A pseudo-metaphysics of birth

I believe it was Jungian psychologist James Hillman in Healing Fiction who gave me a helpful way to think about dreams: Treat their images, characters, and stories -- however nonsensical -- "As If" they were true. They can give voice to the realities of the soul silenced by the ego chatter box of the waking brain.

I probably like the As If approach because it gives me a way in and a way out at the same time. In other words, I'm not accountable for the implied metaphysics.

As I get ready to give birth to this child, a lot of As Ifs are popping up in both my sleeping and day dreams, which grow daily with my swelling belly. The dreams center around a single question: Where do these children come from?

In August, 2003 I became pregnant for the first time. We had been trying. I'd learned how to chart my temperature and look for changes in discharge, etc. and yet it had taken more than six months. I was between two film shoots when I discovered the source of my utter exhaustion. At five weeks an ultrasound detected the first flutter of a heart beat. We were thrilled. Jordy and I took a weekend trip to Sequoia National Park, where we forwent air-conditioning in our cabin in favor of open windows to smell and be one with nature. That night I learned the advantages of being two with nature when a bear came to the window behind our bed, sniffing for treats. "THIS IS WHEN WE'RE SUPPOSED TO TALK LOUDLY!" I yelled at sleeping Jordy, who thought I had decided to take up some issue in our relationship at two in the morning. "Huh?" he mumbled as I switched on lights. "There's a bear on the porch! The National Park flyer said we should talk loudly!" Jordy looked out the window in time to catch a glimpse of the beast's round rear as he (or she) schlumped off the porch into the blackness. In the morning, Jordy and I toyed with the idea that the bear was a spirit guide to our baby, who from then on we called "Baby Bear."

Soon after I flew back east for a film festival and quick visit to family in New England. It was too early to tell anyone I was pregnant, so when I began to bleed, I had no one to tell of my grief. I retreated to my mother's garden to cry privately, and I remember the petals of her black-eyed susans reaching to me like a child's fingers. I was almost 34 and already getting the "Advanced Maternal Age" treatment from doctors. I menstruated late as a teenager and never had regular cycles. It was easy to slide into the despair that I wasn't destined to be a mom.

But miraculously, the bleed-throughs stopped. When I went to my doctor back in Los Angeles, she said everything looked fine. By Halloween, we were confident enough to tell friends and family of Baby Bear's expected arrival in April. The next day I went to a routine check-up. Dr. Lau kept a poker face as she reported something odd on the ultrasound. Baby Bear had developed a cyst in his abdomen. We would give it until Monday to see if it resolved itself.

Over the weekend, Jordy was anxious but I was strangely cool. I said I trusted Baby Bear. I don't even know what I meant by that. Monday I went back alone, confident it would have resolved as the earlier bleeding had. But the cyst was bigger. In a matter of minutes, second and third opinions were collected from the heads of UCLA Obstetrics and Neonatalogy. This baby was not viable, I was informed. He had a rare developmental problem; he couldn't pass fluids, making his bladder a cyst as big as the rest of his body. His other internal organs were already compromised and soon his heart would stop beating. For my health and safety, I needed to terminate the pregnancy as soon as possible.

On November 6, Jordy and I elected to induce premature labor, rather than follow the more aggressive procedure the doctors recommended. It was slow and painful, but we got to hold Baby Bear in our hands and say goodbye. We had his body cremated and placed in a tiny box that has traveled with us ever since.

Every Friday night for months afterwards, we lit a candle As If to guide him back to us. I don't know what to believe about where we come from or go, but I had a strong instinct to light the candle and tell him, again and again, how much we wanted him, how we hoped to give him a healthy body next time.

In February, I got pregnant again. This little guy's pregnancy was robust from the start. Never a bleed-through, never an alarming ultrasound. April 30, Baby Bear's due date, passed with the comfort of hope and the bittersweet realization that these two beings could never have co-existed. Duncan Ira Green was born November 1, 2004, almost exactly one year from the day we said goodbye to Baby Bear. It felt almost As If he followed the light of the candle and heard our voices. But what do I know about how any of this stuff works?

July 14, 2006. Jordy, Baby Duncan and I were driving up the coast of California to Santa Cruz for a visit with sister Annie and college friends at Stanford. Somewhere in the blinding sunshine of Monterey County we pulled into a gas station to fill up and change a diaper when my cellphone rang. It was my mother. My beloved grandfather Bob Reeve, known as "Gar" to the grandkids, would probably not survive the weekend. Two weeks earlier he had celebrated the 4th of July by bone fishing on Long Island Sound, but the next night, thanks to a blown-out night light, he had hit his head on his bathroom door jam. He was on blood-thinners; the internal bleeding was impossible to stem. Day by day he'd grown more remote and the pain had worsened. He was unconscious. My grandmother had finally made the excruciating decision to stop hydrating him.

I almost got on a plane back to Connecticut, but I knew Gar would have swatted his hand at me and said, "Be with your friends, have a ball." He never had time for death. His own mother died in the Spanish flu epidemic when he was two, and as far as I could tell, his mother had given him a double dose of vitality that super-powered his 89 years on earth. I addressed my gratitude and goodbyes to the Pacific Ocean instead, where sea and air merged in waves of mist suffused with late afternoon sunlight. That night I said to Jordy, Let's make a baby.

I like to imagine the meeting of that child, who shot into the world exactly nine months later, with his great-grandfather at the crossroads of infinity. I like to imagine that Gar gave Baby Reeve a specific gift -- the twinkle in his eye, and all the powers that come with it.

When Reeve was conceived, we had a vague plan to move back to New York. When we were evicted from our rental in Los Angeles, we asked ourselves if this wasn't the universe telling us it was time to go "home." We'd heard Brooklyn was a good place to raise kids while close enough to family in New England, finance work for Jordy, and independent film for me. We followed the baby stroller stampede to Park Slope where we found a nice house on a tree-lined street and made an offer. When I emailed my mom the address, she mapped it and wrote back: "That's right down the street from the cemetery where the Reeve family is buried!"

Baby Reeve was born in a room with a view of the Statue of Liberty and spent the first two hours of his life eating. He came out in 5 hours start to finish, and I haven't stopped chasing him since. At age two, he has strong opinions on music, loves hockey sticks and soccer balls, derives great glee from making "hooting" echoes in tunnels, and sleeps with legs and arms out bolt straight. Anyone who knew my grandfather might say it's almost As If... But I don't know how any of this stuff works.

My husband, who moonlights as an amateur epidemiologist, has been following the recent outbreak of swine flu closely. The timing is not great for me to be pregnant, given the higher risk profile, and it's hard to brush off given the family history. So, if one were to give any credence to the above "As If," could it follow that... it's As If I am Gar's mother, Camilla? Following my baby boy through incarnations? There are enough parallels to pause. But then I laugh at the ludicrousness of such thinking. (I pride myself on being more scientific than not.) But, against my will, a little narrative spins off, imagining what if. So here's something strange I just thought of this week when it snowed in New England on my 40th birthday.

In 1918 Camilla Reeve took her two-year old sledding, where it's believed she contracted the flu that took her life. I was born on October 13, 1969 when a fluke early snow storm hit Boulder, Colorado. My mom took my older sister sledding that day, the gravitational force of which she muses precipitated my birth. Coincidence, I'm sure. But what if?

I am not afraid of the swine flu. I am not Camilla, and Reeve is not Gar, and I have no idea if Duncan is Baby Bear, or who this little guy is who pogo-jumps on my ribs all night long. I really don't know where we come from or go to, and mostly I'd rather let the mystery be. But if I allow myself to think As If we were all these people before and again, what do I see?

A powerful web of determined and personal love. Second chances to learn how to live and love better. A will to keep trying, even when our bodies fail us. An immortality that requires no cushy clouds or harps, but exists in a persistent pattern of life.

It is As If I am a character in an on-going story, As If my life matters, As If I'm part of something much bigger than myself of which I occasionally catch glimpses.