My Tangerine Turns Two

Two years and nine months ago, I woke the first day of Spring Break with a heaviness in my abdomen that I knew singularly to mean one thing: new life. We had not been trying for a pregnancy. For a time, we wanted a third child, had even flirted with the idea a few years earlier, then decided for health reasons we would consider fostering and adoption. And then I woke with that heaviness (how to describe it? like a miniature bowling bowl at rest in the stomach, maybe) and after having done it twice before, I knew: pregnancy.

I didn't know, of course. The opera isn't over until that proverbial large woman strains her vocal chords, and a pregnancy isn't for sure until the urine hits the stick.

But that heaviness.

My period not even late, I bought a test, emptied my bladder, watched the two lines appear. And what was confirmed that moment by that stick in my palm was something I already intuitively knew, something my body had already told me: I wasn't alone. There was somebody with me. That was one of the first positives I gleaned from pregnancy, back during graduate school when waddling what seemed like twelve miles to my car in the Arizona heat and leaving my students for five minutes at a time to throw up down the hall: I had a constant feeling that at least I wasn't alone. For a woman who has battled an anxiety disorder her entire life, it is hard to explain what an amazing comfort that was to me. Every little foot in the ribcage, every little twist and turn that felt like the fluttering of wings was that child saying hey, lady, we're in this together, you aren't the only person in this room.

That's what I felt that Spring Break morning. I wasn't alone. And physically I felt like shit, which also sums up pregnancy for me. What a gigantic paradox the condition of pregnancy is. We met my mom and brothers at my grandmother's house to help her pack up her things to move into an assisted living center, and I enjoyed living with the knowledge by myself. I hadn't told Chris yet. I was scared of his reaction--I knew he'd be happy for another one, sure, but we hadn't exactly planned it, and we could barely afford the two we had now. And there was always that burning thing in the background, the issue of our second child's growing list of needs and therapists. I had no idea how we would handle a third, so I wanted to come to terms with it before I told anyone else, to get a gauge of my own emotional state and decide how to feel.

Because I am a very patient and measured person, it was exactly two hours before Chris and I passed each other carrying boxes in my grandma's driveway, me wanting to puke, that I fervently whispered I'm pregnant and then kept walking. His face lit up as if I'd told him Mozart would be joining us for dinner: sheer excitement. I should have told him two hours before, because seeing the joy on his face helped me decide how to feel. It gave me permission to push aside the fears and practicality and relish the gift we were about to be given.

Then I puked a lot. Then I puked some more. Then I gave birth.

And now, in exactly one minute from the time I am typing this sentence, that baby will be a two-year-old girl. Our little Clementine Nancy. Our Little Tangerine. This feisty, happy creature who came to us at the perfect time and made our family complete. What a huge order to place on a child, but it's true: at a time when losing my father made me feel as if huge pieces of me had been ripped from the inside out and that our family would never be complete again, Clementine taught me that love is always possible, that it comes as often as it goes, and that when it goes, it doesn't really leave as much as change forms.

The joy Clementine brought my father in his final weeks is immeasurable. I've written this before, but he would reach out for her whenever I walked past with her in my arms, her pudgy little six month old body impossible to ignore. He didn't know any longer whose baby she was, or where she had come from. But he always seemed to identify her as his; that is, he knew she was connected to him, that she was his legacy. The last pictures taken of my dad are of him holding Clementine, the two of them looking at one another, both smiling. A piece of my heart came into this world and a piece of my heart left, all in the same year. In a strange, puzzled-together sort of way, it almost makes me whole again, if any of us are ever really whole.

So, to my little toddler, to my little two-year-old who of all three children is most given to acts of tomfoolery, to my little muffin who wrote on the walls this week with Sharpie, danced on piano keys, climbed into the kitchen sink, and stole a two liter bottle of soda and chugged as much as you could before we caught you: happy birthday. I didn't know what I was in for when I peed on that stick, aside from the nine months of body-wrecking agony that were worth it a million times over because they gave us you.

Oh, and birthday girl? If you could reward my for this kind post by not destroying something in this house today or sustaining an injury that requires stitches, I would be much obliged.