My son is crying. His wail is stronger than it was at his birth three weeks ago, but it is still so puny that it’s more likely to inspire pity than alarm. When the doors of his Isolette are closed, the cry that escapes is so muffled, it is as though he were bawling into a pillow.
I try to comfort him. Preterm infants can be difficult to interpret, but often they have trouble collecting themselves. Calming them can be as easy as swaddling them with your hands, pulling their arms and legs down close to their bodies. Such swaddling has become less effective since Gabriel was born. Nevertheless, I try it.
He continues to cry. His heart rate climbs to 215 and then 220 beats per minute, high enough that alarms go off in his room and at the nurse’s station just outside the door. I keep my hands on him, hoping a few more seconds will calm him. I talk to him. I consider laying him on his side because he has often tolerated it better than lying on his back. But I hesitate. I worry that lifting or moving my son may be thought dangerous or transgressive. I don’t want to gain a reputation as a difficult NICU parent.
The alarms continue to echo through the room. Gabriel’s nurse finally comes in. “He is really upset!” she says to no one in particular. She could turn the alarms off but does not. Instead, she stands behind me. After a minute, she says, “Maybe I should lay him on his side.”
So I step aside. As soon as I do, I grow livid. I watch her do exactly what I had thought to do not two minutes prior but didn’t. I watch what she does work: he stops crying; the alarms go silent. For the rest of the night I think her smugness so overbearing that I cannot look her in the eyes.
“Don’t forget that you can fire a bad nurse,” a friend said to me two weeks ago. His daughter had been in a NICU for three months, and it was one of the lessons he had learned late in her stay. I am grateful to have had his his experiences and advice at hand. But the truth is, she isn’t a bad nurse. Perhaps she was too hasty to intervene, but it’s a forgivable mistake. Besides, I am not angry at her. I am angry at myself. Lifting Gabriel to turn him on his side is nothing I have not done already. I should have asserted myself and said, “That is a good idea! I’ll do it.” Better yet, I should have tried it the moment I thought of doing so. But I did neither. I backed away from him in deference to her. I am angry because I left my son’s side. My son for Christ’s sake!
It takes hours to calm down.
Every day in the NICU is not like this day, with full-blown jealous resentment, second-guessing, and self-loathing—but every day has the potential to be.
Gabriel Emerson Bales was born by Caesarean section on June 16, 2010, at 8.58 A.M. He weighed 2 lb 6 oz. Because he was 8 weeks preterm, he was immediately admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, where he remains. He is fortunate both for the extraordinary care he has received there and for the fact he hasn’t needed it much: He has done very well since birth, breathing and eating and now growing with little trouble. Since his birth, Kathy and I have been keeping a CaringBridge blog on his progress; we will continue to update it until he is released from the NICU.
How is your summer?
When I was a kid, well before Caller ID, there was a phone number you could call at any hour of the day or night, and a man would answer it. I don’t remember how I got the number, but before long I had it committed to memory. So, too, did my cousin, who didn’t even live in town. We would huddle on my grandmother’s basement stairs where there was a phone and dial the number together. When the man answered, one of us would raise his voice an octave—or, more likely, a half-octave—and say, “Hi there! I’m a cheerleader! Let’s have some fun!”
Of course the man knew the game we were playing. I won’t try to invent what was said—my memory isn’t that detailed—but to his discredit, he sometimes played along, and he was filthy when he did it. Other times, he groused and swore at us that he’d tell our parents what we were doing. That hardly mattered, however, because we didn’t know what we were doing. Calling him was wrong, and it was anonymous, and because it was both of those things it was titillating, and that’s why we did it.
How it all ended I don’t exactly remember, though I seem to recall we were caught on the phone one day and warned never to call the man again. We probably disobeyed that order, but we had been found out. The game was no longer just between us and the man, so it soon ended.
From the time I was seventeen until the summer I turned nineteen, because Mom had married and moved to the other end of the state, I mostly lived alone with my dog in the house I grew up in. One summer I spent working at a local convenience store, but I wasn’t very industrious. Most afternoons I just walked to Jaybird Lake 
and fell asleep floating on the water. While I was still in high school, Mom would come back once or twice a week when she had a class or studio to attend at UALR. Finally, I left for college. She only rarely came back.
She left; I didn’t—not entirely. I lived on campus during the week and at home on the weekends. There I did laundry and slept in my own bed. When autumn came and the temperature dropped, I built a fire sometimes—a wood stove was all we had—but mostly I endured the cold, wrapping up in a blanket, spending late nights at my grandparents’, hanging out with friends until I was too tired to feel a chill. Only a handful of those days stand out in my memory now, one of them a shameful thing I did—or rather didn’t do—to the dog—but that’s another story. Before long, college became reality, and home slipped away. By the spring semester, the house truly was empty.
It gathered dust until the next summer when I returned home and to my former job at the convenience store. With a newfound industriousness, I worked as much as I could, and I enjoyed all of my time. I read Don Delillo for the first time (End Zone), as well as several other late-twentieth-century writers whose works I now forget except that they were about drugs and sex and the libertine lives of the fairly rich. I also readied the house as a rental, scraping plaster off and brushing paint on the walls, pulling up wood flooring to replace with tile, packing up furniture for the move west.
But what I remember most vividly from that summer is this: just outside my window there was a pin oak. A mockingbird would sing from that pin oak, every third song stolen from the mouths of whippoorwills and screaming car alarms, and he would sing there between four and six o’clock in the morning. It was like what I imagine it would be to have an opera singer upstairs sing several arias in the middle of the night: on the one hand, such a lovelier thing could hardly exist; on the other, isn’t there a better time to practice? I hated that mockingbird, and I loved it, too.
I cannot complain about the fact that today, Iowa City temperatures reached 40ºF for the first time in months, but I can complain about the fact that it still gets cold enough at night for the snowmelt to freeze into thin sheets of banana-peel-slick ice. Twice this week I have fallen. My first fall happened a mile away from the house while I was walking Newton. I was just descending a rather steep hill when I stepped on an ice patch and went flying. Bruised my left arm and hip. Newton kept walking until he found something he could eat; then he waited until I got up and met him. I was actually talking to Jeremy P—— when it happened, and of course my phone hung up on him. When I called him back he said, “Oh, you actually fell?”
The second fall happened tonight, just outside the back door, when I was taking out the recycling. It was a similar slip: one step and down I went. Bruised my hand and cut my finger.
Both falls went unseen, which is kind of a shame. What good is a fall when no one is around to help—or to laugh?
