I signed the form.
“Do you want to do Kangaroo Care?” the nurse asked. Kangaroo Care is when you hold a shirtless preemie against your bare chest. The skin-on-skin contact calms both the parent and the child.
“Sure,” I said.
She wheeled in a hospital-issued recliner with cheap vinyl upholstery and drew the curtain around the alcove. I unbuttoned my shirt and sat down, maneuvering the recliner as close to the isolette as possible. She raised the roof of the isolette and flipped down the side, then carefully gathered up all the wires so that none of them would snag. She unswaddled the baby so his warm bare skin could press up against mine. I could see the smear of dried surgical glue holding the two-inch incision on his belly together. She handed him to me and I kicked back with him nestled in my chest hair. It was like holding my heart in my own hands. I wanted to cut open my chest and hide him in my blood, where nothing could touch him. I felt the same way I did back when I was in eighth grade and I was in love with this one girl who didn’t love me back. My heart ached the exact same way, though I don’t know why. I kissed his hairy little head and began to sing to him.
Baa, baa, Black Sheep, have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.
One for my master and one for my dame
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
Baa, baa, Black Sheep, have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.
The NICU didn’t allow such tender private moments to go on for very long. The families in the NICU were all packed together, and the alcove curtain offered only the illusion of having your own room. On the other side of the curtain was another parent, a mother tending to her infant. I could hear the other mother singing to her baby too: a low repetitive drone that I thought was lacking in creativity. I sang a little bit louder to drown her out, but then she sang louder, and now we were trying to upstage each other like we were the Supremes. Eventually, I relented and stopped singing, holding the baby close and pretending that we were the only people in the NICU, the world, the universe. Just us.
“I’m gonna get you out of here,” I whispered to him. “I’m gonna get you out of here and when I do, you will see everything. There’s so much more out there waiting for you. You have no fucking idea.”
I drove home that night and passed by a car fire on the side of the highway. The flames engulfed the entire vehicle, like something out of a cheap Mob film, and rose up to three times the car’s original height. I always tried to mentally rank the car accidents I passed by on the road, trying to remember if I’d ever seen a worse accident. I gave bonus points for the sight of a gurney. I had never seen an accident like that before. Ever.
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There is a list of benchmarks that a baby has to meet in order to be discharged from a NICU. It has to weigh a certain amount. It has to be able to breathe on its own. It needs to maintain a steady body temperature. It has to stop bradying for a full twenty-four to forty-eight hours. And it needs to be able to take food by mouth without emesis. The progress it makes toward hitting these benchmarks is not a straight upward trajectory. Preemies can make progress, and then regress, and then get back to where they were, and then regress even further back. Every time there’s a regression, you feel utterly demoralized, as if you can’t stand it any longer. Our son was eventually cleared to eat several times, only to throw everything back up and go back to relying exclusively on IV nutrients.