Permanent Scars

Originally posted on Okay, Fine, Dammit

The minute Emma was born, I knew something was wrong. I’d swallowed a horse, fought its hellish bucking to the death, turned myself inside out, until I won. Until she slid breathlessly — literally — into the world. I listened for her bourning cry but it did not come, because she was not breathing.

I lie there, split apart at the seams and bleeding out, and watched the scene as if from above. I bore witness while the midwives pumped oxygen into someone else’s baby for eleven minutes before they called 9-1-1, before two ambulances delivered both of us to a nearby hospital. It was all for naught anyway — by the time we got there, she was breathing on her own as if nothing had ever happened.

When we left the hospital for home, Emma was perfect in every way but one: she would not nurse. She could not suck. I knew the powers-that-be wanted to remedy the situation with a feeding tube, to rapidly ameliorate the problem and neatly close out our file, but she was our second child and so I had faith in my body, and in my baby. Somehow I held patience as she lost weight.