by Karen Paul
As the giant needle extracts the fluid for your amniocentesis, the test you take 16 weeks into your pregnancy to assure you that everything is going to be ok, that your baby is healthy and you are the container of everything he needs, you trust that the doctor will not need to plunge the needle a second time into the taut skin now protecting your swelling uterus. You are wrong.
When you go home and start leaking the fluid protecting your baby’s world and your doctor tells you to get into bed, you don’t worry much.
When you learn that the baby’s lungs may not fully develop because of that second needle you pride yourself on staying prone and when you are allowed to get up and take yourself to get your fluid levels checked, you think of your baby, breathless in his still, watery world.
When the fluid has completely refilled at 27 weeks and you can resume your life and you stand and your water breaks and your doctor tells you to rush to the hospital where she has you prone for the next eight weeks and you can’t sit up to eat or pee or hug your two-year-old when he comes to visit, you wonder if you have the power to save a life.
When you start to bleed at 34 weeks but your baby is big and his heartbeat is strong and the doctor preps you for delivery and he is out, he is here, he is alive, and you are still sure that he will be coming home with you, you prepare your breasts for the pain of nursing a new life into the world.
When he can’t breathe and is placed on a machine replacing his lungs and heart, you start to imagine the possibility that you won’t be leaving the hospital with blue balloons festooned to your wheelchair.
When he develops a bleed on his brain and you must choose between a life so compromised that you must decide if it is worth living or life for your little family of three and with sobs, you decide you must choose life for the three of you, and you hold your son for the first time off the machines with his inoperable lungs and feel the warmth leave his body with a final hiccup, you know that you have saved three lives but you have lost more than you will ever know.
When you stand at the hole in the ground in the cemetery where his casket lies and you listen to the mourning prayer you understand for the first time what it means to be human and imperfect.
When you step down the seven steps into the ritual bath, the mikvah, to mourn and cleanse, and you say his name – Ari – out loud and you know that 25 years later he still is a part of you, his molecules and yours forever co- mingled, a chimera, you understand that his five days of life are your lodestar.
Karen Paul, a writer and non-profit consultant, has had essays, short stories and poems published in numerous outlets, including The New York Times Modern Love column, Washington Post, Lilith, Boston Globe, Open Secrets substack, Times of Israel, Modern Loss, Motherwell, Pangyrus, and San Antonio Review and the two volume anthology, When We Turned Within. She graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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