Rachel has come.

Rachel was already parked in my kitchen when I arrived home from work today, but I saw l8 month old Beya first, in the living room, chewing on a big fat rubber band she’d found lying about. I recognized it from a package that had come UPS from my favorite online shoe store on Monday. Never think your home has been rendered child-proof, no matter what you’ve done to prepare for them! I’d been re-locating household objects to higher ground for a week so my daughter and I could enjoy each others’ company in relative peace of mind while she and the two kids spent the weekend with me. Sigh. That Beya! She has a nose for no-no’s, even if this one was less noxious than the usual baby-killers she manages to tease out of nowhere.
Oh, Rachel, I thought. Here you are. Looking more beautiful and more tired and more…well, lots more belly, for sure. She paused from rummaging in my bare cupboards to hug me and sing-song, “Hi Mom!” Like the first two notes, a high to a low, of a song she’d been singing to me her whole life. Quick grin. “I thought we could have a big salad heavy on the veggies and foccacia with olive oil for supper, something fast. I brought the foccaccia, but……no olive oil and no garlic. And no lettuce. I swear! Do you even eat here??! This gentle lecture didn’t come only from the standpoint of a seven months pregnant woman’s appetite, she’s the chef in the family. Food, and the meaning of preparing, presenting, and fellowshipping around it, is her art. I felt, as I so often do around her, that I’d fallen short.
Not seeing the 3 year old I asked, “where’s Novan?” between wet kisses from Beya.
“Oh, he’s still in his carseat. Hasn’t woke up from the trip yet, so I just let him sleep.”
“In the car?? Outside?” I tried not to let my eyebrows arch.
“Yeah. I’ve been checking on him, even poked him a couple times, but he’s out.”
Rachel sailed out the front door to check and presumably poke again, while I gathered my sighs and thoughts, wishing I could just rejoice. They’re here. She loves you, wants to be with you, wants you in her life, wants her children in yours. What do you want?
I thought of my friend Duane, who’d stopped in to see me just as I was on my way out the door of my office. He’d wanted to chat, I could tell, but I kept up the pace of my exit and told him I expected Rachel would have arrived home from Winston-Salem ahead of me, and I didn’t want her to have to wait long for me.
“Oh, Rachel,” he said. “The one with the kids. That must be just wonderful for you!” I gave him a look.
Duane wants so badly to be an encouraging influence on my life, and says what you’re supposed to say to prove it, but he really has no clue. And I had no time to help him get one.
“Sure,” I said. “Wonderful like a fist around my heart. No, I’m sorry,” I struggled for better words when I saw his face fall, eyes going all wrinkly worried from wondering, what? what? how could I have screwed that one up?
“It’s just that, your kids never stop scaring you, you know? They grow up, get all intelligent and responsible, sure, but then they multiply. They bring you grandchildren to worry and get scared for.” Now I really had to give up, because Duane was giving me a look. And I felt ashamed. A month ago his only daughter, adopted, and the pride of his life, a girl on the cusp of great things, ready to launch into college on a full golf scholarship, had sought him out after arriving home from her job at the bowling alley to tell him, “Dad, I’m gay.”
Duane just leaned into his look and kept quiet. I’d already heard him tell me how wrenching the thought was to him that he might never have grandchildren. I let out a long breath, put my things down on the desk, took my jacket off.
Duane’s a good listener. For awhile, anyway. He’s learned to listen long enough to impress you, and remembers every detail you tell him so he can bring it up in conversation later, and win you over by his attentiveness. He learned it in management courses where they teach you how to disarm potential adversaries. He tried it on me in the beginning of our friendship and I got disarmed. For awhile at least. Now, I just see how badly he craves acceptance, and wants to be appreciated, particularly by me. I feel badly for him, especially now that I’ve been so self-absorbed and unfeeling, so I try again to say what’s got me on edge and distracted.
“See, last month when Rachel left visiting me, she walked into a completely demolished house in Winston-Salem. There was a half a foot of water in the living room, and running down the floor vents. The sheetrock on the ceilings was warped and falling down everywhere. The walls were buckled. The kids’ rooms were ruined. A fitting on a water pipe in a crawl space above the second floor had come undone and had been spraying water, filling up the house for probably the whole week while she was visiting me in new Bern.
“Her husband, the big shot financial advisor, was away drumming up clients in California, trying to avoid his, their, my daughter and grandchildren’s, own financial ruin in these perilous financial times.
“Last week Rachel called me just as I was falling asleep, and asked me if I would pray with her for Beya. She was in the emergency room, Beya had choked on a crayon earlier in the evening, was breathing now but wheezing heavily, and they were going to do a bronchoscopy to try to see what might be in her lungs.
“Not long before all this, they all four were traveling in their Toyota Prius on a snowy North Carolina day on Interstate 40 near Durham when an uninsured driver lost control of his car and totaled theirs.
“Rachel’s seven months pregnant and when the baby’s born she’ll have three kids under the age of four. At her last visit with the midwife --yup, that’s right, no doctor, homebirth all the way for her---they found protein in her urine, which is usually caused by stress, and she’s already dilating.
“Duane, I love my daughter. But she's only one of six kids. Six! And yes, she’s fine, they’re all fine, the car got fixed, the house is fully insured, they got three pieces of orange crayon out of Beya’s left lung, the kids were sleeping during the crash, didn’t even wake up, Brad will get a second job, they aren’t starving, everything is fine. Even if everything didn’t turn out fine, I know how to weather ugliness and loss. I know how to regain my bearings. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I’d never had kids. Sometimes, thinking about them, my heart seems too small for the burden of love. I’ll be all right, I just need to get on the living room carpet right now and let Novan and Beya giggle and crawl all over grandma, and then I’ll have my bearings back and I’ll forget to be scared. It’s just….you know….?”
Duane tilted his head back and smiled down his nose at me. Well, OK. Sometimes he has a clue.
My thoughts were interrupted by the whoosh of my front door closing and the voices of Rachel and Novan talking about napping in the “Dodge Wam”. Then a shout, “Gamma!” and running feet, and….two kids on the living room floor. Rachel going to the kitchen to work miracles. Kids!