Dancing

Today I read a story in the New Yorker about a woman who lost her baby at 19 weeks gestation. He was born on the bathroom floor of a hotel in Mongolia. The mother, a writer who was traveling on assignment, held him briefly, alive and wriggling, and hugged him as he slipped away in her arms. For one magical moment, she was a mother. This short life in her arms changed her, forever. She fell apart, her marriage crumbled, and her grief filled the quiet places of her solitude. Grief, like death, is suffered alone. Before I had children, I'm sure I would have felt very sorry for the mother. I would have said, as I always used to say about these kinds of things, "Well, it wasn't meant to be..." But so much has changed since I slipped my index finger into the palm of Alex's hand, just long enough to tell him, "Mommy's here, Alex, everything's going to be okay," before they swept him off, already intubated, into the dungeon of intensive care. I no longer believe that things were meant or not meant to be. I believe that there are times when the cosmos is off balance and things are not as they should have been. As I read the story, I could see where the tragedy was leading, and I kept thinking to myself, "No, no this isn't going to happen. The story is NOT going to end badly. There's going to be a happy ending. There must be." Watching the tragedy unfold was almost too much to read. In fact, I skipped parts. It was like watching the movie I replay in my head of the day I set out for a walk in the woods with our horse and the dogs. I want to skip parts, to believe it will end differently, to hope that if I just close the magazine, I won't have to get to the end, and I will never have to know what really happens. I won't have to feel the tug of the horse's lead line as he rears, or rethink the logic behind my letting go of the line so as not to be pulled to the ground, or listen to the sound of the hoof as it embeds itself into flesh and fluid, or experience again the instant panic when I knew our lives had changed forever. If I just close the magazine, the end will never come. I was reading the New Yorker piece today, sitting next to Izzy, who was watching the Nutcracker Ballet for the 100th time on the iPad. She is obsessed with her tiny mouse part which she will dance in her first performance this December. She dreams big, and her immense talent makes the dream seem less like a dream and more like a movie's opening scenes. She prances around the house with grace, leaps into my arms lightly, then lands and twirls. Alex joins in and he twirls and he leaps and he lands like a foal in my arms. His arms and legs flail and his dead weight strains my lower back, and I tell him he's awesome. I need to steady him for a few moments before I send him on his way around our kitchen island. If Alex had been born healthy, I would not be home with the kids in the late afternoons, to watch cotton candy sunsets settle over the marsh behind our house and dance the the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. No one chooses tragedy. But not all the bad is always bad, or only bad. I wonder if the writer of the New Yorker piece wrote with such depth before her tragedy. I wonder if I would be as in love with being my children's Mommy if we hadn't all suffered so much from the hoof of a horse, or the poor judgement of the Mommy. There's no part of my past more interesting or important than these afternoons, catching Alex and Izzy as they leap into my arms and twirl away and come back again. I can still feel them in my arms when I fall asleep.