The Carraway Seed

Lately I keep coming back to this mental image: Devin and I are in a boat. It’s a little boat, like a canoe but a little more rounded. We are both rowing. Sometimes it’s hard work and sometimes we just clip along. All around is open water. We can’t see any land — we can only see each other, the boat, and the water. When we departed the far shore, our families and friends were there waving us goodbye, and we know when we reach the other side, most of those same people will be there to see us ashore.

(Of course, this is an illusion. There are lots and lots of people rowing with us, shuttling our little boat forward.)

The trouble is, we don’t know exactly who we will be when we get to the other side, and we don’t know yet the identity of the third person who will be in the boat with us when we arrive.

It’s the best metaphor I have so far for how this long, steady, progressive transition feels. It reminds me a little of the Buddhist concept of the hinayana, the small boat, the one that takes you on your journey to nirvana. Admittedly, it’s a concept I understand very badly — mostly based on a Joseph Campbell story in which a ferry boat from Manhattan to New Jersey stands in for crossing from samsara to nirvana. It’s hard to quote just a tiny bit of the story, but I’ll try:

“And then [the ferryman] says, ‘Now listen, there’s a point here, namely, you can’t come back. This is a one way trip. You’re giving up your family, your ideals, your money, your future. Are you ready to quit?’

“And you say, ‘I am fed up.’

“And he says, ‘Get aboard.’

“This is the little ferryboat — hinayana. Only those who are ready and willing to quit the whole show can go across. And we read in the texts, unless you are as eager for nirvanic release as a man whose hair is on fire would be for a pond in which to dive, don’t start. It’s too difficult…

“You get aboard. You do the boat, and you think, ‘Mother,’ but it’s too late, you’re in the boat. It’s ship ahoy. You learn to love the splash of the water. You begin to speak in a new language: port and starboard instead of left and right, fore and aft instead of in front and behind. You don’t know any more about Jersey than you did when you left. But you’ve begun to think about the people in Manhattan as fools.”

…

“You’re in Jersey, you turn around to see Manhattan. You’re in the realm of non-duality. You’re in the realm of transcendance of all pairs of opposites. There’s no Manhattan over there. There’s no Hudson River between. There’s no ferryboat. There’s no man in the boat. This is it. That’s all it is. You’re going past the duality and the realization is: I was there all the time.”

In more mundane thoughts, I wonder if I am just having a bad couple of days or whether this is really the beginning of the super-uncomfortable part of pregnancy. My mid-back is killing me, I’ve had heartburn after every meal for two days, I’m cranky and fussy, and my one luxury, laying on my back, makes me light-headed. And those are just the discomforts I feel like talking about in front of an audience.

Some days the baby kicking is still the best thing in the world, but on other days it’s become part of the mental furniture. Today was one of those days — I was too busy at work to pause and enjoy those movements, which are becoming more powerful all the time. The birth seems months away and dreadfully close. There seems so much to do, and it seems so impossible that it took us something like three months to properly empty half a room. (Granted, a lot of time was spent poring over pieces of our personal history that happened to be in that half of the room.)

Because I am too Type-A to wait until the last minute to start sorting out our birth supplies, I asked our midwife for a list of what she’ll want us to have by the 36-week mark (which is now 10 weeks away). Fortunately, our midwife has her act together and most of it can be ordered in a single kit that includes everything from the massive chux pads I’ll wear until afterbirth stops oozing out of me to the finer things, such as “4 packets lubricating gel,” “3 pairs sterile gloves, size 7,” a cotton baby hat and a bottle of arnica. The rest of the supplies sound like a cross between a dinner mise-en-scene and a disaster-preparedness hoard: small bottle of olive oil, gallon-sized ziploc bags, flashlight, tarp, salad bowl, more hats. (How many heads is this kid going to have?)

I’m also starting to be really eager to have the baby, to stop having to row the boat and stare at all that open water, but on the other hand I feel like I can more or less keep the baby safe inside me now, and once it comes out there are all these dangerous things that can happen to it that wouldn’t happen were it in my belly. Or that can happen to me or Devin that could harm its life somehow. Part of being in the little boat together lately has required a lot of conversations about really difficult things, a much higher concentration of difficult “what ifs” than we’ve ever examined in one place before, and it’s oddly not so much scary as just indescribably heavy.

It’s probably for this reason that I’ve also started re-reading Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions,” which I was trying to save for the week or two before the birth. She says:

“Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me … Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.”

– Beth