337/365 Big Sister Moment (double posted)

This December has been filled with moments. Here is one.

I'm the oldest of 4. My brother Ian is 4 years younger than I am; Bevin is 5 years younger than him, and Colleen is 2 years younger than her. Spread out, kind of like my kids, actually. Enough time between that it's been hard for me to realize that my siblings have started catching up with me--there's a huge difference between 21 and 17, but not so much difference between 36 and 32. Not so much at all, in fact.

Ian and Ashley visited this Christmas. We all went to Christmas Eve mass (10 pm, not midnight, thank goodness), all but Mike, Leo, and Maeve since Maeve had a fever (of course). We sat in two front pews, my parents, Ian and Ashley, and my niece with Sophia. My sisters and I sat behind them. Snow was still falling outside but the church climate was warm, so we kept taking off and putting on coats and dripping from shoes and boots. Sophia and Kennedy were both dressed in party dresses for reasons I never really gathered fully. They'd worn them the night before to my parents' party and I suppose they equated them with Christmas. Anyway.

Sometime around the offertory, Ashley leaned her head against Ian's shoulder, and it totally caught me off guard. My brother is just over 6 foot and must weigh close to 270. He's huge. Ashley is barely 5 feet tall and one of those 120 pounds soaking wet kind of girls. That might even be more than she weighs when she's not pregnant. Tiny.

She's pregnant, in the category of high risk. They will know how high come January at the "big ultrasound" that we all do and none of us notices except if we're looking for the baby's gender. It has never hit me that it is truly an anomaly scan, even when the tech is measuring thicknesses and looking at the roof of the baby's mouth for a cleft. Craziness. Never had to worry. Ian and Ashley have to worry. The baby has Down Syndrome and that can bring with it a whole mixed bag of physical problems, most worrisome being heart defects. We just won't know until we know and on Christmas Eve that was still a long way away.

Earlier that day I'd picked up a baby book when I was at Catholic Supply getting the last Christmas gift (my parents have a creche that we add to each year, an unbreakable creche, I might add, although the woman at the counter said that dogs like to chew on Baby Jesus sometimes. My parents don't have a dog so that's ok). And a little cross to hang in the baby's room, one of those God Bless the Child etc. kind of sentiments. I was standing in line and there was a neighbor in front of me, a woman who goes to my church and lives on the next block and we know each other but I can never remember her name. She and her husband are going to be grandparents in the new year and she's glancing at the baby book and asks me who is having the baby--probably thinking it's me, after all, with my 3 and my youngest at almost 2. And it's Christmas Eve and I'd had a minor brush with death earlier in the day and it's snowing and I'm exhausted and I start to cry. Jesus. I'm not handling any of this well because I'm his older sister and if I could do anything on earth or in heaven to help them I would and I would, without a second thought switch places and have this baby and take this cup from them? You know?

Of course, my neighbor and fellow parishioner has a twin sister who has 7 kids and the last one in that row has Down Syndrome and we talk a moment (it's like everyone comes out of the closet when you break the ice, whether about DS or epilepsy or whatever). The girl behind the counter in her Notre Dame sweatshirt waits patiently. I'm in Catholic Supply, a store I usually detest going to but it was open and I realized I'd forgotten the damned creche and I had no time to make the ridiculous trip over to the shrine in Illinois where I'd rather shop for these things but, did I mention it was Christmas Eve and there was quite a bit of stress? And I'm crying at the counter in front of this woman who is just almost a complete stranger and I pay the girl and I walk out into the snow.

So it's later that night and my daughter is sick again and my heart just won't come to the point where it admits what day it is and Ashley puts her head on Ian's shoulder.

My brother, I should mention, has always been the type that worried me. The adulthood part, I mean. He always reminds me of the passage in that David Sedaris essay about his younger brother and finding out he's going to be a father. Something like my brother was the type who would disassemble the baby and then get distracted by something else, like the chance to eat 100 chicken wings, and forget to reassemble the baby. I'm paraphrasing but that's Ian in a nutshell.

At least the Ian I knew. The Ian who sat on the couch with his 6 year old and watched "Snakes on a Plane" while my girls hid in her bedroom, afraid of scary movies. The Ian who eats habanero peppers to prove his manliness. The Ian who used to drink amazing amounts of alcohol, the Ian who took 47 years to get his bachelor's degree. And so forth. Not an adult.

We'd spent the week together, doing St. Louis things like the Arch and the City Museum and eating Italian food on the Hill because Ashley likes toasted ravioli and even though you can get them in the freezer section nationwide, perhaps, they still are kind of a St. Louis thing. Kennedy, my niece, has grown up a lot. She's 6 months younger than Sophia and is a grade behind her due to birthdays, but she's smart as a whip and nice. Nice counts for a lot when you're the aunt. Later that night she would open my present to her, a sampler quilt with colonial lady blocks, and she would be genuinely happy about it. Nice.

And this week together had shown me that Ian's edges had been worn down in similar ways that mine had. He didn't tease Kennedy, or Ashley, the way he used to. He didn't talk politics with me to get me going unnecessarily. Things were subdued, but not bad. He was more like my friends and less like the people I avoided in high school.

So Ashley puts her head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around her and I suddenly realize he's an adult. She is too, but that wasn't the shock. He's about to be the father of two, one of whom, a little boy, is going to need a lot of care and love and prayer. A baby they're planning to name Ethan, which means steadfast.

It was one of those moments. I've been having a lot of them lately. The most recent one was Maeve's seizure, realizing how incredibly beautiful she is, while she lay there in a post-ictal cataonia. And here it was again. It was another beauty in fear and worry moment. They're here, they're together, they're adults.

What was that I said about life persisting?



The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes

Bring me all of your dreams,
you dreamers,
Bring me all your heart melodies,
that I may wrap them in a blue cloud cloth,
Away from the too rough fingers of the world