Annabelle asked me the big question the other day.”Mom, where do babies come from?””From their mothers,” I replied.”I know, but where do the mothers come from?” she asked.”Oh, well, the ocean and the stars and the mountains all come together and swirl their energy and make a baby.””Oh,” she said, drawing a picture of herself standing next to a flower, “I thought they came from nurses.”
My little sister has always told me that you’re supposed to tell the biological details to children when they ask these sorts of questions. I remember listening to her tell her own preschooler, Kalvin, when he asked the same question, that there are sperms and eggs and the sperms swim up the river and joins the egg and that makes a baby. I can’t imagine my explanation was any more confusing than that.
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Love and Loss and the Magic of Fairy Wings
And now the baby is 16, the same age as Sleeping Beauty when she pricked her finger on that spinning wheel and fell asleep. But my girl is definitely not asleep. She’s awake, probably the most awake person I know. At 16 years old, the is full of love and kindness and a devotion to truth and justice that seems unshakeable. This girl can easily defeat fire-breathing dragons. So maybe all the wishes from the women/fairies at her baby shower worked that day.
The truth of the truths, the truth of my battered grieving soul, is that love just keeps growing. I loved my father so much and then I met Kim, and my heart burst into lights and a whole new love, a love I had never seen before and it felt like my heart got bigger, and then I became a mother, and my love grew even bigger. Boundless. Timeless. Eternal. I still feel it when I look at the sunlight on the sea, when I link arms with my son, when I hear my daughter yelling, “Mom! I need an emergency hug right away!”
And, now that I know the staggering pain that comes with losing the people you love so much, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. I wouldn’t trade one extraordinary moment.
When we made the wings all those years ago, Kim kept saying we were infusing them with our love. I think she was right. Because if there’s one real truth in this world, no matter where people go when they die, the love remains, and in the swamp of grief, I need to remember the wings.
