Mikayla Johnson

       In the morning, my family visits the reservoir. The reservoir has one public beach placed at the bottom of a staircase on the northeast side with a parking lot. The parking lot hosts a standalone car when we pull in. When we pull in, my husband and I lather our two children in sunscreen, wrap them in life jackets, and strap sandals to their feet before they dash across the sand. 
       The sand is littered with sticks, brush, shells, two beach chairs and a cooler. The cooler is red on the bottom and white on the top with big red letters reading “BIOHAZARD: HUMAN ORGAN FOR TRANSPLANT.”  
       Transplant, organ, cooler, beach—I stop, drop our towels onto the sand and scan the water because these things do not belong together.  
       Together with a boy in blue swim shorts, a woman with a duckbill visor wades through the water—they are the only other people here, and I assume the red cooler holds their lunch, a pack of sodas, maybe homemade grape juice bottled in mason jars. Mason jars would make sense because these people seem to reuse stuff, and you can reuse mason jars, month after month and year after year, because mason jars can hold grape juice, cider, maple syrup, peach preserves, bottled cherries, or even human hearts. 
       Human hearts—no, I tell myself, mason jars can’t hold those, but maybe the cooler did, once, when it might’ve belonged to a nurse in a hospital instead of a woman at the beach. The woman at the beach—was she the nurse in question? I question whether I should be questioning the history of this woman, her cooler, its contents past and present, but I’m uncomfortable, searching for how she’s normal because how can it be normal to eat lunch out of a vessel that used to hold humans?   
       I am a vessel that used to hold humans. Humans, boys, twenty-one-months apart, the two of them chasing each other through waves speckled with lake foam, their small soaked selves like two pieces of my sopping heart stumbling around outside of my body. Body of flesh and blood, that is what Mary— chosen vessel—gave the Only Begotten Son of God. God smiles on me, I know this, He gave me these two sons, and I smile at them, soak up the sun and close my eyes.  
       My eyes would’ve lost their corneas, my gut would’ve lost its kidneys and liver, my chest would’ve lost its lungs and heart if I’d died on the table on those birth days. Those birthdays when, at the same time I nestled new babies in my arms, some nurses said, “She’s losing too much blood,” and other nurses said, “Give her Cytotec,” and the doctors buzzed around my legs with needles and gauze while my body roiled with pain. 
       Pain, hemorrhage, baby, joy—I stop, plant my feet in the sand and scan my heart because I don’t want these things to belong together. 
       Together with eleven children, that was the future I wanted. I wanted a slew of handprints and messy faces and refrigerators bursting with food and crayon drawings by the thousands and clothes in every size from newborn to 3T to adult XL. XL van, XL house, XL family, this was my future—I was sure of it—because my patriarchal blessing says I will have “many children,” and I believed those words without a shadow of a doubt until making babies nearly made me dead.  
       “Dead,” my head says, “dead is what we’ll be if you try again.”  
       “Try again!” my heart says, “Please let us try again. We can handle three kids, four, eight kids, thirteen.” 
       “Thirteen years ago you marked ‘yes’ on the DMV organ donor statement,” my head says.    
       Says my heart, “So what?”  
       “What that means is if you try again, you’ll be laid out on ice in one of those coolers and we’ll no longer be together, plain and simple.”  
       Simple scripture stories keep me company in these frequent, painful moments of conversation between head and heart, and I think of biblical Hannah as I settle myself on a towel, the Hannah who prayed for a child and, after years of being barren, received one son. One son—she prayed for one son!—and I should just be grateful because I have two.  
       Two gulls squawk overhead and I watch the winnow of summertime air gust through the spume over the water’s face.  
       Facing the wilderness, Sariah gave birth to two sons while her four older sons became parents themselves, her mothering years pulled long across the decades of her life like stretch marks.    
       Marked by prophetic promise, Isaac—with Rebekah—had two children.  
       Children upon children, Jacob and his wives had twelve sons and one daughter.  
       Daughter of promise, Elizabeth gave birth to one son in her elderly years. 
       In his elderly years, Abraham was promised a child with his wife Sarah—one child—and God said he would multiply Abraham’s seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore.  
        The lake shore rumbles in front of me, the crash and flow of the water like a drumbeat in my ears, while the sun, lone star in the sky, bakes down on the sand.  
       The sand bursts like a spray of brown sugar as my children climb out of the water and walk onto dry ground; at ages four and two, my children are ripe for sandcastles, their minds a happy labyrinth of curiosity and play. Playing with the bucket three yards to my right, my husband builds with my sons, his large hands and their small hands packing sand inside the plastic pail.  
       Pale and weak, the woman with the issue of blood approached Christ in a crowd, her fingers stretching out to touch His robe, for she said, “If I may touch but his garment, I shall be whole” (Matt. 9.21), and the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed. Healed—is that all I have to do to be healed the next time I give birth and my blood runs? Run my palms over my scriptures, cup my hands against Christ’s portrait, finger the fringes of my temple garments, touch the skin over my heart where I first felt that Christ is real?  
       Real women die every day from birthing babies, even now. Nowadays, about 1,000 women die from complications of childbirth in the United States each year.  The year is 2021; I am 29 years old and years of fertility extend before me, but even so, the decision of whether or not to have more children hangs urgent and heavy like a millstone from my heart.  
        Heart surgeon extraordinaire, piano player professionnel, writer of beautiful books and peacemaking prophet of God, Russell M. Nelson and his wife Dantzel had ten children—but his fellow apostle, Elder Dale G. Renlund, had only one child with his wife Ruth, and aren’t both disciples of Christ, equally beloved and strong?
       Strong—am I strong for giving birth to two children, or weak for only giving birth to two?  Two mites, this is what the widow threw into the temple treasury because this is all she had to give; it was everything she had.  
       She had two and maybe two is all I have to give, too. To make worlds, does it cost our Heavenly Mother anything? Anything like pain and time and puking and bleeding? Bleeding her life across the cosmos, maybe, dotting the universe like nebulae after a supernova, the stars evidence of what it cost Her to make our world. Worlds without number, that is what our God has made, and how do they do it? It might be hard for Heavenly Father to watch Heavenly Mother, watch Her, in the act of creation, go through whatever She goes through. Throughout this life and the next, I hope to understand what it requires of Them to make the universe and how They work together.   
       Together with her child, the woman with the duckbill visor ascends the stairs back up to the parking lot, her child’s arm in one hand and the cooler in the other, never having opened the thing, and I watch them leave.  
       “Leave me with an answer,” my heart pipes up, while my head says, “give me more time.”   
        Time is irrelevant to God, I’ve heard, and “all things must come to pass in their time” (D&C 64.2), and “it was her time to go.”  
       “Go with God.” 
       “God called her home.”  
       “Our home is in Heaven.” 
       Heaven is real to me; I felt the presence of two deceased grandmothers in the labor and delivery room during the birth of my first. First member of the Church in her family, my 1800’s pioneer midwife grandma Clegg was there beside me as I nearly bled to death—I know she was—as was my great-grandma Tippetts, who died (and was revived) in 1947 during the birth of her third child.
        Child of the covenant, I have faith that Christ will call for me in the morning of the first resurrection, yet even so, I fear. I fear death by childbirth, leaving these two precious sons and my beloved husband behind; for them, I crave more time.  
       “Time to go?” my husband asks, brushing sand off his knees before clasping my hand.  Hand in hand we walk along the beach with our boys. Our boys are coated in water, the wet of it glistening off their bodies like the blood glistened off them when I first held them in my arms. Arms and legs and toes and nose, hair and tummy and thighs and eyes. Their tiny little eyes, gray and blue and new, gazing up into mine—the moment we saw each other for the first time. The time the feeling in my chest was like an explosive sunbeam tunneling down to Earth, was like a prayer answered by God.  
       Gods in embryo: this is who my children are, and my head and heart can agree on that much.