With A Little Luck

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I have been thinking about luck lately.

The baby has learned how to roll and now insists on sleeping on his belly. Every night I am torn between rolling him back over to ease my anxiety that he’ll suffocate himself against the barely-there bassinet mattress, or leaving him be so that we all can enjoy a bit of sleep.

In some ways, those first few weeks where babies are wrinkly blobs who can’t do anything feel easier than the period when they start to become more active and slowly turn into their own worst enemies. I now remember this stage with my firstborn, where you have to take it on faith that they’ll make it through. My mother reminds me that these fears are normal and the important thing is not to dwell on them, and she’s right, of course. But I find myself repeatedly reminded that loving someone means accepting the risk that one day they may suddenly be gone from your life. It’s the sudden part that scares me, how things can go wrong without any warning. How it’s a million small miracles that keep us here year after year.

So much in life comes down to luck.

When my son first heard the word gravity, he asked me to explain what it meant and I told him gravity is what keeps us on the ground, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know where it was. He wanted me to show it to him. You can’t see it, I told him. You know it’s there because you’re not floating away.

I know I’m lucky because I haven’t had bad luck.

When you usher a new person into the world, you have to hope it works out, that they rise to meet the challenges the world throws at them. That the world rises to meet the challenge of keeping them safe. I want someone to tell me that my children will be safe forever. I want to know for certain that we’ll all make it through the day—none of the behemoth pickup trucks driving too aggressively on the highway will smash into our car; no one will slip on the stairs and hit their head in the wrong spot; everyone will fall asleep and wake up again in the morning just like they’re supposed to. I took my son to see Willy Wonka last weekend and as we slid into our seats for what was only his second time in a movie theater ever and my first since the summer of 2019, I thought to myself, I hope nobody comes in and shoots up this place. I hope we make it out of here alive. You never know for sure in this country.

My mother has a story about how she was gifted a set of crystal glassware for her bridal shower. This was before registries. She is not a crystal person. She was tormented by this gift and refused to use it for fear of breaking it. During one of my parents’ many moves, the box of crystal was dropped, everything shattered and my mother felt an instant sense of relief. The thing she feared would happen had happened and she could stop worrying about it. The tyranny of the crystal had ended. I felt a similar way when my son fell off the monkey bars and broke his arm. I could stop worrying about when this day would come because now it was here and we could just deal with the crisis. I am good in a crisis, calm and collected, quick to respond. But I will drive myself to the point of insanity in anticipation of a crisis. Anyone who has ever been on a flight with me owes me their gratitude because I’m quite certain it’s my unrelenting white-knuckle worry that keeps the planes in the sky.

Shortly after my friend died from cancer at a pretty young age, especially for the type of cancer she had, I was driving to work when NPR was interviewing a physician from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was describing the findings of their latest cancer research. The gist was, it’s all random. There are risk factors for sure, but within those groups, who gets cancer and who doesn’t appears to be entirely up to chance. I found this oddly comforting. She died because she had shitty luck. Not because of anything she did or didn’t do. Not because of some unknowable series of factors that she never figured out how to control. It was freeing, in a way, like permission to take the endless hours I spent fixating on how to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, and use that time for something else, something better. Nothing I do will ever guarantee that everything will be okay.

The baby spent a day in the NICU when he was born because he came out too quickly and wasn’t breathing properly. My son has a scar on his elbow from the surgery he needed after his bones separated when he hit the ground. There is a space inside me where I house all my grief, a little cottage I visit when I am feeling low and want to sit with that emotion for a while. Like Hansel and Gretel, I leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back out: my friend’s hair, swept back from her face and held in place by a butterfly clip that reminds me of childhood; my husband rattling off a dozen facts about some baseball player most people have never even heard of; my niece smiling in a way that looks so much like my sister when she was that age that I feel like I’ve been transported back in time; my son kissing his baby brother every night before bed. There are so many moments of beauty in my life. So many little bits of good luck that keep me anchored to the ground.

When the baby sleeps on his belly he looks cozy and comfortable. So I leave him be and hope for the best.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSomewhere Beneath the DirtIf you have a good life I think you’re obligatedto say it: I have a good life Which doesn’t mean I don’t suffermy own hands at my throataggressive and needy. In a hospital bed my father bleedswithout reason—a rare complicationMy son, in tender healingweeps. The heart breaks and breaksand breaks again, an ever-repeating puzzle of increasingly smaller pieces. I spend my eveningsputting it back together, an image slowly emerging. The sweet bay magnolia in my yardhas begun to flower. It needs pruninglimbs sliced away to help it growI have neglected this bit of brutalcare, waited longer than I’d intendedto plant the Dahlia bulbs. You can rely on meto fail in some small waydrop the egg, shatter the glassI have been trying to leave since the moment I got here, forever running away from myself. In the garden I pull weeds, count tendrils, try to remember beneath all this dirt is the quiet work of survival the small seedsof a beautiful life

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