reader. writer.

Lately I’ve been thinking about that moment, maybe if you are a parent or have a loved one who has depended on you, you know that moment, when in one case, they put my toddler on a gurney and told me to say goodbye before they rolled him into the operating room to put tubes in his ears. Though it seemed to take forever, that was a relatively quick operation, as we discovered years later when another baby, still not quite an adolescent, was wheeled away for hours before we would know that everything was okay. Or that everything was okay enough because we didn’t get the choice we wanted, which would have been no need for the operation in the first place.

It’s a special kind of hell to be the parent in that moment, waiting and wondering what was going on, knowing we had no other choice but to trust the hospital, a series of strangers, none of whom were perfect because no one is perfect, but they were the ones who, for this span of time, would take care of our baby, who told us that they knew what was best for our baby.

Time moves differently when you’re waiting to see if your child will be okay. The mind slips in strange directions. Everything looks foreign, the walls of the waiting room, the patterns on the carpeted floor. I remember staring at a vending machine, trying to feel hungry, studying colorful packaging as if it were an artifact in a museum. Trying to find anything to do that would make sense of the fact that I was still alive, that I would keep living one way or another, even if I didn’t know, not for sure, what the next few hours would bring, if the very heart of me would be returned or not.