Unravelling straight lined expectations_5.1
Fools guide to saving the world, part 5
I'm visual. My mind sees and thinks in bright colours that dance and swirl in a beautiful form of insanity.
So the minute I walked into our home I saw how it would all look. It unraveled so clearly as I travelled down the long, dark passageway that very first night. Yes, right then in front of me I saw the books. I saw the plants. I saw the blinds and lights. It was all very lifelike and present.
But I studied botany? Not sure why or how I ended up there. Something to do with a fleeting conversation I had with a friend on the doorstep of my parent’s beach house. Fate maybe? A generous helping if I really think back hard. In hindsight and with twenty years of mess behind me it would seem my choice was ill-fated but I am still not so sure. Too early to tell I think.
Yet after three years of learning every theory the smartest botanist in the world could teach me about those wonderful creatures we so coldly call plants, I still didn’t have a single clue of how they actually worked. Sure, I had the textbooks. I knew a lot about their cells and DNA and how to model their environment and yet I was (and still am) almost completely ignorant about who they really are; how they think and behave and talk and act.
That’s why when I started putting my vision of our new home into action I started with ivy, inside our house.
For about six months I watched that ivy struggled through a stunted and hideous form of growth forcing one crippled leaf out after the next only by supreme effort and courage. Then my ivy started supporting a white fungus of its own. A week later they were both stone cold dead and brown.
Through that time our home carried a morbid feeling. Of dead dreams and broken hearts but that had more to do with what we were going through. So on a whim and in the blur of pain I broke off a piece of abandoned creeper from a forgotten wall and shoved it into the dead ivy’s soils and forgot about it.
Today that creeper cloaks our home in a majesty the richest mansion could not compete with. It’s truly is specular. My brother is an artist in his own way and met my creeper almost two week ago at our first fortieth birthday party. For an hour he just sat there and starred up, trying to makes sense of its beauty. That helped me a bit I think. Helped me be slightly more transparent about what I had hidden so well, an abandoned gratefulness for that glorious plant.
My third son was born three days ago. At twenty-two, twenty-two. We arrived at the gynecologist for our final check-in, both of us in a huff. My diary said our appointment was at two-thirty but my wife factored in travel so I was an hour early. Then both our phones died (which never happens), at exactly the right moment (or wrong moment). The comedy of errors was truly fantastic. In the end we independently left each other somewhere we thought the other was supposed to be and cursed our respective irresponsibility alone on the long forty-five-minute drive up a very steep hill.
When we were finally reunited in the doctor’s waiting room it was all very chilly. Thankfully I deleted the voice notes where I swore at her otherwise it would have been much, much worse. The appointment was a standard scan and the final stop before our four day weekend and when things warmed up a bit we were talking about what we would order that evening from UBER Eats.
Our little man had other plans though. Nothing to worry about we were told, ‘just do a routine CTG on your way out the door’. But after five minutes of the CTG the attending nurse took one look at the printout and exclaimed, ‘Can’t you feel that?’ My wife said, ‘Feel what?’. The nurse’s stunned response had me shuddering before she spoke. “You’re in labor!’ she shouted. The exclamation mark carried across the entire room.
No. I wasn’t ready to be a dad. Not again. Not without a four-day weekend. The first time was just too traumatic; getting them, losing them a little bit more every two weeks. That was and is a very wicked kind of torture. I am still carrying the PTSD. And all of it rushed to the surface at once and so I rushed out the door looking for some KFC.
Thinking back on it all this morning, the chaos, the cut, the blood and tears and how much I love my sons and my wife, my hand stayed back so innocently to my creeper as I passed it in the passageway lost in thought. At the time I thought I was touching it out of reverence, or a weird hello, or maybe a celebration of the leaves that looked just a little bit more lush and polished than usual. But as drove back to my beloveds I think my heart unravelled why. Expectations. Maybe that’s what I gleaned through osmosis with that very wise soul?
Ah yes, when our expectation unravelled it’s easier to let go and be given something far better in return.
Sam-Jam the mighty (Samuel Joseph) came into the world in a cloud of dust. For three days he’s been trapped inside a white box that helps him breath with us trapped on other side whispering our untranslated loved through all that cavernous space that is ‘suppose’ to be skin on skin. I keep wondering if he gets it. Get’s what I mean when I say I love you. I know he doesn’t, so I just hope that somehow my smell and sound and pheromones will tell him what his brain can’t understand. I hope in some way some way he’ll be able to see past the tubes up his nose, mouth and arms and come to know they might be the greatest thing that ever happened to him because they are keeping him alive.
And that thought makes me smile. He’s off to a great start. Surely he’ll never be expecting life to be a rosy, straight lined c-section that was planned so neatly for the civilised hour of seven forty five on the thirty first of March. And if that is the case then maybe, just maybe, he’ll be graced with an in-built expectation that unplanned is normal. And wonderful! And letting it all go is the way it’s all meant to be?
