Sacred Blood

When I was little, I had this habit of spinning necklace chains on my fingers. I loved to watch them whirl around. My grandmother hated this. Any time she saw me doing it, she would take the necklace from me and tell me never to do it again. "You could put your eye out that way," she would inform me. "There was this one kid who knocked the chain into his eye and the eye broke like an egg and just fell out of his head."

This was a lie. I knew it was a lie then. I know I always glared at her when she told me this and resented her for taking away the necklace. I just wanted to spin it. Why did she have to ruin my fun?

So here I am, in my 40s. I'm not a parent or a grandparent, but there is a baby in my life and I love her so much. And when she crawls around on the floor or sits beside me, playing with my plastic barrette, my mind fills with all manner of horrors. Basically everything this kid does could kill her somehow. Most of the time, I'm kind of sure that's her plan.

What I didn't realize about my grandmother at the time was how absolutely precious I was to her. I mean, she couldn't exactly tell me that. "Don't hurt your eyes. They're my favorite eyes in all the world." "Don't fall and get cut. Every drop of your blood is sacred and I don't want any of it to spill." Human life is messy and bumps and bruises happen. It's easy to process them when t hey happen to you, less so when it's someone you love dearly.

I think one of the most astounding things about loving a baby is the profound knowledge that at one point, someone loved you this much. Someone adored every sound you made. Someone loved the touch of your cheek. Someone looked at your feet and truly believed they were the most perfect feet they'd ever seen.

It makes me feel foolish when I think about how many times I felt unloved when most of my life, someone loved me so much that they truly believed that even though no one else's eyes would squish out like that if they were hit by a necklace, mine were sacred that they would.