A few days before and after my youngest child’s sixth birthday, I was very emotional. I couldn’t stop sobbing in the little moments of my day. It was somewhat alarming, until of course I softened enough for a memory to resurface.
“How long has it been since you held your baby?” the nurse asked, after introducing himself and giving me an update on medical jargon and test numbers I couldn’t quite figure out.
“Ten days.”
“Okay, it’s time. Let’s make it happen.”
When I brought my newborn home from the hospital, my two-year-old son had a cold, and my newborn baby caught it too. My husband took him to the pediatrician on Friday afternoon. The doctor took one look at his chest and called an ambulance. After a night in the emergency room, we ended up in the pediatric intensive care unit.
There, I marked time by expressing breast milk every two hours and touching unswaddled baby skin during blood gas labs drawn every four hours. I got looks of pity. My baby had a severe case of RSV. His lungs and heart were very sick. He was unconscious, intubated and hooked up to machines that fed him and breathed for him. He lived on the vast plateau between getting worse and getting better. I was stunned, scared and didn’t know what my role was in keeping him alive.
I couldn’t think or feel. I was at the mercy of the medical team, or fate, or the drugs, or God. I wasn’t sure which one. The virus had run its course. I looked. I waited. I was in pure agony. I tucked away some of my love for him like a caged, hoarding animal in case the worst happened. In case he died.
In the PICU, each patient has a nurse who focuses on him or her full-time. My baby’s newest nurse, the one who was rearranging the room, was new to me. He was talkative and energetic. He was the first in a line of nurses who prioritized holding my baby as something that could matter.
I shuffled the blue vinyl rocking chair up toward the hospital crib as the nurse wheeled the beeping machines closer so that the central line, feeding tube, and breathing tube all reached comfortably. I propped up my limbs with pillows and he gently handed me my swaddled newborn. I searched his body for any sign of affection, recognition or life. I looked for a piece of skin to touch among all the tubes taped to his little face. I was afraid to move.
“So what do you do for work?” the nurse asked, leaning on the crib.
“I work with teenagers.”
“Where?”
“In a church,” I said. I dreaded this series of questions, but appreciated the company.
“Which?”
‘First Lutheran. Just south of here.”
“Oh, so you knew Mathias?”
My breath caught. I did know Mathias. Mathias could balance spoons on his nose, chin and both cheeks at the same time. He regularly skipped English class in high school, climbed into a hammock he strung from the rafters of the theater, and texted his friend incessantly during math class. He stopped flirting just long enough to challenge my theology lessons with a gleam in his eye. A few months ago, in the fall of his sophomore year, Mathias shaved his head and hanged himself from a tree.
‘How did you know Mathias?’ I have asked.
“His parents are good friends. His girlfriend is my daughter’s best friend. He was there all the time, and he loved going on my sailboat.” After a long pause, he looked out the window and continued, “I thought about inviting him on the boat with us the night before he died. The sky was beautiful that night. Maybe I could have helped, you know, by showing him the stars.”
His eyelids were red and tears were rolling behind his face mask. He grabbed a Kleenex from the shelf and offered me the box. I wanted to continue holding my baby with both arms, but I reached out and took him.
“It’s not your fault,” is all I could say.
In the long silence, the ever-present beeping became more apparent. He turned his head again and stared far away. “Fifty-seven children have died here under my watch. Every single parent makes the exact same sound when their child dies,” his voice caught in his throat. “When Mathias died, my daughter made that sound. No parent should ever hear their child make that sound.”
I nodded slowly and pushed my foot against the linoleum floor. I couldn’t remember the sound of my baby crying.
After three horrible weeks in the PICU, a resident suggested I try steroids on my son’s tiny body. It worked. He got better as quickly as he got worse, and was discharged. It felt like whiplash. It felt like grace. On the way out, after teaching us how to wean our newborn off steroids, the doctor told me not to scare him, or to treat him like the runt of the litter. He also told me that there could be serious bronchial effects during the first five to six years of his life.
Unbeknownst to me, my body had set a timer to steel itself like hell for six years, keeping watch and loving my son so much every day that nothing bad would happen to him until we got to came the other side. Every few nights I lay by his bedside and listened to him breathe. Every day I would be amazed that I got to raise this beautiful boy. When he turned six and I finally breathed out, I sobbed in all the quiet moments from the exhaustion of holding my breath, waiting.
Today my child is thriving. We both breathe easier.
Only now, all these years later, can I see that it was more than a little cruel of the nurse to ask so much of me while I held my newborn baby, who was struggling to stay alive herself. Couldn’t he see that I could have become one of those whining parents at any moment?
In the hospital room I couldn’t imagine the worst. There was something in my body that prevented me from feeling everything there was to feel. I was distant and his story bounced off the armor I had put on to survive. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that I could be the fifty-eighth parent to make that animal cry. Instead, all I could notice was that my baby’s weight barely registered in my arms. I looked for any sign of vitality against my forearm. I rocked him. I rocked us.
Now that my baby is a prosperous boy, can I think about those fifty-seven children? I let myself imagine the sound of their parents screaming.
And now, as I look back, I think maybe I can feel God holding us all – me, my baby, the nurse, his daughter, Mathias, the fifty-seven children and their parents. I hear God wailing with us. I feel that God is waiting with us. I experience God as the love that meets us in our original, shattered cry, rocking each of us to the cadence of our deepest, infinite rhythm.
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Reference By: motheringspirit.com
