My mundane thoughts were drowned out by the drone of the leaf blower clenched in my fists. Leaves and sticks made pirouettes as I waved the blower over the plastic turfgrass that covered my small, Florida backyard. How could maintaining 400 square feet of fake grass be such a pain in the ass?! Truth be told, I liked the chore and didn’t mind being covered in sweat and dirt, alone with my thoughts for a brief portion of the afternoon.
I shoved the blower’s nozzle beneath our cocoplum hedge, and an explosion of tiny blue hearts vaulted into the air. I sucked in a sharp breath and let the blower whine to a stop. I looked down, and at my feet were half a dozen crumpled, torn, and water-stained blue hearts made of thin crepe paper. Apparently, they had escaped the wrath of my leaf blower for nearly four months by hiding in the dense undergrowth.
Months prior, my fiancé’s son had driven down to our townhouse with his doting pregnant wife in tow. After the usual niceties, the four of us stepped outside the sliding glass door into our backyard. Under the light of three smartphone cameras, we waited with anticipation as his son twisted the gender reveal confetti popper. Blue hearts burst into the sky, and giant smiles burst onto all our faces. It was going to be a boy!
Lying aside the leaf blower, I bent down and picked up one of the tiny blue hearts and rubbed it between my dirt-stained fingers. There was so much anticipation and love encapsulated in a thin shred of paper. Yet there were also so many conflicting thoughts of mine. My future stepson was going to be a father. He would soon learn the intimate trials and tribulations of parenthood long before I would in this lifetime. Or more like, before I ever would in this lifetime. Years ago, I had chosen not to have children. And my fiancé, who was already a father of four, was fully on board with my decision from the day we met. But at 42 years old and never pregnant, I wondered if my “choice” was perhaps an innate knowingness of a physical incapability. I would never know what it felt like to carry a child inside me. I would never know what it felt like to experience a woman’s rite of passage into motherhood.
Perhaps it was my destiny to birth new life into this world in other ways. But the finality of it all, combined with the acute awareness of the passage of time, suddenly struck me. I horrifyingly realized that my fiancé was going to be a grandfather! Holy crap, in 29 days I was going to marry a grandfather!
I stood up and grabbed the leaf blower again. “These are deep thoughts for another day,” I chided myself. I squinted my eyes in the late afternoon sun and deftly angled the blower’s plastic nozzle. I clicked the switch and the power roared back on, blowing all those tiny blue hearts into oblivion.
Photo by Abhishek Chadha on Unsplash
