Raising Blaze (3 page)

“He’s…not…going…to…die,” she said again, louder this time, as if speaking to someone with a hearing problem. It hadn’t occurred to me that dying was even an issue to be reckoned with until that point, so I didn’t find anything particularly comforting in her words. I tried to talk to the nurse and when that proved futile, I tried to get up out of the plastic yellow chair I was sitting in. My hospital gown came
undone and I scrambled to pull it around me. I cast my eyes around frantically, trying to find a familiar marker, something to remind me of what my life had been like less than forty-eight hours ago, but there was nothing. Even my body, swollen and unfamiliar, had betrayed me.

I couldn’t see Blaze through the doctors any longer and I could not stop crying, despite my best efforts. My chest was heaving and my face was completely wet with tears. I hadn’t shed tears like this in front of another person for at least ten years. Sure, I’d oozed the obligatory crocodile droplets over lost loves and existential angst (almost required crying in my college days), but real tears, the kind that come from so deep a place they hurt when they fall, hadn’t made an appearance since I was fourteen, when I’d decided that tears were a sign of emotional weakness I didn’t want to show. Now the tears poured out regardless of any decisions I had or would ever make. It would be like this forever more with Blaze. Once he was born, a wound opened inside me that would never close. I would never break down again so completely, but from then on, the tears would always be close to the surface, ready to spill.

“Do you have anybody here with you?” the nurse asked me. “Baby’s dad?”

“
N-n-no,
” I managed to hiccup, “there’s n-n-no d-dad.”

“Well, honey, is there anyone I can call for you?”

“M-m-my father,” I managed to get out. Surely, I thought, my father would be able to sort things out, find out what was really going on. At the very least, I thought, I would have to stop the hysterical sobbing long enough to speak to him. I heard the nurse dialing the number and asking for Mr. Ginsberg. I tried to imagine who’d answered the phone and hoped it wasn’t my mother. This wasn’t the kind of phone call she dealt with particularly well. Despite the sudden thickness in my head, I could hear the nurse talking to my father, telling him that I was upset, could he assure me that everything would be all right, that the baby was in no danger of dying.

When I got on the phone with my father, he sounded tired. He asked me if I had slept at all and I realized it had been almost two days since I had. He told me that Blaze would be fine and that I should go to sleep.

“But what’s wrong with him?” I asked my father. “Why is he in here?”

“Don’t worry,” my father said. “Go to sleep. There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s fine.”

Seeing that I was sufficiently calmed, the nurse led me, like a child, back to my room. I was given a small red pill and descended immediately into a black, dreamless sleep.

I was discharged from the hospital the following morning. Alone.

“Some more tests” turned into five additional days in the neonatal-care unit. Blaze was tested for infection, for lung problems, for blood problems. After the spinal tap he had an IV inserted in his scalp. His breathing continued to be rapid and shallow and he grunted instead of crying. He wouldn’t take formula from a bottle. He didn’t wet his diaper. The doctors found nothing to indicate what the problem might be.

When I left the hospital, my first stop was at the dark, underground office of a local astrologer. This was my particular way of seeking answers to the unanswerable questions that had suddenly been thrown my way. It would be the first—but by no means the last—time I’d seek enlightenment regarding Blaze outside the traditionally accepted means and professionals. Although I’d been casting horoscopes for years, I needed the astrologer to calculate Blaze’s birth chart, since I was in no condition to start figuring mathematical equations. But I would be doing the interpretation myself. I walked into the office uncertainly and with my eyes full of tears. The astrologer was there with an associate, both of them nudging seventy years of age.

“Wait a minute,” the astrologer said to me, “you mean you just had this baby
yesterday
?”

“Yes,” I said feebly. “He’s having some problems. I want to have a look at his chart.” I explained that he had been strangled by the umbilical cord and that he was having difficulty breathing now. The astrologer presented me with Blaze’s chart and told me that Blaze was lacking the element of air in his chart.

“That must be the problem,” she said. I tried to imagine walking into the neonatal-care unit and explaining to the doctors that my baby was born without air in his chart and that, clearly, was why he was having trouble getting enough of it to breathe. The thought was almost funny enough to make me laugh. I thanked the astrologer for the chart and paid her but when I headed toward the door she stopped me.

“You know, you’re very lucky,” she said. “I lost my first child in this way, with the umbilical cord around his neck. A few years ago they couldn’t have done anything for you and your baby. You are very lucky.”

I walked as fast as I could toward the door and my mother, who was waiting for me in the car.

I spent the next five days going back and forth to the hospital, trying to persuade Blaze to take my breast and whispering in his ear that I wanted to bring him home. I started spending longer hours in the neonatal-care unit because I just couldn’t stand to be separated from him. Every time I left the hospital, I felt as if I were leaving my own beating heart alone in a plastic crib on the fifth floor. When I got home, I was incapable of any conversation that didn’t involve the minutiae of Blaze’s care or what time I would be returning to see him. Sleeping was impossible. I would wake up, startled by bright lights, feeling as if I had wires attached to me pinning down my arms. Of course, there were no lights and no wires in my bed, but this is what Blaze was experiencing in the hospital and I took his experiences into my own body. He had only just
left
my body, after all. Besides feeling that I was still physically attached to him and that I was now missing a large portion of myself, I also felt truly guilty about leaving my newborn son in the care of
doctors and nurses. He needed his mother, I kept thinking. There are no substitutes. I knew all about infant bonding and was really worried that I wouldn’t achieve it with my own child.

In the constant glare of the neonatal-care unit, I saw the same feelings reflected on the faces of the parents who shared a similar situation. We followed the same drill on the way in, all of us stopping first to scrub our hands and arms with microbe-killing soap and then donning a hospital gown over our clothes. Everybody learned the nurses’ names very quickly. The nurses, on the other hand, referred to us as “Blaze’s mom,” “Justin’s mom,” “Kelly’s mom,” and so on. We’d get a rocking chair and our babies to hold. When the nurse handed Blaze to me, she covered his head with a receiving blanket so that I wouldn’t have to look at the IV stuck into his scalp. I was one of the luckier ones. Most of the babies in the unit were covered with IVs and monitoring devices. Some parents had to drag half a roomful of equipment around with them when they sat down to hold their babies.

Although most of the babies in the unit were actually getting better, since the unit was a step down from intensive care, many of the babies were still sick and underweight. It was a sad place and most of the parents who came to visit spent some time weeping. I did not cry after that first night.

The tears started only when I had to leave Blaze. In between visits to the hospital, I sat with my mother in her kitchen, weeping into my teacup. “I want him back,” was all I could say.

By way of comforting me, my mother hauled out the story of my own birth. I’d heard the details before, how I’d been sick, had trouble breathing and nobody knew what was wrong. I was blue first and then yellow from jaundice. I didn’t leave the hospital for two weeks, but then I was fine.

“You don’t know what this is like,” I moaned. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to have to leave without him.”

“I also had to leave you in the hospital and go visit you every day
before I could take you home,” my mother answered. “It was even worse because I didn’t have my mother there to help me. And see, everything turned out all right in the end, didn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling incredibly sorry for myself, “everything turned out just great.” I folded my hands over my deflated belly, a posture I’d come to assume naturally over the last several months whenever I felt the baby kicking.

“Take your hands off your stomach,” my mother told me, “you’re not pregnant anymore. You have to get used to the fact that you’re not carrying him now. He’s his own person now.”

She was right, of course. He was on his own, but knowing that I couldn’t protect him in the shelter of my own body made me feel even worse.

Nothing ever did turn up on all the tests administered to Blaze.
Birth trauma
was the best and most general term anybody seemed to come up with to describe Blaze’s lack of enthusiasm at being alive.

“I think he’s angry at being born,” I told a nurse late one night as I held him in the artificial hospital glow.

“Well, that may be,” she said with the weary tone of someone who had heard more than her share of whispered and frantic pacts made with God, “but if he doesn’t start eating soon he’s going to become a ‘failure to thrive’ baby. We’re going to have to put in a feeding tube.”

I thought about the phrase
failure to thrive
and decided it was unacceptable. “Please, Blaze,” I whispered desperately, “please eat. I don’t want them to put a tube down your throat. Please.” I held the bottle to his mouth and nudged it against his lips.

At that moment, Blaze snapped out of his resistance and began to take formula greedily from the hospital bottle. I couldn’t yet sell him on my breast, but the fact that he was finally taking nourishment was enough for me right then. I could have said it was because he heard me somehow and responded to me directly, but I sensed he was just
following his own time schedule. He finally made up his mind to give it a go at five days of age and so he did.

When Blaze was discharged from the hospital shortly thereafter, I was given a few caveats. Watch his breathing. Check his eating. I had to pass a crash course in infant CPR before they would let him go. Let us know, they cautioned, if anything seems abnormal. Of course,
abnormal
was a relative term. I had no clue what was normal to begin with so it was impossible to determine what wasn’t.

When I finally got Blaze home, he seemed no more comfortable than he had been in the hospital. He screamed the wail of the damned through the night, refusing the breast, bottle, and pacifier. He writhed around and refused to be comforted. Because he’d spent a week in the bright lights and constant bustle of the hospital, he had no day-to-night schedule and slept for only twenty minutes at a stretch. Every time he cried, I was convinced there was something radically wrong with him and made several frantic calls to the neonatal-care unit in the middle of the night. There had been times before in my life where I thought I’d been scared, but in those dark hours when nothing I did seemed to quiet my newborn, I experienced real fear for the first time. Often during those endless nights, I simply cried along with him. “What?” I blubbered out loud in the wee hours of yet another day. “What is it that you want?”

In a rare moment of rationality, it occurred to me that Blaze and I were out of synch because of our weeklong separation. It would take some perseverance, I realized, to recapture that moment right after his birth where he had introduced himself to me with his eyes opened to mine. I made a promise to him then that I would never leave him alone again, no matter what the circumstances.

It took four weeks for me to get reacquainted with my son and for me to stop believing that every time he cried he was going to cease breathing. I learned to trust myself and he learned to trust me. Although it
terrified me when he wouldn’t eat, I stopped giving him a bottle, forcing him to learn how to nurse. I kept him in my bed with me even though every baby book I’d read said to leave him in his crib. I wanted him to feel me next to him all the time. I wanted to make sure that his baby brain told him he was safe. I talked to him. I wrapped him tightly in blankets and let him sleep against my chest so that he could hear my heartbeat. Slowly, he started developing a routine and started crying less. After a month, I had learned a new language. I could tell exactly what each little grunt and cry meant. I knew when he was hungry and when he was just restless. My fear subsided and in its place was a love so strong, it sometimes hurt me to look at him. (In characteristically neurotic fashion, I worried about that, too. It seemed a sin against nature to love anything with that kind of intensity.)

Blaze became nothing less than a perfect baby in my eyes. He ate well, he slept well, and he seldom cried. He smiled often. Because of his low Apgar scores, a nurse was dispatched to my apartment after six weeks to check on his neurological development. When she arrived, she explained that oxygen-deprived babies sometimes had “difficulties.” She didn’t tell me what she was looking for at that point and, basking in the glow of my beautiful baby, I didn’t think to ask her. After all, he was quite obviously flawless, wasn’t he? Surely anybody could see that. The nurse seemed to think so, smiling broadly as she picked him up and held him out to look at him. Everything seemed just fine, she assured me and, oh, isn’t he cute?

When Blaze was six months old, John came to Portland to visit us. I couldn’t tell if he was coming to test his feelings about fatherhood or if the reason was sheer curiosity. My feelings about him were in total confusion. Hours after Blaze’s birth, a nurse had given me a sheet of information to fill out for his birth certificate. I was still very angry at John and asked the nurse if I had to fill out the spaces that asked for the father’s name and the father’s place of birth.