Walking Life Into Being

It's hot, y'all. And muggy. And I have a birthday party to make. Two key lime pies with gingersnap crust and whipped cream on top. Shish kabobs of shrimp and vegetables and venison. I need to squeeze limes, I need to marinate venison. I need to peel shrimp.
And I'm stuck in this heat, this almost underwater of a day, stuck back in time, thirty-two years ago, when I spent a day just like today walking purposefully in my yard, slowly, slowly, with the beginning pains of labor. The ones that make you think, "Oh yes. Thank-you. This baby is going to come soon." The ones that make you think, "I remember this. But I do believe it'll be easier this time." The ones that allow you to smile and talk and think and just be so damn grateful the train has left the station, finally and at last.
I had done everything to get that labor started because my water had broken the day before. I had run down the dirt road. I had worked hard. I had had hysterics when my son ran away while I was taking a nap and my then-husband got distracted and lost sight of him long enough for him to wander down the driveway, down the road, naked as a jaybird with the two bulldogs by his side having an adventure. I had drunk gallons of the nastiest tasting black cohosh tea on earth.
Finally, like a car being pushed uphill which has finally made it to the top of the rise, the tides of labor had begun and I walked.
Grateful, grateful, grateful.
Our little community was small then. People kept checking in on me all day. A neighbor friend brought a box of raspberry Danni Bars which were a delicious chocolate-covered frozen yogurt treat. Where did Danni Bars go?
Everyone was happy I was finally in labor. A new baby was coming. A friend had lent us a cradle. A friend had made a mobile to go over it. Midwife friends checked in on me throughout the day. My sister-friend Lynn had come to collect Hank- his first time away from me. I trusted no one but Lynn with my first baby child.

And we walked, that husband I had then, and I. I never have been able to sit or lie down when pain overcomes me. I try to walk away from it, which doesn't exactly work, but it helps me.

That's what I was doing all those years ago. Waiting for a baby whom I thought would surely be a boy but who turned out to be a girl who, even when she was a toddler, demanded to wear dresses and changed her outfit many times a day to be more appropriate for every activity of her day. Not a boy at all. A dark-haired girl baby who came scrunched up and wailing.
But that wasn't until the next day.
Her actual birth-day.
But thirty-two years ago today, I walked through the heat and stopped when my belly contracted and wondered who I was about to birth and wanted it to get harder and didn't want it to get harder but knew it would have to and surrendered to the process of getting this new life here as I breathed and I walked in the heat of a day much like this one and I am there in my mind so strongly that it's as if I'm really there. Some trick of time and space. Some illusion born of heat and memory.
And it's still so powerful that I am crying as I write this.
My May was about to be born and as I waited my body worked, I walked on the clay-red earth of the yard where I lived, a few miles down the road from right here and my heart still turns over in the heat of this day, remembering the heat of that day as I walked and I waited and tonight I will see that girl, that May Ellen girl and we will all of us- her sisters, her brother, her nephew, her daddies, her other-mother- we will celebrate her birth, her being-here, her beauty, her grace, her miraculous place in this world right here, right now, thirty-two years ago, all of it and my heart is breaking with remembering.
I love her so much, that girl. That sweet dancing girl who loves to walk now herself on her strong, fine legs, through the heat and the cold, through her life that began thirty-two years ago and my heart beats her name and my legs remember that walking as I go to the kitchen to squeeze limes, break eggs, crush cookies, make pies for that girl whose name is tattooed in my womb and whose light kept coming to me before I knew I was pregnant. I swear it did. A presence of light I would catch in the corner of my vision and that's how I knew I was pregnant- that light.
Her name is May and she came in light and she walks in light and that is who she is, who I held in my belly in that heat on that day and before I knew her name, before I knew her face, I knew her light and in this perfect world of heat today, it shines on me as brightly as it ever did and knowing her has been and will always be, as it has been with all of my children, the greatest miracle, the most profound lesson, the ultimate joy of my life.