My Baby's Cry

He almost never cried.  Never.  He never woke me in the night—slept twelve hour stretches from the day I brought him home.  For awhile, I wasn’t even sure he could cry, but I didn’t find myself concerned.  I only found myself disinterested.  My apathy didn’t even seem strange, at the time.

 

He grew, bottles propped up with a rolled blanket while I sat on the couch staring at a television screen.  His head flattened to the shape of bouncy chairs and car seats and swings because there were no cries of discontent to rouse me from my depression and investigate.  He was a fixture, moved from room to room in a container.

 

“Does that baby ever stop smiling?” People asked me this constantly.  I’d glance at him and respond, politely.  Flatly.  “No.”

 

He was 18 months old before I looked at him deeply, and his bubbling laugh and his unconditional love and his forgiveness and his amazing little spirit reached inside of me and twisted my heart so hard I could barely breathe.  It was a sudden and startling revelation.  I loved him.  I actually loved him.

 

I called him My Sunshine.  His birth had pushed me into darkness and he was the light that pulled me out of it.  It nearly killed me. I nearly killed me.

 

More than a decade passed and his tears were so rare that in the moments they would appear, alarm bells would sound off in my head, terrifying me.  Guilt grew into something bigger than myself, has swallowed me whole as punishment for that year and a half of emotional neglect.  It has doubled, tripled, multiplied rapidly like the cancer cells that would eventually consume his teenage-boy lungs. 

 

Every single day of my life I see him wrapped in blankets, in a hospital bed that he never deserved to be in, violently ill, with tears running down his cheeks.  I hear his voice, broken and weak, telling me that he is done, while I clench his hand in mine.  He doesn’t want to do this anymore.  He wants it to stop.  And there is absolutely nothing I can do.  Nothing but listen to the IV pump filling his veins with poison that is supposed to make him better.  Make him live.  Make him stay.

 

I wait for him to drift into sleep before I silently leave the room.  And then I run, down the hallway, into the elevator, with a lump in my throat so big that I cannot swallow it away and through another corridor where I find a bathroom stall and I lock it behind me and drown myself in heavy, racking sobs.  I do it until I can’t do it anymore, and I splash water on my face and I walk back up to his room, quietly facing him with the bravest smile I’ve ever known.