These Are Things
These are the things no one tells you:
The birthing is easy. It brings you to your knees, of course, if you do it right, and I don’t mean without meds because by god – it’s still a rending. It’s a splitting open, a metamorphosis, leaving the shell of your old self behind. You crawl out and view the devastation, but you can’t find what’s missing yet. You count it all as whole – fingers, toes, perfectly blue eyes in vernix covered skin.
No, that’s not the hard thing. And for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks if you’re lucky, they bring food. At evening meal time comes hot bread and casseroles, sometimes a salad mixed right there in front of you as you watch, dumbfounded and silent with awkward, weepy gratitude.
Those meals fill you, fill all of you, with contact, with continuity and grace, and give you the idea that you are special. When can you be waited on so well, so perfectly without the guilt of the undeserving? You have just made a human being – and you are still overflowing with emotion and amazement no matter how many times you’ve done it. You are a creator, or at the least, a catalyst. You’ve become holy.
And people bring meals that are complete, separate courses – no one cooks like this at home, but for the miracle of birth there is fresh bread and dessert, even. “You need this,” every plate cries.
But then, and here is the thing, the meals stop and you are expected to go on. You are left floundering and impotent with a baby, a small person to nurture for weeks, months, years on end and no one brings you meals when you are facing the imperfect, the flaws of children, the foibles of mankind. There is no sign-up at the church for “Mary has a child who bites her, leaving bloody holes, and she’s afraid she might run away from home.” There is no Hallmark card that says “Sorry to hear you live in a house with a stranger and a potential serial killer,” and I’m not even saying who is which, because a change of wind could force it in any direction.
These are what no one speaks of, because there are no words that form themselves completely around the things, no idea that can cause you to own it, this embracing of failure again and again.
Tread cautiously, and gird yourself well for the journey. Here there be tygers.
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Beautifully written BK.
As always – thank you. I’m so grateful for your visits.
Divine. Utterly divine.
*blush* Thank you, my dear NDM. I’m honored.