For Crys
I sat there, glued to the end of the couch, holding onto my new baby like she was a life vest, the light from the end table next to me bathing us in a soft, yellow hue. There were other people around, although it was late in the evening. My sister in law? My mother? I can’t remember.
My sons, too, were around. Perhaps it was just the big one. The small one, based upon my memory, should have been in bed, although perhaps he was not.
Softly, I rubbed the top of my new girl’s head, breathing in that new baby smell. Each time my hand brushed that bump on the back of her head, that hard, fluid bump, the tears formed, my eyelashes grew heavy and I began to moan. I wept into her, so scared of the future. We’d been discharged from the NICU with very little beyond a scary diagnosis and a follow-up card for a neurologist who didn’t take our insurance.
The diagnosis was new, and I refused to use Dr. Google to make myself feel worse. I knew what a “posterior encephalocele” was. I just didn’t know how dire a diagnosis that was. Until later. Much, much later.
I’d bought myself some books – pre-nightmare – to read during those boring hours I planned to nurse my new baby. Word searches, books, and a potential maid service – all things I’d busied myself thinking about, feeling they were very important, until the doctor had said the words that forever changed me – “Becky, there’s something wrong with your baby’s head.”
Now it all seemed so stupid. Who gives a shit about spot-free mirrors when you’re not sure if your new baby will be celebrating a birthday?
But I could not bring myself to talk, to open up, to any of those around me. I knew it would be in vain – if I opened my mouth, I’d just begin to cry those awful, gut-wracking sobs anyway. Lord knows I didn’t need to cry any more – I could barely see through my shiny, swollen eye sockets.
Instead, I reached down into my thoughtfully packed hospital bag and pulled out a book. I’d bought two – a luxury considering I was about to have two under two – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and Revolutionary Road. I had no way of knowing that these were not books that someone with a medically fragile baby should be reading (one is about a mother who delivers two babies, one with Down Syndrome, who is taken by a nurse and raised separately from her brother and the other about an unhappy housewife in the 1950′s who dies after attempting to give herself an abortion).
I had no way of knowing how horrifying my choices of book were, but there I had them. And I read them both.
In the quiet of that cold February night, I read them both.
It was the beginning of what I called The Middling Place. The space between learning how quickly your world can be turned on it’s head and learning how to live sideways. The space between diagnosis and reality.
The place where you wait.
The place where, in those quiet moments, your heart feels heavy in your chest, the demons and monsters threatening your every move. The Fear a permanent resident in the back of your own skull.
The Middling Place is a lonely place – a secret place, a land of tears, inhabited by you and you alone. Other people may drift nearby, stuck in their own Middling Place, but yours is a solitary land. Some moments, they’re filled with the purest of joy. Others with an unending sorrow.
It’s not always a bad place, The Middling Place, but in those quiet moments, the voice in your head reminds you of how fucked up this really is, your skin crawls and your guts threaten to expel themselves any way they can. You’ve tumbled down the rabbit hole, Alice, and why yes, I’d like a cup of tea – two lumps, no milk, if you please.
And you wait.
My parents were hippies. You know this. I know this. The guy down the block prolly knows it to, but I’m not asking him because HELLO AWKWARD.
That explanation alone probably explains why they would give me a concoction called, “Coffee, milk, sugar,” starting at age two. I delighted in this drink. I remember sitting at the table, feeling ever-so-grown-up drinking coffee out of a coffee mug JUST LIKE THE OLD PEOPLE DID.
I don’t recall spazzing out and running around like an asshole afterward, but it’s possible.
For Ben’s first Christmas in this house, which had to be (scratches head)(counts on fingers)(stares at wall)(guesses), pushing five, six years ago, I lovingly selected a very tiny coffee mug for him. It was a cheap old thing, but it was so wee and so darling and so motherfucking adorable that I nearly ovulated all over the chick next to me at Crate and Barrel.
I’m not sure what exactly I was thinking he’d do with it. My son, while he is many things, is not an adventurous sort. Milk makes him weep, he doesn’t understand the concept of hot chocolate (until his siblings pointed out how rad it is, I might add). He’s a water-on-the-rocks kinda kid. I respect that.
My daughter, on the other hand, is extremely adventurous.
She also has an obsession with coffee. Normally, she’ll pop up next to me as I’m slurping down the sweet, sweet nectar of the gods, and very coyly ask to dip her binkie in the coffee. If Daver’s not around to bitch at me, I let her. Why the fuck not?* You’re only two once. And coffee? Well, coffee is FOREVER.
A couple of days ago, I realized the downfall to letting her dip-dip her binkie in my coffee is this: she’s infecting me with plague. (I wouldn’t put it past her to dip her binkie in my coffee for that very purpose.)
So I dragged out that wee, adorable cuppy that I’d bought for Ben so many years ago. I ovulated all over the kitchen as I put a splash of coffee, a heaping amount of sugar, and a liberal amount of milk into it.
“There,” I said. “Mimi’s coffee.”
I’ve never seen her grin so largely.
And proving once again that she is, in fact, my daughter, she downed that motherfucker.
Then asked for seconds.
Atta girl, Mimi.
*not actually asking WHY NOT? I’m sure it’s not fabulous for her and frankly? I’m not too worried about a teaspoon of coffee.
Bobbing and weaving in time to the music in her head, she bounded over to me.
“Mama,” she smiled largely, the winning smile that I just know she’ll be using on her future dates. “I wanna watch more Tuff Puppy.”
“No Baby-Pants,” I laughed. “Not tonight. It’s bedtime.”
“Okay,” she stretched her smile as widely as she could. “Can we watch more Tuff Puppy on SUNDAY?”
“Sure,” I giggled at her inflection and emphasis. No one is gonna say no to this kid. “We can watch it on Sunday.”
“OKAY,” she broadcast to the whole house. “THANKS MAMA.”
She bobbed and wobbled off to get her diaper changed before bed.
I sat there, looking after her, bemused and amazed and more than a little bit teary.
It’s coming up on her third birthday. To think this tiny tot with an attitude the size of Texas was once the very same baby whose life I prayed for. Who’s head I wept into. Who’s tiny feet I once held onto like they were lifelines to a world in which no NICU’s, no PICU’s existed. It’s hard to reconcile that these are the same people.
Yet they are.
For her birthday this year, I will celebrate. I will buy a monster of a cake and we shall eat it, sharing it happily with anyone who can be bothered to brave the frigid January air. This year, we will celebrate.
And maybe, just maybe, I can let the ghosts of my past, who still haunt my present, be silent.
If only for a day.
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