There is a marquis down the street from the hotel in front of a Methodist Church that states the best thing about life is it always offers new beginnings. The hospital we have been going to every day has a lot of babies come through with fetal alcohol syndrome, a product of being too close to Appalachia said the nurses. They need to be held a lot because they wail, but by the time they leave the hospital they are fine and sometimes, the nurses whisper, they go home to other mothers.
It’s January 9th, my father’s birthday, he would have been 88 years old today. Instead he died at 62 years of age. A bull, a force of nature, a man with so much energy I look like a slacker next to him. Feliz cumpleaños papi, José.
My friend is adopting a baby, her life is beginning as a mother, a whole new chapter that will stretch her in ways she could never imagine nor will she have time to stop and imagine. I just heard my own son saying, “Mommy Mommy!” over Skype as Darrin trimmed his afro. There was talk of braiding his hair. Not sure about that step but from over here in Ohio, sitting in a hotel bed, cold on the outside, warm on the inside, I just nodded along with it.
The little babies with fetal alcohol syndrome – when I was a baby did they have a name for babies that came in withdrawing from alcohol? Who knows.
I like this photo because it reminds me of photos of my own mother I have looked at through different lenses. It used to be I’d see the photo and look for myself (the baby), and then later I looked at the photo and admired my beautiful mother, then recently, when I became a mother after my mother had passed, I looked at the photo and saw my mother in a different light – my mother is always becoming someone in my lifetime – it’s a wonder. I look now at this photo of my friend and I know exactly what this moment was about, she had a moment of clarity that this is her son, now, and she, his mother. When he looks back at this photo of her, he will most likely be seeing it anew each time his eyes pass over it, but he will never fully understand how he ended her carefree life until he too becomes a father.