Signs of Life

I've found myself thinking, these past few weeks, about those dark days a year and five months ago, just before and after Elijah was born. The memories come with greater frequency than I can remember them coming before, and they are both painful and welcome. Those days seem darker and harder to me now than they did at the time. I remember my first contractions, excitement and fear mingled, knowing nothing of what lay ahead. I remember the comfortable fog that was, for me, the aftermath of almost unbearable pain, my delight at seeing our perfect little son, so tiny, for the first time, my incomprehension as he grew duskier and no one responded to my questions. I remember when the surgeon, a cocky, confident little man, told us briskly that our son had a cleft palate, and it finally sank in that something was really wrong with my baby. These are things I have tried not to think about. Now I find myself furtively searching the internet in my spare moments, looking for things written by and about NICU survivors, like an addict looking for a fix.

A website for parents of preemies has a page where parents tell their stories, asking the reader to imagine being in their shoes. From one woman's "Imagine":

Imagine reading all of these "imagines" . . . . [knowing] you're finally getting better.

It's been so long since Elijah's birth, so long since our NICU stay, so long since his first surgery--too long ago to be reexamining it all again. But looking back, I realize that I was too shocked, too tired, too miserable, too one-foot-in-front-of-the-other to really examine it in the first place. Maybe I'm just now far enough away to really be able to take a good look at what happened, and at what it meant to me.

Along with the looking back comes the desire to talk about what I remember. But because I feel like a fool bringing it up now, after all these months of stoic (or perhaps not so stoic) silence, that desire is turning into an increasing itch to write. Tonight, Dan is with his Army unit. Elijah is asleep, his feeding pump whirring soothingly away, and I've finally waded through my email inbox. So I've chosen writing over sleep.

My mother-in-law and I are planning my sister-in-law's baby shower. It gives me a strange, lost feeling to realize that, if her pregnancy was on the same timeline as mine, tonight would have been the night she went into labor. She's due June 13th.