Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [87]
During her four hours of active labor, my mother tried very hard not to wish death upon herself. She staggered in and out of consciousness until a doctor finally surfaced and rushed her into the delivery room.
When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.
Groggy and exhausted, I asked Colleen, “Is it normal for me to think this?”
“Maybe you’re one of those women who enjoys being pregnant,” she said.
It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed being pregnant. I simply liked the fact that for a while my daughter and I had been inseparable.
Looking at her tiny face, her bow-shaped lips so red that her father said she looked like she was wearing lipstick, I remembered a message a girlfriend had sent me when my first niece and nephew, Bob’s daughter Nadira and Karl’s son Ezekiel, were born.
“May you be a repozwa,” she’d written, “a place where children can rest.”
I needed to rest myself, but I also wanted to speak to my daughter, cradle her, sing to her, inhale her mixed blood and soap smell, watch her ever so slightly open her eyes and tighten her mouth as she tried to make sense of all the new sounds around her: my husband’s laughter, my mother-in-law’s comparisons with relatives both living and gone.
I thought she most resembled my mother and pointed at the picture to prove it. But I also saw traces of my father, who my mother says was too frightened to hold me and my brothers when we were babies, but who would later hold my brothers’ children, laugh and sing to them. I grieved for Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, who would never hold my daughter, and for my Haitian cousins, including Tante Zi’s son Richard, who might never know her. Or maybe she would return one day, to Léogâne or to Bel Air, to declare in heavily accented words that they were her family.
She might be honored by their nods of acknowledgment, the way they’d be forced to consent, “Of course, of course, I see the resemblance. You do look like your great-grandmothers around the cheeks. You do have the high forehead of your grandfather’s kin.” And hopefully those cheeks and that calabash-shaped forehead would gain her entry.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I thought of my mother, who had faced these first hours alone after I was born. She had been made no promises, been offered no guarantees that either she or I would even live past that night. If something had been ruptured inside of her, no one would have noticed. If something had been broken inside of newborn me, perhaps no one but my mother would have cared. My daughter’s quiet yet well-monitored first night was perhaps the one my mother had dreamed for me, for herself, a dream of kind words, kisses, flowers.
“What have you decided to call her?” asked Colleen.
My husband and I had discussed it. There seemed no other possible choice.
“Mira,” I said. “For my father.”
After patiently waiting his turn to hold her, my husband held out his hand. I was also reluctant to let this Mira go. Hopefully I’ll have an uninterrupted lifetime with her, I thought, a lifetime to plant some things that have been uprooted in me and uproot others that had been planted. But surrender her I did, with an urgent wish to also hand her over to my father.
Look, Papa, I’d say. You’ve waited for her. You’ve lived long enough to see her. Today is not just her day, but all of ours. And we’re not the only ones who will cradle and protect her. She will also hold and comfort us. She