Onward

Around the time they’d moved to Montana, Sarah started having a recurring dream that she was driving a car she could not slow down. The dreams typically took place back in LA, where the freeway traffic was a supporting character in everyone’s personal drama. It wasn’t exactly a Speed situation; the brakes worked and she could use them, but they were about a tenth as effective as normal. She’d find herself crossing four lanes on the 405, hunched forward in an intense focus with both hands on the wheel, narrowly avoiding collisions left and right as she urgently sought to reduce her velocity. Sarah never got in an accident in the dreams, somehow, but would wake sweat-soaked and breathing heavily, her heart still thumping from the effort required of each near-miss.

On Tuesday it was Percy, with his maddeningly consistent 5am internal alarm, who saved her from her hellish commute, jolting her into consciousness with his incessant meows. She awoke with the tell-tale metallic taste in her mouth, like every morning for the past few weeks, and decided it was time. Sarah willed herself out of bed, as the white noise from the other side of the wall insulated the toddler from both the cat’s pre-dawn wake-up call and her own heavy footsteps. She walked to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, skimming the test directions as if the rudimentary process had somehow dramatically modernized over the past few years. In three minutes she’d have her answer.

Sarah had never envisioned being a mother. In high school, she fantasized not about weddings and baby showers but about traveling to far-off lands and sampling every local cuisine, living life Anthony Bourdain-style long before that meant anything to anyone. She’d somehow never absorbed the teenage girl dicta to suppress one’s appetites, gustatory and otherwise, and longed for the adult freedom to fully experience the world with all five senses.

After college, she’d largely made it happen, working as a coordinator for a study abroad program that had her living in India, South Africa, and Brazil for three months each for five consecutive years. The pay was minimal but so were the costs of living, and Sarah had taken advantage of every school holiday to take herself on short trips. She’d seen the penguins in Cape Town and voyaged into the Amazon for an ayahuasca ceremony with a local shaman. She’d visited the larger-than-life sundials in Jaipur and dipped her feet in the Arabian Sea in Goa. She’d taken a day trip to the Apartheid Museum and devoured books about colonial histories, simultaneously sickened by all she hadn’t learned before leaving the U.S. and grateful to have the opportunity to do so in context. By all measures Sarah’s twenties comprised an incalculably rich set of experiences, her world expanded far beyond what most could hope for, and the solitude that characterized much of her travels felt at worst like a small price to pay and at best deeply freeing.

But when she met Robert at a mutual friend’s engagement party in her early thirties, he’d charmed her with his intellect and wry sense of humor, which managed to be cutting without tipping over to mean-spirited or cynical. He taught classical history at a community college in the suburbs, and drafted screenplays in his spare time, as Angelenos were wont to do. He rarely travelled and was seemingly content with a world that was somewhat smaller in shape and size, though his dedication to examining the complexity of human experience over the past several millennia nevertheless imparted a depth to his perspective that was obvious from even the first conversation. Over time, Sarah tacitly agreed to accept his more traditional aspirations when it came to marriage and family. After a white-dress wedding and a full year as husband and wife, they started trying, while simultaneously packing up their things and heading to Missoula, where Robert had finally secured a tenure-track position. And in September, days shy of Sarah’s own 35th birthday, Violet came into the world.

The next two years were earth-shattering in a way no solo train travel or hallucinogenic epiphanies had fully prepared Sarah for. The joy was immense but the loss of autonomy was staggering. The radius of her life shrunk back to the proportions of her own childhood. For months, she barely left home, measuring time in the two- or three-hour chunks between nursing sessions rather than in days. For another year, the ten miles between the apartment and her new job in college admissions were the parameters of her existence, and she was consistently home from 6pm onwards. And when March 2020 hit, the walls somehow closed in even tighter than ever before, bringing a jarring end to playdates and toddler music classes and even casual coffee breaks with the stroller.

Still, the small miracles at home felt of such magnitude that they far exceeded any physical bounds. The explosion in Violet’s language and her way of starting conversations with everyone–not just humans but also Percy, the trees, the oatmeal, spiders small and large alike–left Sarah and Robert entranced, even as they counted the minutes until bedtime. Violet was also suddenly eager to participate in every mundane daily chore, from taking out the trash to loading the dishwasher to folding the laundry, which somehow diminished their banality. Her emerging imagination was perhaps the most dazzling. Bearing witness to another human being learning, instinctually, that they could indeed create their own realms and refuse to accept the limitations of the one before us left Sarah awestruck when she actually had a moment to reflect on it. For Violet, the world was in most respects as large as ever, and indeed unimaginably expansive compared to where she’d spent her first nine months.

And Sarah’s own space began to open up even as quarantines came and went. She’d weaned Violet after 26 months, a final step toward reclaiming her body as her own. At last (at last!), Violet had started sleeping through the night consistently, and the bags under Sarah’s eyes had started to deflate. With the pandemic seeming to wane, Sarah had begun planning a trip for the following summer, a getaway to a remote part of Costa Rica for her and Robert’s fifth anniversary. Her sister Tess had agreed to come stay at the house with Violet while they were gone, their first nights away together–or at all–since becoming parents.

And then.

It was a few weeks after Christmas that she’d noticed the heartburn. Her LA traffic dreams also took a turn for the bizarre, even for dreams, with outlandish characters and side plots beginning to appear. One night she narrowly avoided rear-ending not another SUV but a wide-eyed dragon, like the kind you’d see in a Chinese New Year celebration, while the next she turned to find her high school physics teacher in the passenger seat, casually grading exams while she drove feverishly to keep them both alive. And in the mornings, even after such fitful nights of sleep, she found herself unable to stomach the idea of coffee, a once unthinkable abstention.

As soon as the thought occurred to her it seemed inevitable. They’d agreed to be “one and done” and Sarah was on birth control, but there was always that 1% possibility, and she’d had the occasional sleep-deprived day she’d forget to take her pill. An unplanned pregnancy at 38 seemed incongruous, like getting a first tattoo in middle-age or wearing a tie to freshman orientation. But of course growing up also invariably demonstrates how “growing up” is a fiction, or at the very least an oversimplification. Few of us grow out of our quirks and flaws and none of us outlive chance.

So at 5:08am, she looked. If she was honest with herself, the second pink line was a foregone conclusion; then it was confirmed. An accident. A miracle. A mistake. A blessing. A baby, one way or another. And so they would reroute and journey on.