Tiny tiny Clementiney

I'm writing this sitting up in bed, laptop balanced on a pillow, trying to move my fingers as little as possible as I type, lest I disturb the sleeping baby lying on my arm. Her breathing is calm and sweet, and every now and then she breathes a set of those quick, shuddery, panting newborn breaths. Each time she startles, jerking up her legs or flailing out her arms, I spread my fingers across her chest, trapping her tiny hands and shoulders close together in my hand, and hold her still until she settles into peaceful sleep once more.

You'll have noted the "she" in those sentences, and so you know more than I did, that hot smoky August night as I paced around and around our hill, waiting for her to come. And you know her name, too, which came to us so easily this time (so unlike last time!) and still brings me a little shock of happiness every time I hear someone say it.

So we're starting this story from the comfortable perch of hindsight, you and I, but I can remember so clearly how I felt the weeks before she came, and every time I think about it, I feel torn between a mostly-unwarranted wistful nostalgia, and a slight superior smugness toward my previous self—what was that woman so worried about?

Which is suppose is as good of a place to start as any.

I was so worried! It was a little embarrassing. It had been a joyful pregnancy—such a blessing, ten babies, who could have ever imagined such a thing! But it was a difficult year as well. I told a similarly-situated friend that I could hardly remember a single day in months where I hadn't shut myself in the bathroom so I could cry unobserved. "Is this what we have to look forward to for the next twenty years?" I asked her. "Is this just what it means to have ten children?"

Don't misunderstand: I don't think that the exclamations of other parents, the I-don't-know-how-you-do-it's and the You-must-be-a-saint's, have any weight to them. Of course parents of any number of children know love and confusion and heartache! But being the mother of a large family just carries a lot of…magnitude. Life starts to feel like a tightrope you might fall off of any minute. Perhaps the forceful independence of your young adults makes the innocence of your babies and the sweetness of your toddlers more precious through contrast, but the constant necessity of holding so many emotions at the same time—happiness for one child, fear for another, sympathy for another—is exhausting. It all swirls around in your heart at once: the helplessness of watching teenagers make dumb choices and wondering which ones sprouted from sins of your own omission or commission. The engulfing minutia of keeping the younger children alive, mingled with constant looming uneasiness about the suddenly-imminent futures of the older children. The tension between knowing a child doesn't mean to hurt you, and being hurt all the same. Add all this and pregnancy to a year full of change and uncertainty in our family's little world and the world at large—and I found that "I contain multitudes" described me rather accurately.

As the baby's arrival became imminent, I became aware of a constant haze of worry about the labor and delivery. It surprised and unnerved me. Hadn't I done this nine other times? That was probably more often than I'd made lemon bars in the last nineteen years, and I wasn't terrified of doing that. And furthermore, I am fully aware that being terrified makes labor harder, so you think I'd have developed the discipline not to let my thoughts spiral down that path. Well, no. Apparently I hadn't. I lay awake nights, heart pounding. It wasn't that I feared some terrible outcome. I just knew it was going to be hard, and I didn't WANT it to be hard. Knowing that I had gotten through other hard things didn't make me feel any more enthusiastic about this one.

I tried not to dignify my fearful thoughts with too much attention, but they hovered close anyway, swooping down in the dark of night or whenever I was alone. And then, a week before the baby's due date, I got sick. I thought it was the smoke at first, that ever-present haze that had obscured the mountains and reddened the sunsets since mid-July. I felt like I'd breathed in sand and it had rubbed me raw inside—lungs, throat, chest. Sam and I were enjoying a rare quiet Sunday night, Daisy's birthday festivities finished, sitting in his office doing family history on our laptops and looking out at the city lights. Then suddenly I started coughing and couldn't stop. "Soon the air will clear," I told myself after the first hour or two, "and I'll feel better."

I coughed all night and by the next morning I was afraid it was sickness after all. Maybe it was because I hadn't been sick at all for the past year and a half, but it hit me hard. After a few hours of forcible hopefulness, I gave up and slid into the abyss, lightheaded and feverish and my throat raw from coughing. I'd cough till I couldn't breathe and that would trigger my hyperactive gag reflex and then I'd throw up. Throwing up would make my pelvic muscles ache and then they'd cramp and get even sorer. I was so miserable. It occurred to me for the first time ever that it might be possible to go into labor while being sick. I don't know why I'd never thought about it before, but I immediately felt huge and overarching sympathy for anyone to whom it had ever happened. How could any woman bear to go through labor like this, half-blind from headache and coughing till her insides throbbed? It made me realize (for the millionth time) how many blessings I take for granted.

It was a grim sort of week. It probably wouldn't have been easy at any time—you always try to tell yourself that your baby won't come early, but when some babies have come early it is very hard to keep your brain from reminding you frequently of this fact, in a helpful "I-just-thought-you-should-be-aware" sort of way—and sickness-misery combined with normal end-of-pregnancy misery made it extra discouraging. Of course there were the usual things that had to be done—orthodontist appointments, rides to physical therapy and cross-country practice, youth activities, meals and baths and laundry. Abe helped when he wasn't at work and Sam helped more than he probably should have, with the number of class preparation and freelance jobs he had looming (blessedly he didn't have to be at BYU much), but whenever I could I would collapse into bed and lie there thinking about how hard it would be to have a baby in this state. It was a constant fight not to sink further into fear.

At last I had the sense to ask Sam for a priesthood blessing. There was so much comfort in it. Heavenly Father spoke, through Sam, of strength and healing; of respite that would come when needed; of health and wise purposes and being in God's hands. But He asked some things of me as well, and these were things I knew would take effort—faith to be healed, trust in God's timing, pondering what I was to learn. I wasn't sure I had those things sufficiently in me to receive the blessings.

Last of all Sam promised that with enough faith, I would be able to "perform the service God had laid out for me to perform." That promise lodged in my heart. I didn't know exactly what it meant, but as I pondered the words they made a sort of picture in my mind of a choice and a burden waiting to be taken up. I could almost see this handpicked service "laid out" on a table in front of me, vast and shadowed, yet within reach. Was it labor? Delivery? Caring for the baby? Something more? It seemed if I just stretched out my arms I might lift it, but not knowing its weight I pulled back, afraid.

It was only a few days earlier that I had read Elder Scott's talk, "To Be Healed." Now, seeking literal healing, I was drawn back to his words again. I even wrote about it on my blog that week. "Love is a potent healer," Elder Scott had said, and I felt the compelling weight of those words. I was convinced they related to the charge in my blessing. I pondered laid-out service and healing love, trying to understand. 

I have lost the thread of narrative here; we don't know what day we are on, but neither did I at the time—that week felt like ten weeks, each endless night full of waking and aching and pacing the floor trying to escape the pain in my body and the turmoil in my mind. Sebastian's birthday emerged as a landmark in the fog—we celebrated modestly—and then there were a hundred weeks more, during which I existed and tossed and turned in bed and took cooling baths and prayed for relief. I felt a conclusive certainty that this sickness would never end—the baby would never come—and I fought that despair by praying for something, one tiny thing, I could do—something to show that I did want to pick up the service laid out for me, I did want to access that healing love.

Almost just as I sought them, tiny promptings began to come, suited to my literal weakness, and I followed them one by one like stepping stones across an angry sea. "Listen more carefully." "Send this text." "Do this task willingly." "Say this prayer." "Go talk to those ladies screaming obscenities at each other in the grocery store parking lot." (I was really scared to do that one. But I did it.) I kept my gaze fixed on my tiny path, not trusting myself to know what further to ask or to receive.

It was early Sunday morning, a week after Daisy's birthday and two days after Seb's, when I woke up feeling disoriented and realized that it was because I'd slept for more than a few hours without waking up to cough. I felt slow and clumsy, but not dizzy or feverish. Strangely, I was more tired than ever, as if all the hours of lost sleep were now descending on me at once. It felt ages since I'd done more than drift in and out of uncomfortable restlessness, but now the day lay beautifully empty before me. Sam was home and we had nowhere to go. I went back to sleep, dimly aware of the noises of breakfast and the children waking up. We watched our Sunday morning Stake Conference broadcast from home, and then I took a nap, emerged when Sam called me for dinner, and fell asleep again until 7 or 8 p.m. It felt so good to sleep.

I finally woke up as the sky was darkening, just in time to help put the little ones to bed, and then I thought I'd spend the evening writing something or doing some homeschool preparation. But after an hour or two I couldn't concentrate. I had a strange cyclical discomfort—my back aching, then feeling better, than aching again. I started pacing around to ease the ache. Sebastian asked for help with some English homework, so we worked on that for awhile, and then I was up again, pacing around the house as if carried by waves of uneasiness, unable to sit down for more than a few seconds at a time. When Seb called me back in to ask for help with another assignment, he took one look at my face (I don't know what he saw there) and said, "Don't worry about it. I can finish it myself." I was too focused inward to demur. Sam had gone to bed by now, and the house was quiet, and I knew these waves were carrying me toward a specific end.

I drifted outside, up the hill, and looked up at the heavy gibbous moon while I prayed. I felt somewhat rested for the first time in a week, and I hoped that gift had been given for a reason, but I was still worried about capacity and endurance for the hours ahead.

Around 11 p.m., I went down the hill and got out my phone and called Cathy as I rocked on the porch swing, seeking any breeze under the heat of the August night. I so wanted her to get to me in time, after two previous births where the baby had come before she arrived, but I was also aware, without being able to change it, of how very quiet and unruffled my voice sounded. I was half-afraid Cathy would assume there wasn't any hurry—half-afraid there really wasn't any hurry—but she knows me, and she assured me she was on her way. 

As I waited, I paced circles through the house, feeling muffled and dreamy. My mind drifted through pictures and colors—I was in the eye of a swirling storm, and the clouds on either side had drifted inward until I was wrapped up tight, like the core inside a roll of batting, quiet and spinning in mile-thick clouds. I didn't want to stop walking, I didn't want to talk, I just wanted to turn around and around within this silent soft storm.

It was only experience hard-won from other births that made me reluctantly, very reluctantly, wake Sam and ask him to fill the birthing pool. Even those few words were hard to find, and felt foreign in my mouth as I spoke. I fell with relief back into my silent pacing, and even when Cathy and Christine arrived at 12:30, I smiled with effort and gave the minimum answers necessary before sinking back into layers of silence. 

In the calm of that inner storm, rising and falling with the wind and waves, my heartbeat was carrying the promise from my blessing the week before. "Perform the service laid out for you to perform." The words spun, both prayer and question, inside my head, spiraling toward an emerging vision of what they might mean. Not an event, not a moment or a sacrifice. The service was laid out in and through it all, dusting the darkness like stars—the sickness and the pain and the discouragement, this work of motherhood in any condition, the things being asked a mirror image of the things being given. God's invitations are His blessings; there is no contradiction. There they lay, inseparably connected: the service laid before me, and the strength to see it through. 

There's a dream somewhere in my past. It's held too deep in my soul to put adequate words to here, but imagine a desperate rush of people ebbing and flowing in some kind of train station, departures and arrivals tumbling over each other, a crush of humanity and some nameless urgency pushing the masses on. It isn't a place for peace or contemplation, and you are in the middle of it, feeling the fear and tumult and disquietude swirl through the multitudes in half-tangible form, held by the air like fog or rain. Here it should be close and hot and deafening, but over all of it, the waiting and the restless crowd, hovers a silence like the ringing in your ears, and into that silence breaks a baby's cry, and no one turns, no one turns, no one turns.

You start searching the faces of the people around you, waiting for recognition to dawn on one of them; waiting for sudden awareness, a race to find and comfort the baby making those cries. And still you seem to be the only one who hears. Is there somewhere I ought to be going?, you think uncertainly, watching the ceaseless rushing to and fro. Surely you wouldn't be here unless you, too, were on a journey.  But the crying continues, so you hesitantly make your way out of the main hall into a side room, full of mailboxes and parcels and baggage piled high, where the baby's crying is louder. There are conveyor belts and the hum of machinery, and people ceaselessly loading and unloading, though none are looking at the cardboard box sitting on a long counter at the side of the room. You can see the flimsy cardboard rocking slightly with the force of what it holds, and you look toward it as the cries intensify, thinking that surely now someone will respond. But no one comes. No one even turns a head. The box lies there before you, trembling with the cries of its occupant and the tiny fists flailing above its sides, and at last, hesitation gone, you walk up close enough to see the baby inside. In the eternity of that first moment, you lift her from the box and cradle her in your arms, and she looks up at you and you whisper, "I'll take care of you, little one."

I felt the echoes of that dream now, as I reached my arms out into the obscuring cloud to lift the burden I found there. I pictured our baby, its little spirit straining to enter the world, unsure about the next step, but coming anyway, full of trust—and I felt love surge over me as I imagined how dependent that spirit was on what I would do next. Who will open this door if not me? I wasn't ready, but I was ready enough. It was time to stop thinking about my fears. All right, then. I can be strong enough now, I prayed, and held on.

I still wasn't sure I wanted to get in the water once Sam had filled the pool, as it would mean changing what I was doing, and I would rather bear that storm I knew than "fly to others that I knew not of." But once I put my feet in, I found I did want the warmth and motion after all. I slipped into the water and knelt backwards and rested my head on the side of the pool, Sam pressing his hands along my back. Cathy and Christine left us alone in the bedroom, and the silence was so deep inside my head that it startled me every time a floorboard creaked or a fan turned on. I couldn't locate myself within the process of labor—I know the stages, of course, and I can often observe the proceedings from somewhere outside myself, watching the onset of transition and hearing myself get more vocal as the intensity increases. But now I was still in that storm-eye of silence, feeling almost fragile, unwilling or unable to break the spell with movement or sound. Having surrendered to the storm, I was gearing up for a long road ahead, and I could feel flutters of nervousness deep down—not knowing how much would be demanded of me, but trying to prepare myself to outlast it. 

Sam asked if I'd be okay for a minute while he went into the bathroom, and I nodded, all my concentration already fixed on that long road. During the next contraction, I hummed a little and felt the vibrations in my back where Sam's hands had been, and suddenly the deep fluttering resolved itself and came into focus and I knew what it was. Not nervousness, but pressure. Don't resist it. Breathe into it. Breathe. I found the familiar picture in my head: the door opening to light, breath carrying the baby down, sinking into the pain as if welcoming it home. I pushed, and as I did I heard myself breaking the enveloping silence for the first time, yelling, the moment lasting an eternity, at once familiar and completely incomprehensible. The baby was…here? "I feel the head!" I croaked, voice trembling. Cathy and Christine came running-not-running, and I yelled again, and Christine was saying something and reaching into the water, and then I was lifting up the tiniest, wettest little body as Cathy gently untangled the cord. It was 1:25 a.m.

Sam came back into the room and stopped to look at us with utter amazement on his face. "What? How?" 

"Oh! Oh! Is it a girl?" I was asking no one in particular, and Cathy was laughing, "I don't know yet; see for yourself!"

Cord untangled at last, I gathered the baby up in my arms. A slippery, perfect little girl. Sam was still laughing, coming to hug me, stunned, and I felt a little stunned myself. "Is it over? I'm done? She's here?" It didn't quite feel real. The coming storm; the long, dark road—already behind me? I stared at the baby's perfect mouth, her furred ears, her clear bright eyes.

As I gazed into her face, her eyes suddenly locked onto mine, and I gasped at the awareness I saw there. "She knows you," said Cathy, and I could feel it too.

It is the holiest of places, that space after birth, and perhaps it should inform more than it does my concept of what holiness is. For there is quiet and awe, yes, but all woven through with such rejoicing and laughter and bursting-out exuberance that it seems to have more in common with revelry than reverence. Or maybe I am mistaking the tree for the forest, and the appearance of grinning, euphoric masses of sleepy-eyed children in my birthing room for a carnival atmosphere at the average birth. There's something to the idea, though, because I've felt the delighted hum of it in circumstances as varied as my children themselves—how great the joy in heaven over one soul's earthly debut.

The whole family was prepared to fall in love with with another little baby boy, and we had told ourselves determinedly that we did NOT have any preference this time around, but little Goldie spoke for all three of the girls when she would say sometimes, wistfully, "But I really would love to just SEE a new little baby girl." Even the boys thought after eight years it might be time for a change. So I really think there may have been no happier moment in the history of siblings than when six little pairs of excited feet (the three pairs of teenage feet not having been able to be rousted from their beds) came running into my bedroom in the middle of the night to see "the surprise" Sam promised them—and I showed them the sweetest, brightest-eyed little bundle and told them, "Look! You have a baby sister!"

I thought their smiles might split their faces open, and they all crowded around, leaning precariously over the birth pool to see better, squeaking with excitement, Ziggy peppering Cathy and Christine with a million questions about the water and the birth tools and why they were going to cut the baby's "tail." I smiled and laughed with them, but I couldn't tear my eyes from the baby's peaceful gaze. Her arrival had been quick and startling for both of us, so the midwives were keeping a close eye on her heartbeat and other vital signs. I hardly noticed. It felt like the baby and I were in a world of our own.

They took her from me, finally, as someone always must, so I could shower, collapse gratefully into the warmth of blankets and bed, and eat something to stave off the ravenous hunger that comes after labor and birth. The children held and kissed the tiny bundle one by one—Daisy first because the baby was promised to be Daisy's birthday present, after all—and put their comforting fingers into her tiny fists as Cathy did the newborn exam.

After the exam and the baby-weighing (7 pounds 12 ounces) we took our traditional on-the-bed picture (minus the three oldest boys, who were somehow sleeping through it all, and Gus, who had shown an impressive lack of interest in the baby and had already been deposited back in bed) and then we just sat gathered around Clementine, marveling at how perfect she was: her skinny toes, her little dark eyebrows, her wispy hair. Everyone was so happy and excited, Sam and I thought no one would ever go back to bed. But eventually Cathy and Christine had everything cleaned and packed away, and they hugged us good night, and the children drifted sleepily back to their rooms.

When the house was quiet again, I lay awake next to Sam, listening to the baby's tiny hitching breath rush in and out of her unpracticed lungs. I felt too full of wonder and joy to sleep, and underneath the blissful satisfaction of reliving the night's events again in memory—knowing they were over now, and the baby was safely here—I couldn't quiet the chorus of "Clementine! Clementine! Clementine!" in my head. Sam and I hadn't decided on her name beforehand, had hardly discussed it all, in fact—strangely, since there is not much I like more than discussing names. For eight years now we'd had a good solid list of girls' names we loved, and instead we'd had to tackle the progressively harder task of finding BOYS' names we loved. I'd been quite looking forward, if the baby were a girl this time, to a good long consultation with Sam about the relative merits of all our favorites, perhaps involving a spreadsheet—but now the time was here and all I could think was how absolutely perfect, how magnificent and astonishing and refreshing, the name CLEMENTINE was. I got delighted butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it! I could hardly wait for Sam to wake up so I could ask him what he thought.

But later on as we sat in our bed—Sebastian having been gotten off in a mad rush to his first day of 11th grade; all the other children asleep; smoky morning sunlight streaming in through the double-doors—Sam brought it up first: "I know there were a bunch of other contenders. But I just can't stop thinking about Clementine!" We tossed around some other ideas just to say we'd done it, but it was purely perfunctory. We settled on the middle name Fern, for Sam's great-grandma and the redwood forests we both love. Clementine Fern. Like the birth itself, it seemed almost too easy.

That relative ease wasn't all there was to it, of course. The other side of that storm-eye I had felt myself in during labor, the turbulence I'd been steeling myself for and thought I had escaped, came bursting down off and on the week after Clementine's birth. The respite promised in my blessing had lingered long enough, given strength enough, for me to bring the baby here, but it had not been the complete and miraculous healing I'd half-hoped for. Sam took constant care of me while I struggled through fever and side-shuddering cough for the next week, along with the usual exhaustion—weakness and discouragement and short-sightedness crashing over me again in waves much like the ones I'd fought the week before the birth. My back ached and my throat ached with thirst and heat, but when I went out to the porch swing at night sometimes there was rain, and the air was clearing. I faced the endless nights again with dread, but now I had a tiny companion who would look up at me, wide-eyed, in the darkness—and in spite of myself I could feel the tiny sprouts of hope struggling through.

Then at last there was a day when I sat up in bed and opened my eyes without the stab of headache behind them, when I believed I would someday feel myself again. And now, sitting here writing it out in the rocking chair two months after this story begins—the usual baby resting sleepily on my typing arm—I do.

Both myself and…not-myself, though, I guess, because each baby changes me, too. Nineteen-plus years after being introduced to the magic of those first fluttery baby-kicks, I've started to get a tiny glimpse of what babies become— those fascinating, heart-breaking, infuriating agents who set off recklessly into the world as if they don't even remember they were ever part of your very heartbeat, bone of your bones. I've learned that each child, even the tenth, represents a leap of hope and faith. And I'm learning pound by pound, as I lift it, what it means to shoulder a load that is also a gift that is also a school.

"Love"—Elder Scott said, speaking again of that "potent healer"—"comes by learning how to give it to another in a spirit of trust." It's a prism with spectra on both sides, that trust—trust in Heavenly Parents, in the strength you hope They will eventually lend you; trust in a future you can't see and are not completely sure you'll like—mirrored by a trusting determination to build a life where those you love can place a similar trust in you. 

I can't count the number of times I've faltered in that trust, afraid that this time the storm is too dark, the weight is too great, the gap is too large. But I always come back to a hope—half-remembered, half-learned—where I gaze up toward heaven the way baby Clementine gazed up at me in those first moments after she arrived. Everything is so hard and new and strange, my heart says, fearful. But you are YOU. So I will trust you, and here I am.