I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(29)

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There’s a theory I have about why bad things happen. It’s another little bit of wizardry. When something unfortunate occurs, I tell myself it’s the less-bad thing I bargained with the universe for in exchange for something worse not happening. Like, if I miss my flight and can’t make it on a trip, I tell myself that in an alternate universe, I made the flight but the plane was infested with lice and I got a terrible skin rash, and that I must have made a deal with fate that if I could just be free of my lice-itch, I would give up the vacation. Then missing out on a trip doesn’t feel so bad. Or let’s say I’m trying on clothes and feeling less than impressed with my pasty, flat-chested reflection in the dressing room mirror. I just tell myself that something terrible must have been about to happen in the alternate version of my life—like maybe some kittens were about to be hit by a truck while the busty, even-skin-toned version of me was out jogging—and in my courageous way, I said, “LORD, TAKE MY TAN AND MY BOOBS. JUST SAVE THE KITTENS.” It makes me feel noble and empowered over my destiny. It’s how I was able to stay relatively patient throughout the fertility process: Every time I didn’t get pregnant, I was successfully avoiding whatever might have gone wrong in that pregnancy.

In that final twenty-four hours before I went into surgery, I tried to apply my mental coping mechanism, but the stakes were higher than those of any pretend-deal I’d ever imagined, and I couldn’t follow my own hypothetical logic. There couldn’t be any bargain. Because in any deal, there’s always the possibility that it will fall through and you’ll get stuck with the bad end of it, the alternative conclusion.

There couldn’t be an alternative.



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As I lay on the operating table, pressed by heavy warming blankets, my arms strapped down and my body numb, the surgeons did their work on the other side of a short curtain across my midsection. I felt the bizarre, painless tugging—an understatement of sensation—while I watched the ceiling and listened to holiday carols someone had put on a CD player.

It was a few days before Christmas when our little girl was extracted from my inhospitable womb, a very reasonable four weeks before her January due date. Machines beeped, voices rose and fell, light glinted off silver instruments, and then a doctor handed her to John, and John held her up next to my face. She blinked. I blinked.

“You’re okay,” I said. We’d gotten what we hoped for, maybe even what I’d bargained for. There she was—healthy, if a bit lightweight, her skin hanging in little purple folds like a molting salamander—right there on the outside of me.

She weighed the same as a sack of sugar, five pounds, when we brought her home, but she ate enthusiastically and made up for lost meals quickly. Had she not, I was prepared to ask the pediatrician how soon babies are allowed to have carrot cake and banana pudding.



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A couple of years later, she coined the phrase “me real,” and it entered our family lexicon for good. We say it whenever we feel the need to push back against what’s getting us down, whenever wishful thinking runs out and we’ve got to buck up and deal with the choices that are actually before us.

Me real.





The Expat Concept


I was whisper-cursing at the oven when the doorbell rang.

At first I thought the ding came from the buttons I’d been poking on the oven’s control panel. They were nonsensical pictographs, much like clothing tags that instruct you to “iron on low, no steam” by way of a diagram that clearly indicates “colonial hat, no noodles.” I wanted to roast a chicken. My mother had come all the way from the States to visit us in Ireland, where John and I had moved with our baby daughter and toddler son, away from our home in Atlanta. His job had transferred him to Dublin, and we’d been there for just a few days before he had to travel again. He was in Brussels that evening as I searched the oven’s dashboard for a picture of a chicken with steam rising from its body, or even one that vaguely suggested “heat” or “fire.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Hello,” said a young woman when I opened the door. “I don’t mean to disturb, but there’s a little boy leaning out of your top window up there.” She pointed above her head. “And he doesn’t appear to be dressed for the weather?”

Dressed for the—?

I leapt the stairs three at a time to the second-floor bedroom, where my three-year-old, unclothed and ready for bath time, had shimmied up the side of a bunk bed, opened a window, and begun grabbing at snowflakes and calling out merry greetings to neighbors.

“We don’t stick our bodies out of windows, we don’t talk to strangers, and we don’t stick our bodies out of windows and talk to strangers without our clothes on,” I told him as I cranked the window closed.

Everyone had told us it never snowed in Dublin.

I went back to the oven and pushed the picture of a comb hiding behind the sun. Nothing.



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I had not prepared for this trip adequately.

If I could hop in that time machine and give my young-parent self some advice, this is what I might say:

When you are dropped off at your new front door by the airport cab with all your luggage at your feet and two small children clinging to your jacket and wailing, in the blinding sideways rain, you should already know where the nearest market, restaurant, pub, or food establishment of any kind is and how you’re going to get there without a car. (Perhaps you were thinking you’d just yell, “Siri, bring me a dozen apple muffins!” But what if your phone died hours ago?)