My Enemy, the Birch.

In tenth grade, my English Honors project team and I videotaped a stuffed-animal rendition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. We lined up animals along the fence in my backyard, behind which was a row of bushy poplar trees, their long trunks standing at attention as young King Arthur--a stuffed bear? a giraffe? (I no longer remember)--pulled his sword out of the proverbial stone. Our backyard then was lush--all those poplars, a tall bushy evergreen that today towers three times my height at least, a lilac, a flowering dogwood, and a white birch tree on the northern side of the front yard. 

As a child, I rolled in the tall green grass, picked lilac blossoms to use as beds for the miniature animal figurines I played with, and hopped the back fence when the poplars were still skinny enough for me to jump through the spaces between them. But the birch tree was the least of my outdoor acquaintances. I remember asking my mother its name because of its oddly colored trunk. Birch trunks are white, I noted, pleased that I could classify a leafy green thing by name, and then I moved back into a world where I was oblivious to nature’s--and the birch tree’s--particulars.

When I was a pre-teen and gripped with daily asthma attacks, the allergy doctor scratched me with allergens common to the region. Ten years later, another allergist did the same. With a strange sort of ironic pleasure, I repeated over the years that I was allergic to every known allergen in the state of Iowa except the moth, the cockroach, and the caddis fly. (The wheals, raised pale welts on my skin that resulted from testing, indicated extreme antipathy for trees, weeds, dust mites, pollens, molds and household pets. The doctor measured the length of each wheal and its accompanying flare (surrounding red area) with a ruler marked in millimeters. 

The years of allergy symptoms were many and varied. Sometimes, I wasn't able to breathe through the summer without a battery of inhalers, rounds of prednisone and daily antihistamines. I stepped out of the air-conditioned homes I lived in and was assaulted with unseen pollens, mold spores, and the essence of grasses drifting in on the breeze, all wreaking havoc inside my lungs and sinuses. It was unsettling to not know the particular identity of my attacker at any given moment. To not see it head on, or know its rationale, it's motive, in this case, for flooding my veins with histamines. 

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Last winter I ate a pear, and it made my mouth burn, my sinuses flare. I sneezed repeatedly. Random hives appeared on my neck and abdomen. I felt as if I had swallowed a cat (I am allergic to cats). In the spring of this year, I ate an apple and it did the same. Disbelieving that this long-friendly fruit was making war on my insides, I ate another one. It made me sick again. Then peaches were added to this short, but growing, list of produce that did not like me. After months of eating the occasional apple and experiencing the same extreme reactions, I mentioned it to my allergy doctor, who pulled out a colorfully illustrated chart of known allergens and foods likely to give allergic patients cross-reactions. It turns out that apples, pears, peaches and assorted other produce all have a long history of producing reactions in people allergic to birch tree pollen, which I'd been highly allergic to for as long as I'd been allergic to anything. 

When my daughter was first diagnosed with food allergies, we were told about cross-reactivity in foods. I am not a scientist, so you won't get the technical explanation here, but basically, some foods' molecular structures are so similar to others that the body can mistake one for the other. For instance, we heard a story about a peanut-allergic kid who almost died eating lentils.

One theory about food allergies is that exposure precedes the allergy. One eats peanuts one time, for instance, without a reaction. The second time it’s all a slick madness of inflammation, phlegm, and dilated bronchioles, sometimes anaphylaxis. Like I said, it’s a theory, but it made me think hard about birches, remind myself that I’d noticed one once, next to my childhood home. And I wondered how I’d crossed it, how and why the species had pegged me as its target (was my ambivalence offensive?), or why--rather--my body made birch trees the enemy without my consent. Was the birch tree pollen a symbol to my subconscious and immune system of all that didn’t go right on that plot of land and in the house that stood beside it?

But now, that’s irrational. And, then, so is illness much of the time. The rogue cancer cells, the Parkinson's, the ways our bodies betray our spirits and we end up having conversations with our bodies (like I do), saying it's taken things too far: people are not allergic to apples (for instance) because they are allergic to birch trees! They are not allergic to apples--most mundane, most innocuous of foods, staple of my last three decades: Baked with cinnamon in winter. With peanut butter or sharp cheddar cheese in a brown-bag lunch. In pies at Christmastime. Dipped in whipped cream in the heat of summer. Shredded and stirred into pancake batter. Dried into slices. Pureed and dehydrated into fruit leathers for my children.

To question the apple is to question the birch tree, which is also to question ourselves, our responses. And sometimes, those questions flutter into particles drifting on air like tree pollen looking for a place to land.

When the Third One Comes Along

Tiny turned one year old yesterday. Exactly one year ago that day, I was walking the sidewalks on Raven Street with a friend, pausing for the hearty contractions, walking through the milder. My neighbors, most assuredly, peeped from their windows at my swollen belly and bent over form.  I was aware, good-humoredly, that I was a good show, more exciting than most of what happens on the block.  A woman in labor, just an hour or two on the other side of new life entering the world. In the coming months, the neighbors would gawk and giggle at Tiny from a respectful distance.  Only one would offer to hold her, coo, and make faces for her entertainment, jiggle her and rock her during rough afternoons. The rest are not those kinds of neighbors. Though at times I think how quaint it could be if they were, because then the neighborhood would be celebrating with us this week—this week that delivers us a Tiny who is a slender 18.8 pounds but tall: a willowy thirty inches tall when standing, assisted by a parent, sister, grandparent or other good-hearted charity worker who is willing to walk, hunched over, as Tiny leads them around the house/church/yard by the hands.  Her rosy cheeks, her quad-toothed smile, the chestnut brown wisps of bangs that part down the middle of her forehead make her a vision that could turn anyone into a lover-of-Tiny.

Or, so I think, biased as I am.   I have been a lover of all my babies, and have acted like the man in the New Testament parable who invited all his servant could find to attend his banquet, to fill up his table in celebration. For Oldest’s first birthday, our home was jam-packed on a humid June day. Twenty-five or thirty friends and extended family members, most over voting age, were invited to watch and cheer as our one-year-old bit timidly into a chocolate-frosted cupcake for the first time, as her fingers flirted with the satiny paper wrapped around a book, or a bag of blocks.

It was the same dimension of celebration with Middle, in frigid November. Her wisps of blond curls flipped out over her ears as she toddled and tripped over ribbons and bows scattered on the floor, and all the adults roared with laughter as we listened to the pre-recorded song on a battery-operated toy about a farmer and his hybrid animals: You put a pig in front, you put a horse behind. Put them together and what do you find? A Pig-Horse! Little Middle stared at us crazies, giggled, and toddled away. 

But yesterday, for Tiny, it was different. Our local family has grown enough to make for an adequate number of guests: Two big sisters, a grandpa, and his GF, who is also a lover-of-Tiny.  And I, well, I have grown so scattered, so stretched thin from loving the first two babies-turned-children who have so many wants I am working on fulfilling from day to day. And so many needs. There’s the obvious, such as laundry, and food in their bellies, and direction on bathing, or spelling, or chores.   There’s haircut, doctor appointment, and dentist scheduling times two. And then there are Deep Talks, where one of them goes philosophical and analytical and reveals her possession of more self-awareness than most grown-ups I know, and needs to ask questions about my childhood, about what it means to grow up, about the etymology of swear words.   The other needs Snuggling and Book Reading and relentlessly pursues accomodation.

So yesterday, the day of Tiny’s birthday, it turned out I had to take Oldest to her Annual Allergist Appointment where they performed Not-Fun Tests and made her eat peanuts, which made her sick, which made them make us stay in the clinic for observation, which meant we were late getting home. I had not made frosting for cupcakes, had not checked our supply of candles, had not wrapped the Eric Carle book I purchased for Tiny. By previous-child standards, these were parenting fails.

Thank God for Grandpa and his GF, who watched Middle and Tiny, and cleared our dining room table, grilled burgers, and boiled corn so we could sit down, ravenous, and watch Tiny squirm in her highchair.  And Grandpa’s GF dressed her in a special one-time-outfit—a pink birthday tutu and white t-shirt—that would be stained with chocolate chip frosting the second we brought out her first cupcake. When we sang happy birthday, Mark holding a plateful of cupcakes in front of her, she looked at us like we all had a touch of fever and then ripped into a cupcake, crushing it into chocolate smithereens on her highchair tray. Soon after, she let us know she preferred popcorn instead.

 Now that the third child has come along, the fanfare is  dulled—at least for us. Even so, my love couldn’t be more resplendent. And this same love is more prophetic  than ever it was with Middle and Oldest. I can see into Tiny’s future and love her as six-year-old Tiny and as almost-nine-year-old  Tiny because now I know what it means to parent not-just-babies, but children at the entrance to that long tunnel called Growing Up.  So at night, when I nurse her, I stare into her stained-glass-blue mosaic eyes and imagine her someday-fuller face, her someday-sloping nose, the someday-forehead that I will bend down to kiss goodnight or lean toward to kiss goodbye and my breath catches in my throat at all that expanse of change and time.