Dare To Love
Each time I pour the liquid into the nebulizer, hold the blue tube up to your tiny pursed mouth, I wonder: If I had loved you more, would this still have happened? The 37 weeks I dreaded your existence. You sound like Darth Vader the way you wheeze, your jowls barely moving but chest heaving above that baby fat stomach. Do your lungs fill with longing to be loved?
Emergency room terror: a feverish baby just lying there. Not eating, not even crying much. By the time you’re admitted we’ve spent eight hours here, doctors and nurses looking at me with pity. Everyone can see I’m ill equipped for this job. Nurse Shelly brings a sandwich from a machine, squishy white bread American cheese and ham. I eat with one hand while I hold you upright so you can get some air. Nostrils nearly closed with dried phlegm, a fever despite Tylenol and Advil. They’re about to send us home, having filled your body with steroids and bronchial dilators when the doctor changes his mind and sends us upstairs for a few days.
I’ve failed you at the simplest of all my tasks: keep your body going. I’m taught to use a vacuum device to suck the mucus out but I worry I’ll somehow suck out your brain. Your arm stabilized for the IV becomes a weapon; you whack the crib rails. My baby, in this cage, in a tiny hospital gown covered in clowns of all things. Droopy eyes, red cheeks, you still smile. You are ten months old.
I move the IV stand over to the tiny couch extended into a bed of sorts. I awkwardly hold you on my right side trying to keep the lines free. I hold you all night, through waking for temperatures and treatments and oxygen saturation checks. Hold you still and pat your back and will you to breathe.
I never thought you’d live. Call it a way to cope, but I never thought about life with you. I didn’t want you from conception. Surprised at the ultrasounds when there were no problems. Not hoping for deformity but expecting it at each measurement. Then you were born, tiny and early, fully awake and demanding from the first moment.
And so with each illness, each time your pallor turns dusky, I know it is my fault. Doctor visits and the best care can’t make up for a mother who doesn’t want her own son. I follow instructions to the letter, filling prescriptions and waking in the middle of the night to flood your lungs with chemicals to strengthen them.
Only I know why you don’t breathe, why your body fights the very air it craves. It is me. You want so much to be adored, not just cared for. I hold you and touch you, keep you clean and fed. You are safe and secure. But there is a distance between us.
I can’t let go and fall in love with you. Not when I know I might lose you. How could I go on, having abandoned myself to your grey eyes and floppy hair? Your cackles and furious crawling tear at my heart. If I give in, if I love you, stop fighting this growing thing inside me, I will be consumed. How much worse each time you wheeze and look at me for help? How much worse when the doctor says nothing helps your asthma?
Your birthday comes amid months of sickness, constant viruses attacking your useless lungs. You cry at the cold of an ice cream cake. Dad holds you while you open presents from grandparents, your eyes revealing a total lack of energy. I sit at the table, dutifully taking pictures, angry at this charade of normal family life. Soon I take you in a dark room with your bottle, snuggle you in the crook of my arm.
As you suck in contentment, one hand searches for my skin. You reach down my shirt, kneading like a cat. The tension leaves my body for a moment. Here, you and I, our heartbeats in sync, I think we might make it. The bottle drops from your lips, a thick drop of milk in the corner of your mouth.
If I’d loved you, planned for you, dreamed of a tiny layette, would you have known? Would your cells have divided more perfectly? If I grow into your mother, ever so slowly, will it be enough?
6 replies on “Dare To Love”
As a woman who struggled with infertility and then later, two second trimester miscarriages, I can perfectly relate to the desire for detachment from these children we so fervently desired. I quickly learned that, much like my pregnancies, the concept of detachment from these children was to be very short-lived. Once my husband and I gave nicknames to both of our daughters as they grew and kicked inside of me, calling the first one “Peanut” and the second one “Green Pea”, it was impossible to continue to deny our hopes, dreams, and love for them. Sending love and blessings to you and your family.
I have become the sidekick to my teenaged son who faces a chronic disease that will diminish his quality of life and shorten it. In an unnatural, forced way we are attached now because we must spend so much time together, because only we belong in the club of the knowing, while the others are protected in denial or lack of knowing. That moment where you think you write that you might make it, where you are in sync with your child is very poignant for me. I have that but it looks more like the two of us walking down a hospital corridor laughing at the same silliness. We become what they need.
Brave and moving.
I waited four long years to get pregnant with my daughter. And I waited over four more to bond with her, to truly connect with this little person that I had birthed. We assume that mother loving and mother bonding come naturally and automatically. That is not always the case. So many things can get in the way, even from the very beginning.
Some day, I wish for you that this bond will occur, that things will change and you will begin to get a glimpse of something that is less like struggle and more like hope.
Thank you for your honesty. These things need to be said, and you said it beautifully.
At 3.5 years, things are better. It has been a long road though and I feel bad that we didn’t start off the way I wish we had. All I can do it move forward though.
Thanks for your comments.