Giving Birth To Hope

It smells like kindergarten in the classroom. For some reason, Noah’s kindergarten classroom smells exactly like mine did. Is it because of crayons? Or do small children all smell the same?

On the TV screen a slideshow of photos is playing. Pictures of smiling children holding hands, planting sunflowers, observing the cocoon of a caterpillar, singing “Over The Rainbow” on a stage while an elderly woman wearing a cat brooch plays the piano.

“Mama, I hate this nightmare movie,” Noah says to me, turning away from it all in disgust.

As a parent, there will be times when your kid is just a foreign alien to you. I look at Noah sometimes and think, I made him? He is from me?

There are other times when you will look at them and see yourself so clearly it’s as if you are one soul in two different bodies.

Noah’s objection of this cheerful slideshow is the second for me.

Noah is five, but somehow, has a dark sense of humor. I don’t know if I should be disturbed by this or if he’s just a very comedically sophisticated child.

We will be watching The Amazing Spiderman:

Mama: “Doctor Octopus looks…he doesn’t look like a villain, do you think so?”

Noah: “He isn’t wearing any pants!”

Mama: “But even in that shredded robe, his haircut, I don’t know, he looks like he owns a deli, not a mechanically engineered nuclear physicist”

On screen, the camera pans to a close up of Dr. Octopus’s face, his bowl haircut throwing me off his evil villain super status. He is walking in the ruin of his lab, which has just been blown up and is now surrounding him in pieces, completely destroyed. “My dream is dead,” he says, deadpan.

Noah bursts into a fit of laughter. I also want to laugh, but is this something we should be laughing at? The demise of a man’s dream?

Being a parent is something I never wanted to be. I have spent my life terrified of pregnant women. To me, this is just sheer insanity, growing humans inside of our bodies and then pushing them out.

I always knew that if I were to become a mother it would not be planned, and it would be an act of God in some sort of divine timing.

So when I became pregnant during an unprecedented global pandemic when a sociopathic reality show billionaire was running the country, this all made sense to me.

Of course.

But it is divine timing, because children are hope. In a time devoid of hope, I brought it into the world.

The world is screens, and short attention spans and brain rot. It is division, and cruelty, greed and injustice. I could go on and on but I won’t because when you are raising a child in this moment in time you can’t listen to any of that. You read the news but you cannot take it in, you cannot lose faith in humanity.

Because you gave birth to hope. And you have to keep it alive.

Everyday I have to rise above everything that makes no sense, everything painful, everything that makes me want to disappear off the face of the earth and take a vow of silence, shave my head and live the rest of my existence as a monk. What is a female monk called?

I just googled it, female monks are called Bhikkhuni’s.

It makes sense to me that Noah arrived when he did.

I think of this when I am watching his class act out a play, or sing. All these little five year olds, an army against an upside down world.

If we do our part as parents, this is the army that will turn the world right side up again.

I panic constantly now that I am a parent. I don’t know what sleep is anymore. Those hours are for panicking obsessively. There is so much to panic about.

Sometimes I’m panicking in the waking hours as well. The inside of my brain is a thousand small Jennifer’s running around throwing papers everywhere in a room full of file cabinets that are supposed to organize my life. Sometimes the file cabinets are on fire and some of the Jennifer’s perish.

On the outside though, I’m merely standing in the kitchen, next to a vase of roses I picked from outside my apartment complex, smearing peanut butter on bread. Making Noah a PB&J.

The only way to put the fire out and get all the Jennifer’s in my head to calmly take a seat at their assigned desk is to ground myself in the present moment.

So I make Noah a perfect PB&J.

The ratio of peanut butter to jelly is scientifically calculated and distributed equally.

It is cut with acute precision.

The Jennifers are all screaming bloody murder and I silence them with, “this sandwich is GLORIOUS!” I place it on a plate and hold it up, worshiping it like it’s an alter. “Stunning,” I whisper.

“Mama, how was I born?” Noah asks me when I present him with my masterpiece.

Oh God.

“Well, I grew you, inside of…my body,” I tell him.

Both our brown eyes grow wide with terror.

We both are stunned into a silence of complete and utter disbelief.

“How did I get out of you?” Noah asks.

“I, well I ate a dozen cupcakes and you came shooting out of me,” I tell him, which is the truth. Before Noah was born I had eaten almost twelve cupcakes. I was convinced it was gas, not labor. I have never eaten a cupcake since.

“You grew me in your body?” Noah asks again, he just cannot believe it.

I cannot believe it either.

“You threw me up?” he asks.

“No, you came out of the other end,” I tell him, hating this conversation and wanting it to end immediately.

“You..pooped me out of..your butt?” Noah says in a fit of laughter.

I don’t want to talk about..ugh vaginas, ick! But can I let Noah go on thinking that babies come out of their mama’s butts like when Yoshi poops out eggs in Mario Kart? Which is more traumatizing for him? What will his future therapist say?

All the Jennifers in my head are running around, everything is on fire, all the alarms are going off.

Noah is the first person to share my complete disbelief of this whole thing. This reproducing thing. It just can’t be. It just can’t happen this way? It can?!

“Do you want to see a picture of you when you were inside of my stomach?” I ask him, thinking I could show him all the ultrasounds.

“No,” Noah says immediately, without any thought or consideration.

He will be afraid of pregnant women like I was. Like I am. I am still afraid.

Although, maybe not. Noah is obsessed with the human body systems. He will spend hours copying the entire skeletal system into a notebook from a library book meant to be checked out by someone in med school. Then the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, the endocrine system. I learned what the pineal gland is from Noah.

He enjoys watching forty five minute long YouTube videos that explain all these systems. I think these videos are used in middle school science classes, but now with the luxury of the internet, my five year old can now enjoy them as well. I will be cooking in the kitchen and in the background, “indigestible waste is compacted and eliminated as feces through the anus.” I peek out of the kitchen and see Noah on his stomach with his sketchbook, “the digestive system,” he shows me.

For Christmas, Noah wanted one of those life size anatomy skeletons. Silvio and I pondered this for a long while. “The skeleton can stay at your house,” I told him. “You don’t want a five foot tall skeleton with all its organs exposed just hanging out in the corner of your apartment?” he asked. “At Christmas it’s seated at the table with the family,” I am imagining. “Maybe put one of your shirts on it, call it Herman,” I suggest.

“Maybe he will be a doctor,” my mom says, impressed and bewildered when I tell her this over the phone.

“Or a serial killer. I have been thinking about this. If Noah knows where all the organs are in the body, I don’t know, it’s unsettling,” I said, as one of the Jennifer’s assigned to the “bad parent” filing cabinet in my brain got up and flipped her desk over.

“Jennifer!” I’m sure in my mom’s brain all her Judy’s are running around screaming. “Why is my daughter so deranged? Where did I go wrong?!”

“Every serial killer has a mother. What did she do and how do I not do that?” I ask my own mother.

The other end of the phone is silent.

I have checked out a lot of autobiographies of serial killers at the library. You can’t find the information I’m looking for on “Mommy” blogs or by “Mommy influencers.” But I am learning a lot. Mainly, the mothers of these men with an insatiable desire to kill are usually intensely domineering, religiously fanatic, and psychologically incestuous. As long as I don’t do any of that I think Noah will grow up to perform surgery on human organs to save lives, not remove human organs to keep in jars in his refrigerator as souvenirs.

When I can pull Noah away from his medical books, I take him to the beach. He loves the beach, he chases the waves and collects shells. “Mama, what if the ocean sucked me up and I floated away?” He’s laughing and slap happy.

I pause, because I often think about that myself. How peaceful it would be to be sucked up by the ocean and float away forever. “That would not be funny!” I say and scoop him up as a wave crashes into us.

One day we were sitting on our towel, sharing salt and vinegar chips and chatting, when Noah asked, “Mama, do you want to know how the ocean got here?”

“Of course,” I replied, curious about what he will say.

He pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “God.” Like it was a secret he was sharing just with me.

My eyes welled up.

“What else did God make Noah?” I ask him.

“He made you and me,” Noah tells me and he tells me this with such certainty that the tears spill out of my eyes.

“Why are you crying Mama?” he asks me.

“These are happy tears my baby. Sometimes you will be so moved by something so good that it makes you tear up. Tears aren’t only for sadness. It’s just a physical sign of emotion. It’s okay to cry when you are sad or happy or when you laugh so hard you tear up, or even if you get angry. Crying is good” I explain.

“Why are you happy?” Noah says looking at me.

“Because God did make you and me, and all of us. I’m glad you know that. Never ever forget that okay? Look for God in everyone you see,” I tell him, pulling him close to me and kissing the top of his head.

“God made us, but our mamas poop us out,” Noah reminds me, bringing me completely out of the moment and causing all the Jennifer’s to get up from their desk and fling papers everywhere.

“You just, you come out of the bottom half- not the butt though…ughhhh!”

Noah bursts into a fit of laughter.

“I grew in your yoo-ter-is and came out your vergina,” Noah tells me, this information from one of his videos on the reproductive system. I do not correct him that it’s “va-gina,” not “ver” because ew omg ick, that worddddd.

I worry about raising Noah right, I worry the world will hurt him and I won’t be able to protect him or I’ll do something wrong. But he always reminds me that he already knows the right way, he is already strong and capable, he already sees the goodness and the humor and the absurdity and the wonder and love around him. It is my job to never let him forget these things. Children know the way. We seem to forget it all as we grow up.

I gave birth to hope. And now it’s my job to keep it alive.