The seasons of a new boy

It goes like this.

The sun beats down on you for the first time when we emerge from the birthing center. Your eyes are closed and your skin smells new and you’re so tiny that the world at once feels giant and welcoming.

Leaves change colors and so does your hair, growing in tune to your increasingly chunky body that snuggles into my shoulder as I take you with me everywhere – from backyard to refrigerator to stove. I master the one-handed egg crack and you master perfect slumber on the hip of a new mother; habitually swaying a tiny body back and forth, back and forth, like an autumn leaf drifting peacefully to the soft ground.

The world gets smaller when winter storms rage, and we create a universe in our two-bedroom upstairs apartment where exist warm baths and fuzzy pajamas and a big laugh from a tiny belly, rich as hot chocolate and deep as the snow.

Today you revel in the feel of damp grass beneath your still-tiny toes and fresh fruit on your jabbering tongue. Soon the sun will beat down again on a person who is no longer so new; whose eyes are wide open, whose knees are carpet burned, who far prefers dancing to snuggling, but whose cheeks remain as pink and delicious as strawberry cotton candy.

It goes like this. I race to keep up with the swiftly-moving seasons, which play like a movie that I am powerless to pause except in snippets of memory and two-dimensional Facebook albums. So I’ll revel, captivated, in each day and week and month. I’ll store up each fleeting laugh and cry and slobberkiss in my pounding, infatuated heart.

And I hope that once in a while you’ll still want to snuggle – even when wrinkles frame my face like the thousand winding pathways that lie ahead, and these seasons turn my hair into swirling winter snow.

For a little boy

You.

All of you –

Your chunky thighs that kick when you’re surprised

Or enraged

Or ecstatic.

Your three-almost-four-toothed smile that flows into your eyes

That squint in a way that makes me think maybe

maybe a person could really burst from joy

or a really good secret.

You.

You and your arms that flap when you’re excited

And it’s as if you’re going to fly away;

right out of my arms and become

One of the dancing snowflakes out the window.

You and your soft forehead that touches mine

When you need the kind of assurance that can only come

From a nice meaningful forehead touch.

You.

Your tiny mouth that says mama and so many non-words

Only you don’t just say them but yell them

and whisper them and try them out in every part of your mouth so that you savor the sensation of speech.

And that mouth opens wide now for airplanes and choo-choo trains that carry rainbows for cargo –

a spectrum of flavors and textures that elicit an “mmm” and a grin every single time.

You.

You who are unafraid of failure

Unafraid to laugh until your whole body aches

You who forgive in an instant

And love unconditionally

For whom I would do any crazy chicken dance that I’ve never done for anyone else

At any time of the day

just to see your toothy smile for another instant.

You who breaks my heart with a cry or a cough

And mends it again with a laugh.

You came from me. And sometimes I do a double take just remembering

There was ever a time when you weren’t.

But I feel like a bigger person in the world knowing that because I am

You are

And because you are

I am

whole. 

On meeting a new soul

I’ll never forget that morning.

I watched the sky outside turn from dark to gray to a quiet pink that illuminated every corner of our backyard.  I’d never been patient or alert enough to watch heaven make this transition; completing its daily ritual with a wakeful blue that triggers the hustle and bustle of the day. 

But this morning wasn’t like other mornings. There would be no hustle and bustle for me today; there would be only counting to twenty a thousand times with a thousand prayers of gratitude and pleas for strength in between.  There would be only a strawberry blonde and her dark curly-haired man, working together through each twenty-second count and kissing giddily and nervously when each one was over.  It was the beginning of a 24-hour long journey that would prove both exhausting and exhilarating.  It would end with us meeting our son. 

A thousand more twenty-second counts. A batch of cookies to distract my body. The blue started to fade from the sky when I questioned aloud whether I was capable, burying my head into a future father’s chest and soaking his t-shirt as we swayed back and forth and he whispered words of strength in my ear.  We felt heaven encircle us as the sky became gray again and my curly-haired man said a prayer – a blessing – that assured me in the most simple and beautiful way that my body was strong and prepared.  His words were close and far away at once – my yoga ball had become a raft in a clear and vast sea, bouncing gently as each crystal wave lapped against its sides.

The pink morning was a distant memory as the future father helped me into the car and drove me swiftly and silently through the black stillness of a sleeping town.  More twenty second counts. Four hands helping me out of the car.  A brief exam and whoops of joy as someone said the number “8.”  Counting faster now, struggling to focus and not flee, stepping into a steaming hot bathtub and letting a synergic team take over: a husband, two midwives, a doula, my body, my baby, and God.  My eyes were closed now, almost permanently, but I felt everyone’s indispensible presence with each new ice pack on my forehead, each whispered “I love you,” each soothing pressure point, each beat of a tiny heart, and each strained breath that left my body. 

Time was an illusion – it stood still and sped by and my body took over to do the work Mother Nature has trained it to do over a million years of sacred nights like this one.  I was a distant onlooker – There was a team of support, surrounding and coaching and holding and whispering to and kissing a frightened-looking strawberry blonde as she pushed and screamed and cried and mentally counted to twenty, merely out of habit now. 

And then it was over.  A tiny dark-haired person was placed gently into the strawberry blonde’s arms, and she was back inside her body, no longer an onlooker but a mother now, staring into a pair of wide and alert dusky eyes that stared calmly and curiously back.  I stroked his curly hair and rubbed my fingers across his rosy round cheeks. His smell was intoxicating and his skin was smooth and his features were tiny and perfect.  I could have laid in that now-cold water for hours more, locking eyes with this new person – my son – and telling him in a hoarse whisper a million times that I love him more than life. 

And now we’re a family and sometimes it’s as though I’m not in my own body again, but watching myself from the eyes of a little strawberry blonde girl whose dream of this life has always been too far away to see clearly until now: She watches as a strawberry blonde, grown-up mother puts the tiniest little body against hers to feed while she hums a Lithuanian lullaby. She smiles as the woman hands the tiny person to her grown-up, handsome, dark-haired husband, who begins to rock his son and read the same story aloud that he’s been reading to a growing belly for months now: “How to Train Your Dragon.” She wonders, does that strawberry blonde really have all this?  Does one life deserve this much love and happiness?  Is that person with her two dark-haired boys and dog and backyard really me?

After another late night, the strawberry blonde turns and sees the sky outside unveiling another perfect summer morning. She kisses a smooth, rosy forehead that has finally bobbed to sleep and inhales his fresh baby smell.  Deserving or not, it’s another one of those gifts that can only follow a long dark night.

World, meet Clark.

Summer son

We walked tonight, the dog and I, while a little person we haven’t met rode along inside.

A distant baseball game and the sound of backyard sprinklers are clearer than ever on this cloudless evening.

And I hum as I stroll and dream about holding his hand – tomorrow? Next week?  Surely, God, no more than that?

And it’s as though my little passenger is reading my mind. A determined hand reaches up, up, pushing against the wall of his small world.

An invisible hand with five tiny fingers – so close yet so frustratingly unkissable just yet.

So for now I playfully push back and swallow some night air

and I wonder if my son can taste it the same way I can -

If he can appreciate the smell of wet wood chips and the freshness of a summer night and the rhythm of a tiny dog yanking eagerly on her leash.

His hand nudges the barrier between us once again, and I stop wondering.

He’s a son of summer, this one.  

July and I will be his first loves.

7 a.m.

He breathes in the day at the same time I do. The new air floating down as the white sun stretches up.

I breathe deeper and he swims, somersaults, to a rhythm of his own making. A long stretch here, a graceful bounce there. 

And I feel his every movement in a way unlike anything I’ve felt before. His dance is part of me, yet already so much his own. 

I whisper a lullaby as the half-light of sunrise penetrates the blinds. My belly ripples in response like a gentle wave at sea.

And together, my son and I, we greet the day and each other before the world wakes up and interrupts.

Energized each 7 a.m. by a sacred morning routine. 

Spring in my soul and my womb

Even though the trees are still skeletons and a few clumps of dirty snow are still clinging to yellow lawns, I walked outside and breathed in spring today.  I let it envelop and cleanse and massage my soul until I felt so renewed I could climb Provo’s tallest tree.  My baby woke up inside me and I wondered if he felt it too. The new life of spring, flowing through and around me and washing away the bitter sleepiness of winter. 

But for my baby, I realized, it’s always been spring.  He experiences the rush of new life every day; in every moment he rediscovers his nose or feels the gentle pulse of his newly formed heart. He feels spring in each new taste that reaches his tiny tongue, in the slow recognition of our voices and in the rhythmic cadence of a muffled story.  Spring is his ability to somersault and dance in his tiny, fluid world; to feel his new limbs growing and moving and realizing, piece by piece, that he’s him. 

And when he’s born in the heat of summer and he leaves the tiny world where his heart first started beating, it will still be spring.  The feeling of the sunshine on his baby cheeks will be new and perfect; so will the chirp of a bird or the vastness of the sky. There will be two new faces to match the voices he could only hear in the world he left behind.  There will be new tastes and the new sensation of day and night.  It will continue to be spring even into the fall, because every new baby is Spring. Winter is something that only happens when we stop discovering. 

Spring has lived inside me since the long winter outside my window began, but I failed to recognize it until today. I failed to tap into the wisdom of an unborn baby. 

Tomorrow it may snow.  But I’m going to keep breathing in spring. 

On puppies

My brother got a puppy for his 16th birthday.  I find that puppies are one of those few things that can turn even the most serious grown-up adult kind of person into a carefree childish child kind of person, regardless of how serious and grown up the years have made them. The same applies to ice cream cones and helium balloons.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Tasha.

She eats duck food.  (Not to be confused with eating ducks as food.)

She’s absolutely the most difficult moving object to photograph in the world. (This was perhaps my 37th try.)

Sometimes she just rolls around in the grass for no good reason.

And when she falls asleep next to me in my parents’ farm truck snuggled up to an old leather glove my heart absolutely melts.

Sigh. They grow up so fast.

On miscarriage.

The following is a description of something I went through months and months ago. I didn't tell many folks, so it took a gutsy surge of "I don't care"-ness for me to finally post this.  Let it be known that I am doing GREAT! But I'm publishing this so that maybe it can help someone else who has gone through the same thing. If you have, I'd love to hear from you.  We warrior girls gotta stick together! xoxo

It started with a dream.

I saw the blood and tried to scream, but my voice died with my unborn child, a curly-haired barefoot little girl that danced away into a vast nothingness, looking over her shoulder to grin at me just once before disappearing completely.

But it was only a dream.  I woke up and snuggled closer to my curly-haired, barefoot man.  In the morning I told him. “Lucky thing,” he said. “It was only a dream.”

But it was more than a dream.  Later that morning there was real blood. Real pain.  All that was missing was that ghostly, curly-haired little girl. 

I drove around the block before calling the midwife office to confirm that what was happening to me was what I thought it was.  I was brave on the phone, but when I hung up I sat on the far end of a large parking lot and cried.  My curly-haired man left work. I came home to him with puffy eyes and a heavy heart and he held me and let me cry some more.

I wanted to always remember the tear-jerking combination of physical and emotional pain. I wanted to remember what it felt like to close my eyes and try to ignore the reality, but knowing it was impossible, because behind my eyelids were images of so many things that could have been. That were so close to being.  So instead I just counted: “1, 2, 3, 4…” until the pain passed. And then, for another moment, at least, I could breathe.

I wanted to remember how much it meant when somebody understood.  When they just let me talk and nodded and touched my arm and put their hands to their mouths, wide-eyed, at just the right times. I wanted to remember the hurt and anger I felt when people ignored it or brushed it off with the increasingly cliché statement, “Everything happens for a reason.” I wanted to remember the sinking hope that I was wrong, that everybody was wrong, and that I would wake up the next morning and it really would only be a dream. 

I held on to the memory of crying into my pillow, then forcing myself out of bed, then crying into the stream of a burning hot shower, willing it to cleanse me into an older version of myself – a happier, more naïve version; the version that wanted to wait until we’d done everything before we even considered the possibility of a curly-haired, barefoot little person. 

I wanted to remember the number of ways I found to blame myself: That processed chicken salad. My trips to the rock climbing gym. Tickle fights with the curly-haired man.  Not making myself healthier before we dove blindly and recklessly into a decision we knew almost nothing about. 

I hated myself for wanting to remember. But I couldn’t help it.  And in my eagerness to remember every part of my shattered dream, I tried to forget just one.

This part happened as I shivered in my car in that empty parking lot, feeling cold and lonely, sobbing loudly for no one to hear. “Why?” I cried at my dashboard, at my steering wheel, and then at God. And then one of them answered me with a thought: “You need this experience. For someone else.”  And I told the thought to go away, to leave me alone with my pain, and it did.

But it came back later, when I was able to help someone else. It came back when I thought of the day I might really have a curly-haired little girl who really grows up and might really experience the same thing herself.  And now I know why I tried so hard to remember.  If I can tuck these memories away someplace safe deep inside me, I can pull them back out when someone I love needs them.  I’ll show that someone that I remember. That I understand. 

And knowing this helps me move forward.

My dreams get better all the time.

Fertility

There is something in the water in the BYU-Hawaii LDS 14^th ward. And it might be sperm.

Gross. Pretending I didn’t say that, let me start over by announcing that I belong to the most hazardously fertile ward in the world. We’re talking more than all the married wards in Provo, Utah or Rexberg, Idaho COMBINED.

Each week, a list is passed around for more women to sign up announcing their due date. Every other week, another stroller becomes the new caboose of a long train of baby carriages stretching all the way down the hall. Every couple of weeks, another wife suddenly develops a belly growth, as though hiding (not well) a large watermelon under her shirt.

It’s as though there’s a secret fertility club, and to become a member you have to get pregnant, and after you get pregnant you must bear heartfelt testimony to everyone about the newness and exuberance one feels when she has on her belly a large watermelon growth.

Certainly this is a wonderful thing. I hope to grow a watermelon of my own one day... one distant, distant day long after forfeiting my chance of joining the super secret not-so-exclusive 14^th ward fertility club.

Last Fast Sunday, as is custom, a great many members of the club, including fruitful new daddies, stood up to extol the virtues of parenthood and encourage childless newlyweds (like we Bagleys) to try making watermelon Bagley bellies. I was deeply engrossed in a doodle of a giant ice cream cone when Kendon got my attention and looked at me with puppy dog eyes. “I want one,” he mouthed. “Ice cream? Me too,” I said, my tummy growling in agreement. “No, a baby,” he replied, his eyes so puppy-doggy now I could have scratched his ears. “We’ll get one. Someday,” I assured him, patting his leg as I carefully made criss-cross waffle cone lines on my program. He poked me again. “No. Now.”

I looked around me, from the babies in bellies to the babies on bouncing mama laps to the newly-liberated aisle-walking babies, then back to Kendon and thought, Heaven help us, they’ve indoctrinated him. I swallowed hard and tried to look sympathetic.

Then he burst out laughing. Kendon’s laugh can sometimes exceed baby scream decibels. As half a dozen disapproving baby bellies turned and looked at us, I breathed a sigh of relief and began to daydream about puppies.