You Recall a Doctor Asking You to Sign a Waiver for Medicine That Could Make Your Child Deaf

And you’re on the critical floor. Next to them.

Having a NICU baby is something you have to live through to understand.

It marks itself on your soul like a raised swollen scar, no matter how much you conceal it with time and birthday candles. Because, even though almost anyone who’s never had a NICU baby will say, “Why are you writing this on her 15th birthday?”….. I think that’s exactly why.

It’s because candles are lit and cakes are sliced and most birthdays, we say most anything nice (and rhyming). But for the mothers who live through the feeling of not being able to hold your baby when your entire being is needing to like oxygen, or of suffering through fevers and pain while trying to pump breast milk in a separate sad room, and of feeling like watching parents around you weep as they lose their baby on the critical floor. And you’re on the critical floor. Next to them. All exposed. Just air and mourning, every morning.

And you feel survivors guilt by proxy for the baby you want to give your own life.

And you wonder if it’s silly that you want to be home, sick, with your spiked fever and your swollen everything - thinking sleepless nights are the new worst when they’d feel the gifted best.

And you recall a doctor asking you to sign a waiver for a life saving medicine that could make your child Deaf and you remember laughing and pointing to your hearing Aida and saying, “That would just make us more alike”… But then, at night, your body isn’t at home with your toddler who misses you, or at a hospital recovering from labor and intensive: it’s with your baby.

Plastic and plaster and glass and wires.

And you don’t know who to talk to because you feel silly that it scared every part of you into a shadow shaped like a Mom. And you feel silly because your baby is alive and the baby on bed 5 is no longer… and how dare you grieve the fear and fugue of the NICU. And you feel guilty when you eventually leave - a fragile, lemon-yellow infant in her carrier; a Faberge egg you didn’t know was as breakable as you already knew.

We were one of the lucky ones.

And life moves on and… you forget. She becomes a person and she slams doors (rarely ever) and she has playlists that differ from you and she’s seen things some kids should never have to see and she’s a “good egg” with a shell harder than she ever deserved.

And you say things like, “They’ll all regret not realizing you’re going to be THE coolest adult friend one day” when she’s overlooked by many; Never one for social climbing. And birthdays- all of them - are happy, especially when we know a young life we loved who didn’t get to live past this precious year.

It can’t be taken granted.

So even though a birthday is for candles and cheer… sometimes it’s also for being grateful that we ever made it here.

We are the lucky ones. Current tense.

THANK YOU for caring and thank you for your time!