What They All Want To Know

Last week on the way out of the studio after mommy & baby yoga, one of the other mothers stopped to talk to me about MAS. (At the beginning of class I always give the preemie version of an elevator pitch: “He’s five months but he was born 12 weeks prematurely so he looks and acts like a 2 month old.”)

“So what happened—why he did come so early?” she asked after commenting on MAS’s cuteness. (Which is inordinate.)

She herself had had high blood pressure when pregnant with her son. Almost induced at 37 weeks, but through meditation had been able to keep it under control until his due date.

She looked at me expectantly.

Why had this calamity befallen us? Why oh why? Ah, there were so many reasons to choose from. Which to offer first?

I was dehydrated.

I had a urinary tract infection.

I had a yeast infection.

I got pregnant again too quickly after the miscarriage.

That D&C they did afterwards to make sure “everything got expelled”—it fucked me up some how.

I had a progesterone imbalance.

I was too stressed out. In general.

I jinxed things by being afraid I wouldn’t be a very good mother.

Paint fumes! We’d painted his room not two days earlier. Ebronis and his Mom had done the actual work but I was in the living room. I walked in to check on them. I even helped for a minute, to show how I wanted it done. Why had I done that?

Somehow, without even knowing it, I’d plucked an apple from a witch’s garden.

But instead I mumbled, “They don’t know why it happened,” and strangely: felt ashamed.

I was telling her a truth so terrible it should be sugarcoated. That these things happen for no reason at all. The bad things, the good things. Random.

And the moral? That all you can do is be grateful for the baby that makes it, for the life that survives. Do your best to forget the reasons why.