the ritual by rona fernandez
2025-04-26 11:08 Note Type: Tags: rituals, death, mourning, love, children, parents, mother
Once a week, I buy her flowers. Her colors are purple and pink, so I pick blush-colored baby roses, neon Gerber daisies, white lilies with fuchsia centers, violet-blue irises. And foliage to round out the arrangement: glossy camellia leaves, gray-toned eucalyptus, feathery green ferns. I have my favorite spots to buy the flowers — the grocery store in our neighborhood, the farmers’ market when it’s the right season. I avoid the cheap flowers at the supermarket that I know will die within a day or two; those aren’t good enough for this. A few times a year, a thoughtful friend will drop off flowers from her garden, usually on the more difficult days. But I don’t expect anyone else to take this task on. This is my job as her mother though I wish it wasn’t.
This is how I mother my child.
My daughter’s name is Naima Kali — like the Coltrane song and the Hindu goddess of creation. She was born on March 25, 2011, her due date. The nurses said this was a rare thing. But I didn’t schedule her birth — it was too sacred an event to coordinate around my common needs. Still, my daughter came right on time, and I birthed her the old-fashioned way, took no drugs to shield me from the intensity and immensity of labor. I wanted to be fully present during the birth of my first child, wanted to feel it all — pain, ecstasy, fatigue, joy, overwhelm, all.
The contractions started in earnest the night before she was born, a drizzly Bay Area spring evening, cool and quiet. They were waves of energy that started in my full womb, rocking me from inside out, drawing guttural moans from a deep, primal place inside me. People stared at me, wide-eyed, as I walked past them in the hospital lobby, leaning heavily on my husband Henry’s arm as we made our way to the maternity ward. I felt powerful and vulnerable at the same time, sensing that my body was fully in control, that my mind would need to surrender and let my body do this job that it had been created for.
Through the night, the contractions fatigued me as they stretched and opened my womb, my eyelids becoming so heavy that the biggest worry became whether I could stay awake until the end. I kept trying to nap, thinking the real labor was still coming, not knowing that I was in the midst of it, that this was it.
Then finally, after twelve hours of active labor and more than three hours of pushing, she arrived.
I heard my Naima before I ever saw her, for she screamed aloud as she emerged from my body, announcing herself, lungs filling with air, already demanding attention. Henry and our midwife caught her as she was born. As they placed her on my chest, I chanted, shouting, “My baby! My baby!”
Relief and gratitude and love commingled in a deep wave of emotion as my body released her. She was pink, perfect. Her rounded, moist head lifted slightly as she was placed on top of me, her eyes — double-lidded, caramel brown, and beautiful, just like my husband’s — were already open, and she stared straight at me. Naima had an intensity even at birth that will always stay with me.
Bonding is a shallow way to describe what happened between my daughter and me at that moment. Our eyes met for that first time and — bam — that was it. She was mine; I was hers. We were connected immutably from that moment on. I knew then that I would do anything to keep her safe, happy.
Soon, Naima was latched onto my breast; her dark-pink mouth strong and voracious. Henry and I gazed down at her in awe, both feeling something that the word love only scratches the surface of. There is a photo of the three of us at this moment — my dark hair damp with sweat, Henry’s dark eyes shining with pride, tiny Naima bundled in a white, pink and blue blanket in my arms. Our little, perfect, new family.
I often arrange the flowers during a moment of quiet when I’m home alone. It’s a silent prayer that I shape with my hands as I carefully place each blossom and stem in a water-filled vase.
This is how I mother my daughter now, but I wish that I could mother her in other, more normal ways. Wish that I could teach her how to tie her shoes or put her clothes on right side out; wish that I could make tiny pencil marks on the wall in her bedroom to show how much she’s grown each year. Wish that I could cook her favorite food for her — maybe it would have been pizza or lumpia or noodles — or watch my husband teach her how to ride a bike. Wish that I could hear her cry Mommy after falling off the jungle gym at the park or comfort her when she has a fever.
These are the precious moments that most parents take for granted: the small, everyday witnessings of life as their child grows and changes. I wish I could have all these things.
But I can’t. Because my daughter, my first and only born, my Naima, is not here. She is dead.