from the sprigs* archives: the news
July 25, 2008
Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this May 19, 2006. I will most likely rewrite it soon as part B of my book Words Cannot Express. The “B,” of course, stands for book.
My parents had driven to the mobile home dealer in 1971, my father prepared to select a two-bedroom unit from the few models that were available. He would place the unit on a small lot near Lake Texoma, and it would serve as accommodations for their weekend fishing trips.
As they drove, my mother became increasingly nervous, she would tell me years later. She knew she had to tell him something, and she had to tell him right then because the thing she had to tell him affected everything, but most immediately, it affected their purchase of a mobile home.
She didn’t want to tell him. Their children, a 15-year-old boy and a nearly 14-year-old girl, were becoming young adults. In just a few years, they would go off to college, and my father and mother would be alone again.
She must have seen that future clearly — as if time could be measured in inches, one inch equaling one year, and in four short inches, less than the length of her hand measured from the tip of her middle finger to the point where palm and wrist meet, it would be just the two of them driving back and forth to the mobile home. Just the two of them slipping into the boat then slipping the boat into the water.
Just the two of them catching fish and being photographed for the flimsy newspaper published by the lake community. In those photos, they stretched their open-mouthed catch out in front of them, and smiled. The captions of those photos contained their names, the city where they lived, and the length of their catch, measured in inches.
She had to tell him now because they weren’t going to need a two-bedroom unit after all. And if they bought a two-bedroom that day, then she broke the news later, he would be even more pissed off. So she spoke up.
We’re going to need a three-bedroom.
He didn’t understand.
How could he? Twelve years earlier, one of her eggs was fertilized but didn’t make its way out of her fallopian tube. It implanted itself there in the tube, and she lay on the couch in terrible pain — the doctor said there was nothing they could do for her and that waiting was the only course of action — until her fallopian tube burst, terminating the pregnancy. It left her scarred and nearly killed her. She was told she’d never be able to have another child.
So she had to walk him through it, explaining to him that, somehow, more than a decade later, and right at that very moment, a life was growing inside her. She was three months pregnant.
Her own mother had done the same thing, gotten pregnant long after her son and daughter were born. When she found out, she went to visit relatives in another part of the state, stayed with them for several months and returned home nine months pregnant, belly sticking out to here, as my mother put it when recounting the story, holding her hand nearly two feet in front of her stomach for exaggeration.
My grandmother didn’t have to say anything to her husband when she returned. As soon as he set eyes on her, he knew he was about to be a father, again. It was my mother she was pregnant with — my mother whose existence was kept from my grandfather until it was too late for him to put up a fuss about it.
Perhaps my mother would have done the same thing when she was pregnant with me, let herself start to show, let people, including my father, come to their own conclusions. But she couldn’t do that because she knew there’d be a baby on those lake trips, and that baby would need a little room of its own. She certainly didn’t want the crib in their bedroom.
My father didn’t react the way she thought he would. He wasn’t upset at all at the prospect of spending another 18 years of his life raising a child, of hauling a baby to and from the lake. The diapers, the crying and the formula. He was thrilled, probably much happier about the recent turn of events than she was. She hadn’t planned on any more diapers, crying and formula. She didn’t like the thought of their lives together not beginning in earnest until she was 56, and he was 60.
But as he gathered her in his arms and hugged her, perhaps touching her belly, I know she felt relieved, and I bet she felt like she had the potential to be loved by him more than ever before.
Comments
9 Responses to “from the sprigs* archives: the news”
Got something to say, toughguy?
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off. — Philip Larkin
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
Hmmm. This passage resonates a lot with me, for various reasons, but mostly because my 18-year old is going to college in August. You do a nice job delving into the parts of life we can’t control.
i didn’t realize you were old like me. i’m a 1972 baby.
isn’t it interesting how birth patterns repeat generation to generation? i have a friend who was adopted. when she found her birth family, she ended up being sibling #8 … 5 girls and three boys. BOTH of her birth parents came from families with that exact configuration.
Hmm. Shades of Tristam Shandy here. Which is a good thing.
‘72? You’ns are older than I thought — I only have six years on you. So I guess you’ll have to stop treating me like a revered elder, then.
I wrote about my birth here, FWIW:
http://spoil.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/self-portrait-at-birth/
Christine, aaaah to be 18 and going to college soon. I remember that time in my life well. Only I was 17 and going to college soon.
Carolee, you know we’re about the same age. You just forgot.
Dave, a book written over a decade in the 1700s? How can I possibly sound like that?
Yeah, Blythe is the only baby amongst our whole group. You respect us more now, don’t you? Or you think we are all very immature.
Respect, always! Expect when I feel like trying to get a rise out of you.
A plurality of the bloggers I read are folks (usually women) in their 40s and 50s. I don’t know whether y’all consider yourselves to be in advanced youth or early middle-age, but broadly speaking we literary bloggers are not dominated by da yoot, who are mostly on MySpace or FB, I guess.
Expect = except
Dave, wouldn’t that be plurality / is? Now look who’s trying to get a rise out of whom.