Heartache

I was going to name my first daughter Selah.

Selah Evangeline.

We could call her Evie if we were so inclined.

 “This is our Evie” I would say as she nursed—her little body on top of my big one.

I’d be tired, of course, spit-up-upon, irritable, embarrassed by my immediate imperfection,

But I would also be a mother.

 The name Selah, I heard, was a Hebrew word from the Psalms—an instruction, some believe, for the song-leader to slow down, to give time for stillness, breath, contemplation, or perhaps punctuation. That was what I wanted for my child. I had hoped she would be the sort of person who did more slowing down than speeding up, the kind of woman who insisted that people think about what they were saying and hearing and doing—a present presence. But also, scholars are unsure exactly what the word means, and I liked that about it too. As a person often perceived as woefully unmysterious, I’d have liked for my daughter to be credited as the marvel she truly was,

a wonder—

containing multitudes,

a girl who was unlikely to be pinned down.

I was so sure of this moniker in my mid-twenties that I was mad when my friend Brian beat me to it with his firstborn. But before Selah Evangeline, it was Lauren Aundrea, and before Lauren Aundrea,it was Autumn Reyne, so I could have always come up with another name if one had been needed. I am nothing if not a creator.

 As a child, I used to have my own make-believe-soap-opera based stylistically on the shows of the women who raised me. Theirs were Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless, and Bold and the Beautiful. Mine was My Ninety-Nine Daughters, and you probably already guessed this, but it was about my life as a still sexually viable young divorcee trying to keep up with the needs of the nearly 100 girls to whom I had given birth (Lauren, Paige, Gloria, Joanna, and Ruby, to name a few) all while meeting the professional demands of a wildly popular writing career. It’s possible I was exposed to too much grown-people television as a child, but that’s how it goes when you yourself are an unexpected late-in-life baby. Will anything you do ever be as magnanimous as their oldest? No. Will you get to watch what you want when you want to? Yeah, probably.  

After my first few nieces and nephews were born, and I got a taste for the selflessness required to care for a baby, I did (quite loudly) consider a child-free lifestyle, but by high school, I was back to wearing overalls and stuffing them to look like I was with child. I’d rub my fake belly proudly, imagining I was that powerful. Over my lifetime, I have kept journals full of names for children that never came to be. Around the same time that I fell in love with the name Selah, I became certain I’d have twin boys as well. They were going to be called Asa and Josiah, like the little kings in the Bible who did what was right even in their youth, and even when their parents failed them.

I had big expectations for my children.

 Too big—I imagine—like most aspiring parents.

But to my credit, I did a lot of preparing for these phantom offspring over the course of my life.  

·      I prayed for them, of course, which was a given in my religious upbringing, but I did other stuff too.

·      I started reading parenting books before I even went to college.

·      I refrained from any folly I wouldn’t want my children to try out because I wanted to be able to tell them that I had never done any of the things from which I expected them to abstain.

·      I avoided taking Ibuprofen or Tylenol so that when I had a bit of physical discomfort, I could use the opportunity to have little mini pain management practices in preparation for all the “natural” childbirth I believed I would one day be enduring.

It was always my intention to bring four humans into the world as my mother had. I meant to begin at age 27 and wrap up around age 35.  I did everything in my spiritual power to manifest them, but as it turns out, babies, the making of them at least, are more a physical project than a mental one. And as I turned each of the ages I had marked for a new arrival, I found myself consistently lacking in at least half the materials required to create a new life.

I have had my heart broken a few times over the decades

by boys,

by institutions,

by the American electorate,

and each of those breaks has occurred at a particular moment in time. There may well have been build-up, bruises, tension, tremors, erosion, exhaustion all along the way—but no matter how predictable or unforeseen, heartbreak is acute—quite literally a divide between what once was and what remains.

What remains then, quite often,

And what we are left with,

is heartache.

I like the word ache.

It does its job bearing the weight of its definition—looking and sounding like a wince or a wallow. Simple, subtle, maybe a touch romantic. My body aches more often than I would prefer these days, my muscles and bones seem to be calling out frantically for help on most mornings. They remember a time when things were different, and they are trying to alert me. They, like me, are slow to settle into the new normal, so I am trying to shush them with anything I can—  most recently an expensive bed and massages from loved ones and (professional) strangers. I haven’t resorted to pills yet—old habits die hard, I suppose.

 Sometimes it makes me weepy thinking about this body of mine, all that it once and never was. I remember when it flipped and twisted and slept on hardwood floors without a peep. I don’t remember ultrasounds or home births because they didn’t happen.  I think that might be what heartache is—a memory of the way it used to be or a yearning for what is (perhaps perpetually) unrealized. That kind of ache is depressing, I won’t lie.

 There is another type of ache though that happens to my body after a particularly strenuous walk or workout and it doesn’t feel good exactly, but it does feel like being alive—

like I used my body to do something,

like I tried,

and occasionally like I failed,

but always, always

like I survived.

So maybe there is some beauty to be found in the outwardly imperceptible if not invisible throbbing of our once-broken hearts because maybe this pain, so deep and at times so wide, is a reminder that we might not be happy, we might not even feel whole, but we are still here. We may have been left out, left behind, or left alone in ways that left us different, but even after all that, we have not left ourselves.

Our hearts do not betray us when they ache. They save us from the lie that everything is ok, and also from our own myth that we cannot go on, which is the very thing we are already doing. There were years I didn’t think that my heart could live without Selah and Asa, and Josiah, and little Luka, whom I didn’t even mention before because probably she would have been the baby—the one whose name by virtue of being 4th on the list became unspoken or worse an “etcetera” of sorts in my family roll call.

 And there were seasons and situations when the aching that began in my heart was like lightning pinging through the rest of my body while I pretended to smile at baby showers and book clubs where women and worse, girls complained about their pregnancies and their progeny. But lately, the ache is less profound—maybe once or twice a year, I’ll feel a prickle, and I either find a balm or I don’t. And I am not always successful in these moments, but when I can, I try to remember to be still,

to breathe,

to listen.

like in the Psalms,

like

Selah.