LJ Idol S11 Week 3: Everything Looks Like a Nail
Prompt: everything looks like a nail
Content Warning for premature babies and scary medical situations, nothing explicit
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There is someone I haven’t met yet who is 2 lbs 1 oz. He was born last week, 15 weeks early, and someday he’ll call me aunt.
This week everything I think of floats back to him. How is he doing? Is he growing the way he should? Is he safe? Will be be okay? Will be be blind or have cerebral palsy? Will he struggle with language and have developmental delays?
I’ll love him no matter the outcome, of course. That was never in question. And he has good, loving parents, too. This tiny person is my brother’s son. My younger, baby brother, who with his wife has wanted desperately to be a parent. They’ve tried hard, and had hard losses. And I still see the two of them as so, so young.
I struggled to write fiction this week. I started a story about leeches and the inadequacy of our healing, but that was just a story about this tiny person I haven’t met yet.
I tried a story about hammers and anvils, but that was just a story about being made and put forth into the world, which was just a story about this tiny person I haven’t met yet.
My dad wrote this tiny person I haven’t met yet a poem. It’s lovely and gentle and about being patient because the world will wait for him. Someday he’ll call my father his grandfather, because time marches onward and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
The suddenness and 3-month-early-ness by which I became an aunt is the same suddenness by which my mom is now a grandmother and my dad is a grandfather. In a heartbeat, our positions in this family have shifted. In a heartbeat, my generation in our family has changed from the children to the adults. I am no longer the eldest child. I am an aunt.
I’ve felt powerless this week, and yet supremely hopeful in ways that I know other members of my family don’t feel. I have that luxury. And by god, I will use it.
Let me tell you about the tiny person I haven’t met yet:
His skin is purple because he’s still bruised from his traumatic entry into this world. He likes to kick his legs, even though they are such tiny little things. He has a little mask to block his still-developing eyes from the light, and I’ve never seen his face in full because in addition he is on a ventilator because his lungs, like the rest of him, aren’t quite ready for the world. His brain is bleeding in both hemispheres, and no one really knows what this will mean for him. Every outcome is on the table, favorable and otherwise, and nothing is certain.
His skin is so delicate he bruises at a touch. He was allowed to be held by his mother for the first time yesterday, laid out on her chest and monitored and supported by a team of doctors and nurses to keep his head and neck safe and his IV lines from tangling. He is too fragile to be held like a normal newborn.
There is a lot of fear. A lot of unknown. Things could go perfectly fine, or they could not, and there is nothing I can do about it. There’s very little even his parents can do about it except hold him as often as they can and hope. Things are in the hands of fate, of chance, of luck and the skill and patience of care providers.
Someday I will meet this tiny person I haven’t met yet. He will call me aunt, and I will call him whatever he wishes to be because I will love him, however he is.