This is the first of a three part post.
Never give up. I did and I didn’t even know it.
I remember standing in my backyard and leaning against the fence on one of the last days of an Indian summer. I had just taken a phone call from a doctor. The ultrasound of my daughter’s brain had been normal, but he wanted to continue with an MRI of her head and neck. I gazed over the field, turning brown and dead with the fall, and rather than landlocked I felt as if I were adrift with no land in sight and nothing to hold on to.
It was the beginning of my descent. The fall was more like a piece of wood slowly becoming water logged until it no longer floats, rather than a sinking rock. Perhaps I had been balancing at the edge much longer than I knew, but it was definitely the point at which I fell in and didn’t resurface until almost 18 months later.
My daughter suffered the entire time I was adrift. I was paralyzed by the judgments coming our way. She was limp, couldn’t lift her head, and was sick with respiratory infections. This is just a bit of what they all said. Is she okay? Maybe you could keep her at home until she gets over her cough. Why are you putting her through all of that testing? She’ll be fine, she just needs to outgrow it. Why aren’t you doing more? Are you sterilizing her bottles? You aren’t keeping up with your responsibilities. Have you finished that thing I asked you to do? Why don’t you call? No wonder she isn’t sleeping, the colors in her crib are too bright. Have you tried letting her cry herself to sleep? She wasn’t sleeping because she couldn’t breath, something a sleep study told us when she was two years old.
It was all too much for me, and I withdrew. Some people recognized the signs while others took it personally.
Here’s a poem that I wrote when I finally came up for air:
APPROVED
stamped in capital red letters,
may as well have marked my forehead,
for approval gauged the way of my path.
until life overwhelmed my sense of order,
and I sunk and I drifted until at last I surfaced
and found that the water washed away the mark.
It was news of the swine flu that finally forced my head above water, but I came up in a panic swim. Children were dying in Mexico. The flu was headed this way. The newscasts always concluded with the footnote: The latest victim had underlying health conditions. It offered me no comfort, not with a baby who’d already had pneumonia four times. If you’ve ever cried hot tears, then you may have some idea of the depth of the pain I felt.
I was in a race against the clock. So far the doctors had filled me with more questions than answers, and I needed answers fast.
