Wonder
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“Come to my room as soon as you’ve finished sweeping!” he orders me, keen to get back to our game. We’ve come home from a hot August bike ride, he on his new mountain bike, which has shocks and suspension and the whole shebang, as he’d say. He raced his bike down the steps of the high school, leaning back off his seat, understanding how best to absorb the bounce with his rapidly lengthening body. He careened through the woods, flying over logs and jumps, while I watched from the sidelines, too scared to do it myself. “Watch this, Mommy,” he yells, making sure I can see each move, how he’s mastered this track already on the new bike that looks like it’s for a big kid. He is a big kid now, nine and starting grade four next week, and he made his own sandwich when we arrived home hot and sweaty. Now it’s back to this game we’re playing, where we live in an imaginary land and have strange jobs and work amongst the different stuffy creatures who inhabit his canopied bed. A pocket of littleness I know won’t last much longer as he barrels toward double digits.
I was so in awe of him when he was born. That he was here, had made it, after the death of his sister and all the miscarriages. I was sure – I knew – he was the most beautiful baby who ever was born in that hospital and for his whole first year I carried him as close to my body as I could at all times. My little wonder. The one who lived.
As he yells at me to hurry and I wipe up the last crumbs of our sandwiches I think about how the wonder wears off, or becomes more commonplace. And then there are these moments: the sheer physicality of him, red faced and sweaty, grubby with forest dirt, his grin, his voice, still childish, calling me. His liveness. A wonder.
And I wonder about sisters. The little niggling thought, hiding further back than it used to, an almost guilty thought now. Sisters. What would life be like now if she had lived? What if E had the sister I wanted so badly for her? What would two girl heads, close together, conspiring and giggling in the night, conjure up for fun? What secrets would they keep? The other night, we went to the beach and E and her friend swam as the sun set. Watching them from the sand, their far off shapes silhouetted against the reddening sky, I could imagine it: their laughter pealing over the ocean’s waves, their shadowy arms waving to the sun as it sank against the mountains, their arms around each other as they ran dripping back towards me.
It’s just imagination. Not even a memory of sisters exists. Only what I’d hoped for. And the guilty feeling returns, rushing in, because if there were sisters, here, now, there’d be no brother. I can’t wish her here; I can’t wish him away. The family calculus never adds up.
As I wipe the counter, the not-memory-image of her runs through me, a laughing shadowy thing dripping ocean water like stars. She smiles at me and turns away, diving back under the blackening water, slipping away with the sun.
“Come on,” he calls again. His curls still stuck to his forehead, his favourite stuffy gripped in one hand, hope and expectation and impatience on his face. The one who lived. I toss the cloth aside and run down the hall after him as she swims away through the dark night waters, reflecting the stars. A wonder.
If you’ve had a child born after, how do you reconcile your longing for the baby who died and the child who lived? Is this a complicated longing for you or have you found a way to reconcile it?