Ticking Time Bomb, Little Life

I was walking in Prospect Park with the 11 week old baby tied to me in the wrap, “helping” her sleep, which requires myself not sleep. Those two words always together, like Ernie & Bert: SLEEP + NOT. Anyway, if you sleep, life wooshes you by, right? You miss autumn’s golden filaments. Your rights to complain are nil, and other mothers hate you but pretend not to. The scariest thing is about to happen to me but right now the scariest thing is: will she sleep?

Sleep when the baby sleeps, they say with a chirp. Surely said by folks who drug their babies into long stretches of sleep, and then drug themselves into the same. Or how about shut the hell up when you’re not asked? That’s right, parenting advice column, I’m talking to you. And have you checked out the first gold filaments of autumn? No, that’s right, you haven’t. Too busy catching up on sleep. Nature’s not going to wait for you, honey.

Somewhere along the way, my brain switched to thinking about career writers, to a NYT’s review I’d read. Since, along with not sleeping, I was not sending out my writing, this seemed like a natural way to bash my self esteem. This particular writer’s character described her life as hurtling indifferently through space strapped to a ticking time bomb.

I felt that. Or maybe it was just a regular old breeze, with no message attached.

To keep things quaint, a couple of ducks screeched—hurtled— from the sky into the lake.

Hey, ducks! I said.

Well, because it’s a well known fact that ducks are anti-social assholes, they didn’t have the common decency to even quack back. Fine. I kept walking. A couple passed me, both heavily tattooed, both with eyes glued down to their respective phones—while on the most beautiful path in the park on the most beautiful day the autumn could come up with.

ASSHOLES, I thought, chock-full-a judgment. Look up!

Well, no sooner did I dish out advice, my nose nestled into the baby for a hit of that Baby Smell, when I felt one foot go out from under me, the ground rolled and threw me forward. I hit the path with my one hand out, the other trying to tuck the baby’s head somewhere completely safe, maybe back into my womb. About to know what it felt like to crush your own baby.

I felt myself bounce, roll, and then I was on my back, in a pile of the season’s first unglamorous dry brown leaves, looking up at the tree canopy, quiet rustle of leaves.

The tattooed couple (I LOVE YOU BOTH) came rushing back: oh my god oh my god oh my god, they spluttered. Even at that moment my judgment stood tall:  HAVE YOU HEARD OF KEEPING CALM IN OTHER PEOPLE’S EMERGENCIES HO HUM IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A SECOND CAREER YOU GUYS SHOULD NOT BE EMT’s BUT ANYWAY.

Are you ok is the baby ok are you ok is the baby ok is she ok are you, you —baby—you—baby?

i guess if her head was smashed they wouldn’t ask, would they? Or would they?

I think so? I was not sure if I was speaking or thinking. The baby lifted her mighty head on her mighty neck from my chest and began to wail. So she was not dead. She was not bashed.

They knelt by my side, and I had a tour of their tattoos.

CAN WE HELP YOU?
Surely they were not yelling, but the ducks began to.

Yes, but SHHHHHHHHH.SHHHHHH. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS.

Because, of course, she had fallen asleep just before I fell.

They helped me sit up, nervously.

REALLY ARE YOU OK?

REALLY I AM NOT.

I checked the baby. I checked her like she was the last one boarding Noah’s arc, an audition before the flood. Body parts. Sound.

Her hair still stood up straight, as if she’d been electrocuted in a lightning storm.

I think I’m OK, I said. But if you can give me a minute, I think I’m in shock. If you could just stay with me a minute..

SURE SURE SURE, they said, reminding me of the nervous blabbering goose in Charlotte’s web.

It was the middle of the day, I could not have been more in love with them than I was with my husband when I agreed to marry him-- for being on that path at that moment, and for having the impulse to kneel and assist.

We sat up. I checked her again.

They pointed to the stick like it was the true ASSHOLE VILLAIN of this story. It was a very small but thick stick, the size of my pointer finger. No wonder I had not seen it.  No wonder looking up is not always the best way to go through life.

I was pretty sure my ankle, which has been rolled approximately a million times in my almost four decades, was going to suck.  But for now, it could hold my weight.

I’m going to walk, I told them, and was hoping for drum-rolls, angels clapping, a “NOT THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE, ASSHOLE” type award.

ARE YOU SURE DO YOU NEED TO GO SOMEWHERE? They rose with me and offered what they could, which was company. They picked the leaves out of my hair gingerly.

I wanted to let them continue on their tattooed way, so I could be alone with the fact that one of my biggest fears had just passed. I had fallen with her tied to me. I could have injured or killed the baby. I did not injure or kill the baby.

My mama stunt double had jumped in and taught me how to fall just so in an instant. And yet I knew she could have just have easily been busy elsewhere. I was glad I had not been on my phone, texting my husband something snarky or desperate. Then, my asshole status would have been confirmed. This was an innocent fall, holding my babe, smelling her, appreciating her ticking time bomb-ness, which some stick sought to detonate.

I thought of innocent people dying in innocent ways, surely long before they felt their work was done.

Sometimes all it takes is a stick, like in a zen master’s parable, to untangle you from the drama of yourself.

I walked very very slowly out through the park, checking every footfall, nursing my daughter on a bench along the way while guys in rasta gear smoked spliffs unapologetically across from me. I looked for signs she’d become demented or maimed that the filter of shock had not revealed. Was she missed a hand, some skin somewhere, was her jaw unhinged?

But she was just herself.

Nursing felt like the holiest thing since the nativity manger.

It is easy, when it happens, to respect how life changes, or can, in an ordinary, stick-in-the-path instant.

Of course, we don’t perceive that all our instants are like that: tiny capsules of mortality, which we are forced to swallow, until the one we gag on.

We can lurch to the ground anytime, causes obvious or not, warning signs obvious or not. There may or may not be passerby’s who can help us; the circumstances may be dignified, or they may be rather banal. My Tai Chi teacher in Thailand, for example, slipped ironically in the bath tub—chi doesn’t provide traction— and died of concussion. Her gentle hands did not brake her fall.

Sometimes, we fall down fatally in bathtubs. If that isn’t an asshole death what is?   Only in literature might a death mirror a life in its poetic-ness. More often it’s a duck screeching into a bottomless dark lake.

Perhaps appreciating how slippery our lives really are should make my steps heavier, more decisive. NOPE. Lighter, tentative: can I commit to this if there are no guarantees? If fortune cookies are just, well, highly processed cookies?

I’ll be right here with my sneaker hovering, hormonal sweat trickling down my back, scanning the path for sticks with legs.

I had a baby; that’s what having a baby is: SLEEP, NOT. Once a pregnancy gets rolling, there’s a biological commitment to making a person, but how that person will be formed, its destiny, what will go right and wrong, is not up to me or you or the ducks or hills or trees or leaves.

When my daughter came out, she was examined and swaddled, but I’m pretty sure what they did back there, under the bland gaze of the pediatrician, was strap on the bomb, adjusting the buckles to suit her tiny form, and start it ticking.

Like the umbilical cord, these straps soon aren’t visible. But just as no person can (as of yet) come to be without having been tied to a placenta, no life can exist without premise of explosion, matter returning to matter, crumbling leaves to crumbling leaves, breathy trees to breathy trees.

When I get home with her, I sit on the couch, a little dumb. I drink some tea, and as my shock wears off, the ankle sets off sirens of pain. I can hardly put weight on it as I go back and forth on my domestic circuit, my son naked and yelling at me from the couch “I won’t listen to anything you say ever!” and my infant daughter, tripped by his asshole cortisol spouting, screams for an hour and a half straight. I yell at my son, no better for my scrape with mortality.

I call my sister, embarrassed, and confess to her that I am only calling her so I don’t keep yelling at him, while he launches himself off the couch over and over, knocking the paintings and photos sideways, like our lives. And the baby quivers from her own screaming, and I quiver from how exposed and exploded and present I feel.

Tomorrow we will walk that path again. I will apologize to my son, and explain. We will kick asshole sticks to the side, chipmunks darting, the weather temporarily just fine. I will be slower, hold her body even tighter, smell her head with one eye straining to see the ground.  But there will still be that thing I will miss, the stumbling. The tattoo’d folks will pass, nothing to see here. But I’ll hear the ticking, barely masked by the soft sound the leaves make.