Over the Mountain

I saw a meme the other day that said that every “bookish” girlie once had a Greek mythology, Tudor dynasty, or Egyptology phase in their youth. I think I had all three, but when I was eleven years old, I wanted to be an archeologist. I’ve always been intrigued by the past, reading most of the YA-fantasy-fiction-set-in-a-magical-version-of-the-British-Isles that my local bookstore had to offer, from Lewis to Pierce.

I grew up a mile away from my very old great grandmothers, and my sisters and I would visit them in their sitting room, eating flavored tootsie rolls, and straining to hear my Gigi’s stories about growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘20s and ‘30s above the sound of Ellen blasting in the background. Stories about how she had to help raise her siblings after mother and grandmother died of the Spanish Influenza. The time she used double sugar rations to get enough ingredients for a birthday cake during the war. When she wrote letters every day to her fiancé John while he was in upstate New York being treated for TB.

I can’t help but wonder at the role of digital archeologist, decades from now, and the worlds that they would uncover on our desktops and hard drives. If someone took a deep dive into my google photos over they last two months, they’d see snapshots of random toys and tchotchkes— last minute Christmas gift requests from my kids. They’d see my last pregnant belly photos, taken in my bathroom mirror, with my assorted toiletries and robin’s egg blue bathroom sink in the foreground. They’d see screenshots of my favorite holiday recipes, that I have to go searching through my old photos and email attachments to find each year.

Then, they’d come across the photos I sent to Taylor after Jack was born, and the photos he sent me in reply as he and our big kids waiting outside my hospital room as I finished getting cleaned up post-birth in the early hours of Christmas morning.

These images would give way to newborn photos of tired eyes and scrunchy baby snuggles. Then, the before and after photos our pediatric dentist sent me of Jack’s tongue tie revision. A few scrolls later, and there’s a video I took just for myself, documenting how sad and scared I was that Jack seemed to be unable or unwilling to eat any significant amount of food. That I was tired of forcing my newborn to feel hungry. That I was worried, that nothing was working, and that I didn’t know what to do.

Then there would be the hospital photos. The wires and tubes and pictures of the sunrise over the mountains from one of my early morning drives.

From there, any good digital archeologist could find the notes section of my phone from this time, with the running documentation of every meeting with every doctor and resident and intern and specialist, shared with our family and friends to keep them updated on Jack. They’re be notes with poems and grocery lists and knitting patterns I wanted to try as I kept my mind and hands busy during the long hospital days. (P.S. those knitting patterns worked. I think maybe knitting saved my life, and I (again) have my great grandmothers to thank for teaching me all those years ago).

Then, there would be photos of me, again in my own home. Images of my kids that I took myself instead of those that were sent to me during the ten days I existed apart from them. Normal things like pictures of last night’s dinner, that I was there to cook, selfies of my toddler and me after he asked to say, “cheese,” and videos of the sweater I made my sister for her birthday. It would mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, I think.

Because more than any other time in my life, I feel like Jack’s decline, readmission into the hospital, transfer to UVA, diagnosis of a UTI and chronic kidney issue, ten days on an IV antibiotic, and ultimate return home, marks, as Anne of Green Gables would say, an “epoch” in my life. There is a before and there is an after. I try not to think about what happened during.

One day I will, but I’m not ready to today. But sometimes, memories will come back in fits and spurts. I can’t always make sense of why certain moments stand out.

Like maybe four times a week, I’ll remember walking from my car to the pedestrian bridge that connects the Lee street parking garage to the second floor of UVA medical center and thinking, “if I were a mom coming to visit her infant son in the hospital, this is how I would walk. This is how I would carry my bag. This is how I would put my phone in my pocket,” (don’t worry, my therapist friend Sarah already told me this is clinically referred to as “disassociation”) only to be interrupted by a stranger who didn’t speak English running up to me to return the ball of yarn that had slipped from my bag and trailed back to my car, like Ariadne’s thread connecting me back to an alternate reality where my tiny new baby wasn’t living apart from me in a hospital.

And sometimes, I’ll recall with surprising fondness the hour I spent sobbing into my shower and over the baskets of laundry on my bed as I packed up and prepared to follow the emergency transport vehicle to Charlottesville. I’d woken up that morning in a hospital room down the hall from my newborn, a few miles away from my house, expecting that after another day or two of fluids, we’d be sent home. And just a few short hours later, I was preparing for an undetermined diagnosis and an indefinite hospital stay in a city an hour away.

I remember giving my parents quick hugs in the doorway as they came to be with my older kids so Taylor could visit Jack, or having an Oceans marathon with my mom in Jack’s hospital room while she held him so I could nap.

I remember the drive where I tried to listen to our church’s Sunday setlist and felt like I was going to vomit (no shade to my literal husband who is our worship director and picks out our songs), so I just listened to the same one song on repeat for the whole hour. And the volume dial on my car still sticks from the bottle of coke that exploded over me and everything before my commute home that night.

Not all the memories come back to me. Some, I suspect, are lost for good in the haze of sleep deprivation and trauma and medical terminology. Sometimes I think the individual memories don’t matters so much compared to the feeling I had the moment I signed the paperwork to transfer my son to the big hospital over the mountain, and I became someone new in a way that thirty-one years and three other kids hadn’t managed to do yet.

I’m still in the process of orienting myself to who I am now. A mom of four. A woman who birthed her newest baby before her midwife or husband could make it in the room (still can’t really believe that one.) The parent to a medically complex kid. The wife to a man who solo parented our other three with complete competency and grace while I advocated for (and fed) our baby. The recipient of such tender and thoughtful care from our family and community. The child of a loving God who drew near to me and mine in our time of need.

I have a feeling that the changes have just begun. And I feel content to just let them unfold as they will. The questions, treatment plans, and appointments can wait.

For now, I just could cry with relief that my most recent photos are of my three healthy big kids, trying with all their might not to smother their chunky, smiling baby brother.