CLARA'S CRADLE

“That first December, I was hanging my two older babies’ ornaments when I realized Clara should have one too.”

As tree ornaments go, Clara’s silver cradle isn’t very good. It’s so heavy, it breaks the thin boughs its too-small loop of ribbon can fit over. If you do manage to hang it, the engraving is obscured by pine needles. Its best feature—it actually rocks when you push it with a finger—is lost on a Christmas tree. And it’s not very big. On a tree full of sentimental mementos, I’m the only one who knows the cradle is there.

Clara didn’t have a first Christmas. She was born in what I call The Longest Spring: Her March birthdate fell at the end of Florida’s spring, but when we traveled north to Atlanta for heart surgery soon after, spring had just started. All told, Atlanta gave us two more months of cool weather, which ended the day Clara died. It was hot when we returned to Florida for her June 1st funeral. The flowers were done. The blooming season, like her lifetime, had passed. 

Clara is the only one of my five babies whose sex I knew before birth. When the technician announced, “We have a girl,” she added that my baby in utero had a head full of hair. The news made me laugh. I didn’t care boy or girl, but hair was fun. My older two were born bald and for months had only a golden-red halo, so faint we could see it only if we held them up to the light.

Comparing and contrasting Clara and her four siblings is something I still do today. Clara and her one younger brother have blue eyes. Clara and her other younger brother were born with thick red hair. Clara and her sister shared clothes. Clara and her older brother were both fast births, both on Mondays, both in the chill of a Deep South spring. The similarities and differences normalize her presence as my daughter.

When the third child in three years is born, a mother doesn’t anticipate hours sitting by the crib. But it turns out that healing from heart surgery takes time. There’s a lot of waiting, a lot of hoping to get to the next milestone. Sometimes setbacks. Clara was what’s called an old soul. A midwife had called her an ancestor’s child—the rare newborn who’d make and hold eye contact. Her keen gaze went through and past us all. She had a way of stilling life so I could listen. I was trapped in a life of Christian fundamentalism at the time, but Clara brought bright clarity befitting her name, smashing windows in my life’s dark walls.

For hours I played Clara a Celtic lullaby CD of instrumentals and nature sounds while I rocked her and prayed. This music was softer than the nursery classics; “Rock-a-bye Baby” is violent—the bough breaks, the cradle crashes. Clara lived in a hospital, a noisy, painful, sterile place that babies shouldn’t know. I wanted to give her softness anywhere I could. So I found nature sounds. And lotion. As a result, she smelled not just of the antiseptic soap used in intensive care units, but also of baby powder and apricots. A muddled scent of comfort amid pain. I could add softness to Clara’s life. But I could do very little to take away her pain.

That first December, I was hanging my two older babies’ ornaments when I realized Clara should have one too. The engraver at Things Remembered cried when I placed the order: March 29 – May 27, 1999. Babies aren’t supposed to have end dates. Now I keep the cradle on my meditation table and no longer try to hang it on the Christmas tree. This way the boughs won’t break, and as I sit in gratitude, I can gently push with my finger and remember rocking my wise old baby girl. 

—Tia Levings

The first day I got to hold Clara post-op, two weeks after surgery. We’d had to wait until they could close her chest and the swelling went down, so this was a huge milestone. Holding a baby on a ventilator is intimidating, but once she was in my arms we were fine, relaxed and relieved to be reunited, and her heart rate, which could be erratic, slowed and stabilized. We don’t usually get biometrics for the impact of being held, but in this case I did, and the beeping felt deeply reassuring that love was part of healing too. Her nurses cared for me as they cared for her, and as the photo shows, I always felt them looking over my shoulder, rooting for us both.

Clara having an ordinary day as a baby, dressed in real clothes, sucking on a pacifier, watching a high-contrast mobile turning above her. She’d made it off the ventilator and now had a feeding tube, but if you look closely, you’ll see her hands are curled oddly. She’d already survived a stroke and we weren’t sure of her cognitive recovery; her watching the mobile was a moment of cheer and celebration because it marked healthy and normal development. Even so, under the hope was the shadow of concern: Clara still wasn’t strong enough to leave intensive care. There’s a point for many heart children when it becomes clear that if they live, they’ll live on some kind of ongoing life support. We were all trying to be optimistic that she’d continue to grow stronger. And for a time she did.

---

Tia Levings’s memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in August. She writes the newsletter The Anti-Fundamentalist and is on social media @tialevingswriter.

---

For a different reading experience, The Keepthings’ stories can also be read in their entirety on Instagram @TheKeepthings.

Have a story to share? Please see the complete submission guidelines, including photo guidelines, at TheKeepthings.com.

---

---