At college graduation and at grad school graduation, and really all the time during grad school, there was lots of confident talk about changing the world. Sometimes it was cloaked in more sophisticated language about systems and various racially unjust things we were supposed to dismantle, and sometimes it was breezier and cheesier, more literal.
Now, I’m mostly sure of myself at work. I know how to sit with people, even if they’re crying or yelling. I know how to email the right people to get my clients an emergency rent payment or a good therapist. Still, underneath that I often feel totally out to sea. It isn’t about knowing how to do my job so much as it’s about total, subtle uncertainty as to why this job even exists. We talk about evidence-based practice in this field, but that can be so limited — mostly about how one clinician works with one client. We have so much less evidence for practice models in something like child welfare casework, which touches so many parts of clients’ lives and interacts with so many different entities.
I see now that my whole point of view is so limited. My strongly-held beliefs about this work are very few. I think that struggling kids have better outcomes when they have a connected caregiver throughout their adolescence. I think we should keep families together. I think I need to check myself regularly on what, actually, the government should be able to intervene on, and double-check myself when it’s about a Black or Native family. And mostly I think I have to respect my clients, hold that holy and sacrosanct. That isn’t so many things to fall back on. But I do fall back, every day. I try to be present with people. I try to just be with them, to really enjoy that my work in the world is about getting to be together instead of alone.
It doesn’t absolve me of trying to make things better or trying to do less harm. But I don’t recognize myself in the idea of changing the world. It takes everything I have just to learn how to be in the world. I am practicing as hard as I can.
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Meanwhile I’m pregnant and getting to do this thing that so many women’s bodies have done. It isn’t the whole story of women’s bodies — I feel lucky, not to have been drawn into the fantasy that this is the whole story of women’s bodies — but it is one of the big stories. I wondered about that in my early twenties. I had already been a participant in some of the other big stories by then. A young man who I thought was my friend crawling into bed next to me and putting his hands on me, putting his dick on me, while I stayed as still as I could, hoping if I seemed to be totally asleep he would come to his senses and remember he shouldn’t be doing it. Plus just the same old boring drama of hating the way my body looked. I wondered, will this body ever get to be part of a good story about women?
I can’t always tell if this one is a good story. I feel sick a lot of the time. But I do get to think of myself as brave and competent, the way moms are. I can do this difficult physical challenge, and maybe that means I am becoming a mom. Maybe it just means that it’s so hard to be a woman. Hard or good or whatever else, it does strike me as more than a little bit miraculous. My body was a child’s body once, and now it is a woman’s body. Now my body is making someone else’s bones.
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In June I drove up to Breckenridge for Sarah’s bachelorette party. I took a pregnancy test Friday morning. Saturday night we sat around the hot tub and I put only my feet in, wondering if I was telling on myself, if the other girls would guess. I loved having a small and incredible secret. We talked about getting married, about work. Sarah talked about doing shifts in the ICU and seeing the worst things that can happen to people, and then going home to her fiancé and her dog, and feeling so lucky to be alive at all. I cried then and I’m crying now. The best parts are that primal, and that ineffable. I don’t know how to talk about it and am not sure I ever will: woman, husband, wife. Sister. Mother. Child. Home, baby. Body.
In July we went to Atlanta for Drew’s mom’s memorial. Jack and Flynn are having twins. We went to dinner and everyone was hugging. Drew and Trent stood around smoking cigarettes and saying, Can you believe that two of our wives are pregnant? We sat in plastic chairs at the cemetery and tears rolled down my face while Drew told a funny story about his mom’s constipation, and I’m still so proud of him, and I thought about how he took care of his mom just like Isabelle took care of her dad. We sat on either side of him at the bar and I thought about being a mom, of course I did, thinking about how if I get as lucky as it’s possible to get, my baby will be in his seat one day; older, I hope, but with friends on both sides, having just buried me, having talked in front of everyone about how much we loved each other.
I dream about the baby. The dreams are so normal. The baby is a boy — no, wait, she’s a girl. The baby cries, and I learn to breastfeed, and we get up in the night, and Joey and I love her so much. The baby is real, and perfect to me.
It’s like this everywhere, all the time. The life and the death, the beginning and the ending. What is there even to say? Nothing that hasn’t been said already. But I don’t need to say anything that hasn’t been said yet. I don’t need, actually, to express anything that is wholly original. I am satisfied with being alive. My own life is special enough for me. I just want to be part of this: the epic drama of regular people, of parents and children everywhere.
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I’m trying to focus on what’s happening now. The delightful future I imagine so easily, the experience of mothering that I so richly desire, is not owed to me, I know that. Unlikely and frightening things might happen. The baby might stop growing, might never be born. The baby might be born and get sick later. The baby might be born and much later it turns out they have schizophrenia. Or, unlikely and lovely things might happen. I might think the baby is one gender and twelve or fifteen years later they tell me I was wrong. The baby might have a sense of humor I don’t understand. The baby might not look like me at all, or Joey, but like their own person completely.
What I know for sure is that I get to be part of this part. I get to have a small kind of life inside me — right now! Life the size of a sesame seed, now a lemon, now a pomegranate, getting bigger all the time, knowing, somehow, how to be alive. And I am so glad, and so thankful. I always imagined how this would feel. When I saw the very faint second line on the pregnancy test, my first thought was, I knew it. I keep coming back to that in my mind, over and over. I keep coming back to how good it feels to want only the life that I already have.
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When I worked at the Boys & Girls Clubs at the start of Covid, we started making deliveries to our families after the sites shut down operations. I’d drive around the neighborhood in the yellow bus, dropping off diapers and formula and bags of food. It was always the best part of my week. I loved seeing the people, kids and parents and grandmas, who I had grown to care so much about. I remember feeling so struck by how limited I really was, how I had seen some of these kids five days a week for so long but all of a sudden I barely saw them at all.
One day I was walking down the street back to the bus and ran into a boy who went to the club with his two sisters. I loved this family. I still do. His eyes were glassy and red. How does any fourteen-year-old boy think they can hide smoking weed from the grown-ups, I wonder? We chatted lightly for a minute or two. And then he asked me, so sincerely, Miss Anna, is the world really going to end? And all of a sudden he was asking about the end times and hellfire and telling me about the Pentecostal church he goes to with his grandmother.
Sometimes being asked a challenging question by a kid is the most fun thing in the world. It’s like I have to be in an athletic stance, you know, squatting just a little bit, on my toes, ready for the ball to come in whichever direction, but just — conversationally. I loved standing on the sidewalk with this kid I knew so well, figuring out a way to reassure him and leave him feeling safe and calm without criticizing his grandma or telling him that religion makes people act crazy. I loved feeling like I got to be in the right place at the right time, walking around in his neighborhood when he was a little high, confused, guard down, looking for someone to tell him that everything is going to be okay without his having to look too vulnerable and uncool in front of anyone. The thing I love the most is getting to be a real person in someone else’s life for my job. I loved being a safe grown-up for kids when I worked at the clubs. I still love it. I love being a person in someone’s living room who knows them.
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I remember being in high school and watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the scene in the car when Audrey Hepburn says she doesn’t want to belong to anyone. I remember trying to articulate it to my boyfriend at the time. He was my second boyfriend in high school and I had told him since we started dating that I wasn’t his girlfriend. I didn’t like participating in a social thing, a named thing, that other people had ownership over. I just felt so itchy being in a teenage relationship. Lots of kids experiment with weed in high school, and I experimented with being someone’s girlfriend and saying I wasn’t. But even then I wanted so much. I told him I love you, and he was disappointed that he hadn’t said it before I did. Even then I knew that loving made you belong to people, and at the time, I didn’t always like it.
Now Joey makes me a smoothie every single morning and sometimes it’s the only vegetables I eat all day, since I mostly eat cheese and crackers the rest of the time. Afterward he washes the cup. I think I’ve washed two dishes in the last twelve weeks of pregnancy. I have no aspersions about belonging now. My life is not my own. I don’t think there is any other way to be a person, or even an organism. There is no such thing as growing into personhood alone, no one has ever done it. Only in context, only surrounded by other living beings. That’s fine by me. I love being a person. I love all the things I get to do, like swim in the lake, like sit in a window seat on the plane listening to a good song and trying to keep it surreptitious that I’m completely bawling my eyes out. I love that Isabelle texts me baby and McKenzie texts me bb. I love being my father’s daughter, my husband’s wife. Sure, I love being by myself, and having my own ideas. But I also love that I didn’t have to come up with all of this on my own.
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We went fishing last weekend, or really Joey went fishing and brought me a camp chair and I sat next to the river reading my book. I don’t fit into my waders anymore and anyway, the book was good. The water looked so smooth and powerful, pouring between two rocks. In the book the narrator described pinning the ribbon down on a present as a child so her mother could tie a bow. The sense memory bowled over me so quickly it brought little tears to my eyes, thinking of my own mom pulling the ribbon into a knot around my finger, me sliding my finger out with perfect timing, her saying Thank you like she really needed me for the task. All the ways she made me feel useful, noticed, good, pulled into the gentle rhythms of the day and the year: breakfast, back-to-school shopping, wrapping birthday presents. I looked up from the book just as a dipper flew past, up the canyon, swift and dark.
When we got back to the car and to cell service, messages arrived on our phones. I knew my parents must have been cleaning out the garage or the basement, because the family group text was full of photos of things on offer. A quilt, an end table, twenty-two small candles in glass votives.
“Please don’t say yes to twenty-two candles from your mom,” said Joey, and I laughed and laughed.
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This is the part of Catholicism that will never leave me, though now I go to a church sometimes and a synagogue sometimes, though now I speak Hebrew before eating dinner, though now the way I experience belief with gentle and total ambivalence is probably unrecognizable to either of my grandmothers. The part that will never leave me is the part that thinks the human and the divine are the same. That the divine is in objects and bodies, that the way it feels to be alive means God must have been a human being too, at least once. It’s the part that is always delighting in feeling breezes, and holding hands, and looking at images with my eyes that can see, and moving my strong legs on the mountaintop, and becoming not just a single person but now a mother and a child briefly in one body, and even writing emails!, and thinking all the while: this earthly catastrophe is so good that even God wanted to experience it. This is so good that after making it, after everything, God said, I’ve got to get down there and try it, too.
