I had always told Molly that I would stay to help until the babies were all sleeping through the night. In late May, one by one, they all were. It was time to go. On May 30 I flew home. I began this reflection on my experience on the plane and finished it after sleeping the most blissful sleep of my life in my own bed.
Current of Love
Somewhere over Kansas I stopped crying. The land leveled out and dried up and parceled itself out in the brown and green rectangles familiar to all who fly over and to America’s farmlands. I settled down and drank in the peaceful emptiness below and reflected on the serene fullness of my heart.
For some reason, the first thing that came to mind was the comment of a fellow legislator back in January when I told him why I was resigning from my seat. “But, Mary, you’ve just established yourself here. Can’t you just hire a nanny for your daughter?”
The comment shocked me at the time – not because it was promoting a more political or self-centered orientation, but because it missed the mark. Yes, I was leaving my Senate seat because my daughter needed me. But I was also leaving because I needed to. I didn’t know how much I needed to at the time, but I do now.
I needed to get back on the horse that threw me. I’ve always felt bad about how harried I allowed myself to get with my newborn children. I just couldn’t accept the sleeplessness and mindlessness and enjoy the experience, even though I recognized how beautiful, elemental, and ephemeral it was. I wanted to give myself the experience with these grandchildren that I was too worried and work-focused to savor 30 years ago. As I look back at my Facebook posts over the last 123 days, I think I got it right this time.
I needed to get back to basics. When I was teaching, I always had summers to take a step back, live in the moment with my family, read, write, and reflect. A time to get grounded. But when I entered higher education administration, there was no summer vacation. There was no vacation period. I got into the busy-doing-important-things mode and even when I retired, I didn’t get out of it.
There is nothing like taking care of a baby to ground you. At 4 a.m. when it’s only you and those shiny eyes staring up at you, you think about just about everything. And as I waited for one baby to go back to sleep and another one to stir, I wrote. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but this was different. I became interested in writing as a way to have a different kind of conversation, one that isn’t mean or ugly, one that not only welcomes, but elevates all. I wanted to use writing as a way to reach out in the darkness, a way to find friendship and consolation and good will just by saying, Isn’t it wonderful what we all share … the kindness and the cleverness, yes, but also the flaws and foibles that make us funny, familiar, approachable.
Mostly, though, I left Montana because I wanted to be part of the Trespino family story, right at the heart of it. To call it a miracle is cliched, yet there it is: Everything about the story has been miraculous. Molly had had trouble getting pregnant, but she finally did. Until her second trimester, she was only supposed to have one baby, but in late September, they discovered three. That made it a high-risk pregnancy for her and for the babies, requiring her to be hospitalized at 26 weeks and deliver at 30 weeks. Yet her babies were all born relatively healthy, and all Molly lost was her voice. (Wretching with morning sickness for months damaged her vocal chords.)
All three babies stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit at least 10 weeks; James stayed nearly 18. Total cost for Tampa General alone was in the neighborhood of $2 million. Molly has a pre-existing condition that had disqualified her for affordable healthcare before “Obamacare.” Miraculously, she got pregnant while the Affordable Care Act was in place or their financial situation would be hopeless now.
“Little” miracles happened. A doctor ordered an overfeeding of James at one point that had the baby vomiting so violently he had to be resuscitated. Molly and husband Derek were furious. However, whenever a baby has to be revived, the hospital does blood work as a precaution. This time they discovered an infection that, had James not been overfed, would not have been discovered until it was too late. He would have died within 72 hours.
Five days before they were to move out of the house they had sold and into the house they had bought, the new lending institution called and said they’d decided not to give them the loan after all. Yes, the bank had signed a document ensuring them a loan for more than that amount before they ever put their house up for sale and, yes, they probably had legal recourse, but that would take a lot longer than 5 days. We were all heartsick, distraught. But a couple of can-do ladies who had handled the original loan on their sold house decided, “We’re not going to let this happen. This little family has gone through enough.” And they got ‘er done in the nick of time.
Of course, the real miracle is just the miracle all babies share: Those personalities, distinct and unique right from the start … the slow, almost imperceptible changes that ferry them from utter helplessness to minds and wills and bodies of their own. They talk to us now. They grab our noses and delight in our feigned pain. They can hold their heads up. They are drooling and fussing from the teeth soon to emerge. They are coming into their own. I fully expect that one fine day one of them will echo the remark my sister made to a nun who had moved her from the back of the classroom to the front in second or third grade: “I know my rights.” That’s the spirit we like to see.
As the plane drew close to Great Falls last night, I looked down in the twilight at the land I love, unfurling like a flag from horizon to horizon, enlaced with that sturdy, forest-green ribbon of river. From the plane, you can trace the river’s circuitous route in the curls around this bend and that one, curl after curl after curl, each representing years, decades, centuries, millennia of liquid lapping against solid. Such slow, hard work. And so inefficient. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, after all.
So, yes, Senator, I could have written a check for a nanny. I could have visited for a week, stretching out the legislative transmittal break. I could have checked in on FaceTime every day and received texts with photos. But I had to be at the heart of it. And for 123 days, I was. I was that water, lapping against rock. It was slow, dull, mindless work, made inefficient because a current of love, rather than expediency, propelled it. The babies won’t remember a bit of it, but I’ll remember it every day for the rest of my life. It was, without question, a good decision – maybe the best decision I have ever made.
When I left Molly, she was standing on the porch with James, his bright eyes staring solemnly out of his moon face at the two of us in tears. “We made it, Mom!” Molly whispered to me as we embraced. “We made it!”
“Yes, we did, my darling girl,” I responded. “And you know what? I had the time of my life.”
I stopped crying somewhere over Kansas. I started again somewhere above the Missouri River’s famous great falls. I’m home now, but the magical interlude is over. For just as you can never step in the same river twice, you can never return to the magic land of triple-infanthood. Life moves on. May you float, as I do, on its current of love.
Donna Sorensen says
Beautiful!