At 28 weeks I was still getting used to being pregnant. It was just starting to feel real. Like there might be a real person living with us one day soon. A baby! How fun! And then all of a sudden he was there and he was so small and so tiny. Not like a baby at all but a fetus. He was just this little spark of a person I had to breathe into being. Finish off what my body had left undone.
And so I visited him every day. Sat beside his isolette, whispering into the portals about the life we’d lead when he came home. Held his bird-like self against my chest—wires and tubes snaking from him and alarms ringing out every few minutes. Hoping my beating heart would teach his the right rhythm.
I was strong. Strong enough for him, for me, for my husband. I was Atlas, hunkered down beneath the globe. There was nothing I couldn’t bear.
I didn't even cry. No that's not right. I cried once: when he was 7 weeks old, when I found out he had NEC.
But after the birth? When he dropped to a frightening 2 pounds?
MAS under the bilirubin lights five days after birth.
Not once.
I had to puff myself up, you see, make myself so big the predator wouldn’t see him. He’d be so small there tucked against my bulk it’d miss him altogether.
Death would overlook him. He’d be passed over.
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