Like a stone on the beach
she picked him up,
and took him home.
He filled her with new life,
and they held companionable
hands, two became four.
Beneath the bubble,
Poisons devoured him in relentless nibbles,
and the doctor said his only hope
was a healing journey
to a new way of life.
But toward,
is also away,
and children waved good-bye
to their skipping stone,
who crossed an ocean and
disappeared into time.
When you went away
full of dreams and plans
we waved your plane off
and wondered how reality
could possibly live up to
your unreasonable expectations.
We let you go to find your way
and when nothing is
what you thought it’d be
We have faith that
you will figure out
the reason,
and create reasonable
reality
for yourself.
My daughter was born on Good Friday, and Easter Sunday found me in the hospital chapel. The pastor was speaking about change. I sat in the back and bawled. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying, but I was overwhelmed with post-partum hormones and the realization that my life would never be the same. This conversation between characters Claire and Jenny reminded me of that time in my life.
“I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them while ye talk and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they’re born, and they’re different—not the way ye thought of them inside at all. And ye love them, o’ course, and get to know them the way they are.. but still, there’s the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the grievin’ for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.” She dipped her bead and kissed her daughter’s downy skull.
“Yes,” I said. “Before…it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is.”
…”And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead,” she said quietly. “And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn’t know, that’s gone for good, until you know the child you have, and then at last it’s as thought they could never have been other than they are , and ye feel naught but joy in them. But ‘til then, ye weep easy.”
(Diana Gabaldon in Dragonfly in Amber p. 549)
Who knew
when love first entangled
that rapture yields both
blessing and anguish?
Anticipated joy
dashed by disability,
disease, dread,
death.
Watching beloved baby
suffer
and the love that begat
all the suffering
lies so tangled
in anguish
that it’s difficult to
find it at all.
To a tiny toddling boy
you exclaimed his father’s stupidity
and explained to the
confused face that he was
mommy’s best friend.
No pressure
for his future wife,
that.
Shawn L. Bird 