Dear

Oh, it is just so, so easy NOT to write. I almost talked myself out of writing right now--was so close I could taste it, or rather feel the pillow under my head. But it is too easy not to write, and that is the problem. The older I get, the more I see how much of writing is discipline, and how much of discipline is learned. I am still learning. I am determined to learn. And so I write. Badly, sometimes. In brief, much of the time. And when I stop, as happened last week, I start again. As Emerson wrote, in a quote I keep by my desk, "Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." Begone nonsense. Tonight, I write. Tomorrow, I write again. Serene? Not so much. Maybe in a dozen years or so. But begin, yes. That I will do. As many times as it takes to continue from there.

Today I have babies on my mind. No, don't worry mother of mine. Not more for me, but other people's. Or rather, other creatures'. Yesterday two fawns were born in our yard in Connecticut. I will give you the short version of a story I have been telling ad infinitum, to the point that the thought of it exhausts me. One of the babies was left behind when the mother ran off to protect herself and the baby who could already walk, and after a long day of agonizing on the parts of me, the weak and hungry and terrified newborn, and presumably the heartbroken, brave and desperate mother, the fawn was rescued by wildlife rehabilitators: a couple who spend their days answering calls about orphaned infant raccoons and rebuilding turtle shells with fiberglass and treating the broken beaks of vultures. In other words, people who will go to heaven if there is one, people who make me proud to be a human being.

And in the middle of this day, I lay with my own baby, indulgent at her nap time, unable to turn my thoughts from the stricken mother deer, who had no choice but to leave this tiny helpless creature behind, who saved herself and the stronger of her children but instinctively could not risk dying for the other, singing--stroking my own child's hair, and singing in a low, sad voice, praying, in my own way, for the mother to somehow return. 

By the end of the day, she had not. I had doubted she would be able to. So many screaming children, barking dogs, running lawnmowers, ringing phones, starting cars--it was too bright, too loud, too chaotic. I know she was watching from somewhere unseen. Waiting. Or at least biding her time, if I am humanizing the mother too much. But she did not, could not, and we had to leave, could no longer keep the dogs shut up, prevent the rain from falling, keep the infant warm, or fed. And when the rehabilitators came, showed up in a car full of rescued baby raccoons and blankets and carriers and gloves and medication and bandages and food, I had no real choice but to agree with them when they decided to take the baby to a fawn rescue facility, where he would never again see his mother--whom he knew for mere minutes on earth--but would likely, with luck and specialized formula and another one of these human/saints to care for him in his infancy, survive.

And it was not until much later, after a sleepless night spent dreaming of this mother deer, this powerful, daunting creature who had rushed a dog in defense of her own, dreaming of her return to a fawnless site, her agony at the loss, that I connected my actions with hers, that I realized in allowing the fawn to be taken, to be saved, I was obeying my own maternal instincts, that voice that says, no matter what, against all odds, in the face of all adversity: The baby must survive.