jaw hit the table. I proceeded to make a series of high pitched, aborted squeaky noises before I managed to say, "You will?"

He shrugged like it was the most obvious thing in the world and said, "Well yeah. We're a unit. We're a family."

I remember the moment with such astounding clarity, right down to the fact that I was inexplicably eating an appetizer portion of bone marrow (it was lovely, but sort of beside the point).

Mark had said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, possibly-- and importantly-- because, in fact, it was the most obvious thing in the world. One of my favorite bits of vestigial trivia from my days as an avid student of Latin is the derivation of the word "obvious." It comes from two roots: the preposition "ob," which more or less means "up against" or "immediately before." The second root is the noun "via," meaning way or street. So, literally, "obvious" means "right up against your way," or more colloquially, "this thing is so very much right there in front of you that you're going to trip on it and fall on your ass."

So here are my husband's kindness, his fair mindedness, his feminism, his general belief in the importance of not being crappy to people, and his mind-bending, paradigm-shifting, and still butterfly-inducing love for me-- and I trip over them in their obviousness and fall directly onto my ass. And never have I been more glad to be sitting there in the middle of the metaphorical road, looking up in bemused amazement at the best noun-- person, place, or thing-- that has ever happened to me.

Mark is also pretty accustomed by now to my periodically falling on both my actual and metaphorical ass, and is in both cases always ready to pick me back up.

To bring it full circle, it's worth noting that the aforementioned Bill-- who was so appalled that Mark would change his name of his own volition-- is not one of the most enlightened or discerning people I've ever met. But you know what? I didn't marry him. I married Mark. Because no matter how many stupid people there are in the world, no matter how many of them I may have dated, Mark isn't any of them. Mark isn't anybody but himself, and who he is is the most remarkable human being I've ever met; he's also my husband, my unit, my family, my home.

And now he's someone with the same last name as me, and someone whom I love so much that everything I start to write turns into a love letter, almost without my noticing.

Love, Space, Time, and my Grandpa Jack

The evening before my grandfather's funeral, my dad's side of the family gathered at my cousin's house in the Boston suburbs.  As I write this, in the midst of planning my wedding and writing Grandpa's marriage advice into my vows, I realize that in a weird way, that night was sort of the rehearsal dinner for the funeral, which sounds twisted but makes a certain amount of sense when you think about it.  I ended up sitting next to my grandmother in the living room.  She looked around, calm but not dazed, and said to me, "It's so funny.  He always knew where I was in a room."

My sister, who was pregnant at the time with Grandpa's namesake, said she saw it happen from across the room.  I got up, walked out the front door, sat down on the curb, and bawled: big, ugly, choking sobs.  My cousin's husband found me by accident and had to peel me off the asphalt. 

That moment with my grandmother has come back to me sometimes since then.  My grandfather, Jack, comes back to me more often than that, often several times a day: when I see a picture of my nephew, his namesake, with that roguish twinkle in his eye that Grandpa had; when I put an ice cube in my scotch (he always told me it opened up the flavor, even though I prefer neat); and most especially when I wish so desperately that he could've met the man I'm going to marry.

I know the first thing Jack would've commented on is my love's height.  We are not a large people on my dad's side (we got sarcasm, not height, from our Welsh heritage), but Mark stands at 6'4.  I can imagine—with such clarity and vividness that it's almost a memory—Grandpa sitting in his favorite chair and raising his eyes to travel up Mark's remarkable frame.  His eyebrows raise too, and he looks over to me and says simply, perfectly, "Holy smokes.  Couldn't find a taller one?"

Oh God, but he would've loved Mark: both aficionados of the elaborate, marvelously bad joke; both avid Scotch drinkers; both devoted to their families with a kind of fierce steadiness.  I imagine Mark sitting with Jack, discussing the relative merits of peat versus sherry casks, and my heart creaks with the strangest ache, which marks the spot of something wonderful that never had a chance to be.

Another thing that will never be is Grandpa's presence at our wedding.  I have one of those quiet, helpless jealousies that he gave the toast at my sister's rehearsal dinner, and he will not at mine.  He will not comment on the motorcycle boots I intend to wear down the aisle, and he will not use his soup spoon to ladle ice into the scotch toast.  He will not be sitting next to my grandmother, and now, having found my own human, I begin to have the tiniest, barest inkling of what that must mean, and the vastness of his loss seems almost insurmountable. 

To love someone, to live with them, to share the space of your whole being with them for more than half of your life... what happens when that person is gone?  In my early twenties, I theorized about love as a kind of miraculous relativity, and (surprisingly) I think I was right.  But if you follow that logic (realizing my knowledge of physics could fit into a teaspoon with ample room for sugar) then that loss must bring with it a fundamental shift of all the laws of the universe: gravities and bodies in space stuttering, swinging wildly out of orbit, or simply halting in their path, because that person who was always next to you simply isn't anymore. 

I have always been appalled that when I have lost someone I love, all of the atoms in the universe have not suddenly frozen in space, because something has gone horribly wrong with the physics of the world.  The more I think about it, maybe they have—it's just only a few who realize it.

Already I know that my own physics have been changed by loving and being loved by the man who will soon be my husband.  It's true every day on both a large and small scale: I move through space differently because of him.  That covers everything from sharing the mattress to walking through my day knowing that there is someone in another space in the world to whom I am ecstatically tethered.  It's like we have our own personal gravity, always irresistibly pulling us back to each other.  We are only truly at rest when we are together.

Over the weekend, Mark and I were at his parents' house as his dad prepared our taxes.  I was tense and irritable (funny how taxes do that to a person), and my love could smell it on me a mile away.  He has an uncanny ability to read my moods; he often has a sense of what I'm feeling even before I do. When we were alone in his dad's office, him sitting in the desk chair and me standing and radiating tension, he pushed his chair over to me and wrapped his arms around my waist.  When he's sitting like that, his head is at the perfect height for his temple to rest on my sternum.  I folded my arms around his neck, and we stayed like that for a few minutes, my blood pressure slowly returning to normal.

Alongside my mundane irritation, with that weird grace that sometimes comes with cognitive dissonance, I felt gravity achieve a perfect equilibrium, and I understood that—as much as I am still myself—I am also part of a new body, a new whole, moving through the universe.

I'm not sure what Einstein would've had to say about any of this, but I don't think he'd object to the general theory—he did seem to have a grasp of the strange, wonderful nature of the universe, didn't he?  I like to imagine that he and Jack are toasting us from the great beyond. 

With scotch on the rocks, of course.