Feelings
Baby’s Big Break!
By Emmanuelle
THEY wanted so much to have a baby but they realized early on that a baby was probably an impossibility. She was never healthy enough since she was born; she also had Steven Johnson Syndrome and a negative in her rare alphabet of a blood type. They believed though that their five years of engagement, and their unique friendship since childhood, were long and strong enough foundations for them to factor in this impossibility.
Well, they factored it wrong. This baby was not only to be a glorious miracle of a possibility. It shall be a wondrous ball of screaming reality. But, we jump ahead of the story.
The young wife learned of the growing life in her belly only in her third month of pregnancy; her monthly period comes regularly irregular, once in three months. So for the first two months, she and her husband and her brother and her mother (for they were basically the family she had on her side) went traipsing around and up and down and across plains, rivers, valleys, mountains and hills, unaware they were actually five. The little life was traipsing around and up and down and across with the four of them.
One could just imagine their collective awe, the leap-the-loop in their hearts, and of course, the furrows on their worried brows when the pregnancy test proved positive, checked and crosschecked. It was to be another happy, fearful journey for them all.
And so, the little unborn life and the not-so-little wife bonded and blended beyond flesh, blood and chemistry. She, of the elementary glee club and the college theater guild and the state university choir, would sing to her growing tummy excerpts from Fame, Ghost of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Beauty and the Beast, The Sound of Music, King of Siam, etcetera, etcetera.
If the tummy continued to turn and squirm, she would sensurround it with the classics of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and heavenly company, et al.
But not Bach, never the Bach! Bach made the unborn one seem to hold its breath in, and to blow itself to really hard – a blowfish in disguise! The couple would take turns talking to the disgusted bump, soothing its tantrum out, massaging the message through mommy’s skin stretched too tight.
On the other hand, the music and lyrics of the Windmills of your mind would chuck the little one right smack between the eyes. It would lay back and loll in the waters of nirvana and dream of milkland beyond. Screened through ultrasound, it could maybe be seen suckling dear life out of its two thumbs.
When there existed still the probability of an impossibility of a child, the wife and husband stocked on cute dolls and stuffed animals and real-live guard dogs not so cute. They had names for each member of their grinning collection. The big dogs they bathed and rubbed and ran with, though these rubbed back as big ticks and scratches. He and she were overflowing with love and so missing a child.
Then the little one thumped its heart unexpectedly into their lives. See them, cam them! It was such joy to behold, this unique trio of young father and mother and their bump of a child.
Step back and wide, a generation or more. Behold more trios as unique from both his and her sides. It must be true. It is! In the mathematics of life unfolding, one plus one is almost always more than two.
And when the ballooning wife were fearful or troubled or pre-natally depressed, one or all of her family reached out to please unbreak her heart, as she cried her woes in abandon, tears dripping down on her bump of a tomorrow: oh baby, be with me, be well, be strong, be not sick like me but be sturdily mine, and his, and ours.
The prayer she gasped between sighs and hiccups might as well be her husband’s, her mother’s and her brother’s: Oh God, be with her, make her and her child well, make them strong. This baby is not just hers, and his, and ours. It is Yours.
He must have heard and listened. He must have smiled, as did the stars and a host of guardian angels bearing down from the skies. As dawn came one day in the month of Sagittarius crowded out by Ophiuchus, the birthing was done. It was quick, it was almost too easy!
Morning had broken through, and so had this baby!
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