Coming Out

It is raining here, the heavy spring rain that after a dry, cold winter we desperately need.  The farmers have planted their various crops, and watched the lowering clouds with almost desperate hope; it tends to be windy here, and wind without rain means seeds blown out of the ground and semi-wild beets growing in the lawns of people a mile away and replanting and hoping all over again.  Yes, this is good, this kind of rain, and I won’t complain.  We had three days of absolutely wonderfully warm weather and in those three days suddenly everything is green, every little bud and leaf simply waiting below the surface for the warmth to give it permission to bloom, and now this rain, saying “Yes, yes, time now.”  Within a few days of this, I will drive to work and see the faintest of greens spreading throughout the fields, those things which mean potatoes for the table and sugar for your coffee and wheat for bread, alfalfa for cows which means meat for dinner and milk for little toddlers and well; I feel so much more a part of everything than I used to, so much more aware of how the weather and the farmers mean more than just pretty green fields and wheat chaff in the air come fall.  It is all connected, the weather and the food and the life and the death of everything-this seems more true in the spring and the fall, where everything begins and then ends only to begin again.

***The rain stopped, and started again, hard enough to pound against the ground and splash back up to look like mist on the ground, and stopped again.  It has washed everything clean, including my heart and my mind which have been thunderous at best as of late.  Time to make public the subject of these password protected posts, because now we know there is a baby on the way, a little girl nestling inside the body of my little girl, and she told me she wants to keep it.  New life, then, with her growing nearly as rapidly as the roots and buds in the earth are.  I have so many varied emotions about this, from absolute horror to deep sadness to the awareness that life does go on, life will go on, and she will move past me to her own place in the world.  As much as I want to tell her what I think she should do, as much as I have tried to convince her that her life is going to be so much harder than it has to be with a baby in tow, this is her body and her child and her life; my job now is to simply get out of the way and let her live it, so far as that is possible.

The practicalities of this will be worked out as we go, of course.  The doctor has been seen, an ultrasound done, my girl as healthy as can be and in turn her daughter as well.  Believe me, I might sound calm here, and right now I am, but there have been days, and will be again.  What I have to keep reminding myself is that I don’t get to control this girl, all I can do is sit back and let her make her decisions and try to help her as best as I can.  So much of it is up to her, and all I can do is pave the way.  There have been phone calls made and appointments set up and now the rest is up to her; I pray every day, every hour, that she takes the help offered and runs with it, that she doesn’t let this alter irreparably the plans she has for her life.

And outside it is still raining, but a healing rain.  I believe that while this situation is unfortunate, it is not a tragedy; many of you have been along for the ride when there have been real tragedies in our lives, and this doesn’t qualify.  There is a young girl too young to be having a baby, yet there she is, making her presence known a little more every day.  There is the beginning of life outside, and inside, and all around, and how can I be anything but humbled, truly, by the enormity of it all?  Good, bad, or indifferent, it is what it is, and can’t be changed now.  And I wonder if a year from now I will be so grateful that I forget the fear, forget the worry, and simply smell the head of a baby and smile.  Because don’t they smell a little like the fresh rain?