(I have had a spectacularly unproductive week at work, thanks to a dead hard drive, inaccessible wifi, and IT people who seem to…not exist? In my most desperate moments (i.e., when I’m in the office and my phone has run out of juice and I am literally incapable of doing anything except calling IT for the millionth time) I’ve been freewriting in a notebook, so! Please enjoy)
What to say what to say what to say you know, when we’re pushing Gus down the sidewalk in his little car, dogs have access to him now. Before we bought the car, if we were outside, he was always either holstered on one of our torsos or encased in a stroller. But now he’s just sitting a foot off the ground, totally and outrageously exposed to the air and the world and its furry unpredictable inhabitants. One of them could just walk up and stick a snout right in his face. Not that any of them have, but when we’re rolling him down the block now, I definitely size up incoming animals and their owners in a way that I haven’t before.
Disaster-thoughts. Which every parent says they have, which I was prepared to have. But the dimensions of these thoughts are different than I thought they’d be. They’re changing as he changes, as we change.
In the beginning they were all about accidents that were my fault, specifically tripping accidents resulting in head trauma. What if right now, as I’m walking down the hall with the baby, I trip on this rug and bash his head into the corner of this ladder shelf? What if right now, as I walk out onto the porch with him, I trip over the door jamb and he flies out of my arms, sails over the railing, and lands headfirst in the alley below with some sickening unimaginable sound? What would that sound like, actually? I bet if I try real hard right now I could imagine it.
I got lucky and didn’t really have to deal with any major mental health issues in the immediate postpartum period, but I was constantly on the lookout for the worst of the worst (ie, maternal psychosis, where your brain is like, hey, why don’t you drown the baby and then kill yourself? Just an idea), and I knew these brief disaster-flashes weren’t anything to worry about, that every person at home with an infant has them. They’d pop into my mind, and I would literally shake my head, say “ugh.” Maybe I’d hold him a little tighter, walk a little more deliberately, maybe glare at the sharp bookshelf corner as I inched past. As though the thought had come from there, as though the furniture itself was beaming its urgent baby-harming desires into my brain.
These days, his head is not so squishy anymore, and although it continues to wobble through space in a precarious way, the fact is that I don’t see this – his head, the wobbling – for most of the workday, and indeed I am not directly responsible for it during these times. So now my disaster-thoughts are less about me-inflicted brain damage, and more about generalized mayhem. A dog silently, suddenly rushing him on the sidewalk. A car whipping too fast around the corner while we’re crossing. Some weirdo hopped up on PCP, shambling down the street towards us. The other day I was working from home and I found myself imagining what it would sound like, what it would feel like, if an explosion went off in the neighborhood. I pictured myself jumping up and running down the street to daycare. Then I wondered what I would do once I got there. Would I grab him, strap him into the carrier, and stick around to help out in the chaos? Or would I just get him and run, not looking back?
In all of these moments, when the disaster-shadow passes briefly overhead, I always try to picture what my reaction would be, and it’s never clear. Would I really do the right thing, instinctually? Would I immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, gather him up in my arms, turn away, use my own body as a shield against the dog, car, speed freak, gun? Would I, could I, be the animal?
Our first week in the Peace Corps was spent in a town called Zuunmod, in a school dormitory that was empty for the summer. All seventy-some of us were bused in from the airport at night, so when we woke up the next morning and looked out the windows, it was our first time really seeing Mongolia. The school was at the edge of town. If you looked in one direction, there were buildings, houses, streets. If you looked in the other direction, there was nothing but steppe, green, rolling, for miles and miles and miles and miles.
A few days in, a rumor started going around: A hiker, an American guy in his twenties, had just died of exposure in those hills. Some volunteers had actually met him. He was with a travel buddy, they were passing through town, and they’d stopped to chat once they spotted the other foreigners. They said their plan was to hike through to Ulaanbaatar, some 13 miles north. It’s easy to underestimate nature anywhere on Earth, but central Mongolia in June must be especially deceptive: Gentle hills, no tree cover, excellent visibility, beautiful blue skies, eighty degrees during the day. It would seem impossible that you could somehow lose sight of your travel companion; impossible to find yourself freezing, in the dark, alone. But one hiker made it to the city, and the other got disoriented, and died in the night.
It was spooky enough hearing that he had passed through town just hours beforehand, and that some of us had laid eyes on him; what was even spookier was learning that somebody else in our group had had some kind of connection to him, to his family. In the day or two between when he went missing and when his body was found, one of the volunteers had received an email from his dad, who was passing on a message from the hiker’s mother, a family friend. Explaining that her son was lost and asking for anything, anything he knew, anything he’d seen, any information at all. We didn’t have much internet access there – the only place to get online was at one of two public desktop computers at the Zuunmod post office, and of course we were all lined up ten deep every lunch break, to the amusement of the post office workers – so I imagine the volunteer didn’t even see the email until after there was nothing left to say or do.
GUESS WHERE THIS IS GOING CAN YOU GUESS
At the time, I could put myself in the buddy’s shoes, easily enough: The shame, the remorse he must have felt. How many times would he replay in his head the decision to hike ahead, to leave his friend behind, to trust that he would catch up; how unbearable, to live with this for the rest of his life. I could put myself in the hiker’s shoes, too, especially after a few nights of my own in the countryside. It would have been so completely, deeply dark; so bafflingly cold; so silent. Nothing to see but the milky way; nothing to hear but your own uneven breath, your own boots crunching on the ground. How long must he have screamed for help into the empty, darkening landscape; what must he have whispered to himself in his last moments, his words hanging in the air under the endless stars?
But now, oh now, his mother. I see his mother at home in America, sitting at her computer, staring into the screen. My god, the moment when she found out that she knew somebody there? That her coworker’s son was not only a Peace Corps Mongolia volunteer, but that he was, at that moment, in the exact town where her son was last seen alive? To send that email, and to wait, white-knuckled, for the response. To allow yourself some hope, telling yourself: Maybe this person, this boy, will write back and say oh! Sorry to worry you! Your son never left for that hike – he’s actually here with us and everything is all right, ha ha, I’ll tell him to email you. To spend every second willing that message to arrive. But knowing that your child is very probably dead. That he has not only died, but that he has died in a strange land, so very, very, very far away from you.
We took Gus to a wedding in Wisconsin when he was four weeks old; I had the most interesting, weirdest conversations there, with a newborn slung over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. It was as though I was wearIng a sign that said “ALL POST-MENOPAUSAL WOMEN PLEASE APPROACH ME AND TELL ME THE MEANING OF LIFE.” I will never forget this one woman who held him, and rocked him, then looked up at me and said: “You will be amazed at how quickly he starts to walk away from you.”
So we put him in his little car, and we push him down the sidewalk. I think about dogs, and cars, and bad men; I think about how to reach out, keep things at bay, protect him with my own two hands. But someday soon he’ll walk away, he won't be in arm's reach. What will I do? What is there to do but be amazed, so amazed, so amazed.
