An Empty Space

"Are we having a new baby soon?" Joe asked us last night.

Sarah asked for news about a possible new Gladly arrival.

There's a big empty space in our bedroom right now, because last night I took the crib apart and put it in the basement. This is the first time in more than eleven years that there's been no baby in our bedroom, at least for part of the night (toward morning lately we've had four people in our bed). I cried.

This morning at church I saw a friend's baby for the first time, nine days old and sweet as could be. I cried again.

It's not that I'm actually pining for another baby of my own. In fact, as I watched the new baby bobbing around on his dad's shoulder, smacking his lips and stuffing his little fist into his mouth in clear anticipation of his next nursing, I felt a wee little wave of gratitude that my kids' needs now are so much less unrelenting.

Last month I saw two lines on a pregnancy test and immediately shifted into exclamation-point thinking. "PREGNANT!!! How did that happen?! [NB: rhetorical question] Oh my! PREGNANT!!! That line got so dark so fast! I bet it's twins! I'll have to drop out of school for sure!" Five minutes and a thousand heartbeats later, I said "...wait a minute" as a vague memory stirred, and went downstairs to google "frectis pregnancy test." I'd used the same test and jumped to the same incorrect conclusion. The line was dark because it was the control line. (I ask you, though: what kind of stupid pregnancy test uses two lines for a negative result? Everybody knows two lines = pregnant.) Moral of the story: if you buy a twin-pack of pregnancy tests, save the instructions along with the second test.

I thought about posting the story at the time, a light-hearted post in which I proposed Magic 8-Ball pregnancy tests. But it had hit me in a surprisingly tender spot and I wasn't quite ready to joke about it. (Plus I'm not sure which of my relatives read this blog. Hi, relatives! Regular non-TMI content will resume shortly.)

Caitlin Flanagan has a piece in today's NYT about how different the experience of potential pregnancy is for men and women, and much of it rings true for me. I called my husband after my two-line misadventure and spluttered incoherently for a minute. He said, "...yeah?" -- clearly befuddled by the intensity of my reaction and the residual adrenaline. I hung up and called a friend instead, who knew I needed some sympathetic exclamation points. She knows what it's like to discover that a new little life has taken up residence in your womb, to feel the world shift slightly as you think through what the next weeks could bring.

"Do you think much about having another baby?" I asked my husband last night. He answered vaguely; the question is not taking up a lot of space in his head. But I think about it constantly. I wonder about "just reasons" and "the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood." I wonder what the future holds for us. I'm 37 and not getting any younger. I feel called to work toward this degree right now, but I'm not as clear on what comes after that. I've been a Christian long enough to know that God is not likely to reveal to me in January 2008 what he has planned for me in August 2010, but that makes me say, in Inigo Montoya's voice, "I hate waiting."

It wasn't the basement-bound crib that made me cry last night; it was the baby blankets. I bagged up the quilt a friend gave us in 1996 -- I understand better now what it must have cost her to make it while she was waiting to begin the adoption process that would bring her two daughters. Into the bag went the quilt my friend from high school sent across the ocean to Scotland while I was waiting there for my second son to arrive, and the flannel blanket Alex's godmother made him eleven years ago, and the embroidered blanket my friend Shannon gave me after she held my hand during Joe's lovely, lovely birth. There are more, all with stories and memories attached, and together they represent something I am not ready to consign to the basement quite yet.

So I think I will bring them back upstairs and find an empty space for them in my tiny linen closet. Every so often I will take one down and smell the lingering delicious baby smell. I will think about the babies who toddled across them on their way to boyhood and the boyhoods that are racing by, and wonder about other babies who might toddle across them someday.