this is a silly little pic from when moo and e first said hello to their brand new baby cousin fennec. cuuuuuuties all around.
When Eid was born, he didn’t look like me at all. Big and bald and nearly translucent, but also not looking like his sister or their papa. I remember thinking, oh this one is of me, this one is mine. And as melancholy as I was throughout the majority of my pregnancy, and how painful as his labor and delivery were, it was also easy in a way that gave me clues as to who this child would become. He was ease embodied. Empathetic, kind, and patient in a way that was outside of the scope of my parental experience thus far. My daughter had been everything he was not, stubborn and unpredictable and unwavering in her obstinance. And as much as my love for her was complete and consuming from the time before the beginning, I also was not so certain that I had it in me to raise two children of her ilk. I was so nervous about it in fact that I asked for a mantra from an astrologer to help me call in a different sort of a soul- he had done her chart already and knew what I was working with. I clung to those words like a lifeline through my pregnancy. (Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya)
I had been scared to have a boy. None of the men or boys that I share blood with are anything I would hope to perpetuate. I had to get my shit together around it in order to get excited. And Maple, being the fierce little manifester that she is, was similarly displeased with the prospect. I remember once when our baby was only a month or so old standing in the co-op with both children and chatting with another mother who had 2 little girls; one newborn as well; and Maple just throwing her head back and wailing that all she had wanted was a little baby sister and that instead what she got was an enormous baby brother. Poor kid.
But by then I was already in love with my little one, MY baby, more than anyone or anything else. It wasn’t long before his easy ways and steady, dreamy, gentle countenance had us all converted. Boy or no. He was this perfect gem that had been gifted to our family.
He was so full of feelings. From the very beginning. Not emotion run amok but the big considerations of his beingness. Once, when he was just three, I was snuggling him after reading our nightly stack together and he said to me: mama, if everything living dies, and if I will one day die, does that mean that you are going to one day die too?” And I remember just looking at him and saying: “oh sweetheart. yes. that is what it means.” I held him while we both cried for a very long time that night. He was so little for such a big knowing. It hurt in its beauty. in the perfect horror of its truth.
When he was five or six I took him to our primary care doctor and asked if she could check him out for anything lurking under the surface. Some silent threat that might take him from me. I was so certain that the love I shared with this little person was not something that I would get to keep for long; that I would lose him sooner than later because how could I ever be deserving of an ease in love the way that I was living it with him? Maybe the only person I have ever loved easy like this. My doctor looked at me with care and I think was generous in responding to something that existed well outside to scope of her expertise, my existential dread at my inevitable loss. My lack of authority within the unfolding of that particular timeline.
I don’t know why I have been thinking of Eider so much lately. My easy one. The one who never asks for more even when he needs it and the one always willing to curb his own agenda for another’s. Always for mine.
He looks a lot like his papa now. So funny how that turns out. But he is of me. He is of me.