Looking Back

Sometimes it seems I can divide my life in two halves, as if the past and the future were fractured in the moment I got the news. The first half appears, in retrospect, to have been perpetually motivated by one selfish inclination or the other. And then it was as if this news had been dropped on me that was so massive, so enormous that it made all my petty worries seem, well, petty. Lincoln's diagnosis brought grief and confusion, of course, but it also brought a certain amount of freedom. It freed me to look at the bigger picture and stop obsessing about the minutia.

When I think back on those early days of adjustment, just one year ago, the place where my mind sticks is not on the diagnosis, but on the separation. The shock of having the child literally cut out of me, ripped from within and kept away from me by wires, by distance, by barriers of glass, by bili-lights and oxygen tents: it was all too traumatic for me in my post-partum state. I harbored a deep, cold anger for every single person in that hospital who kept my child from me, though rationally I knew their efforts could be saving his life. Writing about it at the time, I described it like this:

"There was a magnetic pull between us. When I would lie in the hospital bed and try to sleep, the metal that made him and the metal that made me called out to each other. How was I supposed to sleep when he was down so many long halls, wrapped in some generic blanket all the babies get, with only the lullaby of the beeping machines? So, I would wake my exhausted husband, and he would take me down to the Neo-natal wing in the dead of night to hold our baby boy."

I still have not recovered from that particular grief. When Linc went into the children's hospital to have tubes put in his ears on Monday, the old wound split open and showed itself to be all too raw still. The sight of him pale and disoriented in the recovery room, with wires coming off of his tiny feet and chest, thrust me back in the NICU, back into the despair and helplessness I felt for the 17 days my son belonged to them.

The difference is this time he turned to me, reached out and grabbed my shirt with his little fat fingers, and rested content against me. He knew he was home there, even in the sterility of the recovery room under the haze of retreating anaesthesia.

There is still a magnetic pull between us, I guess, and we have both just learned to give in to it.