40 years later

The July night that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon was hot. My daughter can say she saw it, because she was there, but at six months and teething, she was fussy. We were in Stoneham at a couple’s house. The woman would later become my babysitter when I went back to work.

My marriage was ending. When I conceived my daughter, I thought it was sound and we would present her with a stable family life with a happy father and mother, a life I did not have as a child.

I was wrong.

Also early in my pregnancy, Vietnam was exploding and Martin Luther King was killed.

Than I dreamed that Robert Kennedy was killed only it wasn’t a dream. The clock radio had gone off and I was listening to real events in California.

Although it was illegal, I seriously considered an abortion. What kind of world was I bringing a child into? One with war, assassination, the denial of civil rights to a large portion of the population. I knew the Clergy Council regularly sent women to Canada for safe abortions.

I couldn’t.

I already loved the life inside of me, a love that would expand until it became immeasurable. And I thought she would have that stable family life to nurture her.

Then when my marriage dissolved shortly after her birth, my worries about supporting her, going back to work and not being able to give her enough of what she needed to become a healthy adult seemed almost too much to handle. My weight was down to 85 pounds. Where would I find the strength to go on?

My hostess dipped my daughter’s iced pacifier in whisky. Whether it was the cold or the whisky, she stopped crying and watched the movement on the television as we all did.

Neil Armstrong descended from the space craft. What my grandmother had pooh poohed as impossible two decades before when I played spaceship using my grandfather’s tool bench as the dashboard of my space craft was happening before our eyes. Man had done what was thought impossible from the beginning of time.

I looked at my daughter sitting in her push chair, one foot through the leg hole, one bare foot on the bar, her favourite position and for the first time in almost a year, I saw the other side.

I saw hope.