Malcolm's trip around the sun

Or, a trip to the emergency room

Like dew shaken from a tree branch, my son came to me in the springtime, jolted me out of a firm way of living, where I was planted at its center. Not only did his birth expand the circumference of what I knew about the world and my existence in it (or what I thought I knew), he shattered it. His arrival entailed a long labor that eventually strolled me into the OR, where the medical team proceed to move my organs around like IKEA furniture. Heavily drugged, I was still conscious for all of it, so eager to meet this little boy that would forever change everything. All I could do was sigh when his tiny body (all 21 inches, 7 pounds, 2 ounces of it) was finally placed in my arms, limp with exhaustion.

April is supposed to be the month of renewal, of growth. And like the flowers in the grass he had grown, too, bloomed in my stomach (is that anatomically correct?). I could feel my reality and my hips expanding, my bones bending (and aching) with the most astonishing pliability with each step. In high school, biology was one of my favorite subjects (I was a Punnett square queen). Nothing was more fascinating than being a human tasked with replicating another, the sheer power it took render him mind, body, and soul.

The night I had figured it out I was at a small house gathering at a friend’s. I had been feeling strange, off. At that point I knew my body like the back of my hand having struggled in the past with irregular periods and that evening my chest felt like it was being powered by a high voltage battery-pack. Thud, thud, thud. “Ha-ha!” I laughed, after describing my symptoms while cautiously sipping a glass of wine. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I was pregnant?”

Only my friend wasn’t laughing with me. Instead, she was smirking—and her knowing smile only got bigger and bigger as I stared back incredulously. Next thing I knew, I was hunched over the toilet trying to decipher the two faint lines like it was some ancient text or Morse code and frantically texting my sister. So mischievous, my body! It had kept a secret from me, knew before I did.

Malcolm turned four years-old recently. On his big day he woke up with a slight fever so I had decided to keep him home from school. But what had started out as a lazy cartoon marathon quickly unraveled into a intermittent vomit fest (I can now tell you confidently how not to clean magna-tiles) that sent us to Nationwide Children’s Urgent Care.

The last time we took a trip to the UC was for stitches the previous year after a game of Duck, Duck, Goose ended with a swift collision with a table corner. When we arrived, he had insisted on being pushed in on one of those wagons shaped like a butterfly while we waited, waited, waited until he could be stitched up. Sometimes, when I find myself playing with his hair, I’ll pull it back to feel the scar that was once a bloody mess. Now it’s flat and discrete, hiding underneath a curtain of chestnut curls. You’d never know unless I told you. I wonder who he will show this scar to, perhaps as offering of intimacy or bravado, what he will say. What other scars will he try to hide in his lifetime.

But, just like that, we were back there again. This time because of a mysterious virus that had managed to overpower my motherly defenses. When administration asked what his birthday was I sheepishly replied “Today.” Yet Malcolm repeated it with so much pride, holding up three (then four with some prompting) for dramatic emphasis. Parents seated nearby and had caught on cracked a supportive smile, holding their own malaised and achy children in their arms.

I’ve been joking that this particular birthday was one of nostalgia since the last time we were in a medical setting was when he was born, with the same hospital-like hubbub, like I was a subplot of Grey’s Anatomy (but Alex—she hasn’t dilated past seven centimeters!). As Malcolm cuddled into my chest as I balanced the phone displaying some knock-off Lion King series, I felt that dance of vulnerability and authority you feel as parent. You’re supposed to be the big one. Yet, any time Malcolm gets hurt, a part of me almost forgets how to breathe for a minute. I tell myself You’re supposed to be the tree; firmly planted, immovable. I wouldn’t say I’m a helicopter parent but sometimes it’s hard to sit through that pang when you’re reminded that you can’t protect your kid all the time, that they are going to feel really, really bad. It feels like you’re breaking a promise you never meant to make. The chasm of what you want the world to be, especially now with precious cargo, and what the world actually is widens.

A few days ago I read a Reddit title that asked Why do some trees weep? I thought it was absolutely beautiful. After two and a half hours of waiting, another bout of vomiting, the doctor had finally come in, said a few assuring things before shuffling off with promises of medicine and a popsicle—much to Malcolm’s excitement. Holding him in my lap, alone, in a sterile patient room at 10 pm, we were both extremely tired. And as I rocked him in my arms while we watched the hundredth dinosaur “movie”, as he calls them, my body had discovered another secret. That pliable bones bend, and bend, and bend but never break.