Every time I dig through my wallet, there it is, the little stack of Post-its, paper-clipped and worn, right between the Kinko’s copy card and the quote from a great man that I once scribbled on the back of a receipt.
It has been there nearly six years, the paper-clipped wad. It’ll be there forever, I think. It’s one stack of papers I cannot, will not, throw out.
In the teeniest, tiniest penmanship I could possibly have penned, I once upon a time made myself a chart I checked, oh, 20 times a day, nearly every day, for nine months. I was pregnant then, with the unknown person who became my little boy, and so enthralled was I with this majestic creation that I had to make myself a way of marking off the unseen unfolding inside me.
It begins: “14 days — heart beats; 26 — armbuds; 28 — legbuds, 30 — 1/4-1/2″ long, beginn. umb. cord.”
It was my way of tracing, in numbers and dashes and my own abbreviations, the course of the life forming inside me. It was my way of picturing every blessed step, culled and copied from a physiology book too fat to lug around, left over from my days as a nurse. I wanted to watch, if only in my mind, this unbelievable spectacle of life.
Maybe, too, it was because I knew what it was to not even get to follow the numbers. I’d had the joy once before of watching the plus sign turn pink, only to then wait and bleed and cramp, and get rushed to surgery, and wake up with a triangle of scars, no baby and a missing fallopian tube. This time, maybe, somehow, if I could guide my finger down the days, I could keep it from falling off the track.
So I made myself this little graph to follow along, barely able to wait till I got to the next line of scribble, the next great stride in the making of my baby.
I would pull it from my wallet on the train. Peek at it during my workday. Stare at it at night, marveling, rubbing my belly, while my little paper put me in touch with the greatest miracle I had ever known.
I followed it right through to the last line on the two-by-two-inch square, the one that read, “8-9 mos — gains 4 , stores protein.”
Not long after that, 8 pounds, 9 ounces of protein and muscle and bright blue eyes landed in my arms, my pieces of paper came to glorious life.
Still I kept my paper-clipped timeline right where it had always been, there in the dark of my wallet, where I could still peek and remember the waiting, the breathless expectation.
It became my talisman; if it stayed there, where it now belonged, maybe it would carry me through another miracle, allowing me to finger it and to hope.
Two more times I would get a chance to begin again at the beginning, to read, “14 days — heart beats,” but the first of those next times I never peeked again after “3 mos — moves body parts, swallows, practice inhale and exhale.”
That was my little girl. I held her for a moment, before she slipped out of my hand, the size of a string bean but perfectly, gorgeously human, those armbuds and legbuds and a face I’ll never forget.
The time after that I didn’t even get that far, and I never ever got anywhere again, no matter how hard the doctors tried, no matter how much I prayed nor what I promised God.
My one little miracle is almost 5 now, and throughout my life I find scattered scraps of hope I was unwilling to give up. There are babyseats I swore I’d get one more chance to use stuffed under the stairs. There are cardboard books I thought might get another round of teething, and even dusty old parts of a breast pump I thought I’d once again get to loathe.
More Top Picks How To Keep A Migraine Diary That Actually Helps
I can’t even bear to look in the boxes of baby clothes whose every stain and worn seam I know by heart.
Bit by bit, I guess I’m starting to believe that, no, there won’t be any more babies in this house, and that my one will forever be my one and only.
You see, I always thought I’d have a gaggle. I never would have guessed I’d only once see my belly swelled and beautiful with life.
So I held on tight, so tight, to every little thing that goes along with having a baby, carrying a baby, feeding a baby, teaching a baby, loving a baby with your whole heart.
It was as if I kept the things around me, the chance of having that baby somehow wouldn’t slip away once again through my trembling fingers.
But time teaches lessons, even lessons we don’t want to learn.
I am starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I should pack up the essentials of babyhood and pass them along, as I did my last prenatal vitamin, to someone blessed to be with child.
I, too, am blessed. If the chart I scribbled long ago had continued to today, it would read: “5 yrs — fills yr heart by the hour, takes yr breath away.”