chrysalis

My 5 year old son says quietly, eyes down and hands held in a knotted ball, that one of the butterfly chrysalises in his classroom “fell down” and won’t change now. I tell him that it doesn’t always work. Nature is like that. “Like what?” he asks. “Butterflies get made most of the time. But sometimes it doesn’t work. But because it works most of the time, it all keeps going.” He asks if “human babies” can control whether they are born or not. I know he’s thinking of our baby, quietly and calmly growing, our 17 week apple sized baby not due until “the leaves fall from the trees.” He often asks me if today is the day the baby will come or maybe “on Saturday?” I remind him almost every day, not till it gets cold again. “No, babies can’t control if they are born or not.” “I wish they could,” he says. “I wish they had some say.” I tell him nature isn’t fair. I think of a 38 week still born baby I knew, who suffocated in the womb. I have seen how often the chrysalis falls and doesn’t change. I have borne witness to the woman with her full and leaking breasts, an empty Pack N Play on the porch in the dark and cold rain and she says, “What are you supposed to do with the milk? Do you know?” My son, how lucky I am to have you and your questions, your relentless thirst for knowledge, your curiosity, your blue eyes and red hair. Your presence. I’ve stood at the door that opens at birth, the door that swings both ways. I stand in terrible awe at that door every time I’m invited into a birth space. How lucky we are that door swung open and let you through into our life. At your birth, that door was open for longer than it should have been. You spent too long in the doorway. There was blood and shit and terror and agony and you and I kept going past the point we thought we could keep going, past the point a woman should be asked to keep going. There was the hospital and bright lights when I had imagined soft and warm darkness at the birth center. There were hours and hours of pushing but then you were born. You were born. You fought with everything you had, your head scraped raw against my pelvis. I cradled your wonderful, wounded head for weeks postpartum until it healed thinking of how hard you fought to be born. “I wish babies had more of a say,” you say now, five years later. “It just doesn’t seem fair.” Your hot small hand in mine, you stand up and tell me it’s time to look for lava monsters.