Jill Barnett - New Beginnings

Her mother laughed, took March’s hand and looked at the ring for a long time, her expression slowly changing. “I suppose a church can be stuffy,” she said after a minute.

At that moment March knew she had won. Her wedding would be exactly the way she had envisioned: majestic views and green grass, kites in the air and a hundred wind chimes in the trees. Tomorrow, those gingham-covered etiquette books would go back to the library, the bridal magazines to the waiting room of her uncle’s dental practice, the invitations in the trash, or even better, in a folder kept for her sister May.

Beatrice took her other peeling, dry, ugly hand. “The beauty is inside your hands, not outside; it spills out onto blank paper and canvas. You have the creative hands of an artist.”

Not even on her most cynical day, could March miss the pride in her mom’s voice.

Funny how the small and irritating things in a day could evaporate in the face of a moment of honest emotion. Her conservative family, all of them, would wear whatever she asked, hike up a grassy hill and stand in the Pacific wind to witness the moment she promised life’s most important things to the man who loved her.

She’d grown up in this house. For all its unappealing and stodgy tradition, the kitchen was the heart of their home and had only been changed once, when her parents put in all electric appliances like in all the suburban tract homes built in nearby neighborhoods.

Her own place in the Haight had a tiny kitchen with one of those old gas stoves you have to lean into the oven and light with a match. She always expected it to blow up in her face. She’d come home today to tell her mother the latest, most important news, fully prepared for the same kind of reaction.

“I want to show you something.” March put her portfolio on the table and pulled out her initial sketches and samples. “These are my hand-designed wedding invitations. Each one is a little different. See? No printer could create these for us.”

Her mother took each one, studying it before spreading them all out before her. The paper March had used was raw with frayed edges, soft and fibrous, hand-printed with pen and ink like old scrolls or music from the Middle Ages. Birds and stars, music notes and snowflakes were in free-form designs and patterns, some done as borders. Another had a very small pattern of the male and female symbol on each side of a scale, at equal levels. Her mother looked at them for a very long time. “They’re lovely, and very much like you.”

“Take a look at these, too.” March slid two folded note cards across the tabletop, holding her breath for a few counts, and waited.

Her mother looked confused by the soft colors and design.

“They’re both very traditional. I thought you’d like that. See the colors? Pink or blue. We’ll have to send them sometime in October. The baby’s due around October 10th.”

For a few heartbeats her mother said nothing at all. Then Beatrice sank her shaking head in her hands all over again. “Oh my God, March.”

So the wedding was briskly-planned and Renaissance-styled, outdoors in a lush park high on a breezy San Francisco hillside, and the best of days, the way March wanted it to be. The wind was a participant; it kept the bright silk kites flying high in the air and rang the many wind chimes they’d hung in all the trees; it ruffled the sleeves of Mike’s white shirt and blew at their long hair, hers topped with a flower wreath and trailing with candy-colored ribbons.

The wind billowed and flowed against her embroidered peasant dress, made of cotton the color of kite string, and whatever direction that wind blew, it outlined the softest beginnings of the change in her once youthful and free life, the rounded bulge of her first pregnancy and a future: motherhood.

Mike had been working at Spreckles for a while when his son Scott made his long, difficult entrance into the world, at exactly three-thirty in the morning. Labor for March lasted more than twenty-four hours, much of that time with her acting uncharacteristically irrational, banishing him from the room one minute and the next, calling out for him to never leave her.

By the time he first held his son, looking like a small red face swamped by a blue-striped blanket, Mike was blurry-eyed, over-emotional, numb, his hands crushed by hours at her bedside, and he was sapped dry of everything, especially sleep. When asked to, he dutifully counted the fingers and toes and came up with nineteen the first time, then twenty-two.

“Count again, Mike,” March insisted.

“Look. He has one head. I’m not worried.” But Mike was worried. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.

The baby became the center of their world. Everyone’s world. He would come home from work to their apartment in Redwood City and meet his mother or mother-in-law, both of whom were there so often it seemed as if they were living with them. Both women handed out advice that often contradicted each other’s.

Already he spent a third of his life on a crusade of germ warfare, boiling everything that came into contact with anything “baby.” (He had read all the baby books himself. On occasion, March had even accused him of memorizing some of them.)

To go anywhere they needed a moving van for all the child paraphernalia. March was determined to breastfeed and had a frustrating and uncomfortable time. She cried as much as the baby at first.

All of those changes he could handle. What scared him was something else altogether. He was a father, a word that held roiling meaning for him and caused him plenty of internal anguish and self-doubt. He was responsible for his son, for his child’s life and future and happiness.

Ahead lay a world of strangers who could easily swallow his child whole if given the opportunity. Life, people, took big bites out of you. Mike felt this immense, overwhelming responsibility to protect his son from everything he knew awaited his child, and it scared the hell out of him.

Finally one night, when he paced the room with the baby so March could sleep, he made a promise to his son, and to the world in that room, and mostly to himself: he would never be distant and demanding. He wouldn’t be the thing that stood between his kids, the way his father had often put himself between Brad and him. He would definitely not come into the house one day a week to rule the roost, carve some meat, and expect those slim, atavistic moments to stand for fatherhood.

Still, every morning, Mike got up at five am, just his father had for so many years, and he went to work at a job he hated because the paycheck was good and the insurance even better. He had a family, so he did what was expected, everything Don Cantrell had said to him.

March accepted the news that she was pregnant for a second time without too much terror. Scott wasn’t even a year yet, and honestly, she was too tired to summon up any negative emotion. Again, the pregnancy was an accident, one that happened during an exhausted night when Scott was barely four months old.

A few months into her new pregnancy, Mike came to her one night. (He’d been reading the latest books again.) One of the things she had always adored about him was his ability to see even a small modicum of possibility, and to embrace it with his own Cantrell enthusiasm.

But her pregnancy was now his sudden obsession. Any day she expected him to double over with Braxton Hicks pains. On that night, after he had read somewhere that infants inside the womb could hear, Mike had come to her with a grand idea to start their baby’s education early.

“If a child can hear, what if he can learn?”

“Just what are you thinking?”

“Let’s teach him to count.”