Becoming & Becoming
An Essay
Baby’s got a new drum. But he’s not a baby anymore—next month he’ll turn three. A big kid. The big kid’s new drum is blue steel, to be played with delicate mallets. It’s a gift from his grandfather. Special for me? the big kid says.
In November 2022, a few weeks before he was born, I transcribed a 13th-century poem attributed to Chan master Wumen Huikai in the Notes app on my phone: “Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, the snow in winter. When your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”
Crowding this note are many others, mostly lists: errands, tasks, people to call, supplements and herbs to buy, appointments to make, healing postpartum soups to prepare and freeze, thank you cards and gifts to send, questions to ask (WILL INSURANCE REIMBURSE PRENATAL ACUPUNCTURE?).
Throughout the pregnancy I had been haunted by the feeling that I was getting ready to die as much as I was getting ready to give birth and become a mother. There was so much to do, to square away. Everything was fine, I was exuberant, and yet I conducted business with a measure of solemnity. I wanted to talk about it; nobody seemed to want to hear it. When I was a child I was often told I was being melodramatic. Was this one of those times? I wondered.
To be fair, many things had ended or were coming to an end. Our housing situation changed under turbulent circumstances, I was leaving my work without any definite plan for when to return, my partner had lost his job, the social distortion of the pandemic had shape-shifted without subsiding, one of our cats had died unexpectedly, and the other cat was suffering, though we didn’t yet know how much.
We adopted the cats together when they were nearly one year old. We couldn’t separate them, they clung to one another. Their names, according to the agency, were Leo and Millicent, and we renamed them Benson and Stabler.
Stabler arrived congenitally stressed. His anxiety was severe enough that he would gouge the floorboards with his brittle claws and then urinate to mark the spot. He scowled. He refused to be held or cuddled. He would lumber up the top of the refrigerator only to frantically slide down its face. His meows were satanic. For ten years our two-bedroom in Bed-Stuy was his purgatory. We doted on him in ways he seemed to just barely tolerate. He was not easy to love, we loved him still.
Two weeks after we learned I was pregnant, Stabler underwent two minor surgeries and promptly lost any remaining will to live. In his last days, in the midst of the anguish that is deciding whether an animal needs you to pay someone to kill and cremate him, I took a photo of a few lines from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
Eight months later, Stabler’s sister Benson became ill, very ill, shortly after we moved to a new apartment. Was it the carpets? The fresh paint? Shock? Depression? Delayed grief? She took to sleeping all day, curled up beside the radiators. Kidneys, the emergency vet told us. I visited her every day that she was in treatment. Her bloodwork looked good when they released her, but there were the daily subcutaneous fluid injections and a persistent lack of appetite. She had been five pounds to begin with, then hardly four.
The night we euthanized her she was so close to death that I was able to hold her in my arms in the backseat of an Uber on the way to the animal hospital. In better health this would have been impossible. We gazed at each other like we always had. Total mutual devotion.
We loved her brother but we worshipped her, that’s the plain truth. If one of us had the gall to mention the eventuality of something happening to her, the other would hold up a hand and say, “No. No. Never.” She galloped to greet us at the door. When we cradled her she purred so mightily her whole body shook. She lavished us with affection and we enforced not a single boundary. She sat in our laps while we worked or ate, she slept beside or upon my pillow. I fretted throughout the pregnancy over how she and I would manage safe co-sleeping with the baby.
In my phone’s photo library I can see her disappearing behind glassy, dilated pupils. I couldn’t see it then—I wanted a miracle. The last image of her—perched on a blanket on the back of the couch—was taken on December 3, and is juxtaposed with one of the first images of my son.
Roughly 24 hours after Benson died, I was admitted for an induction due to several high blood pressure readings and a trace amount of protein in my urine—kidneys, the midwife told us. After 38 hours of labor, a body came out of my body. He was breathing and his eyes were open, the color of a northern sea in winter. The bardo1 of giving birth and the bardo of being born had led us to the same place, and now we were holding one another, and it was supernatural.
We hoped at least some of Benson’s consciousness had wandered into the baby’s, of course we did. Two secular humanists suddenly, urgently wishing for transmigration to be incontrovertibly real.
Was it so sudden? No, not really. I had been sensing a bit of God hovering in my periphery for a while, and the more primal I became—in pregnancy, in childbirth—the more foolish I felt, realizing I had all along been gallivanting around in a mysterious and confounding world while thinking ultimately everything could and would be understood in clean and rational terms. Maybe not by me, but by someone.
Around the time I must have conceived in early 2022, I took two photos of materials I found while organizing my mentor and employer’s teaching archives.
One photo was of text on a page from a program for Merry Conway’s performance piece Into the Strenuous Briefness, a slightly altered quote from Sir Thomas Browne: “We carry with [in] us the wonders we seek without us.”
The other photo included much denser text, with one section highlighted: “That’s just how it is, as Hannah Arendt writes: ‘The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action has no end. The process of a single deed can quite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself has come to an end.’”
The big kid’s drum arrived in a box illustrated on one side with a woman seated in sukhasana and on the other with a woman in a variation of rajakapotasana. It’s unclear to us what the connection is between this instrument and yogasanas. We’ll probably never know. When he plays the drum it sounds lovely, even—especially?—when he means for it to sound riotous. Special for me.
On November 1, members of the Brooklyn Zen Center sangha took turns striking the big bell until it had been struck 108 times. The altar was adorned with photographs and objects and names scrawled on pieces of scrap paper. All for the dead. It was cold and windy outside but the door to the fire escape was propped open so the ringing might be heard by whomever and whatever, alive or gone beyond, was within earshot. A real bodhisattva move. The bell’s resonance was full and strong, capable of carrying all things, the voice of the universe. It goes on and on and on.
Reading Recommendation: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
The title of this essay was drawn from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s memoir In Love With the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying.