The future is safe

I blow upon your least fingernail & it flares cyclamen & rose. I suck flames from your ears. I touch your perfect nostrils & they, too, flame gently like that pale rose called “sweetheart.” ~ Erica Jong, from Baby-Witch

I met somebody today. His name is Alfie, and in seventeen years and fifty weeks he will become a man. Madeleine and I went to see our friend Jo this morning, and instead of gold and myrrh we took rooibos tea bags and digital cameras. Born a month early, at only two weeks old Alfie should still be inside his mother’s womb, but instead he slept quietly in my arms for an hour while I sipped tea and watched him breathe. His skin is so soft his father cannot feel it, his own fingertips toughed from building furniture. While the women in the room talked and laughed, Alfie slept on, so very tired from his long journey to get here. The wind was blowing outside but his home was a calm place, filled with the only thing he needed: his mother.

Later, sitting with Mad in our favourite café, I felt so good, as if touching a new life had calmed the doubts I’ve been having this week. Jo is at home with her new little man, and she feeds him and cleans him and allows the world to carry on around her while she’s safe in her baby-cocoon. And I don’t feel broody, don’t have a great desire to have my own baby in my arms, but I would like a piece of that calm too, to be able to live in the moment so completely. This last year has felt like my own gestation, birthing my new self, my home and, tentatively, my book. I don’t know if I will ever give birth to my own child; once I thought that may have been a possibility but now I’m not so sure. It’s good to know that Alfie is here, that the future is in his tiny hands. And who knows who he will be, but it was healing, for a moment, to take myself away from thoughts of death and instead revel in the light from his little face.