1.
About the time a pregnancy test registers as positive, a fertilized human ovum is the same size as a poppy seed.
2.
I sing and celebrate the poppy.
Our daughter was born by an emergency C-section. She was already more than two weeks late, and even then she did not want to come. Her heart rate had dropped dangerously low. Before the surgery, the anesthesiologist came to deliver the spinal block, a numbing anesthetic combined with a powerful form of synthetic morphine. He was blunt and smart, highly skilled and not kind.
I have a needle next to your spinal cord right now, he hissed. I don’t care how bad your next contraction is. Don’t. Move.
I hated him and adored the bite of his needle all at once.
The surgeon I trusted. His hospital had one of the lowest C-section rates in the nation. The surgery was not a frivolous one. After my abdomen was opened, he found that there was almost no opening into the birth canal, that the contractions had been crushing the baby’s head into my pelvic bone. Completely unengaged, he said, and I pictured a bored baby, thumbing through a magazine. Then, likely noticing my downcast face, he added, In the old days, she never would have gotten out. You both would have died.
And I remain privately surprised by my memory of that day, when I felt as if she were a seed and I the husk. In that moment, my body accepted that her coming might require me to be shed, from her life and everything I knew. It did not feel as morbid as I am sure it sounds now. Giving birth, I felt that I had entered a sacred place where life and death touched.
Our daughter is nearly ten years old now. Every morning when she stumbles out of bed, her tangled long hair making her look like a wild sprite who found her way into our house by mistake, I feel grateful and victorious: We’re here! Together! All hail the poppy, to which we owe our lives.
3.
My mother’s father died on Christmas Eve. I was seventeen. After our family left the hospital, we had just enough time to pick up our dinner rolls before the bakery closed for the holiday. said the baker, Gino, offering his condolences. Along with the rolls, he boxed up a ring-shaped poppy-seed
