Three Pounds of Flesh
How a premature birth, the NICU, and motherhood taught me how easily women learn to apologize for surviving.
3:17am. I apologized.
After two and a half months inside a maternal/fetal special care unit, my body had nothing left. They told me they had to deliver her. I sobbed, not from relief, not from fear. From failure.
A c-section. They cut her out of me. I puked non-stop, hunched over a cold silver institutional pan, hormones pouring out of my skin soaking the sheets beneath me. I lost control of every function I thought was guaranteed. They took her from me. The NICU had her now. I could not follow. I could not see her until I was strong enough to get there.
I sent him a photograph of my daughter and apologized for the hour.
I was already good at that. Apologizing for things that were not mine to apologize for.
I remember being grateful that the two seats next to me were empty. I slept across all three, pregnant, somewhere over the Atlantic, while my son turned one at home without me. Of course I thought about the cake. He deserved more.
There was a period when everything we had talked about was actually happening. The board was changing. Different faces. A different kind of energy in the room. Stewardship working the way stewardship is supposed to work. I had built that. We had built that. I remember thinking: this is why. This is what every plane ride was for. Every late night. Every weekend.
I thought we were at the bottom of a pit digging ourselves out.
He had inherited a mess. Every day I did the things I should not have had to do: cleaned up what someone else had left behind, for him.
In the fundraising world, instinct is your instrument. You walk into a room and you know. Who will give. Who will close the door on their way out.
Until you don’t.
When I finally had him on the phone I tried to stay distant, cold, and purely professional. My body did what it always does when it is bracing for something. It went still and got ready to say sorry before I even knew what for.
I am being advised not to give you that number, he said.
I am worth more than that number, I thought.
My daughter was in the NICU. I was pumping milk that would not come. I spent countless hours beside her incubator willing my body to do the one thing it was supposed to do.
It could not.
In Chicago they put her tiny body on a screen.
They cheered her arrival.
Years later, those same hands held the photograph.
They welcomed the child.
I apologized and paid for being her mother.
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.