A Birth and a Relic

This week, our good friend Mel Worthington put out another slideshow of our son, Judd.  He’ll be a year old on August 9.  (She let me pick out the music :) :  http://www.worthington-photography.com/babyjudsonat11months/)

I think the best photographs are the ones that capture more than you expected:  an initial reaction that was the opposite of what you’d intended, or an ironic sign in the background.  One particular shot in this slideshow captured a version of me that I thought I’d left behind many, many months ago. 

I’m not even in the picture.  It’s a simple still life of a shelf in Judd’s nursery (the one with the Irish Blessing sampler front-and-center).  On the left-hand side of the shelf sits a ceramic statuette of Mary, cradeling the infant Jesus in her arms.  She’s actually part of a nativity set, and a pretty unique one, I think.  I’ve never seen another one where Mary is actually holding her son.  (Usually, the baby is front-and-center in a manger with light beams painted on the hay around him, looking pretty cold and uncomfortable, while all the other Bible figurines just stare at him like he might be radioactive.)   

Anyway, Mary came into my life shortly after I found I was pregnant.  For the second time. 

Judd is our first child, but my second pregnancy.  The first, as Memaw would say in a hushed tone, “didn’t work out.”  I miscarried at two months.  The experience devestated me, physically and emotionally.  But worse than sadness during the event, was the terror afterward. 

That first pregnancy had been my only one, and all I could think was, “What if this is destined to happen every time.”

Just two months later, when we got another positive pregnancy test, I could barely register the joy of the moment.  Sean took me out to celebrate and I couldn’t even eat.  Those next early weeks were a blur of sleepless nights, unprovoked tears, and shaky smiles.  I told everyone it was just the pregnancy, but I knew that nerves were to blame.  When I did sleep, I had nightmares of being in a sea, with a baby drowing, just out of my reach.  Every time the current brought me close enough to save him, he’d slip away. 

My mother would tell me, “Let it go, Em.  It’s out of your hands.”

I knew she was right, but all the same I could only think, “How could something formed in my body, so deeply connected to me, be out of my hands?”

Now, good Baptist gals aren’t supposed to need “confirmation.”  They’re supposed to just believe, and let that be enough.  But I had had it with “belief.”  I prayed out loud, “I don’t think I can take any more of this.  Please just give me a sign that everything is going to be okay.” 

Two days later, I arrived home to find a package on the doorstep.  The return address belonged to one of my grandmother’s friends in Lexington, Kentucky.  The ceramic Mary holding her baby was inside.  It wasn’t Christmas.

I looked for a note in the package, but there wasn’t one.  The closest thing to an indication of where the gift came from was engraved, in dainty, handwritter script, on the bottom of the statuette — “AME.”  Anna Mason Emerson.  My great grandmother.  She died when I was four years old. 

I have few memories of my great grandma (we all called her Ma’am), but my home is cluttered with the physical reminders of the time she spent with me, her crafts.  Quilts, little pillows, dolls, and of course the ceramics.  In her time, the woman rivaled Precious Moments in her single-handed proliferation of nicnacs.  Her earlier work was meticulous, with every fold in every porcelain gown accounted for, every glint of light on every pupil outlined.  Later on, the painting wasn’t so careful and cracks appeared in the glazes.  Still, she used her remaining time to create the fragile momentos she knew would outlast her.  She was a good, strong, Bluegrass lady of faith; one who I think secretly believed that her heart had to keep beating as long as there was something else to dust.   

Up until that day, I hadn’t allowed myself to do anything to the room that would be the baby nursery.  Early gifts and cards were folded away in the living room corner cupboard, out of sight.  Emails from friends with links to great baby sites sat unopened in my inbox. 

With Mary in hand, I opened the closed door to that little blue room.  I opened the plantation shutters and sat her on a shelf.  And for the first time, instead of looking at her, I looked at the child in her arms.  I realized that all this time, I had squandered the joy that my new baby deserved, wallowing over the lost one.  The new baby didn’t deserve that. 

I left the statue on the shelf and went to call my husband.  I told him it was time we started looking at cribs.  Soon, Memaw would call and tell me that her friend Carol had sent the nativity statue.  Ma’am had given it to her as a gift one Christmas, and she’d stumbled upon it, housecleaning.  She lives right in the middle of half a dozen Hancocks, and could have left Mary in the care of any of them.  But something made her box the statue and send it to Richmond, Virginia.   

Nine months later, I held Judd in my arms for the first time.  Memaw was there, and she said, “You have no idea how much your Ma’am would have loved to be your great grandmother right now.”

I don’t think she ever stopped.

       

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