A Million Little Rainbows
One way to clean out your garage is to schedule your child’s birthday party in it, three weeks from now. That’s what we did, and so here I am, unboxing and reboxing toys/clothes/camping gear/gardening supplies/all manner of construction detritus that has accumulated over four years of life and home renovations.
I love browsing Facebook Marketplace but I am a picky buyer, rarely biting unless something looks exactly right. “Why don’t people put more effort into taking nice photos?” I grouse. “Ah, I get it now,” I reply to myself as I photograph a jumble of stuffed animals backgrounded by the leaf-strewn dirty cement floor. Even so, everything I post to our neighborhood Buy Nothing group gets snapped up immediately.
Strangers pull up in the alley; I open our garage door and disgorge one item of used kid gear after another. “Our garage has a heart on it!” I cheerfully include in my message with our address. Our garage also has multiple crystal chandeliers hanging in it, signifying a level of class possessed by our home’s previous owner but not by us. They make quite a still life when grouped with a legless armchair and twelve old window shutters (all on their way out soon, my husband assures me; he’s running his own under-the-table junk removal business).
It’s an apt metaphor for parenthood: a beautiful room, lit by crystal, filled with junk. Containing a car that you must load kids into and out of in perpetuity. But it has a heart on it, and sometimes the sun hits the chandeliers just right and they make a million little rainbows on the walls.
A young couple packs our old bassinet into their trunk. It’s their first baby; they’re having a girl. “Oh wow, congratulations!! Girls are the best. Have so much fun!!!” I gush, the light from the chandeliers illuminating the maniacal gleam in my eyes.
Have so much fun??? How dare I. I watch our bassinet disappear down the alley and shuffle through my memories. It’s 4 a.m., and I’m out-of-my-mind tired, lifting my crying baby from that bassinet to feed her for the fifth time that night. It’s 2 a.m., and I’m dozing with my other baby in my arms after another unsuccessful attempt to settle her on the bassinet’s APA-recommended safe sleeping surface. It’s 5 p.m. yesterday, and my four-year-old is defiantly hocking a loogie onto the stairs on her way up to a time out. It’s 7 p.m. that very night, and I’m speed-walking home to meet the bassinet buyer while chastising my six-year-old for not being able to keep up with me on her six-year-old legs as she sobs, because none of this is her fault. None of this is so much fun.
We put the girls to bed. They curl up against me like freshly showered coconut-scented shrimp. Later that night, we get news that a friend has lost her baby close to her due date. I creep into the girls’ rooms with an aching heart and sit by their beds, thinking of our friend and of others who have lost pregnancies, of the young expectant couple, of my years working at a pediatric hospice, of my own older sister who I never had the chance to meet. The girls’ night lights are on a rainbow setting and I watch their faces turn from red to orange to yellow as they sleep. The thread of our future together spools out in front of us; I don’t know how long it is. Have so much fun, I whisper before kissing them goodnight.
