Abba
She wouldn’t stop crying, so I picked her up before realizing that the diaper was wet. The sun was setting and the room was dim and quiet, disturbed only by the peripheral noises of the hospital hallway and the sound of her distress. I gingerly held her up, setting her flat on the bed, and watched her arms wave from side to side as I puzzled over how to change my first diaper.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Stop crying.” She didn’t listen and I spent a few moments fumbling with the pacifier before sitting down in the rocking chair, swinging back and forth easily with the infant cradled in my arms. A plastic music box hanging on the edge of the crib’s stainless-steel safety bars began playing a lullaby. We rocked and swayed, rustling quietly in the dusky shadows of twilight. It was as if the hospital, that crazy world of light and noise and pain and angst, had rumbled off into the distance and lazily forgot to bother us for now.
At morning report, the infant was recovering well from whatever illness she’d had; I couldn’t recall the details, save the small fact that we were now responsible for her. We, meaning the hospital and the State of New Jersey, who were granted temporary custody as the parents were “currently indisposed of for the time being.” I thought about all the other rooms on the pediatric floor, each of which held two beds: one for the patient and one for the caretaker. Each room had its own guardian: an anxious mother or grandparent or cousin or other relative. Each room except this one.
I remembered the words of a nurse who stood by the bed at rounds, updating us on the baby’s condition. “She’s doing well,” the nurse reported, thoroughly distracted by the baby. The team continued talking about the details of custody and social work while the nurse remained preoccupied. She cooed at the baby. “Hey,” she said quietly, gently caressing the swaddling clothes: “It’s going to be a tough world out there.”
We had been rounding on this patient for several days and I, being overwhelmed with concerns about my own patients, had never paid much attention to this one. But that last comment caught me by surprise and disturbed the rhythm of my thoughts. One of the residents told us, “If you have time, come in and hold her. It’s okay.”
For the rest of rounds, throughout lunch and the bustle of afternoon errands and errata, my mind and feet wandered back to that room. Whenever I peeked in, I found someone at her bedside: a nurse, a social worker, another floor staff member. It seemed that word had gotten around and everyone quietly came together to do what they could. I didn’t get my chance until the end of the work day, just in time to hear a few cries from the crib.
And so we rocked, back and forth, and I thought and thought. Did she know how alone she was? What kind of person would she become? Who would rise up to defend her weakness, her frailty and vulnerability? If she met me in ten, twenty, thirty years from now, would she still let me hold her in my arms? Why couldn’t I adopt her? How different will it be on the day I hold my own child? Unfamiliar feelings of affection, of unknown protection and helplessness swilled around inside of me, centered but unfocused on this loose bundle of warmed clothing and weak, spastic movements. I didn’t know how to feel or how to respond. I still don’t.
I couldn’t wait to write this stuff down, mainly because I didn’t know what to do with all these ambiguous thoughts. I only held her for a few minutes and yet it’s taken me two days to articulate what I’ve been feeling. Who will love her? Who will dream good dreams for her at night? Who will give her the first cherry ice pop, the first kiss on her scraped knee? Who will keep her safe in this world of terrors?
I was walking outside my apartment tonight, thinking about these things. I stared through the bare branches of a budding tree and into the lamplight that stood fixed beneath a muddied sky. I asked my Abba, father, to provide one for her, and then realized that I didn’t know her name.
