Even Jesus’ parents gave competing accounts of his birth.
—You were, said his mother, —unexpectedly large. I said to your father, Where had so much child been hiding? I couldn’t believe this huge person had been waiting inside me.
Yet his father, squatting, slick with the day’s sweat, his back against a cool interior wall, recalled a different truth. —Tiny. You were tiny and helpless. I thought you had come out dead. I was no midwife. You didn’t scream. I heard my siblings scream when they were born.
His father put his hand over Jesus’s mouth. —Speechless. You waited to speak.
—He had a voice. You slept through it.
His father exhaled disputatiously. —I sleep lightly.
His mother smiled in disagreement.
Additionally disputed: The length of labor.
The hour of birth.
Who visited the next day, bringing food.
Which relative they told first.
His father had an explanation for these contradictions.
—Your mother drifted like sand. For weeks. She woke and nursed and fell asleep. She slept when she nursed you and slept eyes-open afterwards. She wouldn’t remember.
During this exchange, his mother did not stop shaping dough nor look up; her face brightened in delight at the depths of her husband’s errors. She made her sound of blade-on-stone that ever preceded her need to insert a truth.
—Your father came and went. Ask cousin Rachel. Your father’s version of events is something he dreamed.
—I did have strange dreams. Powerful dreams.
Though only vaguely remembering any dream on waking, Jesus thought his own dreams told him the future. A day’s shape. His own life. The lives of others. He believed dreams either fell from the clouds or seeped upward from groundwater.
He asked, —Did you dream about me? Before I arrived?
Now his father’s memory was the problem.
—It’s been a long time.
Only on this did his parents agree: An unusually warm evening. Hazy. The light lingering. His first breaths drawn in the dark.
This curiosity and these questions came when he was five years old. A neighbor in Nazareth had given birth; he thought a goat had been trampled by a cart. Or the wounding, wounded sounds might have been an enormous bird like the ones in his dreams that came from the desert caves—dark, long-taloned and long-toothed. But his mother explained the source of the noises.
So across two Sabbaths he had asked about the circumstances of his own birth.
—I didn’t cry out like that, his mother said. She rubbed at her forehead. —I remember falling asleep, and there you were.
—Why can’t I remember?
—You didn’t know there would be a future. You didn’t know you would want to remember.
—You knew. You knew to remember.
She said, —Yes. That’s why this is my story to tell.
