Luck

Two days from now, on Sunday, May 10th, I will be celebrating a bitter sweet Mother's Day.  The day marks the 10th anniversary of the birth of my baby boys, Raymond Lawrence and Alexander Varney.  They were born 14 weeks early and only survived for a handful of days.  For several years I was unable to speak about what happened to my boys, for several more I was unwilling, and now I find myself unsure.  



The first five pieces in this blog are pieces that I wrote for myself at various points over the past ten years.  I share them now because I want to be honest about the impact their brief lives have had on me, and because the time feels right. 

I grew up thinking the bad luck in my life belonged to my dad. Nothing ever went right when he was around. The puppy he brought home set off asthma in his toddler daughters.  The snowmobiles that he borrowed from a buddy to take us on a fun little ride wouldn't start. The three week trip to the Canadian Rockies would be marred by two and a half weeks of rain.  And snow.  In August. The truck would break down, the car would get a flat tire, the trail wouldn't be marked, the cabin full of bees, the weather forecast was ALWAYS wrong. Things went South all. the. time. But I just assumed it was my Dad.

Then I graduated college and started making plans of my own. I visited my parents in SouthWest Arizona - a stone’s throw from Mexico - in May - a time when the average temperature is well into the nineties - and they had the record setting cold temperatures. I would plan day trips into Boston and the T would experience a bomb scare. Suddenly it was MY car breaking down...hornets in MY walls...MY plans falling apart. And it occurred to me, the bad luck was MINE. 



So, I cast off the youthful optimism that I'd had for 22 long years and accepted my fate. I had bad luck. You know, now that I thought about it, I'd never won a raffle. Never had my name picked out of a hat (except for that one time in first grade but the volunteer read my name aloud so it didn't count and they started over and I didn't get picked in the do-over), never found wallets filled with thousands of dollars in thrift store pants. Never processed the deposit of the eccentric millionaire who wanted to leave his fortune to a friendly bank teller. I just wasn't lucky.  C'est la vie.

I can't say I've thought much about LUCK in the years since then. I've thought about fate and faith and universal justice. How can you not think about those things when you lose a child - and see so many people blessed with what you were denied?  When the crazy cat lady turns into the crazy baby lady, I get bitter, what I can I say? But I never really thought of it in terms of LUCK. And, if I had, I'd have to come down on the side of UNlucky.

So, this year, I have a student who finds four leaf clovers. All the time. He's a little socially awkward and I (honestly) interact with him much the way I interact with my 7 year old daughter, and he likes me. So he brings me four leaf clovers on a regular basis. On a recent outdoor school event, we sat in the grass next to each other. We shared the same ten square feet of ground. In the forty minutes we were outside, me diligently searching the grass, him casually scanning around him, he found seven four leaf clovers. I found zero.

Also this year, Anna has started finding four leaf clovers. She brings them home and is delighted with my dramatic "NO WAY!" reaction. She told me she found a five leaf clover once, but Dominic told her it was bad luck so she pulled off the fifth leaf. The ease with which she finds them reminds me of my Uncle John, a salt-of-the-earth farmer in Maine, who used to delight his visiting niece by wandering out into the front yard and returning with a four leaf clover. He had luck.

Just the other night, I was talking to Tony about our daughter and I said, "She has luck." He asked me what I meant. I presented my evidence. She won a $50 savings bond in the school banking contest. She won the reading log raffle. Her name was pulled out of a bucket at the Spring Fling. And, my trump card, she finds four leaf clovers. "That's a big deal to you, isn't it?" He asked. "I've never found one," I reply. "Have you?" He had. Of course he had. Our daughter had to have inherited her luck from somewhere. God knows it doesn't run in my side of the family. (Uncle John married in.)

Which brings me to today. It was a cool, drizzly afternoon and Vinnie and I were waiting to pick up Anna outside her school. I'd parked along the far edge of the baseball field and was letting Vinnie run in the grass. It's fenced in and I didn't need to keep a super close eye on him, so I was scanning the grass as I waited, moving from clover patch to clover patch, looking for four leaf clovers. (I'm sure I'm going to sound pathetic and desperate when I say this, but I do this a lot. Pretty much every time I walk past clover, I look for the four leaved ones.) I wasn't finding any, and kids were starting to come out of the school, so I tried to get Vinnie to walk towards the playground with me. No dice. He was enjoying his romp in the grass. So I had to bribe him with a game of "I'm gonna get you." This involves me wiggling my fingers and crouching down and him running in the direction I want him to run. It works like a charm. So he's giggling and running, and I'm periodically grabbing and swinging him. This game degenerates into him running at me and me picking him up and swinging him. And that's when I found my four leaf clover.

I was swinging Vinnie. He was tucked in my arms in a cradle hold and I was holding him up over my head and then letting him "fall" to the ground. As we buzzed close to the ground I saw a patch of clover and there in the middle, like it was lit with a spotlight, was one with four leaves. I repeated the swing just to make sure. Then I put Vinnie down and held onto his wrist while I touched the clover - making sure it wasn't the leaf of one plant hanging out between the leaves of another - I've been fooled by that trick many-a-time! But no, it was real. All four leaves on one stem.

I picked it, taking more care in the holding of it than in the steering of my toddler son; Vinnie walked smack into the middle of an ankle deep puddle. Anna darn near ripped off the fourth leaf in her inspection. But it survived. When I got it home, I put it in a ziploc baggie and sucked all the air out. Then: Anna hit me; while I was dealing with her, Vinnie *may* have put a raisin up his nostril, but I couldn't find a flashlight to verify. The mail contained a bill I didn't expect, and it took two hours to find the cake pan I want for Vinnie's birthday. It was 9pm before I even remembered my four-leafed friend to show Tony. 

Maybe it's the universe reminding me that my reproductive history isn't all loss and sadness (I've been pretty contemplative after having two two year old boys in the house for two days).  Maybe it's telling me "just play with the kid you DID get and just get the eff over yourself already."  Maybe it's the universe helping me remember my Uncle during a tough time.  Maybe it's completely meaningless.  But today, I came face-to-face with an assumption about myself and my life that I'd forgotten I had.  And I realized that it was a stupid.   And I choose to get rid of it.  So, whatever the reason for this little clover to be in my path, it's all good. I've got it now.  And I'm shipping the bad luck back to Arizona.