A Year

Tara and I are in New York. I packed ahead of time to practice managing the car seat, the stroller, a changing bag, and a three-week suitcase. She’s growing while I’m shrinking, and it was a puzzle to figure out what each of us would need in New York’s Indian summer and Ireland’s blustery autumn, multiplied by a daily estimate of up-the-back poos and down-the-back milk, then pared down to the load my back can haul.

This time last year, I had just quit my job in Seattle. I’d originally meant to stay there for two years, and it had been more than four. I felt it was time to come up with a plan for the next half of life. I was a renter. I had no debts and no children, and was prone to being single. And I had a Green Card, at last. That added up to the freedom to go anywhere, and what I wanted was to go where my roots could grow. Whatever tribe and livelihood would bring me joy at fifty, I wanted to point toward now.

So I handed in notice to a company that had been very good to me, and conceived a few notions for a few months off. I would drive across the country to a six-week silent meditation retreat. Then I would go to Zambia, to see where I was born. I might start writing again, to discover what was on my mind. And after that, I’d move either back to Brooklyn or back to San Francisco, and settle in near old friends.

There were a lot of ‘I’s in those plans.

But it turned out that notions weren’t the only things conceived by then. A baby had picked me, for her own private reasons, and apparently, for the rest of my life I’d have company. “A wolf pack of two,” I joked at the time, but I was wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

Here’s something I wrote in 2008, in an essay about not having kids:

I’m bound up in an individualistic, transaction-based culture, rising and falling by my own efforts, and I don’t like to need anything from the people I like and love. That membrane of separateness, of self-reliance, is as fragile and illusory as a soap bubble, and a child would pop it instantly.

I was dead right. Independence was an illusion, and she dissolved it long before our shared waters broke. It took me all those months of pregnancy to grasp how babies make the world swell with love, and to learn to rest on that support.

All the baby gear I packed for this trip was infused with friendship. The car seat from Lisa, installed by Gordon. The stroller from Leelila, put together by Devin. The diaper bag from Tricia. The clothes and blankets and burp cloths from a dozen more friends. Our neighbor Keith loaded them all up and drove us to the airport, where he insisted on carrying Tara through security and all the way to the gate. On the other side, our New York friends were waiting to meet her and spoil us more.

Tonight she’s sleeping in Crown Heights, and I’m marveling that it’s a year today since I first learned of her existence. I didn’t know it would be this easy to be us.

Photo: Keith Cormier