Travels with Dylan.

June 2, Santa Rosa.

It's now been two weeks since I joined the circus, again, armed with two babies. I wanted to put the road trip into words so that I would remember it in all its glory, I wanted to talk about Sheyla and her in-laws, don Sandro, dona Maigo, the house in Dallas, the wait for Nicolas to be born there, Nicolas' birth, my mother's visit. Instead I traveled down memory lane and wrote about Dylan being born.


Travels with Dylan.

Dylan was born naturally and when the midwives put him on my chest I didn't feel anything at all except relief that the unbearable pain was finally over.
Much later Dylan, softly, came into my life.
Women are not born women, much less mothers, they grow into it, wrote French writer Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking essay, The Second Sex. Motherhood was anything if not elusive for me until much later, when he'd started to walk and I saw in him a little man, until it finally, imperceptibly came upon me that this was my son, this unfathomable little person, unlike me (Dylan is the portrait of his father,) a world of his own I can never hope to break in, unlike me, I the vessel of his passage to life, the provider, not owned any love except that which he chooses to endow me, so unlike me, not my own but his own, now and forever, until after I'm gone and he's gone and we are both returned to the great mystery, life bursting in, life continuing and then out like a candle, Dylan an old man one day and then gone, much later, after I'm gone too, if I'm lucky and he is, Dylan and his big baby eyes still, looking at me from that faraway world none of us can hope to claim.
It was raining when Dylan came into my life, early in the evening on a winter day in Savannah, Georgia. November 14, 2005, a Monday. I kept the To-Do list I had made that day, as on every day, a necessary attempt at keeping my messy life from verging out of control. It ran, in order: "scan film; finish portfolio; eBay auction; call dealer; oil for car; cook/rest."
I've long since forgotten what the first four items were about.
I was a photography student in a graduate program at the Savannah School of Arts and Design, a short-lived attempt at reinventing my life once again. The To-Do list for that Monday went undone. I woke up early as usual but feeling odd; I was two weeks from my due date and as I drove my boyfriend to the airport we decided to go on instead to the birthing center I had chosen to have the baby at; it was down the road and if he was going to be away for a few days, better to check that that odd feeling in my gut was not what I both wanted and dreaded it to be.
The midwives sent us home to wait it out; it could be it or it could be a false alarm. I called my Mom; she was staying at a motel in town with a girlfriend of mine, the both of them visiting from France, where I'm from. Within four hours my waters broke and we rushed to the birthing center, my boyfriend speeding on the highway, sliding in and out of lanes at eighty-five miles an hour and I in the passenger seat writhing in pain, unable to speak already for the pain, moaning, a scene from a bad TV show.
Labor was two hours long - very short, agonizingly long. Dylan met us at 6:22 that night. I remember they told me it was raining outside.
It would months before I realized my life had irrevocably turned a corner, and yet it remained much the same.
I still live in a travel trailer, only I hit the road with it to go work with my boyfriend in the circus where he performs as an acrobat. I still make To-Do lists every day and they still go mostly unchecked. My boyfriend and I got married, and that didn't change anything either. I still love to read alone in the quiet of the advancing night after the day is done, only now that means after Dylan is finally asleep.
And now six-week-old Nicolas, too.