Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy Read Free Book Online Page A

worse.
    We’re so scared for you. We’re so sad for you.

    As if our new child had died. I remembered
    so vividly the ecstatic leaps of joy
    I’d made without condition,

    when their children were born. I knew
    from several occasions that the most basic
    thing to say was:
Congratulations!

    Because our beautiful baby boy
    was in fact alive. I heard mostly silence
    from the parents of those kids I’d celebrated.

    Why on earth would it be the closest,
    dearest friends to shit the most toxically
    on a sad new family struggling to find

    blessing where blessings were?
    I wondered. It seemed to me that those
    with children could ill afford

    to sympathize—we were their nightmares—
    how could they not be half-glad
    it happened to us and not to them,

    our misfortune statistically
    tweaking the odds of misfortune
    in their favor.

    But the guilt of that relief
    showed on their faces. A sight
    I’ll never forget.

    Of course, our crisis doesn’t actually
    mean anything for the likelihood
    of others’. It’s all a trick

    on the parent-heart, and we all fall for it,
    how else to sleep? When I was advising
    a dear student about her chances

    of becoming a Rhodes scholar,
    there were many grueling numbers
    and pairs of numbers meant to terrify:

    forty thousand applicants for twenty-four scholarships,
    for example. But once she was a finalist,
    I told her: your odds are now 50:50.

    Not 852:1. Either you get it or you don’t.
    Yes, parents. I wish that my son’s pain
    meant your child would be spared,

    but my son is not Christ. And I am no
    damn Pietà Mary. In spite of our proximity,
    your kid is just as likely to be next. 50:50.

    By the way, the student didn’t end up
    a Rhodes scholar, and I told her
    that, for a poet, the experience

    of not winning the prize was going to be
    more useful than anything else
    thus far. Oh, but paltry
usefulness!

    The uses of disappointment are shit
    when you just want the big damn prize
    or want your child to be able to move

    his limbs and talk. Back to the friends,
    though, since this is the only place
    I can go back to them, it seemed

    to me that those most frightened
    not only for their children but about
    their places in the world, they were the most

    grindingly inept, the least able to drum up
    compassion. Those gunning for tenure
    with little achievement to support it,

    stay-at-home moms who had once
    been talented but were now pretending
    they were not in order to “raise a family”

    and to slide into inanity. I don’t know what to
    make of such spiritual inertia but it seems
    like the same stuff racism’s made of:

    fear of difference:
As long as it’s not me,
    I don’t have to know anything about it.
    As long as they stay the hell away from me,

    it never has to be me.
As long as they stay
    weak enough they can believe they will never
    be gutted by this particular pain.
Not my

    child, hurt like that
. As long as they seem
    incapable of handling such trauma,
    God will never force them to.

    Secret, smug believers!
God never gives you
    more than you can bear,
they like to say, as if
    the strong should be punished for their strength:

    We can bear it. So we got it.
    But what about my baby? How weak does
    a newborn have to be to escape God’s burdens?

    And why press down so hard on Cal when
    it was I who grossly claimed superhuman strength:
    I know I can deliver him, I know I can

    push. I don’t care how much pain I’m in,
    I can handle it! I can do it! I’m the strongest
    fucking woman in the world!

    When in fact, if I had let myself be weak,
    a C-section would have kept Cal safe
    and I’d never have seen the true spirit

    of some of my once-close friends.
    It’s like that old college saying:
    Alcohol kills brain cells, but only the weak ones.

    I’m certain that I’m merely, unadmirably,
    jealous of these friends who certainly
    have their own problems,

    just not the