You heard what happened there? he asked, his eyes probing mine for a flicker of registration.
I scanned his face. We told ourselves that it was our duty to know what happened in the world.
No. And don’t tell me. I had always known that others saw my boundaries as window dressings to be gathered up and swept aside. As a child, teachers moved me around the class on the gamble that I would cool a particular quadrant of the seating chart. I always knew I had been given a job. I also knew that to fail to quell the chaos would be to betray my identity. The teachers assumed that my body would lull the other students into learning. They were mistaken. Thermodynamics did not bend for them, and I absorbed the frenzied heat around me. I hid all signs of my own increasing temperature, even as erasers flew and desks toppled.
One day my seatmate stabbed me in the thigh with his pencil. The attack felt routine. Devoid of emotion or malice. Devoid of intention, even. At home, I pointed out the pencil tip lodged in the top layers of my skin. Aren’t pencils made of lead? I asked, my tone rising. My mom grazed the pad of her index finger over my skin, frowning at the floor beyond my leg. I suspected she was thinking less about the lead and more about the reality of my classroom existence. Our teacher had threatened the administration with stress leave earlier in the year. Those kids are so rangy, my mom had said at the time. It’s all this sugar here in Austria.
It was spring and I had my orange denim shorts on. Every April I tried to coax summer out by dressing for it. The brittle single pane windows of our living room were propped open and the sound of streetcar bells drifted up on the cold air. Mine was the room at the far end of our apartment, the entirety of which was furnished with pre-war items. The cramped room contained a massive armoire, and on those brisk spring mornings I would creak open its doors and pull out the summer clothes that I wanted to wear. Kneeling beside me, my mom would consider them for longer than I felt necessary. I knew she was trying to reconcile my age and intelligence with this recurring misstep; but I wanted what I wanted. Eventually, she’d carefully offer the same weather lesson from prior springs: You know honey, just because it’s sunny out, doesn’t mean it’s actually that warm. I would hear her elongate the word ‘warm’ as I stared at the brilliant sky through the window, wondering whether to explain to her that if I made the decision to wear my hot weather dress, the day’s temperature would rise up to meet me.
Well, you’re not going to die of lead poisoning, I don’t think, she eventually said, pulling the sentence in slowly, from faraway. I continued to not die of lots of things over the years. Eventually a therapist said to me, You handle your side of the street, they handle theirs.
But what if they come to my side? I asked.
That’s when you put up a boundary.
I pictured the schoolyard game Red Rover. The only time I’d played I’d had the wind knocked out of me.
And if they get upset?
You cannot control other people by taking all their bad feelings away for them. Even if those bad feelings are about you. She spoke in declarative statements, and I spoke in questions and complaints. While I believed her prescriptions, I simply couldn’t visualize shuttering myself the way she suggested.
*
The hospital where my son spent his first two weeks of life had terrazzo floors, cleaned daily by an older blonde woman who noted my insistence on moving the room’s garbage bin to the other side of the bed. Each morning she reminded me: It goes here. By the door. The neutrality in her tone never faltered, and it occurred to me that she had relationships with other mothers, in other rooms, reaching back months. She was pacing herself with me.
I surprised myself by saying nothing in response. I stood motionless, staring at the bin as it slid, tiny bits of debris grating under it. I was accustomed to choosing which rules applied to me, but I wasn’t accustomed to making my defiance plain.
Her visits ended with a flick of the wrist to seal the yellow garbage bag. See you later, she smiled, backing out of the room and releasing the door’s puff of air. Thank you, I cooed from the other side of my son’s bed. We both knew I would move the bin as soon as she left.
But had I promised her any particular configuration? Of the room? Of myself? Besides, who was to say whether my previous body still existed. I could sense that I had grown into the room, limbs wrapping around the leather banquette that I slept on, fingers slipping into the stale beige drawers holding my son’s newborn onesies, sweat and breast milk drying into the heat of the room.
And what’s more, had I not sat holding my son, listening to a semi-circle of doctors relay a diagnosis? Had I not sat, teetering on fresh stitches, visualizing my son’s ureters being cut and re-sewn onto the inside of his body? Had I not sat, my stomach punching its own emptiness, asking “Will my son’s kidneys last his entire lifetime?” Had I not sat, blinking at the floor, reckoning with the answer?
Had the blonde woman sat? Had she sat in this room? Had she bled, sweat, and milked onto these terrazzo floors? I knew nothing of her life, but I knew enough about mine to know that I was not going to lob my son’s diapers over the web of wires dangling between the IV stand and his body. During the day, the wires felt clean - secular, even. The nurses gathered them up, their manicured nails clicking on the clear silicone as they arranged them on the metal guardrail with some slack, to not pull on his veins. Sometimes the wires refused to cooperate, and the nurses whisper-sang Come on, as we stood together, heads cocked, waiting for them to unfurl into their resting position.
In the middle of the night, the wires taunted me.
Imagine walking freely with your baby!
Imagine moving him from breast to breast, untethered!
Imagine lying down in a bed with him!
Imagine tripping on the wires, yanking the needle, and tearing his vein.
Imagine tripping on the wires, dropping him onto the floor. The terrazzo floor.
Before he was born, the head of nephrology asked us on a Zoom call if we wanted to know. We said we did. He told us that some babies with this condition never leave the hospital - they stay, living on dialysis. He told us that some babies with this condition never leave the hospital - they stay, dying.
For the first 24 hours after his birth, my son's creatinine levels were mine - maternal creatinine. But once his kidneys were required to function on their own, they struggled. His creatinine climbed each successive day of his life. His kidneys needed to be flushed, meaning his body’s liquid input had to be greater than the output - a positive fluid balance. The doctors were banking on a turnaround, and the job of making the liquid to fuel the turnaround was mine. If I failed to feed him a larger volume of breast milk than the volume of urine emptied into his diapers, my job would be taken away.
I had to weigh him before and after nursing, to determine the exact intake of breast milk in each feeding. I also had to weigh his diapers to measure his output. I recorded these numbers on a whiteboard hanging over his bed. The nurses came to check my work. If the last entry was not sufficiently recent, they asked when I intended to feed him.
He hasn’t woken up yet, I mumbled from my banquette, milk dripping out of my shirt and onto the floor. Somehow, I could instantly answer when questioned in the night. Wake him, the nurse instructed. That afternoon we had chatted about her commute, her olive coloured scrubs, and her vacation to Spain with her boyfriend. She was young and laughed easily. Now, at 3 am, her words meted out disappointment. Did I not know my assignment?
I had to bring my baby and his wires with me to the scale. The wires were attached to his IV stand, which was plugged into the wall. I peeled my skin off the leather cushions, convinced the noise would wake him. It never did, and my arms found more lift than intended when I picked him up off his bassinet. The idea of him was heavier than his actual body.
The lactation consultants had taught me the football hold, and I laid him in the crook of my left arm and unplugged the IV stand from the wall. Immediately, a low-battery alarm began to wail: a nurse came running, then darted away for an extension cord, then ran back to hook the IV stand back up. I put my baby down and rhythmically looped the long orange extension cord between my elbow and thumb, until I had a wreath to wear over my right shoulder. I scooped my baby back up into my left arm, and dragged the IV stand with me to his scale. Holding him secure onto the scale with my wreathed arm, I scribbled the number on the scale on a stray food court receipt. With him in my arms again, I hooked my free fingers around the IV stand, and shuffled us over to the banquette, to unswaddle him and start breastfeeding.
After the feed, I had to weigh him in the exact clothing and blankets that he had been weighed pre-feed. I reversed the process. Needing more milk, I had to pump after feeding. I estimated that if I pumped right away, I could sleep for 45 minutes. The breast pump sterilization center was on the hospital’s third floor. Only one parent at a time was permitted inside; there was always a line, even at 4 am.
I shuffled to my son’s door, swung back to give it space to open up wide, and stepped out into the humming lights of the hall. When your mom is already dead, you can hear her say anything. As I walked to the elevator bay holding my bin of pump parts, she said, You know honey, just because it’s an option, doesn’t mean you have to do it. I wondered whether to explain to her that if I made the decision, my baby’s creatinine would stop, turn, and come back down to meet me.
Beautiful. ❤️