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To: The chocolate cake chute also known as “mother”
From: The baby riding around inside you
I’ve noticed how distracted you’ve been lately. I’ve also noticed how very much chocolate cake you sent my way this past week. I can only surmise it has something to do with “Aidan” and her “birthday” which was five days ago (my best estimate, since that is when the deluge of chocolate began in earnest).
Honestly, I can’t wait to meet her. She sounds like a delight—except for the deplorable state of her bedroom which you seem to be unduly worried about. You want it CLEAN before I make my appearance, but really, it’s okay. I won’t judge her for keeping 18 balled-up and browned socks under her bed. I won’t be chewing on those for months. I know how proud you are of Aidan. To you, she seems like a girl suspended between childhood and adolescence. “Nine” seems so far away to me. She’ll be eighteen when I am nine. Whoa, I just felt a surge of cortisol and strange urge to either fight or flee. And your heart is pounding! Normally I like it, but not when it sounds like a freight train hauling ACME brand tornado pellets during a thunderstorm. I won’t bring up sibling math again. Sorry!
Thanks for the cake. I have to admit I am ready for a break, however. Send down some corn on the cob! And guacamole!
Love,
The baby
~~~~~
To: The baby
From: Your embarrassed mother
I have good news and bad news. If you are anything like me, you will want the bad news first.
The cake-a-lanche will continue for several more days. It means more sleepless time for you and more internal bruising for me (you are strong!). The chocolate cake is gone, but will be replaced with a white cake this evening. I wish you could see it. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker battling amidst icing flames. Six sparkler candles. The occasion?
That’s the good news! It is your brother Sam’s sixth birthday today!
He’s one cool dude. Whip-smart and quirky. Huge elephant fan. He has a calendar he bought with Christmas money—National Geographic images of elephants. On the little square set aside for July 13th, 2006, he stuck a sticker. It says “God’s Special Helper” and I believe it. He hopes you are a boy named Gordon, but if you are a girl he will adore you just the same.
I have to compliment your perceptive observation regarding how distracted I’ve been. You are right. Between waiting for you and birthdays galore, I have been distracted. There is so much to do. After midnight tonight, there is another birthday furiously approaching on the horizon.
Yours.
Love,
Your mommy
(I recently purchase a large red fitness ball to sit on, to encourage my baby to be in an anterior position, to improve my posture, and for possible use in labor.)
THOU still unpopped bride of bounciness,Â
  Thou foster-child of Cramp and slow Time,
Target salesman, who canst thus express
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What red-rubbered legend haunts about thy shape
     Of roundness or texture, or of both,
    In Halls or the carpets of Living Room?
  What aches or pains are these? What sciatic loth?
What mad spring? What struggle to relieve?
    What air and plug? What wild ecstasy?
Heard contractions are sharp, but those unheard
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft rump, bounce on;
Not to the well ligaments, but, more endear’d,
 Relief to the backside areas of no tone:
Fair ball, beneath my frame , thou canst not leave
  Thy spring, nor ever can that air be banished;
    Bold Ball, never canst thou rudely collapse,
Though straining under me—yet, do not grieve;
    You cannot fail, though thou hast not thy rest,
  For ever wilt thou prop, and still be round!
Ah, happy, happy ball! that cannot shed
  Your job, nor ever bid the Bouncer adieu;
And, happy derierre, unwearièd,
  For ever tilting baby anterior;
More happy love! more happy, happy labor!
  For ever warm and might to be enjoy’d,
    For ever panting, and for ever pregnant;
All breathing human labor soon gone,
  That leaves an epidural high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
    A burning perineum, and a biting tongue.
Who are these coming to the Labor and Delivery?
  To what red ball, O pricy obstetrician,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the monitor,
  And all her silken flanks with wires and tubes drest?
What little baby by crotch or c-section,
  Or cabbage patch with peaceful stork,
    Is delivered of its sac, this pious morn?
And, little babe, thy frame for evermore
 Will accessible be; and not a ball, to bounce
   Why then thou mother can drain the air.
O Ball shape! fair cradle! With support
  Of heavily pregnant mother overwrought,
With swollen ankle and the stretch mark snake;
  Thou, silent form! dost ease our weary pelvis
As doth eternity: Foot Pump’d Divine!
  When old age doth mean advanced maternal age,
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
  Than ours, a friend to mommy, to whom thou say’st,
‘Bouncy is good, good bouncy,—that is all
    Ye blow on earth, and all ye need to blow.’
~Hat tip to Keats. Anyone standing on or near his grave just felt a strange rumble.
Aspens and evergreens grew thick to the west of my uncle’s Blue Mesa cabin. The forest floor buzzed with insects hunkered underneath fallen pine needles. Logs, rocks, stumps, chipmunks, swooping camp-robbing birds, and opinionated ravens thickened as my sister and I walked deeper into the wall of green and gold.
“Don’t go too far!” our mother would shout from the cabin door, snapping us out of the dream we were neo-Ingalls, a Mary and Laura for the late 20th century. Baseball caps instead of bonnets, jeans instead of calico, KMart’s Adidas knock-offs instead of ankle-high boots—we were ready to explore and perhaps discover abandoned gold mines, Native American relics, bear skeletons, and any other buried or unburied treasures previously overlooked by Francisco Coronado or Cortez.
“Yes, Ma!” Wasn’t that what Mary and Half-Pint called their mom?
We wandered, pointing out objects of interest. Indian Paintbrush, the red-feathered wildflower, grew in abundance. Tiny wild daisies, purple flowering bushes that smelled sagey, Mormon Tea, Columbines—none could be gathered into a rustic bouquet because we were taught to leave wildflowers alone. It was always okay with me because I regard bees suspiciously and bees were in abundance in the mountains. So we continued looking for that which would make a bespeckled professor shake our hands at a news conference—Priceless Treasures Found By Sisters.
For a long time our eyes found nothing unfamiliar. Growing up in Colorado meant we were savvy about ant-filled fallen trees and mottled sunlight creating the illusion their were thousands of deer fawns stashed in the bushes all around us. Then I saw it—a small mound that looked like undulating earth frozen in time, so I kicked it. To my surprise it flipped over, revealing an underside that was flat and smooth. I began noticing other mounds just like it all around me. They were about the same size as dinner plates, rising to a peak of about four or five inches. They looked geographical, with a carved-by nature texture, dried by thin air. If the mountains had eyes, these were the teardrops. Wow.
We gathered them into our arms, shouting at each other how many we had. Six! Seven! I got nine!
Let’s go show mom and dad!
Hurdling over downed trees, leaping over stumps, we scrambled breathlessly back to the cabin where we offered our find to our parents with frantic expectation. For a moment there was silence as they considered their daughter’s harvest before they burst into convulsive laughter.
“Do you know what those are?” they demanded. I imagine by this point they were needing the nearby outhouse because not many bladders can withstand that kind of laughter.
“No…”
“Those are cow-pies!”
“Cow-pies? You mean…”
“Cow poop, girls.”
I can’t speak for my sister. I felt horrified, betrayed by my eyes, tricked. Foolish. Really, really dirty. Duped by poop.
We washed our hands and arms as our parents explained how ranchers used the national forest land in the summers for their cattle. The cows were gone, but left evidence behind.
The experience didn’t kill us, so it was with narrow-eyed-knowing a year later when my sister and I stepped up to participate in a cow-pie throwing contest. It was July 4th, Independence Day. The dried disk I chose to hurl through the air felt familiar in my hands, nature’s own frisbee. It flew far—I had a good arm, good enough for a blue ribbon. I told everyone we knew how I won a blue ribbon throwing a cow pie that day. I was proud I finally won something, but even more proud I wasn’t disgusted or afraid of getting a little dirty. Like before.
I was a tough girl, a bossy older sister like Mary, pigtails flying and freckles flickering like Laura.
With time, those experiences that frightened us or scandalized us can actually be empowering. As an adult I can think of things I once feared and tried to avoid that I now regard with shrugged shoulders. Like cooking a turkey for a houseful of Thanksgiving guests, or childbirth. Okay, maybe that still scares me a little, even the sixth time around. I’m just going to have to grab on, feel it’s familiar weight in my hands, and just do it. Like before.
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