Yellow Part Deux

I don’t remember when I had the thought first, exactly, but it was the night Z got really sick.

“The mother of my children”. I was thinking of T and how he must differentiate us, his wife and I. How we have different roles. How he must perchance describe us individually. And when I had thought that, I had turned it over in my mind a few times as I often do with common phrases. Looking for a new perspective on them. 

Later that night we had to go to the hospital. Z’s face was flushed and his eyes fever bright. He looked so small and lost, and I suddenly felt years of pent up emotion trying to burst free. Trying to pour out on him. He looked so tiny and in such need.

On the big hospital bed he looked even more dwarfed and a little scared. How many of my siblings and nieces or nephews did I sit with in hospital rooms like this one over the years? How many little hands did I hold through bed bumpers and tried to be soothing? And yet none of them had pulled like this one. None of them made my heart beat somewhere in my throat like this.

I promised him his favorite fast food afterward, if he was allowed to have it and his stomach didn’t disagree. I looked at him wearing my t-shirt on the gurney and laughed at myself. When I was little and sick, my mother would break out my dad’s white Fruit of the Loom t-shirts for me to wear. They were loose and let air flow against feverish skin. But it also cloaked us in parental love. It was a way to feel special.

Dad’s shirts were magic. And I had forgotten about that until I sat looking at him on white sheets and that image came screaming back into my mind. With it came the memory of the ren faire and T demanding I remove my corset, telling me to put his shirt on. Another form of magic. Another tie. How had I forgotten such a powerful memory?

As we left, S met us in the waiting room. Again, in the space of a heartbeat “the mother of his children” came up and all I wanted was to give them love and support. They needed to recalibrate, and I suspected needed a little time together. It’s distressing to take a child to the hospital even for me. I can’t imagine how that feels for them and so I offered to let them go an do whatever it is parents do when they have to disappear behind the veil. All those things are and probably always will be. A mystery. I have not given life. I do not know what goes into that.

But I can support. I can imagine and I can see a need. And so Z and I took our first ride together in the truck by ourselves. 

I kept him at my side so I could keep my eye on him during the trip home. His little yellow hoodie with it’s small ears dipped forward as if the creature it was modeled after was also ill reflected in the light of the radio. He was solid and warm leaning into my side, and before we were even half way to my house he was asleep. 

I was somewhere above Conway when the thought came fully. “Mother of my children”. But this time I wasn’t thinking of T. I was thinking of S and my relationship to her. I was thinking of this tribe and what I felt, and of this tiny human curled up against me making me feel emotions I hadn’t yet imagined I could have. 

I got him in and settled, and tried to settle myself. Was I even allowed to feel this? I don’t even feel the whole thing, just the very beginnings of it. The early whisps that tell me if I opened my heart to it, it would click in as easily as everything else has. Is this, then, the beginning of something completely new? Something I haven’t let myself even dream or hoping for? 

Or is caution here the best course? Is it too early? Too much? The risk too high? is it treading on sacred ground the likes of which I am not worthy even to view? 

I’ve sought redemption for my failure for 19 years. She would be an adult today. Do I dare to imagine that this could be it?