It has been months since I’ve posted a piece of writing. My counselor asked me this week if I still was writing, and I said yes, in general, but not so much actively, at the moment. I’ve continued to type out some thoughts daily, on a site that keeps track for me, and then I inadvertently missed a day last Wednesday, wrote again Thursday, and realized on Friday that I had forgotten a day and broken my streak of a couple hundred days. I took that as an opportunity, then, to take a break, and here I am. But I still have some of the pieces I wrote for my original session of Writing Your Grief that I meant to post here and never did. So here’s one, and there are at least four more to come, and I have a backlog of additional writing prompts from Megan Devine when I’m ready to start again. Which I think I am, if not every day ready to write about something deep and thoughtful, at least some days.
January 26, 2018
The prompt was to write about things we remember or want to remember, and/or things we want to forget. (Disclaimer: Memory is a tricky thing, so the details as I recall them may not match up to what others remember of the same experiences I describe.)
Photo from the 2012 camping trip. Rader is second from right in the Mario shirt with the walkie-talkie on.
I remember that I was nervous when the ultrasound showed we were having a boy. I grew up with just a sister, and my mother grew up with just a sister. I didn't know about boys. The boy moms I knew, moms of my friends growing up, were the ones who went prematurely gray. Which made the point to me that boys are difficult.
I remember I was terrified when, at only a few days of age, my son was readmitted to the hospital where he was born, because he had developed a fever. Fevers in babies can be serious, as their immune systems are mostly undeveloped. They did tests to try to figure out what was causing the fever and rule out what wasn't; sepsis is what I remember them wanting to rule out. I remember they did a lumbar puncture — a spinal tap — and my husband, who as an internal medicine resident was not far removed from his own medical training, was more worried than I, knowing what it all meant and what kinds of things could go wrong. I remember he was brought to tears by the possibility of an air bubble in the IV line, because bubbles don't belong in the bloodstream. As a parent of a child in the hospital, he knew too much for his own good.
I remember when your six-day-old baby is in the Children's Hospital, even when he's full-term and born healthy, even when he's not in the NICU, you think he's going to die, and it's so scary. Because what if you have to go home without your baby? How do you live with an empty crib in a nursery you decorated yourself, with curtains and bumper pads and a bed skirt you sewed for him?
I remember we brought him back home again on my 32nd birthday, when he was eight days old. Was it only two days in the hospital? I remember it feeling much longer.
I remember two times I couldn't find my little boy. Once was when he was a toddler, and we were getting into the car right outside our house. Somehow I lost sight of him, the car being between us, and for whatever reason he didn't answer when I called his name. I remember the sick feeling of imagining him being lost.
The second time was on a camping trip with friends. We were in a campground with a network of trails, and he went bike-riding with his two younger friends, brothers Alex and Tom. They were maybe 10, 9, and 8. Rader wasn't interested in bike riding and didn't ever own a bike, so had borrowed one. Somewhere on the trails, he either lost track of or couldn't keep up with Tom and Alex, and they came back without him. The moms immediately went into a panic (me most of all, of course). Earlier we had seen a pickup truck driving around. Had he been abducted? Again, I remember the horrifying feeling of imagining having to go home without him.
What I don't remember is what happened next; it's all a fog. Did we get the campground to seal off the exits? Did the dads go out in search of him? All I know is he came back, and the panic subsided, and we were OK.
I remember another time, but there was no panic. We were visiting London with the same friends, three summers later. Matt was 15; Rader 13, Alex 12, and Tom 11. I don't remember specifically where we were going or returning from, but the kids and parents lost each other on the tube. I think the parents made it onto the train and the kids got left on the platform. But we had been successfully navigating the tube system for days, and we had even talked about what to do if we got separated. I think the plan was that whomever was on the train would get off at the next station and wait for the others to catch up. It worked perfectly, and the incident is barely a footnote in a trip full of great stories. I remember feeling they were old enough and sophisticated enough that we didn't need to worry.
This is a chronicle of the times I thought I could lose my child, my son. These are the stories of all the times, except the one when I actually did.
[Postscript: I’ve been reminded since I wrote this that we actually lost him one other time, at an air show in Anchorage, Alaska, after a family cruise.]