Flower Fortune- Sweetbriar: Poetry and fragrance.

So this morning Rev and Trinity came over to play and Harry cooked breakfast. I watched as the children ate pancakes and drank milk, their little hands sticky with syrup, their mouths puckered and pooched like sweet, juicy crabapples. They laughed as Rev pulled their ears, clapped their hands at Harry as he rubbed their heads or picked them up to swing them around the kitchen. They rubbed their eyes, still sleepy, lifted their arms up as I slipped small little shirts over their warm bodies. Such a particular smell they have, I thought, as I kissed their fat little necks hugged them to my breast, bringing them to see their father. To be a mother, such a strange sensation: one that can plague from the very beginning, but that binds you heart and soul with another tangible, vulnerable being. To comfort someone, to have someone solely depend on you, to cry to you and look to you for full life advice is such a miracle, such a completely unnerving sense of responsibility, but also a selfish pleasure, an almost erotic sense of placement and purpose. Rev and Harry were completely aware of my nervousness this morning, and they gave me kisses and Harry would grip my hand and bring it to his lips, looking me straight in the eye. Virginia was permanantly in his lap, pinching his nose and pulling on the buttons of his shirt. She has grown into these doe-ish eyes, big and clear and intelligent. When she looks at me, I feel as if I am not her mother, only a helper, a nurse, someone to look after her while she is still too young to be independent. Sometimes, when she looks at me, I see my ancestors deep within her, like she will be the one to redeem what was taken from me in my childhood. Already I have personified her as a ghost or an angel, and so I cling to her most and watch her as if she could inspire me with wisdom.

Last night, Harry and I laid in bed, alone, and in his deep comforting voice, he explained to me how my day at the doctor's would go, what kind of tests they would run, what he had researched about our birth control situation, about how our sexual relationship might have to be planned if we didn't want more children. It made me wonder how such a planned existence could mean happiness, and when I mentioned so he laughed and said, I knew you wouldn't like that Pidge. He held me all through the night, and we stayed up late talking about the new baby, if there was to be one. It is safe to not have the baby, he told me, though I could tell this would be his last decision. Even when I was sixteen and had told first told him I was pregnant, his face lit up with happiness, his eyes bright with purpose and intention. Instead of being scared he said, Don't you worry, Pidge. We'll tell Mum and Dad and they'll take care of you. Wow, really? Am I going to be a father? There was never fear in his voice until months afterwards, when his parents sent him to California to test what he really wanted. But that wasn't his doing. And now, again, all he would want is this child, in its pure, innocent form, dirty and bloody and crying as it made it's way from my body and directly into his arms. A mother is never the first to hold her children, and in that way, maybe I think my children find salvation.

The doctor was horrible. Probing and cold and antiseptic. Draining away all that is good and wholesome and pure from my life at this moment. He asked me awing questions, personal and fiery, yet curious in a non-committed way. I have never liked the way my doctor puts his hands on my stomach, in his mind I see that he is not feeling to find nothing, he is feeling to find something: a tumor, a growth, an unexplainable cyst. If only I had my warm, gentle, Emmy; my lovely doctor who has been responsible for me for years, decades of my life, children of my blood. So sweetly she touches my skin, crawls her fingers along me and pushes on small nubs inside of me, making them kick and squirm and make their presence known. How gently and erotically she makes me feel like an Egyptian, someone royal and godlike and important. But to this doctor I am a mannequin, a harsh, fleshless animal who has only evolution operating on her progeny. I peed in a cup, had my blood drawn, was thrown to the lab where the contents of my whole essence were taken down to molecular size. I waited all day in a tiny room to be told that I am not pregnant.

Though I financially and spiritually rejoice, I could not help tearing up as I drove home, thinking of those little faces at breakfast time. Though I have not been the greatest mother, still those children are my life.