The Me You See (5 page)

I tried to sketch it all.

Because it was beautiful.

But today is different. Today is not beautiful. Today I’m
going to a funeral.

My wife sits on the edge of the bed, hardly able to put
weight on her legs or keep balance, not just because she’s gotten weaker in the
last month, but also because she can’t process what happened.

Like any of us could.

“I don’t get it,” she says, as I help get her dressed. Her
arms are flaccid and she doesn’t want to move. “I don’t get what happened. It
doesn’t make sense. She was doing what she loved.”

I can’t even respond because it feels like I’ve swallowed a
handful of cotton balls and if I open my mouth to speak I’ll gag. I can’t agree
or disagree. I just don’t know.

“She was doing what she loved,” my wife says again.

I nod.

I slip my wife’s arm into the sleeve of her coat and think
about her niece. How she was doing what she loved because it was what she loved
and not because she thought it made a difference to anyone or anything. It was
just what she loved. If I could have picked Stefia up off that stage and shook
her alive I would have told her that what she did mattered. It had always
mattered. She had affected people she didn’t even realize she had affected. She
had been the topics of people’s conversation when they were at the end of their
rope and needed something to hang on to.

And maybe, just maybe, she had even helped to keep them
alive.

“She was just doing what she loved,” my wife repeats again
like a mantra that can’t be forgotten, her face sick with confusion and pale
with incredulity. “Just what she loved.”

I nod again.

“I’ve been doing what I loved,” she says.

And I nod, but this time more slowly and every bob of my
head feels like a weight pulling my chin closer to the ground. Because I know
what thoughts my wife has connected. And I get what she’s saying.

And I have to accept it.

I have to.

We don’t say anything else. My wife leans on me to stand up
and I help her with slow footsteps to an exit that neither of us knows how to
handle.

Lullaby, and good night…

A lullaby plays over the loudspeaker system whenever a baby
is born here. I love to hear that sound. Another life successfully brought into
the world. A potential bright spot on the pockmarked face of our country’s
population.

I work as a labor and delivery nurse and I love my job. I
love meeting the people. I love how different they all are. I love their
stories. But mostly I love their vision. Their carefully laid out plans for how
they’re going to raise the baby they’ve just birthed to be the Person Who
Changes The World. They’re not going to make the same mistakes their parents
made. They’re going to do things differently. Because they are different.

They say it’s all in how you’re raised, you know? It’s all about
what your parents did or didn’t do or how many siblings you had or what kind of
neighborhood you grew up in or if you sold Girl Scout cookies or let the JWs
into your house. What kind of food you ate for dinner. If you sat at the dinner
table as a family or ate in front of the television. How early you ate eggs or
peanuts and how much candy your parents allowed you to have.

Let me tell you what I think: it’s all a big joke. And I’ve
only found one person who ever agreed with me.

Stefia.

I’ve worked on this floor for almost 20 years. It never
fails to amaze me how much the birthing and parenting recommendations change
year to year. What new theories they come up with. What practices aren’t okay today
that were okay yesterday. What beliefs are going to mess your baby up for good,
and what things don’t make a difference at all.

“Heidi?” my co-worker, Amanda, asks. She is fresh out of
nursing school and makes me crazy. Her squeaky voice is the solitary reason I
eat too much chocolate when my shift is done.

“Yeah?”

“The patient in room 310 is asking for more ice chips.”

“So give her more ice chips.”

“Do you think that’s okay, though? She’s had, like,
twenty-four cups or something of ice since she got here.”

“It’s just ice, Amanda. Frozen water. It’s not going to
kill anyone.”

That is, unless there was some new study about laboring
mothers and ice that I missed the memo on.

Amanda turns around and leaves quickly with the
twenty-fifth cup of ice, looking like a puppy that has been yelled at. I think
about apologizing for about half a second but decide against it. That girl
drives me crazy just by breathing.

Maryanne, the charge nurse, shoots me a look that I can’t
quite read. I can’t tell if she thinks I should follow Amanda to apologize, or
if she thinks Amanda is annoying, too. Maybe she just knows that I’m on edge
because Stefia is being buried today and I’m stuck here with Miss Ice Chip. And
honestly, that’s just about enough to make me want to drink about a quart of
whatever they shoot in your spine for an epidural.

Numb me up and make me stupid so I can totally forget this
day even happened.

I shuffle papers on the desk at the nurse’s station, making
a mental note of what rooms are full and who is closest to delivering. Room 310
is closest but wants to go au natural and refuses to let her labor be augmented
unless there is a medical emergency. Room 307 is a good four hours from
delivery and would literally do anything to speed it up. Room 303 has a whole
list of things she wants after the baby arrives.

The mothers are all so needy. And so worried. And it makes
me wonder when it was that things got so complicated. Birth is just birth. It’s
the same process as it was a thousand years ago. Babies are still just babies
and they need to eat and sleep. Why do we complicate things?

The hard stuff comes after the birth. Most women don’t want
to hear about that while they’re trying to push their baby out, but I think on
some level they know it’s true. The hard stuff comes later. But it’s not even
the stuff that new parents think is going to be hard. Not all the stuff that
people talk about or read about or research while they’re decorating the
nursery or deciding whether or not to vaccinate. It’s the stuff that no one is
brave enough to talk about.

I contemplate what kind of parent Miss Ice Chip would be.
She’s a total flake. To be honest, I’m not even sure how she got hired except
for maybe her sparkling bedside manner. She makes most patients smile, and she’s
calm and peaceful—perfect for those new age hippy mothers who come in and think
that low lighting and soft music will change anything about how their babies come
into the world. But as a nurse, as someone who needs brains to complete a task,
she’s a shame to the department.

Amanda as a parent would be hilarious.

Except that’s the thing people don’t get. I’ve watched
hundreds of women walk out of the hospital with babies, bringing them home to
raise them up the right way. They’ve all got different ideas about what that
is, though. They’ve all read different books, followed different baby gurus on
Twitter, and liked a multitude of conflicting baby-raising things on Facebook.
But what they don’t get is that it doesn’t matter.

It really doesn’t.

Or I should say it has no bearing on how your kid turns
out. It has no bearing on how their life ends up. And no one wants to talk
about that because it makes parenting seem worthless. If a child’s life is
going to turn out how it turns out, why do we all try so hard? Why do we debate
babywearing and vaccination and whether or not a child should be breastfed for
five weeks or five years?

Does it matter?

No one wants to contemplate the answers to these questions
because if there’s any truth to them, then a parent’s job is pretty worthless.
And who wants to be the bearer of that message? Who wants to be the one to
point out that if you offer a golden platter of Everything Perfect to two
different kids, they might each take that platter in opposite directions? One
might cure cancer while the other invents a new kind of atomic bomb and
purposely blows up three quarters of the world.

How much of what we do even matters?

I don’t know if any of it does.

And neither did Stefia.

**

I talked to Stefia for the last time a little over a month
ago. Of course I didn’t know it would be the last time. It’s funny, I always
think if I would have known it was the last time I was going to talk to
someone, I would have said something different—awe inspiring or infinitely
humorous. But we can’t ever know it’s the last time. That’s the way it works.

And maybe it’s better that way.

I had walked into the coffee shop for my Americano before
my Tuesday shift (like always) and she was there (like always). She asked if I
wanted room for cream, and like always, I refused.

Stefia was one of those beautiful and friendly and smart
people, a mix of things that everyone would write down on their Personality
Wish List if ever they were given the option. She could hold her own in
conversation on just about every topic I’d ever brought up, which was quite a
few, since my visits usually fell smack in the middle of the dead time at the
coffee shop.

“What’s on your mind today?” she asked, as she pressed the
lid over the to-go cup and handed it across the counter to me.

I took the cup, removed the lid (like always), and blew
gently into the glorious bean water that would fuel my ten hour shift.

“I’m thinking about parents,” I answered.

“New parents? Old parents?” she asked. “Are you having
another baby?”

I laughed. “God, no. My two are finally grown up and moved
away. I’d die if I had to go through labor at my age.”

“You’re not that old,” Stefia said.

“Seriously, 42 is too old for labor,” I said, putting a
definite punctuation mark on the entire idea.

Stefia came around the counter and joined me on the
customer side of the shop, filling her own mustard colored mug from the air pot
on the center island. She leaned against the granite slab, sipping her dark
hazelnut blend (like always) and waited for me to speak.

“Do you think parents matter?” I asked her.

She looked down at her feet and I could tell she was
wiggling her toes around in the fronts of the moccasins she wore around the
shop.

“That’s kind of a loaded question,” she answered.

“Do you think how a parent raises their child makes any
difference in a child’s life?”

“There are a lot of things that make a difference in a
child’s life,” Stefia said. “Not just the parents. Maybe not the parents at
all.”

“It has to make some difference, doesn’t it?”

“Why? Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with how you
were raised.”

“It has to play some part,” I said.

“Not always. Why do some kids play violent video games and
not go crazy, but others play the same game and shoot up their school?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And then with a sigh that spoke more
than my words, added, “I just don’t know anymore.”

“What’s really going on?” she asked. “What are you actually
talking about?”

All I needed was an invitation and it came spewing out of
my mouth. I told her about the phone call I’d received two nights earlier and
how my 19 year old son was in jail for possession for the third time. And his
girlfriend was pregnant but she’d lost the baby when he pushed her down the
stairs.

“He wasn’t raised that way,” I said. “I mean, my husband
and I are so far from that world…it’s like, how did he end up there? You
believe me, right?”

“People always want to blame the parents,” she said,
without skipping a beat.

“Well, what else is there?”

She took a chair at the table I was at, her thin and toned
body like a trophy of youth she wouldn’t appreciate until she was older. And I
wondered suddenly why I was discussing any of my issues with her. A solid
twenty years—at least—separated us. Why did her opinion even matter to me?

“Parents aren’t the be-all, end-all of influence,” she
continued with a shrug. “Sometimes, what influences someone is just random.”

 “Random,” I repeated, practically choking on the word.
“What about your parents? They’ve influenced you, right?”

Stefia sat with her elbows resting on the table, hands
holding her cup just under chin, but she didn’t drink.

“My mom isn’t around. Hasn’t been for several years. My dad
is just barely getting by with mom gone, even all this time later. He’s like
some corn husk that was tossed on the ground to wither away.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know she had died.”