On Mother’s Day 2009, I buried two placentas in my front garden, my 12-year-old son crashed my car, and my fourth child was conceived.
When you give birth at home, as I did with all of my children, you must decide what to do with your placenta. Mothers giving birth in hospitals rarely see their placentas, which are whisked off upon delivery. However, like many homebirth moms, I could not bring myself to just toss mine in the trash.
For as many years as my second and third boys were old (12 and 9), I packed the frozen placentas in a Playmate cooler each time we moved, which was often. I did not want to leave bits of them and me behind in places to which I would never return. Six years after moving to Akron, which was also two years after I had left their father, my boys and I were resolute: We had rooted here.
I finally felt free to plant the placentas. Like a claim-staking flag, I placed them in a deep hole in the center of my front flowerbed. The nearby mountain laurel, an acid-loving plant, flourished that summer.
After long winters of muddy boots and snacking boys, I want nothing more for Mother’s Day than a clean car. When they turn 12, I teach my boys how to start the car and on winter mornings, they warm it up before we leave for school.
Two hours after I buried my placentas, my second son, Hugo, pushed in the clutch and turned the key so he could roll up the power windows to wash them. The car took off and smashed into the back wall of our garage before Hugo was able to rip the key out of the ignition.
It wasn’t his fault. I always park my five-speed Matrix by putting it in neutral and applying the handbrake. That morning it was in first gear, the hand brake off, which is how other people park cars with standard transmissions. Other people like my boyfriend.
Max and I met several years earlier at book club. He later joined me on the board of a nonprofit where eventually we worked on the difficult task of closing a defunct organization. When most other board members ran, yes, like rats off a sinking ship, Max was steadfast and reliable, going with me to hard meetings and helping with tedious paperwork for many months. As we got to know each other better, he told me about the women he was dating and learned about my exhausted marriage.
A year after my marriage ended, we realized the obvious. Four months later on a beautiful day in August, my boys met Max at the wedding of mutual friends. The next week I asked my sons over dinner, “What do think about me dating someone?”
“Oh, no! No, no, no,” Hugo said.
“But what if I already am?” I asked.
“What? Wait, who?” asked Hugo, bolting up from the table, nearly knocking over his chair.
“I know,” said Jules, my quietly observant third son, “It’s the guy with the glasses.”
The boys quickly took to this 41-year-old bachelor who, before meeting us, had shared his home only with two cats. Max began coming over after work to cook dinner and help the boys with their homework while I attended night classes for my graduate degree. Then, about an hour after I returned, he would leave for his home, a 45-minute drive.
“All I hear about is Holly and the boys this, Holly and the boys that,” said Max’s octogenarian Uncle Bascom when I first met him, his Southern accent reminding me of Shelby Foote. “It sounds as if you are a musical group or something.”
I wished then that I had met Max 20 years earlier. You don’t get do-overs, I told myself. You just go on to the next thing. Foolishly, I’d forgotten life routinely reveals there are few, if any, absolutes.
The weeks after that Mother’s Day were hard. All I wanted to do was sleep. I was driving (in my car with a new front bumper) to Youngstown three days a week where I taught writing to public high school students for an outreach program. Friends would talk with me on the phone so I would stay awake on my commute. Everything took more energy than I could conjure.
I felt ancient. Always quick to jump to the worst conclusion, I was sure the stress of the previous years had given me cancer and my life would be taken from me just as I was contentedly living it on my terms.
But at age 43, I was not dying. I wasn’t even menopausal. I was pregnant.
Max and I now have two children together and as I watch him with all five of our kids, I think how sad it would have been had he not had the opportunity to be a parent, not because everyone should be a parent, but because even more than me, it is who he is. A father, a family man. And then a lawyer, scholar, gardener and amazing cook.
For this I will always wish we had 20 years of our younger selves together. It’s the drop of bitter in the ocean of sweet I am lucky to have.
Contact Holly Christensen at whoopsiepiggle@gmail.com.