Sailing Alone Around the Room

            Funny that I love to write poems, but find that it often feels like a chore when I read someone else’s. With the exception, perhaps, of most any poem from Billy Collins collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room . My mother, Margot, gave me this book of poems the week before my first son, Lucca, was born. She had hoped that in the quiet moments of waiting, we could read the poems aloud to one another. Of course that never happened. She became increasingly drunk as the days passed without Lucca making any signs of budging (he was finally born eight days after his due date). She was deeply alcoholic at that stage of her life, and about two to three days of sobriety was all she could handle. But eight days? Not a chance in hell.

            At first the signs of her drinking were hard to detect. She would disappear at odd moments – just as my sister and I had finally gotten everyone assembled to walk the few blocks for dinner at a nearby restaurant, say, or in the grocery store when we had sent her to aisle 6 to grab a can of diced tomatoes – and return fifteen minutes later, acting a bit skittish, a bit sheepish. The next day, we could smell the alcohol on her breath, and the day after that she had become wall-eyed and slack-jawed. On the fourth day, she slurred her words and fell down on the paving stones leading up to my front porch.

            My then-husband, the mid-wife and I had a discussion. Should Margot be uninvited from the home birth? Was she a risk? An unwelcome distraction and source of anxiety and stress? Of course the resounding answer was yes; her drunkenness was unwelcome in a birthing room – in any room, really. So then we had to figure out how to make this known to her. Sit her down and tell her point-blank? Slip her a note? Hope and pray that Lucca would be born during the wee hours of the morning while she was sleeping off the three bottles of white wine she had consumed the night before?

            As it turned out, the latter is exactly what happened. I went into labor around 10:00pm, after my mother had returned to her hotel room for the night. She had begged with me as she was shuffling out to the car, “Promise me you’ll call at the first sign of labor. Promise!” And I had promised her that I would.

            But I didn’t. None of us called her. And when she arrived the next morning just thirty minutes after Lucca had been born – drunk, weaving, jaundiced – she took one look at me, and one look at him, and crumpled. She was mortified, deeply ashamed and yet full of yearning. Yearning to touch her very first grandchild, to fold him into her arms and embrace him. A tough cocktail to swallow – all the shame and the overwhelming love. She gazed at Lucca, and reached out her hand to stroke his cheek. But then she hesitated and withdrew her hand. She looked at me nervously, her eyes pleading. I nodded and watched hawkishly as she petted him, and then buried her face deep into the hollow of his neck.

            I still have the Billy Collins book of poems. In fact, I came across it just the other day and read the inscription she had written on the cover page: “For my sweet Elizabeth, to be read in the quiet, gentle hours of waiting. All my love, Mummy.”  I showed the book to Lucca and read my mother’s dedication to him. He smiled and gave me a quick hug. Then I placed the book for him on his bedside table,  hoping that someday soon he would reach for it.

            And he did, bless his heart. About three days later. “Mom,” he said, “I really like this book of poems. They read like stories.”

What a gift, I thought. What a beautiful way for my mother to still sit right here beside me.