A Really Good Day(33)
“Pink!” I shrieked. Another contraction followed hard on the first, and I crouched down again, groaning.
“Go to the hospital!” the contractor said, not realizing that I was about to put him in the hospital.
Through my contraction, I gasped, “I will never get used to pink granite!”
The contractor begged me to leave. He promised that by the time the baby was out of my womb the mistake would be rectified. Fortunately for him, it took a full two days and a C-section for my son to move out of his rental in my uterus. When I wandered back into the construction site, the baby hanging from a sling, the offending pink granite had been replaced with dark green. Like tears, sometimes being scary will get the job done. Rocking back and forth to keep the baby asleep, I gazed around the kitchen and shrugged. Granite is granite, I thought. Eight years later we tore it out, recycled it, and replaced it with zinc.
The spring after we bought the house, we waited for the roses in the redwood to bloom. April passed, then May, then June. In July we called a tree surgeon, who climbed into the tree and told us that the rose vine was dead. It was an ancient rose, planted alongside the redwood in 1907, when the house was built, but it had bloomed for the last time the previous spring.
Though I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in fate, I am superstitious. I knock on wood; I don’t walk under ladders. I have no explanation for this behavior. It overtook me relatively late in life, after I met my husband, who, despite being an eternal optimist, is the one who taught me to throw salt over my shoulder and mutter the phrase “kene-ahora” to avert the evil eye. Neither of us really believes in this stuff, but we’re both uncomfortable if we forget to utter the magic words. I think in my case the simple fact is that I have no confidence in the permanence of my good fortune. I don’t believe I deserve it, so I’m terrified it will be taken away.
Given this, how could I see the death of the very thing that had attracted us to the house as anything but a harbinger of bad luck?
“It’s an omen,” I moaned, staring up at the dead vine.
You won’t be surprised to hear that my husband was unperturbed. It means something, he said, just not what you think. The rose attracted our attention. It drew us to the house where we were meant to raise our family. There’s no reason for it to bloom anymore. It’s done its job, and now it can die.
We planted another rose, but we haven’t let it take over the redwood. It turns out that the vine was choking the tree. Once the tree surgeons had cut the dead rose loose, the redwood began to thrive, growing new and healthier branches, reaching ever higher into the sky. Today the needles shimmer in the late-morning light, and because I am seeing things in a new way, I notice what I have missed on virtually every other morning of the last eighteen years. It is beautiful.
Day 14
Transition Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Woke up crabby, then everything changed.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: No more than six hours, despite trying hard to sleep for longer.
Work: Not as productive as yesterday, but not too bad.
Pain: A little bit in the night.
Today’s epiphany: What if mood is a choice? What if I’ve just been too lazy to be nice to my family? I know this is simplistic. I know that over the course of my life I’ve felt no more able to control my storms of irritability than I’ve been to control the weather, but today it feels possible. When I first woke up, I was my usual pre-microdosing self: grouchy and tired, resentful of a world designed for people who like nothing better than to spring ecstatically out of bed, meditate for an hour, and salute the sun as it rises. If I had my druthers, I would loll in bed until noon with only the newspaper and a cup of tea for company. (Oh, to be a resident of Downton Abbey, with a silver bell to summon servants in whispering slippers bearing trays of tea and buttered toast!) After a few predictable moments of grumbling and longing (married ladies are meant to breakfast abed), I thought to myself, It’s really not that hard to be nice, even at six-thirty in the morning.
My tread was light as I came downstairs. When my kids straggled in from their bedrooms, their faces creased with sleep, their noses buried in their phones, I greeted them with affection and good humor. This is bare-bones parenting; it should be the norm. And yet generally in the morning, if I even manage to haul my ass out of bed, all I can manage is a periodic grunt from my perch at the kitchen table, hunched over my tea and The New York Times. But today, as I placed my children’s (serially prepared, because God forbid people in the same house should eat the same thing in the morning) breakfasts before them with a cheerful clatter, I told them each how much I loved them. I cracked a few jokes. I reminded one that because we both had restless nights we needed to be on alert for low moods caused by sleeplessness.
As I attempted to weave a French braid into my teenage daughter’s hair, and planted a kiss on her cheek, she said, “Oh my God, who even are you today?”
When I was seven years old, I had a recurring dream that featured a bucolic glen in the woods populated by sweet-tempered animals, including a fawn. (I think I might recently have seen Bambi.) Everything about the dream was lovely: The flowers bloomed; the sun filtered prettily through the canopy of trees. The animals’ fur was soft, and they were all eager to be petted. The velvet-nosed fawn was the gentle leader, beloved by the other animals, admired by visitors to the glen. Only I knew that the fawn was actually evil, a demon hiding behind thickly lashed chocolate eyes.