In the Scheme of Things

Sharing a post written when Claire was an infant:

I told George that our baby, Claire, was born carrying all her eggs inside her tiny body. He asked in amazement, “So you’re telling me she has our grandchildren inside her already?” I said, “Well, if she has children, yes."

Right now, it’s all beautiful potential.

Claire was a promise for me for a long time as well. Nine months in my belly, yet the possibility of her has been inside of me for my whole life. That must say something about the psychic bond between mother and child. For Claire and me, it’s been a particularly long journey. Forty-four years together, then George joined the mix and she became her own separate person. I like to believe that she was born wise, because she lived forty-four years as part of me before she started her own life.

It’s a wonder she or any of us are born at all. Remember when they used to give a prize to the thousandth customer to walk through the department store doors? It’s kind of like that. One lucky somebody gets to be the thousandth customer, but many, many more need to make up the nine hundred ninety-nine who go before.

And that’s just the half of it, literally. You get one shot to swim better than 300 million others or so.

Right from the start, the male and female impulse seem so contrary – on the feminine side, hanging out patiently and waiting for just the right moment to take the plunge, on the male, jumping from the gate and enduring the race. With each, there’s an indefinable measure of grace.

As I look at her sleeping, she is so substantially her, so uniquely Claire. The seeming randomness of it all makes me shiver.


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