When Glass Tubes Turn Blue

“She has your nose”, I said.

“Poor her.”

“Your nose is perfect.” 

“You’re my mother, you have to say that.”

My daughter held up a picture of my unborn granddaughter’s face. I had heard about 3D and 4 D digital ultrasound pictures but had never seen one.  I could not believe that this was the face of a real person—an unborn person.   I told my daughter about the ultrasound picture I was sent home with in 1988, and how everybody pretended to see a baby in a grey blob.

     I found out I was pregnant with my daughter eight months after I graduated from high school in 1987. Back then decisions were simpler.  I remember a jumbo poster that hung outside the cafeteria of my all-girls catholic high school. It showed a sad teenage girl holding a baby. The caption read, “Having a baby is like being punished for eighteen years.” Yet the other option was spouted as murder by the church and my school.   I did not want to be a murderer or punished until I was thirty-six years old.  Although the poster was intense, I could not imagine having to contend with all the information that is at our fingertips today. Social media has an incessant stream of judgmental memes, about subjects such as this.

This wasn’t on purpose, but I knew very little because my mother told me nothing about ways to be careful not to have a baby. Now you can just google it. So, after I threw the glass tubes across my bathroom when the liquid in them turned blue.  I sat on my bed for hours, staring at my bedroom wall. My 'Like a Virgin' Madonna poster was taped to the pink flowered wallpaper my father had hung just months before. Madonna’s bandana headband, I tried to duplicate a thousand times, was no longer relevant, and the flowers bright, almost florescent, looked blurred, distant, and frivolous. I remembered a xeroxed poem handed to me in religion class less than a year earlier. Wondering if I still had it, I pulled my backpack out of my closet.

The scribbled notes on my backpack read like a yearbook.

“Can’t wait to see you over the summer”

 “We survived Sister Saint Mary together”

 “I know you will do great things.”

Stuffed in my trapper keeper, I found electric blue words on the wrinkled page.  “Diary of an Unborn Baby”; a poem in the perspective of an unborn child, chronicling its growth in the womb. I reread the poem for over an hour, dissecting each word.  

Three months later I held up the fuzzy picture. “Where is it?”, my mother asked turning the shiny, flimsy paper, while tilting her head to one side and then the other.

“Right there. You see that blotch?”

“I think so.” She said.

 I thought, at the time that the poster on the wall of my high school and the xeroxed copy of the poem, inspired my decision to keep my baby, but came to realize that how I did come to the decision was by sitting with my heart until it gave me an answer. 

A few years ago, I sat with a friend facing the decision that I faced decades ago.  “What do you think I should do?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. It’s your decision, but I would not look for answers scrolling on my Instagram feed, I would put my phone away for a day.  I would sit in the quiet and ask my heart, and whatever you and your heart decided, I would do.”

I wondered that night if it would be a crib or a ride.