These Hands

I promised to savor her smallness.   To let her nap on my chest, curled up like a mollusc, and allow the laundry to pile up.  And so, I carry her into bed with me in the early amber hours of morning as we stretch and purr and sluggishly shed sleep’s skin.  I attempt to memorize the contours of her face, the pucker of her lips, the ripe plumpness of her cheeks.   I inhale the honey sweetness of her breath. I know this is our last baby and her hands make me cry.  They are flawless and minuscule.  The delicate nails, the quaint dimple of her knuckles, the distinct pattern of her fingerprints.  She will have these hands for eighty, ninety, perhaps even one hundred years and they will do a lot of living.

These hands will soon begin to grasp and thump the floor in rhythm with her knees.  They will clap, yank hair and assault her sister’s Barbie house.  They will learn to tie laces and doggie paddle in the shallow waters of Michigan summers.   These will be the same hands to tug on my sweater at the park when I am chatting with another mom and she is desperate to show me her cartwheel.  And the hands that will refuse to unravel from my neck the first day of school.  These hands will ravenously flip the pages of a Harry Potter novel, clutching a flashlight under the covers, flinching at the sound of my footsteps. She will let me hold these hands through parking lots, on escalators, and in crowded department stores.  These hands will need me.

These hands will cover her face, soaked in tears, and shoot up in elation after a soccer goal.  They will perspire during spelling bees and freeze on the sledding hill.  They will clench the steering wheel in white-knuckled uncertainty that first trip down the driveway.    They will give me the finger when my back is turned behind the kitchen counter and they will wave goodbye when we drop her off at college, just as my own will suddenly feel as though they have been severed from my wrists. These hands will grow independent.

These hands will encircle cups of Italian roast coffee and drape over stemmed glasses of burgundy. By day, they may steady a scalpel or draw a bow across a violin.  They will taste-test the world and uncover her talents. These hands will tentatively reach out and touch the arm of a stranger.  They will caress the face of a lover and gingerly adjust the knot of his tie.  These hands will be enfolded in another’s.  These hands will one day wear a sapphire ring. 

These hands will grip the rails of a hospital gurney during labor and envelop a swaddled infant.  They will learn to be a mother’s hands – tender and sturdy.   These hands will work hard.  They will callous.  Scrubbing, mixing, typing, diapering, comforting, teaching.   They will tuck in toddlers, apply Mickey Mouse Band-Aids, twist hair into French braids, and scour the clay out of softball socks.  These hands will make countless bologna sandwiches.   These hands will nurture.

These very hands will get singed while taking a lasagna out of the oven and sliced while chopping carrots for Christmas dinner.  They will ball-up used wrapping paper, wipe tears from little cheeks, and trim tulips from the garden.  They will endure numerous paper cuts, splinters, and knicks and knocks and one broken pinky on the ski slope. They will tire, rub throbbing temples, and wearily plop down on pillows with the lights still on and the evening news rattling on the TV.  

These hands will travel, touching pyramids and pink sand and the leathery backs of elephants.   They will call me on Sundays and carry in my groceries.  These hands will expertly swing a golf club. They will wrinkle and cradle the heads of the great-grandchildren I will never meet.  These hands will quiet.   These hands will find serenity.  

These inconceivably tiny hands that I have held since her first day will be the same ones decades from now to reach across my worn-out body and squeeze my own.   And as I lay here now, staring at these hands I have known for only sixty days, I think there isn’t another pair I would rather hold on my last day.  These hands are mine for such a short, fleeting, delicious wisp of time. 

My Moons

A Miss Piggy doll.  A wire rabbit hutch.  And throwing up in a sea-foam green bowl.  Those are pretty much the only watered-down memories I have of my life before 3 ½ when my sister, Amy, arrived on the scene with pudgy knees and a portly chin and clinched us a family of four.  As determined as I may be, I can’t rustle any images of my mom’s belly gradually ballooning out or of my grandparents taking me to the hospital, or of the time I apparently extracted Amy from her cradle by the neck and dumped her in my mom’s shoe closet.  Truthfully, I don’t really recall my sister as a baby at all.  I’m sure I squeezed her cheeks too hard and wrestled away any toy she got her chubby hands on, but I am also quite certain I must have loved having someone to boss around.    

Naturally, my sister and brother, who arrived two years later himself, are entangled in all of my childhood memories.  They are the constant characters in my own time reel, the major moments and the minuscule ones.  My playmates on our trips down to Bluffdale Farm to ride horses, collect warm eggs for breakfast, dig for toads in the ravine, and terrorize the glut of cats that sauntered about.   My fellow salesmen, peddling Girl Scout cookies while propped up on peat moss bags behind the check-out line at our family hardware store.   My companions on those drizzly afternoons, playing dress-up in the basement while listening to The Isley Brothers on our brown and orange Fisher Price record player.  My partners in crime, scrambling up the stairs and plunging under the covers when we spotted mom’s headlights in the driveway when dad let us watch an extra hour of TV.   My devotees on those airless summer Saturdays at the ballpark, teaching Blake how to trade softball pins and coaxing grandpa into buying us snow cones that stained our teeth blue.   And they were there, my siblings and fellow survivors, in the ravaged aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.   That surreal night under a massive violet Floridian moon that we leapt butt-naked and screeching into the floating tangle of palm fronds and roots that littered our condo’s pool like a cauldron of soup   - our childlike glee reverberating over an island awash in darkness and muzzled in stillness. 

For decades, my siblings have been the ones who could annoy me to no end, bruise the deepest, and cut to the very core of my insecurities with a single line.  They’d be the first to tell you I slept with a diaper until I was at least six, that I asked why we needed Austrian currency in Vienna during our family’s 1996 trek through Europe and that I just recently pronounced ‘Dolce ‘ in Dolce & Gabana like the milky caramel dessert.  Just like any other family, we are simply three random human beings who happened to be thrust together in this journey.  Throughout our childhoods, we evoked equal measures of anger, jealousy, fun, humor, and compassion in each other.   To this day, Amy and Blake are the only ones who can truly relate to the endearing madness of my mom’s deliberate one-fingered phone dialing or comprehend all the repercussions when I mention dad is acting manic again.   They were the ones who shed tears with me during my most stark moments of grief and let me babble on in nauseating euphoria when I was falling in love.   They are my constants in a world that shifts and swivels comrades, cities, careers, and circumstances.  They are my huge violet moons.  

In roughly a month’s time, my own little family will welcome its fourth member.  My parents will accompany Bridget to the hospital and she will parade through the door, wearing the pink Big Sister Shirt I bought her and greet her new baby sibling.  She will walk through that door with her little toddler legs, curious, expectant, and perhaps a little mystified, and her life will never be the same.  She will leave behind the only reality she has known thus far, as ‘The Only’.    But, she will enter the only reality she will ever recall.  

This tiny squirming infant in my belly right now, jutting out arms and legs and hips and elbows, is the stranger waiting to complete our family.  He or she will be with all us for the remainder of our lives.  Whatever broken bones, family vacations, Christmas mornings, gymnastics meets, flooded basements, flu seasons, and brown bag lunches await us, she or he will be there.   Right now, Bridget is adoring and animated.  She gives my belly hugs, coos ‘I love you’ into my stretch marks, and softly encourages the baby to go to sleep and stop kicking mommy.  She claims she will share her stuffed dinosaurs, tickle her or his feet, and sing Twinkle Twinkle whenever the baby is crying.    She is adamant upon naming her sister or brother ‘Watering Can’ and is anxiously waiting to introduce him or her to the magnificent taste of lollipops.

I have no doubt there will be hiccups to this honey-sweet version of life after baby.  I predict some tantrums, tears, and impressive bonks on the head.   (Although, I am hoping we can avoid a shoe closet dump).  I expect hair-pulling and “I’m not touching you” taunts and squabbles over the front seat.  I anticipate some awful door-slamming crashes, vicious screaming matches and black and blue bashes , but I also know there will be love.   There will be love and inside jokes (likely at the expense of Brad and me) and volcanic laughter that bubbles over for hours.  They will grow in tandem, witness to every intimate detail of one another’s lives.   Her proudest achievements.  His devastating heartaches.  For decades, they will be together for every birthday party, graduation celebration, and pancake breakfast on listless rainy Sundays.   Later on, they will stand, side by side, at one another’s weddings and in turn, gaze on as their children chase seagulls down the beach.  They will more than likely, be shoulder to shoulder at Brad and my funerals, shaking hands and smiling at all the small snippets and stories they had never heard about their parents.  They will live more years with each other than I will ever get the privilege of claiming with either of them.

My hope is that they will be each other’s pillars, their asylums in world that can often be harsh and shrill.  My hope is that they will be each other’s sanctuaries, that they may exhale and know they are home, recognized, accepted, and loved.  My hope is that my children will simply become each other’s moons.