Yesterday morning was awful. I didn’t get to bed on time, had nightmares all night, and woke up exhausted and grumpy.

I compounded things by picking a passive aggressive fight with The Bean, and “won” by almost making the boys miss their bus to school.

Yaaaaaay!!!…….. I think?

I couldn’t find the shirt I wanted to wear, and had to settle for the one that makes me feel frumpy.

I was late, and pissy, and frumpy, and grumpy and….. and then I checked my phone, and saw I had a missed call from an unknown number. I checked the voicemail transcript (is that not the best invention EVER?), and stopped dead:

“Hi, Becky Bean, your baby was born this morning. You have a filly. I sent you some texts. Bye.”

Starting around day 335 or so (around April 15th), I began obsessively checking my phone for texts from Kathleen. The average horse birth happens around day 342. There’s a wide window, of course, and it’s not unusual to have them go past a year, but this wasn’t Sparkle’s first foal and she’d given birth relatively on time last time, and had bagged up well in advance.

I remember one evening, the evening of the “Four” post, I shooed The Bean off to bed ahead of me.”I know, I know,” I said. “I want to go to bed too, but… but I really need to get this post out. Who knows? This horse could be born tonight, and then it’d be too late to announce it ahead of time.”

Yeah. It didn’t happen that night. Or on day 330. Or on day 340.

Day 342, the official “this is what’s average” day came and went.

So did day 345.

And day 350.

And day 355.

And day 356. And day 357.

Eventually I started a daily habit. On my break at work I would Google “mare still pregnant at day 358” or “mare still pregnant at day 359” and read forums with fellow anxious waiters, doing my best to ignore the posters who admitted that their mare had waited until day 380 to give birth… or that had some mares giving birth on day 385, or even day 400+.

Somewhere along the way (don’t ask me why) I had decided that she would give birth in the middle of the night. I would check the phone several times through the night, but once no news of a baby was there by the time I was headed to work, I figured my chances were done for the day. And so, after I checked my phone that morning, on day 360, I completely dismissed the possibility of a foal and went on with my day. That was why Kathleen’s call came as such a complete shock.

I hate to be cliché, but as soon as I saw that, I had that “and then her heart leaped into her throat with excitement” moment. I literally felt my heart give a strange squeeze, and I got all choked up.

Until that moment I didn’t even realize how much I wanted a filly, not until I saw it in black and white and felt that giant surge of joy.

I didn’t see the notification for any new texts, but I optimistically opened my text messages anyways….and nothing. No pics. I reopened it. I turned my phone off and on again.

Nada.

I called Kathleen and got her voicemail.

I sat, pulled over on the side of the road in my idling minivan, and thought very seriously about calling in sick to work.

Only that would be wrong.

Only I had a filly. A filly!

Only I wasn’t sick, so that would be a lie.

Only, only, only there were no pics! I had a filly, and I had no idea what she even looked like! Dark bay? Light bay? Star? Socks? Scandia Morgan Horse Farm was literally less than three miles away from where my van sat. I could be there in under thirty minutes, even with dropping off the twins at daycare. I would be able to see her little wet foal coat, all swirly with dampness from just being born.

But…. But it would be wrong, and not nice to my coworkers. I work for a small town, and there just isn’t a lot of people in the City Hall office. The absence of one person is felt dearly.

But I had a FILLY. And there were NO PICS.

But… but if I went and saw her I wouldn’t be able post any pics or say anything on social media. I mean, you can’t say, “Ugh, cough cough, I’m siiiick….” And then start posting pics of your visit to a horse farm an hour later. I’d have to wait until Friday to post anything, and sitting on this giant news for more than a day would kill me.

I went on Facebook messenger and was relieved to find the following details:

“Filly born. Looks like Marvelous side of pedigree. Three whites, white face. Red head.”

I sat there in my van and read the lines over and over again, while Magpie and Finn babbled at me from the backseat.

I…. I had a chestnut filly. How was that possible? I had figured, long since, that I was getting a bay colt. Colts take longer in the oven and Sparkle had definitely baked this foal really well, and we had bred a bay horse to bay horse.

And now I had not only a filly, but my all time favorite color: chestnut.

Knowing the description gave me the strength to do the right thing, so I shot back a message letting her know I hadn’t received any pictures and then headed off to work. Meanwhile, Kathleen went inside to check on why the photos hadn’t gone through (they’d accidentally gone to some other lucky Becky in her phone book.)

I dropped off the twins and pulled into the work parking lot, opened FB messenger…. And there they were:

I sat there and just stared. She said white face, but I’d just figured she meant she a nice little blaze, not anything like that. That was just amazing. It was so unbelievably unique. That was….

I zoomed in on the last headshot. Was that….

Was that a blue eye?!

I texted Kathleen back who said it’d be best to wait a day or two before making any final decisions on the eye, but that she was a big filly, and should be easy like her mom since she favored the Intrigue side so much.

I sat there in my van until I was actually a few minutes late for work, completely stunned.

I had a big, chestnut, tons of white, possibly splash gene filly with at least one blue eye.

It was like I’d ordered her from a catalog.

I had done my best not to hope for one thing over the other. I didn’t want to be disappointed in any way when the foal came. If I didn’t psyche myself up hoping for a filly over a colt, or for a chestnut when there was such a small percentage chance of a chestnut, then end I wouldn’t end up secretly disappointed if it came out anything other than “my favorite”. Color wasn’t important – the foal was going to be amazing no matter what.

But this?

I feel like I just won the horse lottery. What were the chances? What were the chances that I’d pick an in utero foal and get literally every single thing I’ve ever liked in a horse?

I skipped into work on a cloud and began what was literally the longest day of work of my life. I’m sure it was a long day for my coworkers as well, who had to listen in on my excited gushing over, and over, and over. I felt a little bad for them, but not bad enough to stop. I told everyone. I mean, EVERYONE. I felt like a first time mom. I had a baby! I had a baby! It’s a girl! Can you believe it? A great big redheaded girl!

The hours crept by. I couldn’t even sneak away to see her on lunch, because I had to pay the farrier (Jupiter leaves to his amazing new home this week and desperately needed his hooves trimmed before he left.)

I got one more pic during the day:

But that was it. It was awful. The day crawled by, oozing along at a slug’s pace. I thought it would never end, but eventually it did. The second that five o’clock hour rolled around, I was out that door and off to meet her.

Kathleen met me near my car, and together we went to the foaling barn. Sparkle was a gem – hands down the nicest new-mom mare I’ve ever been around. Aside from one half-hearted ear pinning before she sniffed my hand, she was a total doll about letting me into the stall, standing kindly and patiently and letting her filly approach us and snuffle us all over. I’ve never been able to scratch such a young foal to my heart’s content.

After a little bit Kathleen went back inside, both to fix her dinner as well as just let me sit in the stall and get to know…. Little Miss No-Name. So that’s what I did. I sat in the stall, took pictures, and scratched on my newborn filly. I know I’m completely biased, but she was just so nice. She wasn’t wary or pushy, and she genuinely seemed to like people. She kept approaching and softly sniffing me, and grooming me back whenever I scratched her neck.

I got groomed by a 12 hour old foal, y’all. Yesterday was definitely one of those days that you hold close to your heart, and pull out to remember and soothe yourself with when times get dark.

I’d like to say that seeing her made me automatically know what her name should be, but instead it made it harder. Oh, sure, I was able to get rid of almost all the names I had on my list… but now I have a new list.

I fall in love with one name, and then after I sit thinking about it for a few hours, I start second guessing them. I latched onto Fantasy for a few hours. It was perfect – easy to say, sounded kind of feminine but not too girly, encapsulated how I felt about her (the horse I’ve been dreaming of pretty much all my life), but then started wondering if I start talking about my Fantasy, if people are gonna wonder if I’m daydreaming about dirty things out loud. Does it sound bad? I can’t tell – I’ve really overthought it at this point. FairyBramble is still an option, but I’m sure if it was the one. Allegria means happiness in Spanish… or maybe I could call her Soprano, because she makes my heart sing, high and sweet…..

The Bean wants me to call her Negative Amortization, since she’ll just get more valuable over time.

I told him I am not naming my heart horse Negative Amortization, and to quit being such an accountant.

And then I heard the word “heart horse” come out of my mouth and I was all “OMG, I’m gonna name her Heartsong like on that one penguin cartoon!”… and then I remembered that Scandia Morgans already had a Heartsong.

I thought of naming her Sonnet – it was the name I always wanted to name a horse, since FOREVER…. but I already had one horse named Sonnet, if only for a month or three. It seemed wrong to reuse it. Except… except I only had that horse for three months, almost 20 years ago. Is it wrong to reuse names? Bad luck? Mean? I don’t know the rules.

The Bean suggested another name – Singularity (actually, he brought up Quantum Singularity, but I just liked the Singularity portion of it.) We could call her Rarity for short, which would be perfect, and rolls off the tongue so wonderfully… except Rarity is also the name of a My Little Pony. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but still.

As I chewed over that, The Bean continued coming up with more names: Event Horizon (Horizon was already on my list), Dark Matter, Einstein’s Action At a Distance….

No, Bean. I am not naming my filly Einstein Action At A Distance any more than I’m naming her little Negative Amortization. Thank you for your suggestions, though.

Speaking of suggestions….. Look, I can’t promise I’m going to pick the name that wins this poll (the internet has taught me never to promise that, lest I end up with a horse called Horsey MsHorseFace, or worse)…. but I wouldn’t mind a little more feedback.

Do any of these names strike you as awesome? If not, do you have any suggestions? Please vote – this may be the most #FirstWorldProblem I’ve ever had in my entire life, but I feel overwhelmed trying to name this gorgeous little filly, with her unique masque and her blue eye and her awesomeness.

If you don’t like any of my ideas, there should be a space for “Other” where you can input your own name. Keep in mind that her complete name can’t exceed 25 spaces, and eight of those spaces will be taken up by Scandia (with a space after it.)

So…. seriously. Help me. If I figured out all the behind the scenes stuff right, there should be a poll right below this:

UPDATE: It worked! Also, if you input your suggestion under “Other”, there’s the complicated way of me approving them, so I’ll mostly be listing them in batches. They’ll show up eventually, though….. I hope ?

SECOND UPDATE: I am really struggling with it showing me “Other”. If you entered an “Other” name, can you also add it in a comment? I’m trying to add all the “Other” names into the poll.

What do you do when you’re out of practice with your daily writing?

You write, whether you feel like it or not. .

My goal is to write every day during the month of May. So far so good, even if it’s not getting posted.

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When I think of summers in Mexico, the memories are all wrapped together in a tangle of senses. I remember the whir of the fan, the air licking gently at sweat-soaked skin. You don’t know hot until you’ve done 110 degrees in 80 or 90 percent humidity. Even the showers, short as they were, were never cooler than lukewarm. By the time you dried off you were already damp with sweat again.

The trick to sleeping in heat like that without any air conditioning is definitely the shower before you go to bed. You take a lukewarm shower, making sure you save any of the drips off the showerhead in the bucket for watering the plants, because Lord knows water is precious. You dry off just enough you don’t stick to the sheets, and leave damp skin above the sheets to tingle pleasantly when the rotating fan finally hit your corner of the room.

Of course, even that was a dilemma, the Sophie’s Choice of sleep. Anything beneath the sheets was covered by sweat, but anything I left above the sheets would be chewed on by mosquitoes. There’s something about my blood that mosquitoes and other bugs have always loved. It’s the same with my mom, and as the months go by, it appears I’ve also passed it on to my daughter.

Ah, well. A family that itches together stays together?

It always took me a long time to fall asleep the first few nights we were there, no matter how tired I was. Despite the fact that the rooms were so familiar, with none of the furniture rearranged between my yearly visits, everything felt different. The smell – I think I remember that the strongest. It’s been almost 11 year since I last set foot in Mexico, “thanks” to the drug war, but every now and again some strange combination of smells – almost too-ripe fruit, wet concrete, growing green things, diesel, hot tortillas and lime- and bam. I’m back there, lying on my back, room bathed golden by the street lamp.

I remember the night watchman, the way he bicycled slowly up and down the different streets, blowing his whistle in a soothing cadence that pierced the city silence.

It seemed counterproductive to me, even as a little kid. Why hire a night watchman if he was going to announce to the bad guys when he was approaching, giving them plenty of time to hide?

Still, he was a staple, one of the things you could count on. Tiò would eat small green pea-like chiles with stems for every meal, the tortillas were bought fresh in a brown bag- recien hechas, and nightwatchman would start making bicycle rounds around 9pm.

Sometimes I look in the mirror- at my pinkish white skin, my McDonald’s hips, my very Beckyness, and it seems so incongruous to me that these childhood memories are my own.

The first few nights the sound of the night watchman would wake me up. The slow, unhurried Too-weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet rise and fade of his whistle would jolt me from a sound sleep every time. I hated him, but only at first.

By the time it was time to return home there was something oddly relaxing about it. I think, now, that he was paid to bring the feeling of security rather than actually fight off crime. Whenever I returned home after a visit with my family the tidy, quiet streets of my Orange County home seemed empty without him.

Houses in Mexico are built completely different from the United States. In my memory every house looks the same from the outside – square, whitewashed walls, with bits of sea green coke bottle shards glued to the top, to discourage people from climbing over.

Once you were in the inside they varied wildly, but the outsides were always the same: Long, flat, stretches of boring white wall, riches and hints of any prosperity all tucked safely away. It made the peaks, angles, and giant windows of Southern California seem almost garish in comparison, a deliberate flaunting of wealth.

If the outside walls were all the same, there was one more thing that was also the same: the tile floors. Cool, dry, and pleasant beneath my bare feet, it felt so different from the 80s brown carpet of my drywalled California home. With the summer heat and being situated so close to potential hurricanes, you can’t beat a Mexican gulf house for sturdiness – everything is made of stone, concrete, or tile. Cool in the summer, freezing in the winter, the walls always felt immovable beneath my palm. The stairs were silent when I went running up them, and the second story floors were completely quiet. There were no creaking floors, no thumping foot beats, no matter how I ran around.

It was oddly disconcerting, and rather than encouraging me to be wilder, or louder, it felt almost wrong to make too much noise. I found myself creeping, sticking close to walls and running hands around corners as I tiptoed here and there.

It’s the floors I remember most of all – those brownish tile floors. They were never dirty, despite the fact that my Tià B had five boys. I always stayed at my Tiá B’s house. It’s not that I wasn’t welcome at my other Tiá’s house, but what was one more kid when added to that noise?

Tiá B was a beauty – is a beauty – a woman forgotten by time. It’s almost disconcerting – she looks the same in photos from her 20s as she did in her 40s, and her 40s aren’t virtually the same as her 60s. She’s perpetually slim, olive skin glowing, dark hair shining.

I remember the quick, practiced way she swept the floor, running the broom with brisk strokes, feet taking shortened steps, toes pointed slightly out. She cleaned the floors in some way or another every day, broom whisking along the walls and down the stairs, the scent of Fabuloso rising up as she mopped, humming.

It wasn’t even a chore to her, just a way of life. You sleep at night. You put on shoes to go outside. You sweep and/or mop on a daily basis.

Sometimes I look around my own wood floor at home, the way it creaks beneath my feet as I walk, the way dog hair and children and dust stack up along the walls in happy piles, and I am ashamed. I know that if my Tiá B lived there, those floors would gleam.

Then again, Tiá B wouldn’t have an 80 pound dog living in her house, a cat with a hairball problem roaming in and out, 3 horses and a bunch of chickens scratching up in the acreage, so I can’t really compare the two of us. It’s a different life.

No matter how I try, I don’t remember much about the days during my summers in Mexico. Frankly, I think it’s because they were just too hot. A few memories surface, when I start digging. I remember the thirst, the way I needed water constantly. I remember steady sweating and the way the icy cold glass bottles of Coke could be rubbed against my forehead. I’ve never been a fan of Coke here in the States, mostly because it doesn’t taste like the Mexican Coke of my childhood. When I was younger I used to think it was the memory of it I missed – the feel of grabbing one out of the fridge, the sound of my cousins, the smell of carne asada and orange trees and diesel and tortillas and men’s cologne all rising up like a musk around me.

Now that I’m older I realize it’s a real taste preference: Coke in Mexico is made with real sugar. Coke in the US is not.

Evenings are more firmly stamped in my memory, my brain gaining the ability to retain memories as the sun sets and the summer heat went from unlivable to something slightly more manageable. Mexican frugality and the late 80s/early 90s peso being what it was, air conditioning was a resource to be hoarded, carefully sealed off rooms of crisp cold that felt almost sinfully good.

My Tiá B taught English in the downstairs spare room, a classroom filled with actual desks and a chalkboard covering the near wall. Evenings would find it filled with quiet, well-dressed strangers, the scratch of chalk against the wall, repetition of verbs and phrases. In the corner of the room there was a small TV on a stand, a VHS tape I could never see with cartoon voices spluttering out in English, starting and stopping.

“Donald Duck is happy. But look – someone took it away. Now he is angry,” my Tiá would say slowly in English. “What is he? He is angry. What is he?”

“He ees an-gree,” chorused the voices.

Angry. Sad. Happy. Lonely. Running. Walking. Sleeping. Short, simple English words floating out, repeated in thickly accented voices. It seemed to me that they never got any better, but now that I’m older I realize it’s because I usually only listened in on the beginner class, since that was the class with the cartoon. The repetition of the same material was confusing to me. English was so easy. It was so much harder than trying to learn how to speak Spanish, with its strange collection of sounds, and the backwards way of ordering sentences, with nouns first. The Coca cold. The food delicious. The gringa sweaty. The family beautiful.

I smelled Mexico the other day – Grocery Outlet was selling some ripe mangoes, rain threatened on the distance, and suddenly I was there. Eight years old and feeling the spongy grass of the backyard beneath my feet as I pestered one of my ubiquitous older cousins. Listening to the hum of a language I almost understood. Surrounded by love and a place that felt almost-but-not-quite like home.

“Smell this,” I said, holding the mango beneath the noses of my four very white children, who all sniffed and shrugged. To them it was a fruit, nothing more. They’ve never been to Mexico, and there’s a small part of me that withers a little every time I think of that. To them it’s just a place, not anything real. They can point it out on a map, but they have no idea beyond that.

I think, sometimes, of throwing caution to the wind and going there anyways. I mean , there’s a drug war, but heck, there are school shootings here. Sometimes it just feels like six of one half dozen of another, you know? I’d like them to meet their cousins, to know their familia, to perk up when they hear the rare Spanish being spoken here in Oregon and eavesdrop with an odd wave of homesickness.

I’d like them to be able to walk through the store, and smell something, and have the memories of love come flooding back.