Timeless dream for mom-to-be

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

She wanted me to see the closet. "It's so cute, Mom," she said. "Scott did it." Scott, the husband and hero, still. The guy who turned a patch of floor into a kitchen. The guy who figured out that if you moved the bed this way and coaxed the dresser that way, you could fit - not a crib - but a Pack-and-Play into the corner of their bedroom. The guy who transformed what amounts to a tall spice cabinet into a perfect little niche.

The closet is tiny, 14 inches wide and not even a foot deep, the kind of space that years ago would have hidden an ironing board that flipped out when you opened the door.

My daughter opens this door, which is in the hall of a one bedroom apartment, and there is a flood of blue - blue onesies folded on a small shelf and blue blankets and bibs folded beside them and a dozen blue sleepers hanging on blue hangers and three blue bears, and a yellow duck, overseeing it all.

I look at these things, then turn and look at my daughter, my youngest child, 6 1-2 months pregnant, and happy. And I am struck by how universal and timeless all this is. How I dreamed this dream and my mother before me and my mother's mother before her. And how times change and people change, too. But this doesn't - this nesting and dreaming, this hoping and planning. A queue of mothers-to-be, since time began, collecting things, touching them and imagining a whole new life.

They call the baby by name already. "Adam weighs 3 pounds now," they say. "I wonder what Adam will be like." "Want to feel Adam kick?" my daughter asks, "Want to see what I'm making? It's in Adam's closet. What do you think?"

I think it must be nice to have a name for a dream.

I used to dream on a pale yellow sleeper, the soft fuzzy kind that covers a baby's feet and zips up the front, that a baby wears to keep warm on winter nights and that hasn't changed a bit in 30 years.

The sleeper was yellow because we didn't know then, boy or girl, so we couldn't give a name to a dream. It was "the baby" this and "the baby" that, everything yellow and white and pale green.

I don't remember if I bought the sleeper or if my mother bought it for me. But I had it for months before my son was born. I used to bury my face in it and feel its softness and smell its smell and try to imagine the hair and nose and lips of the baby who would wear it.

I couldn't though. You never can. Even when you know the gender.

Someone gave us a blue baby swing, a bright ugly blue, not navy. But I loved that swing, loved winding it, with the yellow sleeper positioned just so, stepping back and away from the swing, but stepping forward in time.

Now I see my daughter doing the same thing.

She shows me a blanket she's crocheting. She picks it up and rubs it against her cheek. She shows me a book, a toy, a photo album. Her hands caress these things.

This is a good time, I tell her. Enjoy these days.

She is enjoying them. She opens the closet door just to stare. I see this. I watch her crochet and see her dreaming.

Scott hung a teddy bear poster over the Pack-and-Play and put a baby lamp on top of the dresser. I see him dreaming, too. Both tell me about Aries and the signs of the Zodiac and what a book says Adam, if he's born on time, will be.

The book doesn't know, of course, any more than they know. Any more than anyone has ever known.

It's universal and it's timeless, this time of waiting, this time for dreams.