a heart black and blue (for mothers)
"There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blueWhen they hold 'em to the light, you can see right throughEvery dreamer falls asleep in their dancing shoesI may say I don't belong here, but I know I do" - Iron & Wine, "Thomas County Law"
Three years ago, I was sitting in the passenger seat of our car, driving up the highway after my first maternal-fetal medicine ultrasound with my son, Jackson. We drove back holding our hearts in our hands, beating mercilessly with the news, the medical lingo, the printout of three-dimensional photo capture. Jack was missing an eye, Jack's chin measured small, Jack had cleft lip and palate. We kept the silence that seemed the only language we could both speak.Somewhere, I imagined as we drove, there was a country of mothers in fields with beautiful baby bumps and smiles, with easy pregnancies, with children ushered into life with no worry or intubation or surgery or possible threat. "Somewhere, on the far side of other hills", I believed, there was a land I was supposed to reach, a place where motherhood looked the way I had always thought it would, where the aches were always sweet and the tears always tinged with laughter.But how to get there, holding this news, this ultrasound? How to win back that song and join the ones singing?--I began to mother in the NICU, I began to mother in the surgical pre-op, I began to mother with a beast pump and an alarm set for every two hours. I began to mother by untangling my son's wires and reattaching his pulse oximeter. And what of my own wires, those images of what it might have been, me perfectly coiffed and only slightly tired, nursing a baby in the dim hours of the morning? The NICU cut them, quick and to the core, and there I was in a nest of broken wires, old expectations, unfinished images. I still had those ultrasounds creased from living in the pocket of my shorts all summer. I still thought I could hear other mothers singing a song of something that had been taken from me.--There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. Three years later, I hear this line as I'm driving to Target, paused at a stoplight. There is quiet in my car, a rare thing, my son looking out the window and my daughter asleep in her carseat. I am only half listening to the song, but the line pricks at me, and as I pull the car into the road I find that I am crying.There was no other country, there is only this one where all mothers, however they became them, live with a heart black and blue with love, bruised with the work of giving and aching and worrying, the work of cherishing and holding up again and again their children to the light, to see the wonder.Our hearts, wherever they come from, NICU or birthing tub, adoption paperwork or emergency c-section, worn with loss or grief, with worry or hope, measuring doses of baby Tylenol or repositioning a tracheostomy, going to physical therapy or solving another math problem-this list that lives endlessly in us and around us,it has worn our hearts to the same patterns, widened them to the same infinite space, made them translucent when held up to the light.--Three years ago, driving up the highway in that poorly kept silence, I believed I would not belong here, in this country of motherhood. I believed that I had no way to reach or understand mothers whose stories were different. I thought I would be forever separated from them, walking hallways alone, signing consent forms and pumping behind a screen, memorizing the procedure to clean and change a trach tube and a g-button.There ain't a mother with a heart less than black and blue. We all belong, no matter how we began, no matter the shape of our aches or the number of our tears. We all belong, no matter the manner of birth or the length of time we've been at this -our hearts are the same color.Held up the light, we can see right through. We can see each other.Love,hilary