On Monday mornings, I wake up, stretch, and in the still darkness of my bedroom I submit quite willingly to the day ahead with nary a protest: it's my day, after all, and all I've to do is get the kids up and ready for school before I can sink in and enjoy it. Even if it's a day of dentist appointments and grocery shopping and bill paying, I absolutely love it, because I get to do all those things alone. I roam the house, pleasantly spinning my wheels, doing a chore here, opening a piece of mail there, skimming the two-day-old paper left on the kitchen table for a spell. I talk to Mike. I talk to the cats. I take a run. I take a long shower. And before I know it, it's 2:56 and time to rush out the door to pick up the children.
I could spend a week of Mondays like that, no problem.
But for the kids, Monday mornings are something else entirely. The agony is real. It's partly my fault, especially in Beatrice's case, because I often let her stay up too late on Sundays (we always seem to be sharing dinner with friends or doing something else that is worth pretending that she isn't due under the covers by eight o'clock for). Yesterday was no different. We had been to a raucous singalong/performance called Hamiltunes (everything you're imagining right now is spot on) the night before and the girl didn't even get home until ten.
I woke her up and she uttered a groan. She begged me to come back later. I turned on the light. She asked if I could bring her breakfast in her bed. I said how about I make your breakfast, and then let you know when it's ready? Which I did, and when I returned six minutes later to her room she was sound asleep again, drooling. Doesn't seem possible, but she was. When I woke her up again she cried helplessly. I knew I only had myself to blame.
After finally coaxing her to the kitchen and feeding her, she begged to have just a little snuggle time before she got dressed. The clock was ticking. My Monday awaited me. Feeling not a little ambivalent, I said okay.
We climbed on top of my bed, where she performed her customary snuggle voodoo with gentle nose digging and perfect cheek-to-shoulder fitting; her marvelous warm skin and her loopy yet astute conversation are like a siren's call. I should have strapped myself to the mast of the morning getting-ready-for-school routine, but I was beaten down by all that early morning wailing. She must know I fall under her spell and regularly stay in a snuggle longer than planned, even consider skipping whatever we're supposed to be doing next. Just a little snuggle time. Sure.
So yesterday, after a few moments of settled quiet, Beatrice, who had been moaning with fatigue and the prospect of going to school moments before, pondered the ceiling for awhile before asking me a series of pointed questions: how did Jewishness and Christian-ness get started, anyway? Did someone invent being Christian? Who were the first people to be Jewish? Did they just decide to be that religion one day?
What an opening. I reminded her of the story of Abraham and Sarah, and we talked about how God called to Abraham, who just picked up and followed where God led, off to a new country. We talked about how God promised Abraham and Sarah countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky, even though they were old at the time and had no children. Those stars would be the Jewish people. It was a miracle that Sarah had a baby when she was so old, but she did.
I was totally getting into the story. As you can imagine. It's such a good story! And I was kind of waiting for Beatrice to chime in with something awesome like, Mama, Grandma and you and we are those stars that God pointed out to Abraham! We are part of the story!
But she didn't say that. As I was telling her that Sarah was ninety years old when she had her baby Isaac, Beatrice interrupted.
Mama. That means you can have a baby!!
(Yep. Her takeaway was that her mother, an old wizened woman like Sarah, might also be singled out by God for such an honor. It happened once! You never know.)
Oh, but Beatrice. Even if getting older wasn't an issue, I don't have a husband anymore to have a baby with.
So ... just get a new one!
Gabriel had wandered into the room and was sitting on the other side of my bed during the Abraham and Sarah story. Her suggestion snapped him out of his reverie.
Beatrice. Do you actually want Mama to remarry?
I started laughing and blurted out: and to have some ... some... man live in our house??
Gabriel layered on: some weird guy who sleeps here?
And then Beatrice caught the absurdity of it all, and started giggling and snorting as she took it even further: a guy with hairy armpits!!
That really cracked us up.
There has been so much press around Robert Alter's new translation of the Hebrew Bible that even I, on my scanty media diet, have encountered a handful of reviews and profiles and found reading about it to be completely compelling. One in the New York Times Magazine not too long ago used the language Alter chose around the episode of Sarah's laughter as an example of his translation process. I had always thought that her laughter was in response to the outrageousness of God's promise. A baby, me? Ha ha ha! Somehow her laughter seemed to speak of the improbable, surprising joy that would ripple out from her to her baby and her community.
But Alter's words suggest something else: Laughter has God made me,/Whoever hears will laugh at me.
Ever since I read that, which was before Beatrice asked me who decided to be the first Jew, I have been thinking about Sarah - a Sarah who might have been the object of laughter. I have been thinking about how her life must have looked as she approached the end of it, a woman whose worth in her time and place (as in most times and places) was measured in terms her fertility, especially her ability to birth a boy who would carry her family's legacy into the future.
She's so mean to Hagar. Were others mean to her? Did she miscarry, perhaps many times over? Was she lonely, isolated? Did she feel herself to exist on the periphery of her social world? Could she feel any safety, any power, in the role she inhabited before Isaac? Did her family and friends laugh at her?
Was it so bad that when God told her she would get the thing she had wanted for decades, the thing she must have given up for lost and mourned long ago, the thing that would have earned her the smiles of others rather than their laughter, bitterness surged because to hope after so much pain would be unbearable? Or did she simply brace herself for more laughter to come? A pregnant ninety year old woman is, after all, so improbable as to be laughable.
Sarah had never worn the easy mantle of a cisfamilied woman. She had always lived outside the norm.
Cisfamilied. Could it be a word? It describes the state I once enjoyed and never will again. I was a wife and mother in a mom-dad-kids 'normal' family, thoughtlessly partaking of all the privileges cisfamily-ness entails. Even messed up cisfamilies get to reap the social rewards of being 'normal.' Now I am a single widowed mom in a not-normal family. We have no dad to trot out at school and sports events. I can't ask my husband to stay home with the kids while I go out with friends. I can't ask him to consider a crazy late-in-life fourth baby. I am the lone single adult at the social gatherings I attend; everyone else is part of a couple. I take stock of wedding rings now: everyone in line at the grocery store, the people on either side of me in yoga class, my coworkers in a staff meeting. I notice my naked finger resting on the conference table. I didn't know I was cisfamilied until my status changed.
But Sarah was never cisfamilied. She was a non-mother, and then she was a freak super-old mother. Maybe our foremother suffered terrible sadness, loss, doubt. She got her baby, and with him all those stars in the sky, but maybe it wasn't simple or easy to accept that gift. A lot happened at the end of her life. We haven't even mentioned the part where Abraham takes Isaac off with the intention of sacrificing him! Or when Sarah cruelly sends Hagar and Ishmael away. Or the heartbreaking joy that must have filled her as she held her tiny baby. At eighty-nine, could she have predicted any of it?
So obviously I'm not in a place to even consider loving another man someday. A strange man with hairy armpits walking around my house sounds about as improbable to me as a having a baby at ninety. Or forty-one. The preposterous and downright distasteful idea, there on my bed yesterday morning with Beatrice and Gabriel, made me laugh. Hard.
And yet, and yet, holding Sarah in my heart, the Sarah of before Isaac and the Sarah of after, I cannot help but wonder with just the tiniest flicker of hope: what impossible love might God have in store for me, for all of us? Right now it's a scorched field for as far as I can see; years upon years of dried-up barrenness, in every sense. We will never be 'normal' again, but I suspect there are a lot of rich, unexpected, creative ways to live out a not normal family life that we might discover. Extended travel? Creative endeavors? New friends? An adorable rescue dog named Arlo that I came way too close to bringing home from the pet store on Saturday?
Maybe, just maybe, the distant future holds a reality that is defined less by loss and pain, and more by abundant and generative love.
Hoping hurts. I do it anyway.
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