healing.

The minute Emma was born, I knew something was wrong. I’d swallowed a horse, fought its hellish bucking to the death, turned myself inside out, until I won. Until she slid breathlessly — literally — into the world. I listened for her bourning cry but it did not come, because she was not breathing.

I lie there, split apart at the seams and bleeding out, and watched the scene as if from above. I bore witness while the midwives pumped oxygen into someone else’s baby for eleven minutes before they called 9-1-1, before two ambulances delivered both of us to a nearby hospital. It was all for naught anyway — by the time we got there, she was breathing on her own as if nothing had ever happened.

When we left the hospital for home, Emma was perfect in every way but one: she would not nurse. She could not suck. I knew the powers-that-be wanted to remedy the situation with a feeding tube, to rapidly ameliorate the problem and neatly close out our file, but she was our second child and so I had faith in my body, and in my baby. Somehow I held patience as she lost weight.

I used a man-made contraption to artificially coax milk from my body at regular intervals. I used a plastic medicine syringe to teach my baby what was natural. I pressed it flush against my pinky finger, slipped them together into her mouth, rewarded each hesitant suckle with a pump of my hard-won milk. We fed her every hour, on the hour. We did not sleep. Finally one day, miraculously — two and a half weeks later — she latched on to my breast. In that moment, exhausted in my living room, I cried with an abandon I’d never known before. I cried like a newborn baby, in the way Emma never had.

It’s no secret I’ve had a bad week. I could list the specifics here but I won’t, because they don’t matter. What matters is I thought I was simply depressed (as those with depression are wont to do) but when I finally let myself give in to my loved ones, when I let them pry my fingers one at a time from the death grip on my sorrows, I learned my pain was legitimate. I realized that anyone, depressed or not, would have had a hard time under the circumstances of this week.

Last night was incredibly healing. After days of torment I got right with the one who matters the most. It was not a pretty process, and it was not without losses — but it had to be done. It hurt, but I know we are both better for it. The hardest thing to do was the right thing all along.

After, driving home spent into an eraser-pink-streaked sky, I was struck by the memory of Emma’s tongue. In those weeks of teaching her to suck on my pinky finger, I kept my nail clipped as closely as I could - but despite my diligence, I carved a hole in the top of her brand new baby tongue. It’s still there today, three years later; a gouge, a perfect divot in her otherwise perfect mouth. Last night as I drove, it struck me that even the good things, the things we do with the best of intentions — even the things that will save us in the end — leave permanent scars.