May 8, 2011
Dear Future Child,
I write to you today so that you might have some account of our first disaster endured as a family. You see, you were there, too, as the tornado swirled overhead.
This is the part of the story we don’t tell people because you are not here yet—just some tiny embryo—and the world is too unstable. There are still far too many factors left unaccounted for, too many variables.
Only sometimes, I’m told, does X + Y = BABY.
This morning, while cruising the cereal aisle in the grocery store, your mother nearly gave our secret away. There she was, mulling over the mini-wheats, when confronted by a cereal stocker named Al.
“Happy Mother’s Day,” he told her.
“Thank you.”
“Are you a mother?” Al inquired, and after a moment’s hesitation—after weighing the unforeseen consequences of confiding in a stranger—your mother whispered, “No, but maybe one day.”
Al nodded, returning his attention to the toasted oats and filing away the only clue we’ve yet to offer of your existence.
Now, I admit, Future Child, I know as much of growing babies as Al does. However, in the past few days, I’ve become accustomed to a new vocabulary—“fallopian,” “ovum,” “folic acid”—a great flurry of words now left fluttering around our unscathed house.
This is your father’s attempt at using his new vocabulary in a sentence:
HOW MANY PLACENTAS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHTBULB?
And:
IS IT TIME TO CHANGE THE AMNIOTIC FLUID YET?
I am a poor student, though at least I know the one word we are never to say: miscarry, which to me sounds suspiciously like a football snafu, some ill-fated effort in which the ball was not properly tucked in the crook of one’s arm.
Let me try another sentence:
I HOPE THAT WE DON’T MISCARRY.
You’re probably wondering, Future Child, what might lead one to miscarry. Is it dependent on the stress of the mother, the split of the cells, the tornado overhead?
All of these things, likely.
I wonder if you could feel our heat as we gathered tight around you. If you had an inkling of what we were learning for the very first time—that your protection suddenly seemed far more important than ours.
And trust me, Bucko, in your current state as an unstable embryo, protecting you is no easy feat. Just imagine holding tight to a poppy seed while on a roller coaster. You are as precarious as the water droplet clinging to our rusted showerhead, as uncertain as the small-clawed squirrel teetering atop the wire outside our house. You are the siren, the silence, the funnel and the cloud. But this is just the start of who you are.
While huddled in our bathtub, I thought, You are an I, or an almost I, and was reminded of a poem I taught last spring to a class that hardly cared.
Of the many ways I think of you, I most enjoy imagining you as the almost I; not yet a “he” or a “she” but an “almost.” And maybe, if we are lucky, a “soon-to-be.” A “person-in-progress.” A bucko. My bucko. One whose future will be determined by weather and coin flip and fate.
What, I wonder, will the universe decide for you?
Which you will you be?
Will you buy the corsage or the boutonniere?
Which talks shall I reserve for your mother?
Though perhaps since your conception occurred so close to the tornado’s birth, you will come out half tornado, instead; a cross-pollination of sorts, your abnormality invisible on one Doppler screen, but wholly visible on another.
Let’s pretend, for argument’s sake, that you do leave the womb spinning. What are we to do with you then? How do we swaddle your swirling shape? How do we confine you to a crib?
Fatherhood, I’m told, is hard enough without the convergence of cumulonimbus and vapor, though perhaps this is the unique challenge with which we’ve been blessed. Our penance for survival.
And let’s not even discuss your adolescence where, just for spite, when I say “Don’t you even think about blowing down the neighbor’s mailbox!” you’ll blow down his gazebo instead.
Or his tree. Or all of our trees.
Have I told you about the time your mother and I dreamed up an alternative ending to our lives? How from our place beneath that rusted showerhead, we whispered prophecies?
If we die here nobody will ever know about . . .
We barely even knew of you ourselves. Just three days removed from the plus sign on the pregnancy test, the new world stretched before us still seemed unfathomable.
We could not conceive that we had conceived.
What universe, we wondered, would allow for such a thing?
But as our house creaked and our neighborhood swayed, what suddenly seemed most unfathomable was our lives stripped of that future. We’d interpreted the plus sign as a promise, and we expected the universe to make good.
But the universe provided us far fewer tea leaves than oak leaves, and predicting our future on how foliage fell seemed suddenly less than ideal.
Outside that bathroom window, an oak tree as old as the Civil War stretched its limbs and bowed down to us.
As I imagined its roots uprooting, I thought of the old koan:
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
It must.
Because what is the alternative? That we believe only that which we can see and hear and feel? That there is no place in the world for an almost I?
Trust me, Bucko, when a tree falls it makes a terrible sound.
Swear to me you didn’t hear it.