“Purple pants!” I cooed to my husband. He looked over, his eyes recognized the color purple, and he smiled. “Purple pants,” he replied responsively, much like the congregation had been doing since the beginning of the service.
They were sitting in the first row of the choir. At the last service we attended, the woman was big with pregnancy. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that eventually the baby would come, yet it was. A baby in the choir. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. Green shirt, purple pants. Tiny brown booties. An enormous baby sling. The mother’s faded red top, tousled hair, hand perpetually cradling the baby’s head while she sang, no need for sheet music, she was instinctively singing and cradling, the baby’s own responsive nehs and tiny little nasal snorts punctuating the music of the service, the music of the intimacy between the two. The little dance they did – the mother adjusting her body, the baby’s body, sometimes getting up, returning with the baby snug and tight in the sling, the mother’s body in service for every single person in that congregation, providing succor and musical comfort with her lovely soprano voice, yet now her body is the primary, central realm of her baby’s world. There is just one world for those two, the in-between space between cradled head and hand, between sleepy head and breast, between purple pants and the arms that hold them tight.
Their world was so inclusive, I worried my gaze would interrupt. I smiled at them as if my enjoyment, my primal experience of the rightness of the world in that single moment, was something I could offer them. But they need nothing from me.
I needed something from them. I had purple pants envy. Not exactly the same as penis envy, but not too different, either. I envied the power of the purple pants, the symbolic meaning of union and perfectly cared-for infancy, the mother-child bubble impenetrable by crowds, traffic, the mundane of chores and vacuum cleaners. I remembered my purple pants bubble, even though my guy never had that exact onesie/snappy pants combination. We’d sway to music, I’d have conversations with him in the midst of any and all larger world transactions, my hands were permanently within an inch of any exposed body part, he’d move seamlessly from sleeping to wakefulness, from nursing to sleep. Fully grown bodies don’t drift off to sleep after the last satisfying mouthful; remembering the way consciousness slid and shifted throughout the 28 hours of each day brings back the hugely satisfying – and demanding – bubble.
I envied the purple pants. Never again will I be in that realm. No matter how cozy a moment I have with my tween child, how intimate a moment with my husband, there is an inherent separateness in our selves. We have independent bodies, minds, souls, life histories that overlap, of course, but no longer intertwine like braided bamboo. If any one of my gang were to ever wear a green shirt and purple pants, the response would not melt the coldness and hardness of adult living. No one I know wants to be seen in a green shirt and purple pants. But oh, the vision of it.