That night you waved goodbye to Heaven I sat on the edge of the bed, blowing on a star. You rumbled in there, tucked in that space under my heart, no doubt anxious about this new journey. My body clenched itself around you, demanding you come down. Each time the clamping came, I pursed my lips, exhaling in a slow steady thread of air, focused intensely on that one star in the lower right quadrant of a poster on the bedroom wall.
We were renting a house in Pittsford New York, far from our Pennsylvania home, while your dad served a federal judicial clerkship. The Wrathall’s had left it intact, grateful to have a nice young responsible family to mow the lawn, water the plants and care for the place for the year they spent abroad. The walls in the master bedroom were lined with posters of the Universe, astronomical galaxies on slick glossy poster paper.
In the bedroom down the hall your fifteen-month-old brother John slept in his crib. I had learned, when I was pregnant with him, how to use the Lamaze breathing method to handle pain. A slow deep breath in, clear down to the belly button, then a diligent focus on one thing, toward which the air was released like a harpoon in an Inuit whale hunt. Focused puffs of air shot with perfect aim. The object of my focus was that blur of light, unnamed, or at least unfamiliar, though I do wonder now if perhaps you were passing it on your way down to me.
You were early, three weeks ahead of our due date. I wonder if the trauma of being pushed that far ahead of schedule shook your spirit and you’ve been trying to compensate for it since. It was March 4th, and tomorrow would be my 22ndbirthday.
Because my labor with Johnny had been so long, and I had made three stops at the hospital before they admitted me to deliver, I was determined to handle the labor at home as long as possible. I sat there in the in-between places, resting between contractions, praying two alternating prayers. The first was that this was false labor, and we would have three weeks more to prepare, and I would be able to have an actual bonafide date with my husband, with a real babysitter coming to watch John. But the second prayer was the one I must have known was the true one: that I would know when it was time to go to the hospital. The contractions did not stop, and as they came closer and closer together, and you hurled nearer and nearer to Earth, I knew quite suddenly that it was time.
I found a small screw in the corner of the visor of our old Toyota Corona, and that received the breathy stream of pain that stretched from my womb through my lips. We were further from the hospital than we had thought. Dad almost missed the delivery as he was registering me downstairs at Rochester General. You arrived gloriously warm and wet, your arms flailing, your tiny legs cinched up toward your heart. I held you against my breast, breathed you in, the distinctly sacred scent of fresh blood filling my nostrils. A little girl! A perfectly beautiful baby girl of my very own, like God had handed me the ultimate Madame Alexander doll for my birthday. I had practiced for this my whole life.
There is something about you, Sarah, that sets you apart from every other good thing. Something I have tried for two-thirds of my life to define, but I have been unable to draw the lines around it to give it form. You are mine alone, in some unspoken way. Not that I am unwilling to share, and not that you are unwilling to be shared. You have given yourself wholly to your little clan, to your own Dave and your four littles. You are sister, and friend, and teacher, and servant, and doctor and more. But it seems to me that you have multiplied yourself, over and over, to become so massively able and competent, and each of us think you are ours alone. But I held you first, so the less noble, selfish part of me refuses to share that tiny portion that belongs just to me. It’s just a tiny speck, like the prick of a diaper pin, or the point on a distant star, but I claim it as my own. And I thank you for it. Because if you were not who you are, I would not be who I am.
I was born, then reborn, on the very same day in the calendar year. It was the day, in the middle of the last century that I cinched myself irretrievably to my mother. I’ve always loved that day: March 5. It seems to be the awakening hour, the time when the hope of spring twists the handle on the frigid door of winter and cracks it open to the warmth of longer, warmer days. March 5 was the perfect kind of day. And then, as if it could not possibly be any more perfect, there was that March 5th when I lived in New York, and in spite of having a fairy-tale beautiful life, I dared to wish on a star. And there you were.
Happy day of birth, my Sarah Bella Boo.
ILYMTYCEI,
m.
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| Mom |
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| Sister |
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| Doctor |
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| Daughter |
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| Sarah and John on her blessing day. |
