Driving West
Ten years ago, on each weekday morning in the months before my son was born, I drove west. I drove through countryside, past cornfields, through miles and miles of intermittent woods and open sky. The sun rose behind me. It was like I was just ahead of something, like I could feel the earth turning under my wheels, propelling me forward. I had driven that route for years alone—the end destination a small rural school where I taught English—but those months, when I was pregnant for the first time, I was always conscious that I no longer was alone: that there were two hearts beating inside me. Contrary to my previous patterns—drives spent listening to NPR, or to music that reminded me of college—I rarely turned on the radio. The space inside my car had become too intimate. Instead, I sang. I made up lullabies, little tunes that I imagined soothed my baby in the same way they soothed me. I watched the sun rise in my rearview mirror and I sang, so full of impossible knowledge, legitimate fears, blind faith.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the woman I was then, how I’ve changed, how I’ve stayed the same. It’s hard to sus it all out—my children are so much a part of who I am that to remember me before them is a task of separating tightly woven threads—but I can do it if I try. She was quieter. Possibly less anxious? But also less sure. She didn’t know much about cooking. She never texted. She went on long walks by herself. She daydreamed in less practical ways. She read books for hours and hours, loving them, but without understanding the hours themselves as something to be loved. The prices of things still consumed her. She sometimes didn’t know how she ended up where she was, and other times, a stranger could say, “Everything happens for a reason,” and she’d believe it.
If I close my eyes, I can feel my ten-years-ago hands on that steering wheel, hear the sound of heartbeats in my ears, sense the light growing stronger behind me. There was a force, a push. An electric pressure. On one of those mornings, suddenly hot and dizzy, my vision blotting, I had to pull off on a gravel road, stop the car, tear off my scarf, rip open my coat. I thrust open the car door, needing the cold shock of the twilit air. Why? I thought? How? What now? I was terrified. But the only answer was the steady force inside me. So I leaned into it, with a kind of relieving abandon. What else could I do? With my baby kicking beneath my hands, I watched the sun rise. I sang to us both, my voice quavery, but the words sure: “Good morning, little baby. Good morning, child of mine.” Then, soon enough, I turned the car around, got back onto the highway, and drove toward what I sensed deep down would be a beautiful day. A beautiful life.
