Thirteen
/I don’t know if this is still an expression in Korean parlance, but in 2007, an elder at our Korean church announced that I was a woman “who was no longer alone.” Meaning I was pregnant with you.
As was pretty on-brand for me in my twenties, I resented the phrase. Pregnancy did not automatically change me from “no longer” anything, especially as determined by an elder male. That was for me to determine.
Some weeks later, I was sitting at my work cubicle and struggling to stay awake. I know, I know. You’re like, Mom, can you not with the tale again about how you were all working and grad schooling and commuting and incubating a human. WE GET IT. You’re Pioneer Woman.
Okay but this is important. Because my boss called me into his office and waved a report at me that I had “written.” He basically said there was nothing in it he could use. You’ve probably never had someone tell you that, or maybe you have, but since you are not a “hard-o” like I am, let me assure you. That reckoning should have been devastating and I should have been way insulted. Instead I was just so tired all the time that it just made me feel…sad. For my boss. Because he was depending on me to do the dang thing and I was just a tired fail potato that housed a Costco sized M&Ms every afternoon.
I went to the restroom (as I did in those days every 12 minutes) to pull myself together.
I stood in the stall and held my belly and felt the full freight of my sadness. And then I felt you. You turned and for the first time I could discern the outlines of your head, your back, your legs all tucked. Sacred encounters can happen anywhere, and there I met the holy and the wholly lovely person who had been with me for all the conversations and the commutes and the interminable classes at night. I was no longer alone.
I had no idea. No clue. Not even a speck of the dustcloud that trails after the miracle on which a love like you floats.
You are musical and hilarious. You are still a nature baby, held in the thrall of frogs and turtles and other amphibious creatures. You speak fluent sarcasm and can carry a bit with an ease that amazes me. We recently met a family at the dog park whose Boston terrier named Monte has spawned an entire fiction series that you will oftentimes play out while riding with me in the car. You are so beautiful and don’t know it. You are learning to love being you.
You spent this year fighting a personal crisis of which only you and Daddy and I will ever know the true depths. You will meet people in life, good and loyal friends and partners, who will learn about this crisis, but they will only understand it as ones learning about the events of a history instead of marching across the battlefield in combat. I hope you will remember what we learned in fighting this war alongside you, and that you will always know the miles we would travel to help deliver you to safety.
Throughout this past year, none of us have been alone. We have been always together, and the edges of where we began and ended became blurred by the seasons that bled into one another that we have called this long quarantine. We dream of a time when we will be free of the restriction and the fear and the stupid masks. But we also know there will be a loss that accompanies this freedom, and that loss will be the togetherness we will have called Never Being Alone. I would not relive this year for all the M&Ms in the world, but I will not soon trade in the marvel of once again finding myself with you.
