From Adair Lara's online journal, expounding upon motherhood while becoming a grandmother. Touching.

Adair Lara


Iwould join them when the birth was imminent. The kids wanted to experience it alone, just them and the 10 or 15 hospital staffers who wandered in and out. “But people can come and go during labor,” Morgan had said. “People!” I am not a People. I gave you life, you little wretch.

Still, I was determined to respect this wish. It would be my first act as a non-interfering grandmother. I had kind of blown this earlier, by buying her so much baby stuff that she complained there was no point in having a shower. My friend Monique said if her mom moved in on her experience this way, hogging the buying of baby clothes and cribs and so forth, she’d be furious.

Bill worried that Morgan would be dropping the baby off her all the time, but I should be so lucky. My skills will be carefully reviewed before any living bundle of helpless flesh will be turned over to me.

Morgan wanted a drug-free labor, just a woman in a field, giving birth to her child as the sun comes up. Not a drop of coffee, nor an egg yolk, or a bite of her beloved sushi had passed her lips since she learned she was pregnant. She counted kicks with an eye on the clock. She left baggies of prenatal vitamins everywhere so she would never miss a day.

But she had not reckoned on this long an ordeal. In the night Funny Hat Needle Man came (an anesthesiologist in a paper hat) gave her an epidural drip and suddenly Trevor and I had a cheerful third player for Trivia. I have a picture of her at five am studying her Contracts book.

The baby would be a girl, no boy parts having shown up on the sonogram. (Reminds me of when my friend had a sonogram and her PC doctor said, I see a clitoris!”)

A girl, means there is a god. In thirteen years Morgan will know why I spent her adolescence sobbing on my bed. She will be staring at an open window, the curtains blowing backward. I will stand by, filing my nails. “Gone again, is she?” I’ll say.
It also means she will know what it is to have a daughter. The most exasperating person alive. A mirror that follows you around. Having a daughter feels like taking off your own skin. It feels like studying for a test you can never pass, because the answers keep changing.

It also feels like a radiator on a cold morning, and like a song I once heard on a morning in Paris, one that I had once loved and hadn’t heard in years, that filled with such happiness that I never forgot how the leaves on trees looked outside as I listened.

And I pushed with Morgan again, lifting her head, my stomach cramping, and saw her determination, and Trevor’s intentness, and then it came to me. She was the only one who needed to push. It was her baby, and she knew what she was doing.
The baby’s head was starting to show. “I’ll be down the hall,” I said hastily.
“Stay, Mom,” Morgan said. “We want you to.”

Ryan Adair Anderson arrived at 12:57, black-haired and black eyed, and perfect, her long eyes upside down smiles. I kept saying, “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

And the best thing is that she looks exactly like…

Her paternal grandmother.

My luck, she’ll just get my singing.

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