Wishes for Baby

When I think of all the disappointments I’ve faced in life, and all the hard things you’ll have to go through, I think of George from my first office job. It was a big corporate job, the kind where you have so many supervisors that you might never actually meet your manager. It was because of this disconnection, probably, that someone in some chain of command mandated two hours of community building a week. Someone suggested adult show-and-tell, and none of us cared enough to object.

 

Week after week, we grabbed dusty things from our desks. There were novelty post-its, desk pets, photos of fat-faced kids in macaroni frames. George himself repeatedly depended on his rubber band ball, which was modestly sized, but impressive in color variation.

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Then one day, he brought something from home. Something antique and homemade by either his great-grandma or his great-great-grandma. I remember him saying, “It may be the only one in the world.” How strange I can’t remember it at all! But I remember his voice, louder than usual, puffed up with pride.

 

And then he dropped it.

 

His face showed the truth. He looked like he was falling. He was surprised and panicked, but knew there was no point in crying out. “Oh well,” he said looking down at the pieces. Everyone laughed. At first, it was a nervous laughter, but a few weeks later, and for months afterwards, when people joked about it in the lunchroom, the laughter was real. Even though George smiled along with everyone else, I couldn’t not see his falling face. In meetings, when we discussed a change that meant more workload, or when we were told someone was being let go, he always looked like he didn’t care, but I saw the falling in his eyes.

 

This is all to say, someday you will care about something so much and everyone else will laugh at you for it. Just know, that it’s not really everyone. There will be people like me, who go back to their desk and cry as they listen to shards being swept up, who tear up years later when they tell the story again to their boyfriend or their friends at a party, who remember the moment a decade later when asked to write something in an unborn baby’s scrapbook and wish so much to prepare you for the moment.

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