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.