It is just a little over a year ago that Chris and I travelled to Maine to say goodbye to a friend. And it was a little under a year ago that we travelled to Vermont to see if it could be our place. I can tell it has been a year because it is just past Peak and becoming what New Englanders call Stick Season. It is the season that comes just after the colors begin to fall to the ground and just before the snow flies. We missed the snow by a narrow window last year when we were here. Vermont got snow on November 11th and it stayed through the end of March. I can remember the date because it was the first day of my last period. I won’t forget it.
I have been doing so much reflecting lately and I think in part it is because of the significance of the season and how it was just a year ago that everything, everything, changed on a dime. In big and small ways, in painful and beautiful ways, and maybe more than anything else in ways that formed us all into something new, something so completely different from what we were before, and something that I have longed for us to become for years.
I know it sounds sappy. It is sappy. I’m a sap. A year ago I was still looking at babies and small children every single day wondering if I would ever get over the longing. I was still feeling guilty to my family of 4 that I could feel so grateful for each of them and yet oddly and so pressingly, incomplete. I think, in some parallel way, Chris felt the same odd guilt about his grief for living so far away from the mountains. And from where I sit now, all this change, all of this shift, all of this growth, is so striking that it bears noting. In ways that I hope to remember.
There were layers to the life that we were living before. It was so complicated even in its good fortune and grace. For the first 2 years that we lived in Mount Horeb I remember feeling like I had stepped into my wrong life. Like I was living as the Shadow Mother from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, button eyes and all. I had taken a step sideways off of my path and onto another. Which now I can see, was also mine, full of unexpected fruit that I probably wouldn’t have accessed had I not stepped sideways. But it was complicated and intensely painful and, like I said, wrong at times. Maybe I am getting brave enough to write about the details of that time sooner than later, but not today.
Today, I am simply struck by the image looking back at me out of the mirror, with grubby clothes and a baby strapped to my chest, and a face and belly that feel so soft and complete in Love. I look like me. The me I have always felt myself to be and the me that I have scrambled like hell to crawl back to or remember or maybe just be known as. By myself. By the people around me. It took so long for Wilfred to get here. And it took so long for us to get here. There were multiple failed attempts on both fronts and they fucking hurt like hell and in many ways they still do. We carry the grief of our missteps and our losses even once we have made right it seems. Perhaps because we have gained an acute awareness of how easy it would have been for things to turn out differently. To have settled with the not quite right life, in the not quite right place, missing someone who you have always known was supposed to be right here.
And now we are here and he is here. But I remember the unknowing and the doubt and the second guessing. And I know we would have been ok if things had turned out otherwise, but I cannot begin to express the sheer joy that they did not. It is like truth in my bones.
In the days right after he was born, Chris would say to me things like: I am so sorry we waited so long, I am sorry that I ever doubted that he is supposed to be here with us. I always balked at folks that said they were complete at the arrival of a little one. I had never felt anything of the sort, BUT NOW I DO.
This morning when I was driving Eider to Orchestra I told him how grateful I am that he was at the birth of his brother. Even if he wasn’t in the room, I could feel his presence and was thankful for it. He said that it was hard and uncomfortable because what I thought was just some moaning he thought was some full on howling and roaring like a wild animal. Like a wolf. He is not wrong. That becoming was an immense pain. And it had to be in order for me to die and be born and give birth all at once. But still, it’s hard to see your mama hurt like that, he says. Even when it’s Pain With A Purpose, as they say.
When I look in the mirror at this new old reflection of myself and my newest cub, I feel wonder and awe and gratitude and grace. And also so much grief. For the alternate life. For the life in which my baby never comes and we never make our way to the mountain. But more than anything, for the people whose vision of their life never arrives, who have to fight with no end in sight for more than 5 years, or for any amount of time, or indefinitely.
I guess this is a lot of words to simply say, I am changed. I am made new and made old at the same time. I believe in the unrelenting faith in the deep vision of our own truth. Even when we feel guilt about having such big dreams. Thanks if you’ve read this far. Thanks to my family for trusting me. Thanks to my community for allowing me to change. I see you and I love you and I am here to say: holy shit, the difference a year makes.
