BED

Bed.
My children were born in soft beds in a rambling Victorian house in the heart of the city. My girls, in the same bed nearly seven years apart, the Birth Center's "pink room"...not the one I'd chosen for Rosie--but as she was nearly born in the car, the downstairs room closest to the front door was where I ran into and collapsed, the baby alive and wailing just moments later.

Bed.
Not a gurney. Not on a metal table swathed with army blue hospital sheets shielding the mystery of the child emerging from my body from my dainty, female eyes. Beds...with my sweat and blood pooling on the sheets--where other women birthed other babies like I did. Without drugs, the veil between worlds felt stretched paper thin...it was my own personal vision quest, almost a "shamanic" transcendent experience. I felt like a warrior goddess...creator of life. I hurt like hell...I wouldn't have had it any other way. I am a tender person--I fear pain, cry over papercuts. This was my only chance to dig deep and experience my own body. I have never felt more powerful than the moment my children became.

Bed.
I take to my bed when I am sick...feverish and delirious between our flowered sheets and the open air. I take to my bed when I am depressed. It becomes a shell then, a second skin. I weep into the unflinching pillow and watch the patterns of light moving through the shades and over me. Beds have witnessed my ebb and flow--high tide and low, like this one from our vacation house in Maine a month after Rosie was born when I was hallucinating cat-eyes in the trees and spiders for hands:

While my extended family enjoyed the sea, the hammocks slung in low branches, the hiking over rocky hills...I stared out the window and counted each breath, willing myself to live.

Bed.
I make the bed every single day. I haven't cleaned the room or done the 1001 household tasks most people do--but the bed is made...always. I tumble over it with the kids and some books on rainy afternoons, my voice filling the grey spaces and our memory banks.

Bed.
M. and I sleep politely, even these years later, invisible lines marking the border between two countries. Awake, there can be no spaces between--my hand on his, his lips on mine, and this is peace. But asleep, he cannot cross the line or I will push him back to where he came from. I have hit--kicked over this...sleep making me mean and unrestrained. Bed becomes a study in politics and territory--lovers who must break apart each night along invisible chasms only my overprotective instinct understands.

Bed.
We tuck our children into theirs after they each get their story every night. Sweet dreams, kisses, and declarations of love and tenderness follow a struggle for getting pajamas on, bedtime snacks distributed, and teeth brushed. It has never felt to any of us like a banishment, though I once believed I'd be a mother who slept with her babies, all nesting down together. We don't.

Several years back, both boy-o and Petunia had a raging stomach illness. We tried to nestle them in our bed with us, just to be close to them--just to watch out and get to them quickly. They balked, "I want my bed," sobbing, they got it. I slept on boy-o's floor, M. slept on Petunia's.

I know what they mean...Ill, in love, depressed, tired, quiet, reading, birthing, crying, smoothed down, rumpled, light and darkness, dreaming myself to life...I take to my bed.