Six days later Porter came. I remember the casual sign taped at the receptionist's desk in the ER-- just a regular piece of computer paper with the default font, asking patients to alert the person behind the counter if you'd recently traveled to Wuhan, Italy, or Iran. The images of empty subway stations, masked citizens, and scrolling obituaries felt like exotic, foreign problems then. Kobe Bryant's death seemed to be the only one that mattered the day that Porter was born.
The day I had my six-week postpartum check-up with my midwife was an unusually mild day for March in New Jersey. I remember walking out afterwards with my perfect trophy baby, and a healthy body that I recognized as my own and was grateful for. My stitches were gone and my uterus had tucked itself back where it belongs, and even greater healing had taken place within our home. Our family had survived two incredibly draining years (see here, ICYMI), and my shoulders, alleviated and untroubled for the first time in so long, finally let go. It felt like Porter and I were free, a new beginning. Maybe we'd even have an early spring.
A week later the world stopped. There's no reason to describe the scrambling, the angst, or the upheaval. It happened to all of us. The pandemic seemed to cut into each of our films, turning our moving pictures into stills. It caught our family with Chris working inside the make-shift Covid ICU floors as the only chaplain at a community hospital in the epicenter of this global curse. I was home alone teaching our kindergartener how to read and write, sending apologetic emails to her PE teacher for blowing off the obstacle course assignment, resentfully shoving screens in front of our 2-year-old's eyes, and wondering whether I should call this heavy fog "postpartum" or "pandemic" anxiety and depression. And that was before our next freeze frame when my laughable "maternity leave" ended and I added full-time WFH to my to-do list the same week that the virus peaked in New Jersey.
I've heard that grief slices life into Before and After, and that try as you might, you never get to return to Before. I'm a sucker for newborns; I always have been. The birthday cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, and the smell of baby's pink skin is intoxicating, and the world seems to simultaneously stop spinning and spin wildly away. But the way I look back at Porter's first weeks of life is more than wistful. My eyes linger at each picture wringing out any drop of Before, homesick for a home that is no longer here.
The big kids must feel it too-- the satirical homesickness felt by those of us who never leave the house. On days that were too rainy or too cold to play outside, I would take them for a drive to stretch the afternoon to dinnertime. The kids took turns picking our route. Each time they wanted to look out the car windows to see their schools, the library, and the hospital (now adorned with "healthcare hero" signs), asking to recreate meeting our new baby who didn't even have a name back then. Their last memories of Before.
The name Porter means "gatekeeper." In the Benedictine tradition, the porter is someone chosen to welcome visitors to the monastery, no matter who they are, or how they arrive. Said another way, the porter is someone who looks for strangers to welcome in as guests, to see Christ in each of them. The name rose to the top of our short list as we watched in horror at the current administration's immigration policies that separate families at our border, and perpetuate the discrimination against "strangers." We hope that our Porter will be a gatekeeper with the spirit of proactive hospitality, inclusion, and compassion. As Pope Francis said, "The future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as 'you' and themselves as part of an 'us.' We all need each other."
The passive aggressive middle finger to Donald Trump when we named our son felt good too.
It was impossible to know then, on 1-26-2020, that Porter would be another kind of gatekeeper in our family-- a strange bridge connecting us from Before to After. In so many ways it feels like we are stuck in the same blurry still-photo, the snapshot taken when none of us was ready-- not looking at the camera, chewing a bite of food, blinking our eyes, not smiling.
But then I look again. I see the growing baby, the one who learned to smile the same week wedged between Before and After. And I earnestly hope that we have only come upon a new gate, one with a hospitable porter who seeks strangers to welcome as neighbors, one where we value communion over self-centeredness. A new home that might heal the homesickness that sickens us today.
No comments:
Post a Comment