hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy

I can submit what happened, this all eclipsing trauma, to craft. I can make it obey. I can tamp it down inside narrative. I can create metaphors to make meaning out of no meaning. You, my husband, held our four-day-old son. There were cords and he seemed comatose. I had imagined his wide open, alert blue eyes finally drinking us in, like the other boys did at their births. I had imagined the magic hour, just delayed by four days. Yet Teddy lay on you like a slab of incoherent meat. He breathed with the help of CPAP but that was all.

I remember the slimy poop our first son did on my chest after birth, his infant hands reaching, the way he took my nipple greedily in the first half hour. "What a good nurser! He knows just what to do." The messy, warm, wet, heavy, new life against my chest. The flush and hot flash of birth. And now Teddy lay, not awake and not asleep. They said he was not unconscious.

The Nikon camera felt familiar and comforting in my hands from so many other births I've attended as a doula. I always get one of the first skin to skin. At the births I attended over the summer while pregnant with Teddy, I took pictures of the fathers, proud, content, satiated like plump ticks holding their newborns in armchair gliders. Each new father made me imagine you in October, with our 3rd son, the same.

I took some pictures of you holding Teddy that day. I tried to get a shot that didn't include the cords. A close up of the fingers on one hand where you couldn't see the IV. One of the foot that didn't have the pulse ox on it.

Then I thought, fuck it, and took a picture of the cords with no baby at all, just a picture of all the cords hanging down, sloppy beneath the boppy.

The next day, I held Teddy skin to skin. You took the picture. I look so young, so vulnerable, so hopeful. I remember his warmth. He was no longer so cold. But he still wasn't moving. One hand would flutter and tremble, then his whole body would tremble, a fragile movement. I worried it was seizure activity, but they said it was only morphine withdrawal.

"So he isn't sedated then? Why doesn't he wake up?" "He's been through a lot. We just have to wait and see. We'll get the MRI by Thursday." This was Monday. "It may seem urgent to you, as parents, to get the MRI, but it's not technically emergent. His MRI may get bumped by an emergent pediatric MRI. Whatever damage is there, it's already been done."

The damage, she said. The room spiraled. The damage has been done. How much of his brain was left? Was there anyone behind those closed eyes?

I held him skin to skin and felt my uterus contract involuntarily, a sudden warm gush of blood. I hadn't been bleeding after the birth. But now, skin to skin, my body woke up to being his mother. Without holding him, my body seemed to have processed the birth as if he had died. But he smelled like plastic. He smelled like hand sanitizer. He was against my chest, but he wasn't. He felt so far away and I cried, holding him for the first time. Teddy, I had to go home that day. I was discharged. Leaving you there alone, not knowing, is without words. There is no craft big enough to contain what it felt like when I left you, my son, without knowing what of you was left.