Upon Hearing Wonderful News

One of my best friends has just told me that she is pregnant. I could not be happier for her, her husband, the future child they will have. I cannot wait to meet this person as my friend is one of the singularly most wonderful people on the earth and her child will be, well, most welcome.

And then I find it gives me pause. I think about how she will soon have a three month old, a nine month old. Her child will all too rapidly be one, an age Willa is fast approaching and suddenly the ground beneath me, that I had thought fixed, permanent and unchangeable, shifts. Fissures sparkle and I realize that I am standing on pack ice in the middle of a polar sea. A crevasse opens and on the one side I stand in mittens and hat and on the other are the mothers I can no longer sit with at the table. They will be rescued. I will have to turn back to the ship, frozen in ice, an artic explorer writing a ship’s log of fear and sometimes desperation.

My friend’s child, this unborn possibility, will lap Willa within months of being born. Developmental milestones will be tossed to the annuals of its personal history and we will still not be eating, not walking, not talking.

I haven’t quite dealt with this yet. While I managed to make my break with Willa not being the typical child we expected I guess I haven’t made the break with the typical mom I thought I was to be. I am scared that the people I know are going to have children, and we will recede into our invisible city, forever inhabitants of a place no one can join.

Today my invisible city feels empty, apocalyptic. Drifts of snow piled in cabin corners, ice on broken windowpanes and roving polar bears. My friends will soon be separated from me, my experience apart that much more from their own experience, their own commonality of motherhood, the concerns of the typical child.

Will the interest in our life, like all novelties, fade in the glare of a sun not meant to shine on what is frozen? Will the eyes of our friends soon have to look away toward what they can use, toward what they can share, away from what is so completely foreign to the child they will have lying in the cribs of future nurseries?

As Willa gets older I see ever more prominently what is not there. When you have a child with developmental delay you make all these rationalizations, well they aren’t that far behind, with the adjusted age… It’s a lie of course, and as they get older the gaps widen and you, as the mother, fall in.

I’m tumbling down into one of these gaps. I feel miniature. I can hear the chatter from the world above. I’m part of it but somehow parallel to it. I am a mother but I am not the mother my friend will be. I’m not the mother I thought I was. I’m not the mother my other friends will become. I will be wearing blue when they wear red. I will be drinking when they eat. I will see when they close their eyes to sleep.

I know I am not alone. I know there are legions of mothers like me, living in cities of their own. But this is the first time. The first time knowledge has come home to roost. I know too that chasms exist between mothers with different children. I will do everything in my power to throw lines across the void, tie together rope to make a bridge, send out flares from below, write letters and put them in bottles to float off towards horizons I can no longer reach. I will talk and share and I will be patient too. And I will congratulate my friend with great love in my heart because she is going to have a baby, a beautiful baby soon and I would not want anything less for her.

I hope our children can become correspondents, from one city to another, one world to the parallel one. They can send letters across. Children can do anything. I have to gather the stationary, hoard postage, ready my girl for reaching out from deep places and taking hold of friendly little hands; the hands of her future friends.

Back on my ship, frozen in ice I finish my entry and walk up to the top deck. It is the permanent arctic night and up above plays the aurora. I see impossible colors and shapes. There are others who see these strange phenomena too. I have to remember that. And to these mothers I look now and extend my mittened hand once again. I feel fearful but warm, excited for what I will discover and sad at heart for the distance between old friends and myself. I feel numb sometimes too. But I look up, and there is the aurora, there is Willa, there is my life and my greatest joy.