I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.
--Wendell Berry
When we first arrived at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit or NICU (“nick-you”), I did what every good girl who is drop kicked into an alternate reality is taught to do: I smiled, observed the customs, learned the language, kept my voice low when asking for directions, and even made friends with the natives, but in truth, I was ceaselessly scanning the strange and distant galaxy for the nearest exit so that I could run like hell when given the first opportunity.
I loathed everything about the place. I hated the pre-entry, compulsory three-minute-hot-water-hand-washing that caused my fingers to crack and bleed and never failed to remind me that I was a polluted outsider; a germ-ridden giant amongst rows and rows of angelic, immuno-compromised Lilliputians. I hated the way the nurses called everybody with leaky breasts, “Mom”, and THEN when the alarms on our babies’ monitors went off, would show off their name-memorizing abilities by bandying about words that were not part of our limited lexicon.
“No need to worry, Mom, just a little bradycardia”.
“Oh, thank goodness, Nurse, I thought it might be something serious like his heart stopped beating.”
I hated the Chinese chicken salad less than I hated anything else in the cafeteria, but I hated it all the same. Especially the limp little canned orange slices masquerading as mandarin fruit. God, I hated those. I hated that none of the doctors ever talked to us unless we backed them into a corner and I hated that the old ones, the only ones who really knew anything, had breath that smelled like rotting wood. I hated how much blood they took from the Lilliputians, day after day after day. I hated that everywhere you turned you saw the name “Kimberly Clark”. Who the hell was this Kimberly Clark and why did she feel it necessary to monopolize the entire planet’s rations of paper towels, rubber gloves, and disinfectants? I hated the snow that collected around the hospital’s windows, and then had the audacity to STAY there. (Melt, damn it! Don’t just sit there, do something!). I hated that my husband could peacefully doze by Quinn’s incubator, like that irritating little itsy bitsy spider, so sure that the song would end with sun coming out to dry up all the rain. I even hated the sweet little minister, in her sweet little starched collar, who offered sweet little prayers and platitudes for us. And truth be told, if Buddha himself had been there serenading my baby boy to sleep, I’d have hated him, too.
I had enough good sense to know that I was expected to keep my odium to myself, but my nose was constantly twitching in the wind, searching for the faintest scent of fury amongst the other mothers, hoping to find an ally. But alas, all I saw around me were the complacent faces of mothers and fathers who had long ago adapted to this new way of life. I suspected some of them had acclimated unwillingly, but many of them seemed to embrace this new terrain with such ease and grace that I didn’t know whether to pity them or revere them. Were they saintly or insane? After getting to know Belinda, the mother of the preemie who was situated directly across from Quinn, I was leaning toward the latter.
Belinda had been holding vigil for her daughter, Camille, for three months and in that time had erected the most elaborate pink shrine to ever grace an incubator and was well on her way to finishing a Pulitzer prize worthy scrapbook detailing every precious, if not perilous moment on planet NICU. She had found a way to not only “get through” those first few worrying months of her child’s life, but to make the most of them. To celebrate them. I could respect that. Even admire it. Okay, I envied it. I was NEVER going to have the presence of mind to put together a scrapbook for Quinn, now or ever, and I certainly wasn't capable of creating happy memories worth photographing in this miserable place, so clearly I would be voted off the Good-Mommy-Island way before Belinda. But as jealous as I was of her creativity and fortitude, I also suspected she might be mainlining big vials of denial and developing quite a nasty addiction to the stuff.
Belinda had confided in me that the NICU had accidentally given Camille another mother’s breast milk, and while back in the days of wet-nurses, you might have been grateful for the communal milk sharing program, in the days of AIDS and Ebola, this was tantamount to a major disaster. Besides having to undergo a spinal tap and other not-so-fun-but horribly-painful tests, Camille’s little four pound self was subjected to a two week internal cleansing; every cell in her body was scrubbed raw with a hellish cocktail of antibiotics and antivirals in an effort to prevent any one of the hundreds of diseases she may have acquired from oops, ANOTHER MOTHER’S BREASTMILK. But rather than going stark raving mad as any sane person would do, Belinda, my last good hope for comradeship, switched to formula feedings and then found the gosh-darned silver lining tucked beneath that monstrous black cloud:
“Yeah, but they pay a lot of attention to us now, so that’s good”.
Somehow it hadn’t occurred to Belinda that her daughter was in an INTENSIVE CARE unit, and that “a lot of attention” should be standard issue. Something about this place brought out the dooper in this super-Mom, or maybe she’d just had a little too much of the purple kool-aid, either way, she was going to be of no use to me and my determined efforts to wallow in RE-ality. So, while Belinda was busy scouring ebay for antique French prams for Camille’s grand exit, I was searching high and low for someone who still had some fight left in them.
And then on the fourth day of our all-inclusive stay at the NICU, a new preemie arrived on the scene. The preemiest of all preemies. Now, you should know that there is a certain decorum expected of NICU parents and visitors, one that doesn’t allow for gawking at babies, especially babies who don’t belong to you, but upon passing by this tiniest of creatures, so fresh from the womb, not yet dressed, (except in a makeshift diaper), not yet named, and not yet even resigned to her new status as a breathing being, I couldn’t help but pause for a moment longer than is considered appropriate. Okay, truth is, I stopped dead in my tracks and LINGERED … and depending on who’s telling the story, maybe I let out an audible gasp …or two … but you have to understand, although this 26-week-old neonate weighed less than most of my grandfather’s garden tomatoes and although her miniature bones were still visible through her translucent, wrinkled skin and although she had more tubes and hoses coming out of her than she had limbs and orifices, and although her flailing, squirming, mad-as-hell contortionist self barely looked human under the bright lights of her incubator, I didn’t stop to gawk at her strangeness, I paused to gaze at her beauty. Her sheer will. She seemed to me to be the only other person in the world who was as pissed off as I was. At last, I’d found a kindred spirit. Someone I could call friend. But for reasons that will become clear later, we’ll call her Nadzia from here on out.
For the first three days of her incubated life, Nadzia had no visitors. Unless her parents were bats and only able to visit in the dead of night when no one else could see them, they never even stopped by to take a peek at their beautiful baby girl. Fortunately, the nurses seemed to be paying her a lot of attention, doting on her as they changed her diapers and adjusted her breathing tube, but there was also a lot of whispering happening around her isolette, and even though I am an inveterate eavesdropper, I couldn’t hear enough to understand the content of what was being said, only the tone, and the tone was somber.
I began to make up horrible scenarios in my head, ones that involved whole families being wiped out in tragic car accidents, and long, terrible stints in foster homes for Nadzia. I was beside myself with worry for my new friend’s future, so on that third day of Nadzia’s solitary confinement, I asked my husband, in earnest, if my wild imaginings were indeed true and Nadzia had no family left, if he would be up for adopting her, seeing her through the next few months of NICU life and then bringing her home with us to raise as Quinn’s sister. Rather than looking at me as if I’d just been slipped a mickey, my eternally wise and gracious husband looked at me with tender, knowing eyes and said, “we can talk about it”.
Oh, how I loved my itsy bitsy husband, always willing to give that waterspout one more climb! Finally, the reason for this stopover in nowhere land made sense to me! It wasn’t my “advanced maternal age” or my defective genetic code, or even that second epidural that had landed us here, it was Nadzia! It was divinely ordered, we had to make this pilgrimage and suffer its hardships in order to find her … the NICU suddenly seemed more holy-land than woe-is-me land, and for the first time since my arrival, hope prevailed.
And yes, I know what all of the astute, psychologically sophisticated folks are thinking ... and they’re absolutely right. I was no doubt projecting my worry for my son onto the nearest person who seemed to have it even worse than Quinn. I definitely wasn’t equipped to really accept the fact that my newborn son might die in this strange place -- and maybe I was looking for a worthy distraction, and what better distraction than a one-pound orphan with nothing but lambswool beneath her to keep her warm? But despite that truth, there was another truth that was equally as real to me, and it goes something like this: On his way to a very important meeting, out of the corner of his eye, God caught a glimpse of me fumbling my way around the NICU and when he saw, I mean really witnessed how inept and ill-prepared I was for Life, he didn't chastise me, or coddle me, he simply reached his hand down from the heavens, pulled my shrunken, underdeveloped heart out of my chest, resuscitated it with his own breath, took off its training wheels, gave it a good push and then told it to peddle beyond its reaches! (He may have even stood on the sidelines for a bit, cheering “Go Go Go!” Or “You can do it, I know you can!” I don’t know for certain because I was too busy catching his tail wind.)
I had my marching orders. If I were ever going to love without bounds, then I had to love without bounds. It was as simple as that. And it didn’t mean only loving Quinn without bounds, because that was in and of itself a bound. No, I had to LOVE in a Thirteenth-Century-Sufi-Mystic-Poet-Prescribed kind of way: I had to LOVE, as Rumi says, until I’d gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. I had to LOVE until the Universe and the light of the stars came through me. I had to LOVE until I was the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival! And whether you attribute that inclination to the psyche or the soul, it matters not, because the fact is, the one-pound orphan with nothing but lambswool beneath her to keep her warm was the spark that made me feel infinitely … capable.
It was time to dust off the bootstraps and get to work. I would talk to the nurses, tell them my plan. I would call a lawyer, see what we needed to do to get the adoption papers rolling. In the meantime, I’d ask if we could move Nadzia’s incubator next to Quinn’s so that we could keep an eye on both of them at the same time. I would fill her desolate isolette with the softest, sweetest pink blankies and little stuffed lambs and pictures of her big brother … even Camille would sit up take notice of Nadzia’s new digs. I’d get on ebay, see if the French ever made double prams, surely they did, I’d seen some in old movies … cost was no object … I’d put it on a credit card! And in time, we would make the grandest exit of all from this holy land, bidding adieu to all of the fresh-breath doctors and attentive nurses, maybe even asking the kitchen to whip up a Chinese Chicken Salad to-go …oui, oui, one more for the road, s'il vous plait!
But then, because there’s always a “but then” in stories where people peddle harder downhill than uphill, on the fourth day of Nadzia’s life, a woman showed up, freshly hosed down and dressed in yellow scrubs, eager to hold my soon to be adopted daughter. I should have been relieved, even happy for Nadzia, but that would mean I was a more evolved person than I was, because mostly all I felt was indignant. Who did this woman think she was? Waltzing into Nadzia’s life, three days late and a dollar short? What exactly had she been doing for the past three days that had prevented her from visiting her (my) daughter? Was she really fit to be this child’s mother? Hoping she had a darned good excuse, though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what it would be, I turned on my supersonic hearing and inched my chair closer to the women hovering over Nadzia’s incubator. At first all I picked up on was a fuzzy lesson on how to hold Nadzia without disrupting the various tubes and wires she was connected to, but then I overheard the nurse telling the woman that no one from Nadzia’s family had been in to visit and that she would be the first person to really hold this baby. Then she thanked her for volunteering. (Volunteering? This woman was a baby-holding volunteer? I could have volunteered! Why hadn’t they told me? Why had they let Nadzia lie there, so alone, if all they needed was a volunteer!?) And then, as the nurse handed Nadzia to the volunteer, she said something in hushed tones, something that was inaudible to me, something that brought the woman to tears as she gracefully scooped up the tiny stranger and held her to her heart.
And in so many ways, I wish I could say the story ended there.
But, as the days marched on, one by one, Nadzia’s extended family began to trickle in. Stuffed animals began appearing in the once barren isolette. Knitted blankets replaced the hospital’s blue and pink striped covers. And pictures of pimply-faced teenagers, who had yet to make a live appearance, were taped to the surrounding walls of Nadzia’s incubator. The maternal grandmother was the first to arrive on the scene: a small, shy, blonde woman whose English was so poor that she required a Polish translator for her initial visit. Unfortunately, she was my best hope. While her English was limited, her heart seemed to be fully in tact. I was fairly certain Nadzia could make a life with this woman. She might end up in ESL classes, but I could live with that. The paternal grandmother on the other hand, well, let’s just say, in my not-so-humble opinion, she had her shortcomings, and leave it at that.
The problem with being “a crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival”, is that you have to sit there, shining down on EVERYONE passing through, equally illuminating the pitiful faces along with the beautiful. The cowardly and the brave. The asleep and the awakened. You don’t get to have your favorites. And you don’t get to hold grudges against 72-hour no-show-and-no-hold-your-baby families . You have to know that not everyone who abandons their child is lying dead on the side of the road and you have to keep on shining anyway. You have to throw away your dimmer switch. There is no selective lighting when you’re the moon. You have to know that foolish teenagers do foolish things, foolishly believing that their actions don’t have consequences. Real-live-one-pound-three-ounce consequences with fingernails, eyelashes and souls. You have to stay as still as a moon can stay as the bereft teenaged mother enters, with her narrow, immature hips and tiny gold stars embroidered on the hem of her jeans, and when she gazes at you from a distance, you have to pretend that you are following her, because she still believes you are. You have to have mercy on this crazy world, always trying to put her best foot forward, but never failing to show up to the party with mismatched clothes, smeared lipstick and toilet paper stuck to her shoe, and not just because you're merciful, but because that foolish "she" is YOU. All distinction between "us" and "them" is lost when you're a moon. Which is why it ain't easy. Which is why I recommend signing a short-term, renewable contract.
As fate would have it Quinn and Camille would receive their NICU pink-slips on the same day. Camille had logged 101 days on planet nick-you and Quinn had logged 11. They had both logged lifetimes. Literally. Belinda and Camille would leave first, which seemed appropriate somehow, since they were and had always been our pathmakers on this journey. Belinda would show me pictures of the splendid nursery awaiting Camille, and for a moment, I would wish that I could start all over again and be Belinda’s daughter. Oh, what a life she had laid out for her! If Belinda had anything to say about it, Camille would never want for warmth or succor or love. I would shed a few tears and think that the world was showing off now, revealing just how beautiful she could be with just the right lighting. I would snap a few shots for Belinda as she exited with Camille, photos that would surely complete the coveted scrapbook. And as a parting gift she would hand me a brand new disposable camera ... and so I would bundle up my son in his finest duds, a cream colored knitted onesie that I had hoped to bring him home in all those eleven years (days?) ago ... and I would comb his duckfeather hair ... and I would finally take a picture of Quinn at the NICU. There would be no denying that it had happened. I would say good-bye, one by one to each of the nurses, all of whom I had come to love and deeply respect. I would think that if I had another life, I would want to become a neo-natal nurse. And then I would look up and see the sweet little minister pulling a privacy curtain around Nadzia’s incubator as her Polish grandmother and a solemn Priest took their place beside her.
I won’t lie … I would panic. I wouldn’t understand what the Priest was saying, or why he was talking about “provisions for the journey” and “the shadow of death” when just moments ago I had seen Nadzia’s monitors blinking away. I would wish that I were Catholic so that I could know what it all meant. And I would find a way to slowly pack up the last of Quinn’s belongings so that I could stay with Nadzia for just awhile longer.
When the curtains were pulled open and the Priest bid farewell to Nadzia’s weeping grandmother, a nurse would sit her down and try to comfort her. The grandmother, who couldn’t have been more than forty, and in her newness to this country, seemed a child herself, would begin asking questions in broken English, questions to which, no matter what the language, she could not find a way to wrap her mind around the answers.
Yes, the baby would die.
When, nobody knew.
She had a condition.
No, there was no chance for her.
There were papers to sign.
There would come a time when there would be nothing more the NICU could do.
And then she would need to take her granddaughter home to die.
“Oh, no, I don’t want, I don’t want …”
“But, it will be best for her, to die peacefully, at home”.
“No, no, I no take home, we leave her here, I cannot do, I cannot do.”
And I would whisper to myself, “yes, yes you can” and I would pick up my son and I would make my way to the nearest exit. I wouldn’t need to stick around to know how Nadzia’s story ends, because it ends the way all of our stories end. I would only pause long enough to gaze once more at her beauty, and I would think: We are ever so briefly here ... please, friends, I beg of you ... let the light of the moon and the stars shine through you.
