Birdies In the Wind

"Like two sparrows in a hurricane Trying to find their way With a head full of dreams And faith that can move anything They've heard it's all uphill But all they know is how they feel The world says they'll never make it, love says they will."








There were hummingbird eggs in the tree outside out little apartment. I was four; this was one of the first delights, and one of the first secrets too that my mother and I shared. She noticed them first and told me they were there. She lifted me up so I could see into the nest up on the branch. The eggs were so tiny, and inside of them, even tinier birds were growing.

My mother told me we should never ever touch the eggs. If you touch baby bird eggs, or even baby birds, their mother can smell you, and she will be so scared of danger, she might leave the eggs or her babies. She won’t know them anymore. Also my mother told me I also should never tell the big boys who lived next door about the eggs, because those boys were pretty rough, and we didn’t know if they would touch the eggs even if they were told not to.

Every morning that spring we passed the tree on our way out for the day. More often than not, the momma humming bird was hovering around the nest. I can still remember how she looked flapping her wings so fast that they buzzed, so she could stay right there where she could watch over them.

Then one morning, as we passed under the nest, my mother gasped. Apparently, the little boys next door had discovered the nest, and all the eggs had been thrown to the ground. Some of the hummingbirds, it was clear from the broken remains of the eggs, had been almost ready to hatch.

I don’t know if it was from the fall, or if they were just to little to be out of their shells, not to mention, there was some evidence of stomping with some of them, but all of the baby birds were dead. Their mother sat quietly in her nest. I have read over and over that we should attribute human emotion to animals. But in my memory of seeing her that day (and I do remember), she seems broken.

When I was a teenager, around the corner of our little townhome, there was another tall tree. Walking to the mail box one day, I looked up and could see that in it there was a hummingbird nest. A beautiful bird was flitting around it. I instantly remembered the hummingbirds near our apartment when I was little. Next to the tree, which was against the wall of our building, was a metal box (the motor for an air-conditioned I think). I climbed it. Standing on my toes from there, I could see the tiny little tops of eggs.

I was delighted to see them. I had always felt like the entire species hummingbird was “mine” in a small way, since one of my first memories of my life is the expectation of their new life, and then the sad reality of how precarious new life can be.

I was older and much stronger than I had been the first time I had discovered this fragile sort of treasure, and still the only power I had to protect the eggs was to keep their location a secret. So that is what I did, I was careful not to disturb the tree when I checked up on the eggs, I was careful not to let any one, especially Griddlebones (my cat) see me hopping on top the air conditioner motor to peek at the little eggs.

Then one day as I passed under the tree, I heard tiny little chirps. I knew the eggs had hatched. From my perch, I could see the backs and heads of two little baby hummingbirds. And for days I saw the mother appearing to feed them.

Vicious wind storms are not too uncommon in the part of the Mojave Desert where we lived. Not two long after the babies hatched, we had a doozie. It started up over night, and I could hear the howling intensely. The windows rattled and debris blew across the road outside and hit the brick wall outside my windows with a crash. There were rain drops too, not many but they seemed huge and they flew against our sunroof so hard I thought they were going to break in. The house was not very old but it creaked. I thought this must be the sounds a tornado makes before it lifts a structure off it’s foundation.

I could hear the tree smacking against the side of the house. I could see that all of the branches on the south side were blown up and back and pointing to the north. The nest had been positioned to the north. I knew that with wind so powerful and the upheaval of the branches, that even if by some miracle the nest managed not to detach and fall to the ground, there was no chance the babies would be able to stay in it.

Sure enough, the next morning, I passed a silent tree. I looked on the ground for them, but I could not find any remains. Of course, with wind that powerful, something that small would likely have been blown across the county. The nest was still clinging to the tree.

I had a lump in my throat as I climbed up. I wondered how there could be hummingbirds in this world at all if it was so hard for them to survive the mere few weeks it took for them to grow up and get strong enough to fight for themselves. I moved slowly to view the nest, I was afraid I might me met with the site of a mangled baby bird corpse again if one had gotten stuck on a twig or something. Instead, in the nest, were several little heads and backs. They were chirping and moving around. I was astounded. I was in awe that beings so tiny had held on in a mass off weeds and mud tethered to a tree, and survived a storm that had made me wonder if my own buckling roof was going to fall on my head.

(I wish the story ended here. If I meant this post to be about how seemingly small folk can find great might and overcome the worst the world has to throw at them, I would stop here. But this post, for those of you who are not interpreters, is about how hard and scary it is to risk your heart on motherhood. It does happen to be Mother’s Day.)

I was so relived and happy to see those baby birds moving. It was as if my faith in the universe had been given a boost (which is hard to do, since I was so optimistic in the world at that time anyway) and it was as if I had been given the gift of being allowed to be the only human soul to witness this particular, though it was small, great miracle. And really, I did not exaggerate this storm one bit, the fact that those babies outlasted it was amazing.

But the mother never returned. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if she herself was destroyed in the storm, or if she, and I will take the liberty of assigning human emotion to a bird again, was too afraid to come back to her nest and see if full of her own mangled little ones. But she didn’t come back.

There is not a man made solution that I know of that can be fed to new baby hummingbirds; to survive, hummingbirds must have their own mother. There are some creatures, fortunately humans are among these, that can be fed and nurtured and thrive if someone else takes them over when the parent does not return, but there are very few, very, very, very few creatures who will survive with no mother at all. It was not long before I found the abandoned babies, all of them, huddled and lifeless in the nest.






The words at the top of this post were from a song my husband’s cousin, Angela, sang at his grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary. The family event had been in the works for months, and Angela and her sister Rachel had been asked months before if they would sing for it. Before she sang the song, Angela told us a story, she said she and Rachel had been sitting in her room, looking for an appropriate song for Grandma and Grandpa when this one came on the radio. The two sisters looked at each other and agreed at the same time, Angela said, that this song was for the one. They began rehearsing it together.

“I know Rachel is singing it to you with me.” Angela said, cracking her voice and flooding every one’s eyes. A few weeks before the event, Rachel and her husband had been killed by a stupid (I don’t know if alcohol was determined to be involved or not, but a selfish, cocky, and dangerous highway maneuver was) driver. Their two very small boys survived the accident. I remember that shortly after the accident, one of P-wog’s relatives commented that the rescuer who first got inside the wreckage of Tim and Rachel’s car must have experienced a miracle of his own, because what he found there, amidst the three people who were killed in the collision, and the two cars that were both nearly completely flattened, was two babies still alive, mostly unhurt, and alive in their car seats in the one part of the car that had not been destroyed.

Angela learned of her sister’s death as she was being handed her nephews. For now, she is acting as their mother.

She sang the song to us, which is by Tanya Tucker, if any one needs to know, and although it’s about a couple marrying young and making it through life together, this part I posted made me think not only of P’s grandparents struggling to bring their kids up, but of Tim and Rachel being lost on their way home together, of the two sisters who’d had each other to go through things with from the start, picking out that song together, and the one having to sing it alone, and of the two young brothers who were left behind together.

I had just met Rachel the Thanksgiving before she was killed. We had both just had babies and we sat and talked for over an hour together, each of us with our new infants asleep on out laps, of how and where we’d grown up, how our labors and births had gone with our babies, how nosey people give so much advice when you have a baby, how our babies slept, how they fussed, how we planned to discipline, how we wanted to raise them, plan for their futures, how we feared for their health over every little thing.

Rachel had so little time left with the infant left on her lap. I hope she cherished it the same way her death reminded me I had better cherish every second I have with mine. Lil’ E seemed so fragile to me when she was born, or even before, when I was sure every knock and every bump was a threat to her. And when she survived being a fetus and came in to this world, I sat up her first hundred nights, sneaking out of bed every few minutes some times (ask P, he will tell you I did) to make sure she was still drawing breath. By some great miracle of it’s own, she has gotten six year stronger and six year bigger and some how avoided all the things that can befall an infant or a toddler. I feel my stomach tighten and my breath catch every time I let my mind wander and think of the things that happen to some people’s little girls. My heart stops when I call her in from play and she doesn’t answer right away. When I am at work and she in her kindergarten class, I sometimes feel the hair on my arms crawl when I think of the things crazy people have done to class rooms full of children as precious to their mothers as mine is to me.

When I feel myself to be in danger, even a little, the feelings I had as a child that it was a “rush” or “what will be will be” are replaced by dread that this danger could be the reason I don’t make it back to her. When I think of all the things that can happen to mother’s and their babies, it’s hard not to feel like my little one is really just as fragile as those tiny little eggs, and that often, all I can do is frantically buzz my arms around her, keep watch, and hope I will always make it home, and hope nothing comes for her, hope we both make it through if there is a storm.






It was Mother’s Day last year when P-wog and I returned from our trip. On the porch, there was a package of pictures and note apologizing that they had taken so long. They were the pictures taken by the volunteer woman at the hospital. She is the one who bathed Michael, and dressed him, because I was to weak to move. She had lost her own little girl some time before, and maybe this is why she knew that I would need to know that someone had known he was not just a patient they had lost and needed to move on from, and that he was not just bio-waste. She knew I needed to know that, although I couldn’t do it, I needed him to be bathed, and dressed, and treated tenderly. Because she stood in for me, and did the things I mother would when I couldn’t, I will forever have a place in my heart for that woman. The package she left me last mother’s day were pictures she took of him in his little blanket.

Sometimes, when I am raw with sadness, I know quite specifically what balm I need. Within days of losing the son I had just begun to love, I felt the best feeling I could have would be to hold a baby. It had taken me a while to have enough faith to let me hope for my boy. It was with reluctance that I gave in and embraced this hope and began to feel the joy of an expectant mother. Losing him so suddenly left me not only mourning, but in shock that things so precious are so easily snapped away. I wanted to feel the comfort of holding something that precious in my arms as a reminder of how wonderful it is when they do make it, and to remember why the heartbreak and risk are worth it. Unfortunately, though my sisters-in-law (fertile women that they are) are usually very accommodating about this, not one of them at this time had an infant to share. So, for sometime, my arms sat empty.

My cousin said I could write about her son (I hope the permission still stands, Lis).

It was not long after I lost Michael, when my cousin also experienced something similar. The baby she had learned rather by surprise (especially since she was waiting to adopt) was lost. I know that this did not take away the love she had for the one she lost, but she got a phone call that very week. And another mother was unable to take care of her baby, that she loved very dearly. I don’t know if it was dumb luck, or supreme wisdom, but if you had to choose a stranger’s heart to embrace your child in your place, Lisa’s is one of the best hearts I can think of (I could name a few more too though).

Lisa and her husband adopted her son and I waited as long as I thought polite to invade. I think that may have been almost 24 hours. And then came sweet relief.

This is Moses (a year ago, when he was born):

He was screaming when we met. His sleep deprived momma plunked him, in a towel and diaper, with drops of water on his hair, in my arms and said, “ok here, he doesn’t really like to take a bath.” I laughed while I rocked him and his crying settled. I talked to him about how I wanted to be his favorite first cousin, once removed (the competition for favorite aunt was kinda stiff). I started to heal. I visited and held this little person as often as common courtesy would allow me to do until Lisa and her children (her other one is pretty cute too) joined her husband in Timbuktu, where her husband is in school. I open her blog every day, just in case there are new pictures of this living reminder that some of them make it, and they are miracles, and that’s why we do it, what ever we have to do, to be mothers.

A few weeks ago, on the same night, P-wog and I had similar dreams. In them, we both saw the baby we lost last year ago. The circumstances of our dreams were different, but we both dreamed that we watched him breath (something he never really did in this world).

Yesterday we talked about (no one get excited, this was a very, very, very, very, very, hypothetical talk) our feelings. Both of us miss the feeling of having our new daughter placed in our arms.

And I told him what I have thought time and time again in my head when ever someone asks me when I am going to try for another. I told him that I don’t know what happened to Michael, but I don’t want to it happen again. If I were to find that we had another child growing inside me, I think I would be afraid to hope as much as you have to hope in order to let yourself become attached and really freely love someone.

The truth is I don’t trust my body any more than I trusted that nest on the branch of that tree. The other truth is, I freely love Michael knowing there is no hope he will breathe in my arms in this life. I have another miracle downstairs watching the Wizard of Oz.

Everyday I am allowed to come home, and she comes in, and I tuck her in is a miracle. It’s not that my nest will ever be stronger than the wind that might pick up, but I think the heart of a mother is, even when she sits broken because her protection was not enough, even when the shelter she created to protect her children can’t save her, and even when the best she can do for her child is share him with stronger arms because hers are too weak. And if the woman did not make the baby she is holding, it doesn’t really matter, because the baby she is holding makes her a mother. I don’t know that I have seen or felt anything that I would call more amazing, than what my children have made me feel. There has been nothing before this, and I imagine there will be nothing ever, that has made me feel so weak, so strong, so terrified, so happy, so helpless, and so needed, all in the same breath.