My reemergence from the fog of depression had taken nearly three months, a span of time I mourned for all the things I missed, and I found myself taking big greedy lungfuls of the scent of Sam’s neck and hugging his squirming body around the bulk of my belly in an attempt to apologize for having faded through so much in our last weeks together before his brother arrived. For his part, the new baby, having loitered in his womb world a full four days past his due date, was like someone realizing he’s going to be late to work, and he banged around grabbing his keys and gulping his breakfast and whatever else it is babies do on their way out. Meanwhile, I was determinedly lumbering around my kitchen with one earbud in, putting away dishes, making cookies, and stopping to bend over and breathe the word “choo” at the floor.
Childbirth the second time around was all about trying to incorporate the lessons Ross and I had learned in round one. There was a Plan, but it was merely a piece of paper with some words on it and I understood it as such. My mom had been summoned a full two weeks before the due date, and had thus already put a lot of effort into wrangling Sam and stocking the freezer, tasks that she continued as I sent Ross off to work to set his out-of-office message and tie up a few last details. My world, as the contractions got closer and stronger, shrank to a diameter of no more than five feet with a bright point of focus at the center. Everything else, including the question of whether or not I would get an epidural again this time, was pushed outside the circle.
If I thought I could handle it, and if it were not wholly against my nature, I might try this radical focus-limiting thing more often because the result was that everything I asked for unfolded before me with little or no resistance. I called Ross when I needed to go to the hospital and he was already on his way. When we reached the hospital, the nurse showed me how to hold Ross’s hand by gripping his overlapped fingers instead of in a handshake grip, which meant I could clamp down as hard I needed to without grinding his knuckles or breaking his fingers. He was there beside me the whole time, answering the nurses’ questions when I couldn’t speak, helping untangle me from the various cords and monitors when I insisted on clawing my way out of the bed to pace and whimper, and repeating, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m so proud of you.”
I had decided against pain medication again, but for totally different reasons. The preceding months had taught me that so many of the things I had taken for granted could be easily lost, despite the best efforts of everyone involved—jets could crash, a marriage could nearly unravel, and the treacherous currents of my depression could nearly tug me under. All of this could happen and the process hurt so badly that it didn’t hurt at all. I was sick of being numb. But the persistent and inexorable force of a new life, and the privilege of bearing it, imperfect as I was—I wanted to feel every second of it.
Seven pounds, nine ounces, and twenty inches long, Wesley arrived on the same day that Venus briefly passed in front of the sun, the second in a pair of transits eight years apart and comprising one of the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. Eclipses, transits, and planetary orbits are not normally events I make note of. I had completely missed the first one in the pair, which had occurred roughly one month after Ross and I got engaged in 2004, but when I had a baby with the second one, I let my mind riff on the metaphorical implications of long but predictable separations, a planet named for the goddess of love, and the boldness of it crossing between our world and the sun as a tiny black dot I might have otherwise missed were I not looking at everything with wonder and amazement. With his arrival, I felt like I was finally getting a glimpse of the complexities of our family’s orbits and the deep love that kept them spinning. Love and distance, it seemed, were the two biggest factors in learning how big my world could be, and that insight felt like a privilege I could only have earned in struggle and doubt, and in the pain of having almost lost it all.