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Small Talk
By Amy Julia Becker ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2014 Amy Julia Becker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-33936-6
CHAPTER 1
birth
as a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. and at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother. –N.T. WRIGHT, SIMPLY CHRISTIAN
I am sitting on the white tiled floor, my back against the wall, hugging my knees to my belly, which is just beginning to expand with new life. Penny, age four, faces me from her perch on the potty. I study her face—the eyes that always look so earnest, the round cheeks, the full pink lips. I need to cut her bangs. They are in danger of getting tangled in her long eyelashes.
"Tell me a story about when I's born," she says. Her glasses sit low on her nose, and she looks like an attentive librarian, eager to hear whatever I have to offer.
I make a noise that is the combination of a smile and a sigh. It is a story I love. It is also a story I have told many times before. The recent announcement of this new brother or sister has piqued her interest, so I am recounting these details for the fourth time in a matter of days.
The baby inside shifts a little bit, as if she, too, has perked up for the words to come. Penny puts her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hand.
"Well, when you were born it was wintertime. Just a few days after Christmas. And I woke up in the middle of the night because my tummy felt kind of funny. I read a book for a while, and my tummy still felt funny, and finally I woke up your dad. I told him I thought you were coming."
Her eyes get even wider, and a smile spreads across her face. "And then you got the nursery ready?"
"Yep. We spent the next three hours hanging pictures on your walls and washing clothes to get things ready for you to come home. And finally I went to the hospital, and the doctor checked and she said—"
Penny interrupts. "I can feel your baby's head!" She opens up her palms, as if she is the doctor expressing wonder and incredulity.
"That's right. So we called your Nana and your aunts and they started driving to the hospital. And your dad went home to get my clothes and some pillows and things like that. And it hurt and hurt and hurt and then I got some medicine and it felt a lot better."
Penny nods, those big eyes now more sympathetic than excited.
"And then it was time to push. And I pushed and I pushed—"
"And I shot into the world! Who catched me?"
I laugh. "Your dad and your Nana were there, but the doctor caught you. And then I held you in my arms and we were so happy because we had you. Our beautiful baby girl."
She nods again. She is familiar with these words. She thinks we have come to the end.
But this time, for the first time, I continue.
"But, Pen," I say, "after you were born, I was scared. Because the doctors told us you had Down syndrome."
She looks at me as though I have slapped her. Hard. It is a look of shock and confusion, and I want to pull my words back. But to pull them back would mean returning to that woman four years earlier and convincing her there is nothing to fear.
Penny says in a quiet voice, "Why you were scared?"
My own voice catches as I tell her. "I was scared because I thought Down syndrome would hurt you." I think back to those initial moments. How much I didn't want to believe it. How I ached when I saw the pain in Peter's eyes. I realize the answer I have given her is only partially true. "And I was scared it would hurt us."
"Oh." She blinks her eyes the way she does when she's thinking hard. She struggles a little to pull up her underwear, flushes the toilet, and turns to face me.
"But, sweetie," I say, pushing my weight off the floor and resting my hand on her shoulder. "It didn't hurt you. And it didn't hurt us. So we didn't need to be scared anymore."
"So then you were happy?"
The story feels so complicated to me, and yet she has stated the simple reality. We were scared. And then we were happy. And now we are happy, because we have her.
I reach out my arms and pull her close. Her face rests on my belly, and I think about welcoming this little one who will join us in a few months' time as I say, "We are so happy, every day, to have you in our lives."
* * *
William's birth story is as familiar to my children as Penny's. Both of them could recite the details: I went into labor in the summertime. Penny stayed with my mother while Peter drove me to the hospital. On the way, we had to pull over so I could vomit on the side of the road. William's head was so big the doctor had to use a vacuum to pull him out.
But I rarely dwell on the difficulty of that labor. The kids laugh when they hear about the vomit, and I don't tell them I couldn't stand up and didn't want anyone to visit because I was too wiped out the first day after he was born. I never mention the look of concern on Peter's face when I didn't have the strength to hold our new baby. Those details don't stay with me as much as the feeling of serenity the next day, when I was able to waddle around without feeling faint, when I gazed out of our picture window over Long Island Sound and my heart felt as peaceful as the quiet water.
Even before I told Penny more of her story, I regretted the contrast between my thoughts about her birth—my memories of hurt and fear, the feeling that I was drowning and might never come up for air—and the narrative I have created to talk about her brother's entrance into the world. I suppose I wished I could redo Penny's birth and make it into its own Hallmark card, with a mother who already understood that each life we are given comes out beautiful and broken, that every human being who enters the world does so with neediness, vulnerability, limitations, and gifts.
But recently I have started to wonder if my memory of Penny's birth—the joy and pain and fear and love all mixed together—holds the more appropriate emotional narrative for the birth of each of my children. Perhaps Penny's story is the only one I tell with accuracy. The only one that hints at the years of both pain and wonder to come.
As I've told my children stories of easy, peaceful, happy births, I've thought more about the way I talk about spiritual birth. I have a story of spiritual birth that I can offer in simple terms. I could say it happened at my baptism, that God welcomed me as an infant and I've been part of the family ever since. Or I could say it happened in high school, when I experienced for the first time a yearning and a need for something or someone greater than me. I could tell stories of answered prayer and personal transformation since then. Or I could tell the real story, the one that involves both faith and faithlessness, unanswered prayer and unexpected grace, doubt and love, sorrow and sinfulness and anger and pain and hope and joy and gratitude too.
Just as physical birth is messy and complicated, being born spiritually is not a neat and tidy transformation. It is an ongoing story of neediness and growth and trust.
As I begin to prepare our household for this third child—finding the bassinet and infant car seat, dusting off Penny's newborn clothes, searching bins in the basement for rattles and swaddling blankets and teething rings—I begin to remember the vulnerability of new life. New babies have to learn even the simplest things—how to eat and sleep and smile. Now that I've gone through infancy with the older two, I understand that birth is only the beginning of a relationship that asks a lot of the parent and expects nothing but dependency from the child. Maybe dependency is all God asks of us.
I think about Jesus' words to the religious teacher Nicodemus in the gospel of John, his insistence that to know God we must be "born again." I wonder if I have always oversimplified that overused phrase. The biblical writers do describe new birth as redemption, becoming as white as snow in an instant. But I also assume Jesus knew what birth was like—bloody and painful and risky in the midst of the blessing of it all. So perhaps Jesus was telling Nicodemus that entering into God's family involves neediness and ignorance and constant attention. It's exhilarating and irrevocable and hard and messy and slow and immediate, all at the same time.
Penny's birth provoked everything I could feel, from delight to despair. And as God's Spirit grows me up, calling forth the best in me and helping me see the worst for what it is, I realize that this new spiritual life is just as painful, and just as glorious, as entering into this world to begin with.
* * *
After that moment in the bathroom, Penny keeps asking for this new version of her birth story. Again and again, when I tell her about our fear when we found out she had Down syndrome, she receives the story and repeats it back to me.
But one day we are driving together, just the two of us, and I get to this now familiar ending. She interrupts. "Mom, stop. Don't tell the Down syndrome part."
My lungs seem to squeeze my heart, as if my fist has gotten lodged behind my sternum.
"Why not, sweetie?" I ask, blinking hard.
I look at her in the rearview mirror and she shakes her head.
"Pen," I say.
"No, Mom," she says, "I don't want to hear the rest."
"I know. I'm not going to say it. I just want you to know that I love you. Exactly as you are. I love how kind you are. I love how your body is flexible. I love how much you love reading, just like me. I love so many things about you. And I always have."
She is quiet for a minute. She puts her index finger in her mouth and looks out the window.
"Okay," she says. "You can tell the rest of the story."
She keeps her head down as I say it. "The doctors told us you had Down syndrome. And we were scared that it would hurt you and us. But it didn't."
She looks up with a smile. "But it didn't. And you were happy."
CHAPTER 2
failure
I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes. —JEAN VANIER, COMMUNITY AND GROWTH
Becoming a mother has been as much about failure as anything else.
It started in my imagination. I created a portrait of a good mother, a portrait largely derived from my own mom, who could have won prizes for the ways she followed the advice of Family Circle and Good Housekeeping. I am the oldest of four girls, and Mom kept us healthy and happy and wholesomely entertained throughout our childhoods.
Take Halloween. Mom still has a Halloween album with photos from every year of my youth. In the background, the house has been turned into an orange and black extravaganza. Up front, all four girls are decked out in creative, inexpensive, homemade costumes. One year, we cut the shape of the continental United States out of a large piece of cardboard, painted it according to the colors of the map on my wall, strapped it to my chest, and then affixed Alaska to my head and Hawaii to my index finger. Another year we dressed up as the weather. I was a cloud, Kate a rainbow, Brooks and Elly the sun and the rain.
Handmade pilgrims came out at Thanksgiving. The hallways overflowed with hearts in February. We drank green milk on St. Patrick's Day. Every Fourth of July involved a cake with Cool Whip, blueberries, and strawberries in the pattern of an American flag. And don't get me started on our house at Christmas.
It never dawned on me that all this creativity took a tremendous amount of time and effort. It just seemed like what good mothers were supposed to do.
Mom also offered an ideal of domesticity when it came to the day-to-day effort of managing a household. She cooked dinner for us every night. Yes, it occasionally included Spam, and there was one unfortunate run-in with a jar of fermented applesauce, but dinner with my mother never involved take-out pizza. Moreover, I grew up with a vegetable garden. Four plots in our backyard with wooden dividers and well-mulched paths, filled with lettuce and beans and squash and zucchini and tomatoes. I remember pulling the strings off the yellow wax beans in preparation for dinner. I remember rinsing dirt from the lettuce leaves. And those memories—of the gardens and the holidays and the home-cooked meals—are filled with laughter and peace and belonging.
So when I became a mother, I assumed that the ability, and the desire, to cook, garden, decorate, and sew Halloween costumes came with the territory.
Until I failed at all of the above.
* * *
The garden comes first. This third pregnancy seems to have summoned some latent domestic instincts. I decide to re-create one, just one, of the four plots of my childhood vegetable garden. I want to give our kids the experience of dirt and growth and bugs and bunnies. I have dreams of our whole family feeling more connected to the source of our food, even if only on a symbolic level. I envision vegetable casseroles and planting even more produce next year.
And then reality sets in. The crabgrass. The abundance of squash—all at once, growing so quickly I can't keep up, no matter how many casseroles we eat. The need for water almost daily. The tomatoes that never ripen. The parsley. I don't even like parsley. Or green beans, for that matter. After we pick them, they sit in a pile in the refrigerator until they are so shriveled I have to throw them away.
Stooping to pull out the crabgrass grows more and more uncomfortable as my stomach expands. Within a few weeks, I have failed as a gardener. I allow the weeds to overrun the vegetables, and eventually we dig up the whole plot and put grass in its place.
Fall arrives, and I try to put the gardening debacle behind me. One night, Penny and William are asleep, and Peter and I are cleaning up the dinner dishes. The house is quiet, but my mind is busy with lists and phone calls and goals for the season ahead, which includes my least favorite holiday.
"I'm thinking about Halloween," I say.
"Yeah," Peter replies, "I thought we could go to the consignment store and find something cute."
"I'm kind of opposed to store-bought costumes," I say in a tone that suggests offense, as if my husband has just proposed selling our unborn child to the highest bidder.
Peter looks at me with his eyebrows slightly raised. "You are also somewhat opposed to anything crafty."
It doesn't take me long to concede his point. I appreciate women who collect fabric scraps and own a glue gun, but that's just not me.
I soon realize I've put myself in an impossible situation. I'm convinced that Halloween is a big excuse for unnecessary expenditures and marketing peer pressure, so I don't want to spend any money on it. But my kids have costume parties at school, and I don't want them to miss out on the fun. I'm not objecting based on religious principles or something noble like that. The perfect solution would be for me to cobble something together by hand, but I don't have the time, energy, or skill required. I'm holding on to an ideal of mothering I can't achieve.
Up until now, I have managed to avoid the Halloween hype. We skipped Penny's first Halloween, sent her to my mother's for the second, and then Mom outfitted both kids—as Curious George and the man with the yellow hat, created from old dress-up clothes and props stored in her attic—the following year.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Small Talk by Amy Julia Becker. Copyright © 2014 Amy Julia Becker. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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