At that time I was living with my wife and our three children, buying organic milk and trying to remember to use the compost bin in the backyard, which had seemed like such a perfect purchase on that bored and rainy Saturday last April. We'll put our banana peels in it! and egg shells! the kids can dig up worms for it in the dirt patch on the side of the house! My wife and I had a communal
sparkly-eyed vision of them naming their little critters and caring for them like pets. We didn't even have to say it out loud: it was the dream we'd always had together, and the reason we'd let ourselves get pregnant the third time. The kids will frolic! And when the first two didn't seem to do so the way our folie de deux imagined they should, we silently agreed that three was the magic number, that duality was what kept our lawn from being pressed and joyfully ruined by laughing kiddies, that the first two spent so much time playing off of each other that they had no real time left to play. So we added Beibi into the equation, and imagined her worm being somehow the zaniest in the dreamt-of mulch that we almost teared up over that day at the building supply store. She did change out lives in ways we could never have imagined. I still don't know if the world truly understands the role our tiny little girl played in the events leading to the end of our everything we knew, and so I suppose it's my lot to try to map it out as best I can.
Beibi had something, even from birth. She came early, in week 39, and had to stay at the hospital for a few weeks, which somehow devastated my wife. Beibi was healthy, and the most confident-sounding nurse said she'd rarely seen a stronger preemie in her career. I suppose, though, that Honey, my wife, knew that this would be our last child and so poured her entire last ounces of motherly fear out during those days in the maternity ward. When would she ever in her life get a chance to feel so much deep, dark, hormonal concern for a new life! Even if, in some unlucky future, any of us were to become chronically ill, she would have the strength needed to support the family through the trauma. Here in this state, though, in her hospital robe and new fuzzy slippers the kids and I had picked out for her, her hair a slick mess, with her hobbling, pained gait (it had been a hard labor; not long, but induced after her water broke, and very intense) and a constant humming concern for her first-born children, she let all of her maternal humanity flow from her soul. She cried fat hot silent tears that I couldn't comprehend, as if she'd already lost the small soul swaddled there in the monitored hospital crib. She's going to be ok, I'd say to Honey, who'd nod and smile a distant trusting smile. The oldest nurse would pat her shoulder and stroke her hair back from her face, murmuring something soothing that only new mothers could understand. Then she'd nod at me wisely and gesture for me to go warm another bottle of pumped milk, hinting that it was the best thing I could do. We spent two weeks like this, and though Honey had been released from the hospital two days after the birth, she had asked me to demand one of the overnight rooms, for wandered around at home dazed, emotional and too distracted to even eat would have been a low and long torture. The staff was used to the soundless wails of intensive care baby mothers, and gave her the space she needed to explore this maternal darkness, a place where logic is warped and twisted into the sharpened edges of fate. Honey wondered why the gods had given her a child to carry for all these months if they were simply going to take her back again. What cruel Great Mother passed judgement on selected hopeful hearts, granting them instead of the suckling bundle a sickly or miniscule life, hard-wired to the beeping machinery of a patriarchal version of health? How could her other children be expected to understand that mamma's belly had been full of life, but was now deflated, with no tiny sibling to show for all the times they'd been so good, behaved so well over the past six months? All this, and Beibi wasn't even truly in danger. Life and death were one thing for Honey, though, because she knew even then, with her deepest understanding, that her third-born child, brand-new in the world, was in many ways the incarnation of death itself.
© Madia (Maria Alva Roff) December 2011
