marble

Teddy in the pine needles, his hands grasping, bringing the needles to his mouth and he rears back, as a needle goes in his eye--and were the other kids like this at five months? I miss not worrying about their development. But I still have the carefree attitude to enjoy with Sheamus and Nat. Nat writes his name at four. Everything is on track or ahead. Same with 6-year-old Sheamus. I can be grateful for the easy parenting of the older two as I worry about Teddy's soft fingernails, and is that a sign of his severe anemia from birth?

At midnight, my mind is going, my heart is palpitating. Teddy, images of him dying, his little hands, I imagine them rotting and soil over his blue eyes. Intrusive thoughts intrude. I spend the evening on Google and Facebook reading about HIE and I shouldn't. And I read that 40-60% of kids with HIE die before their 2nd birthday. Of what?! I immediately want to know, and if Teddy is at risk. (Later, I learn that this statistic is grossly misleading. There's a special place for people who mislead parents of kids with brain damage.) I want to know everything about our future and for now he's sleeping sweetly in his crib. It's the longest stretch he's had in weeks, and so I want to wake him up, even though I've been longing to put him down. An attempt at mindful breathing, but mostly at midnight, I just frantically research things that could happen to Teddy and remember the meconium at Sheamus's birth and research for some godawful reason, meconium aspiration syndrome. I imagine Sheamus ravaged by O2 deprivation like Teddy was, and this image, of Sheamus's devastated brain, makes what happened to Teddy's brain even sadder. He had a brain like Shea's and now he doesn't. I hadn't come to love his brain yet like I love Sheamus's, but I will never know what Teddy's brain would have been like without the cellular death, the ischemic damage, the event, the injury.

The fucking sadness of it hits me all over again. I just want someone to witness it, to witness the devastation. I want someone to wail with me, to grieve, to hold the sadness in the palm of their hand for a moment, like a dark, hot marble. I want to see someone else hold it for a moment, to be weighted down with it, to see the marble burn a hole in their palm, for them to cry out, so I can get some distance from this pain, from this sadness. Then they can give the marble back and maybe a little of its heat will have been rubbed away and left on someone else's palm.