Bringing home the baby bumble bee
When I was at my mom’s bedside this afternoon, she kept patting the sheet down on her right side, and making a little indent in the bed with the back of her thin, bruised hand. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “Making room for the baby.”
Everyone knows that W.C. Fields said, “Your parents fuck up the first half of your life, and your kids fuck up the second.” When people asked why I didn’t have children, I used to say that my parents did double time on me in the first half. It was better than being a whiner and saying, “I’M BARREN” a la Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona – although I wasn’t barren, I was just incapable of keeping any of the babies I made.
Do you ever have nagging prescient thoughts? I do. A week before my father died, I thought to myself that he was driving everyone crazy – I was sitting at a table with my sister-in-laws and my mother and everyone was talking about how dad, the rage-aholic, was making each of their lives miserable in some way – I thought I wonder if he died if all this would end. And he did – and then I had the guilt of the century thinking I had wished it. But the truth is, it did end.
Now I know I don’t have any real power. But why is it that I preminisced the end to the salad days with Steve and me, and that I would return home and it happened? Why did I have an epiphany on the #42 bus in San Francisco that I would meet him? Why did I look across a crowd of Mardi Gras revelers and see Tatjana and know in that second that my life would not be the same? And why is it that I’ve felt a nagging feeling for the past five years, that I couldn’t welcome a child while I was taking care of my mother and now they are crossing paths?
They say the gift of a writer is second sight – the ability to see into the usual but understand the unusual. Right now we’re treading water – mom is dying and the baby is about to be born – will I have a moment to briefly introduce my child to my mother? Will this be my child?