I Had to Make Myself So Big

It’s been five months and two days since MAS was born and I’m just now realizing: He made it. My god. He made it.

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.

Wanna Know More About Us?

Our story begins with an ending.

I was in the process of recovering from a particularly traumatic miscarriage--11.5 weeks! lots of blood! everywhere!--when my husband Ebronis and I planned trip to the Left Coast. Our best friend and my sister both live in the Bay Area and so to keep our minds off our grief we scheduled a two week getaway around the Memorial Day holiday.

We spent a relaxing four days with said best friend & his now fiancé at Mar Vista Cottages in a little town called Anchor Bay, smack dab between Gualala and Mendocino along the Northern California coast, followed by a couple of days in Davis with my sister and her girlfriend. Much to our surprise, a few days after returning to Brooklyn in the beginning of June we discovered we were pregnant with MAS. A blessing? Yes. A surprise? You betcha. (After all, it took us over a year to conceive the first time and here it had only been two wrenching months since the miscarriage.)

We were grateful. And scared. So we spent the remainder of the summer waiting anxiously for the first trimester to pass without a hitch. Which it did. The second trimester passed without a hitch as well.

But the third trimester?

Ah, that’s another story entirely. At 27 weeks I went into preterm labor without warning and after 5 days of hospital bedrest delivered MAS via emergency c-section. He weighed 2 lbs 5 oz.

The miscarriage and premature birth, our doctors told us, were not related. We had bad luck is all.

After 66 frightening days in the NICU we finally brought MAS home to our Brooklyn Heights apartment. Our three cats, who all outweighed him by about 9 lbs, begrudgingly let him stay. For now.