control
Isn’t everyone like this a little bit when they are little? There is nothing to control, you are learning the rules of right and wrong based on your house and then your school and inside yourself. And all that isn’t easy at all. Maybe it’s the hardest thing to be a kid. No say over even what’s for dinner or on which side to part my hair. Little ways, then: if I cross this street before the hand starts blinking, then I’ll get an A on my math test. If I hold my pencil like this and turn a doorknob like that, then the teacher will love me tomorrow. I will only eat this and only weigh this much. I will get grades that show I am in control.
Then maybe you leave for college, no longer under parental control, and you want to make decisions for yourself, and maybe some of them turn out badly and you feel a little scarred inside, wobbly. Your parents were right and you were wrong. And what good is intuition when it turns out like this. So you rebuild and rebuild, balancing what you knew with what you know, what you thought with what you think, or what you think you think.
Because I have learned to surrender so much: so as to make, to write, to parent, to love.
And then there’s a child born into a house full of all kinds of worldviews, every child is. Born into all kinds of histories and traumas, all our palimpsests of regret and enlightenment.
And with Rosie I have been given a situation where I have to surrender more control than probably any parent should. To not know where she is and to trust that the other house does, and to learn later that they didn’t; to not know what she’s doing and to trust that she’s doing okay, and to learn later that she isn’t. It isn’t good for my digestion, for my heart, for my ability to trust. But also it is.
My friend has the opposite situation: she’s raising her son alone. Every piece of food that enters his mouth is food that she bought and prepared for him. His allergies are severe enough that she watches him with a magnifying glass — if he laughs too hard he’ll get asthma; if I eat a peanut and kiss his cheek he’ll swell up. Don’t run too fast, don’t fall, don’t swim that deep, don’t eat this, don’t wear that. He bikes to the stop sign and stops — she knows that he will, her heart doesn’t hit her throat like mine does — I don’t know that Rosie will stop. I don’t even know where she left her bike — it transitioned with her to her mother’s house — and she doesn’t know where her helmet is, and she was surprised to find her bike lock in a bag she didn’t remember she had used.
Yesterday in the ultrasound, the baby wasn’t turned to give us its profile or a clear view of its heart. They took other measurements and waited for the baby to turn. They pushed against my stomach to try to wake it. My stomach growled; the baby moved its arms but didn’t turn. I thought turning thoughts. I talked to the baby silently. I jiggled from side to side. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I asked. The sonagrapher said no. They ended up making me pee to lower the uterus, which sometimes turns it, and it finally worked. The baby is connected to me, it’s in my body, part of my body, but already I can’t even control which ways it’s facing. It’s already its own person, and I have so much to learn.
