Ronan's Beginnings

This may be better timed on his 3rd birthday, coming up in July, but I just found myself writing about his birth and my experience with it for the first time ever. It still hurts and makes me cry, so I guess that's why I haven't done it before. I had an assignment to write about an event in my life that seemed bad but turned out to be good. So, here it is, a bit long, but the first time I've every really tried to express and somehow document that time in our lives:

2 pounds, 11 ¾ inches long. No, these are not part of the specifications for a slightly out-of-spec ream of printer paper, but are the shocking specifications of my third child at birth. Barely longer than a piece of regular paper and the same weight as two boxes of butter, Ronan Mark Chapman embraced the world 14 weeks early, after a pregnancy of uncertainty and medical confusion; 26 weeks of medical reassurance that “the baby might be fine, or not. See you in 4 weeks.”

I lay on the hospital bed, in the middle of labor, crying to my husband in between contractions, sobbing that I was sorry I couldn’t keep our baby boy in me any longer, as though the sudden hemorrhaging and delivery were somehow my fault. We barely saw our son as the Neonatal ICU nurses whisked him away so suddenly, to put him on a ventilator, in an incubator, under bili-lights, with sensors taped to his feet and IVs fed into his bellybutton. In fact, I wasn’t able to see my son for several hours, as my nurses tended to me and his nurses tended to him. Our first visit with Ronan was brief. We were grateful that he was stable enough that we were allowed to hold him for about five minutes, a tiny thing of nothing-weight, with dark brown hair sticking up in shock from his small, round head, and eyes still fused shut. We returned to my recovery room, faced with the impossible question of “what next?” and the guilty yet impossible-to-deny question of “would a miscarriage have been better?”

Ronan’s journey in the first three months of his life is too long for such a short period of time, and far too long to recount here. I was discharged two days after his birth and began a routine of a fractured life which lasted for the 80 days he was in the hospital. Each day I cared for my two oldest children in our home, my husband went to work. Each day, either when family or a friend watched my other two or when my husband returned from work, sometimes after midnight, I drove 45 minutes to Ronan’s hospital to be able to spend either ten minutes or four hours with him, depending on his needs and what felt like the rest of the world’s needs. I couldn’t hold him every day, it all depended on how his breathing was that day, that hour when I was there. When he was one month old I made him a quilt; all in greens with an appliquéd pea out of a pod, for my pea out of his pod too soon. That quilt felt like the only thing in the world that I could really do for him as his mother. I couldn’t feed him. I couldn’t bathe him each day. I couldn’t hold him any time he cried. I couldn’t listen to his soft breathing at night in the silence of the world as the stars spun about our heads.

Despite this frightful beginning, our Ronan is a champion. We were told, early on, of all the risks and their strong likelihood for a child of Ronan’s size: cerebral bleeding, blood transfusions, learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, breathing difficulties throughout life, eye problems and blindness, infection, disease. We walked up to each test, each dicey moment, each seemingly inevitable tragedy and skipped over them all, skirting the edges but never toppling in. Ronan is small, he still has some growing to do, and he has been slow to speak, but even these issues are within the range of normal, and all agree that once he hits a couple growth spurts and decides to get a word in edgewise around his sister’s seemingly endless narratives, no one will ever guess that he started out so impossibly. But this is not simply the story of Ronan’s success, it is deeper than that, it changed more than that, it changed more than him. Ronan’s story changed me.

Ronan taught me to love and live each moment. He taught me to not wait until the perfect, relaxing vacation to breathe, but to be present in my life as I move through it, always. When I was home with my oldest children I loved and laughed and enjoyed them. As I drove to the hospital I transitioned and came to live and breathe and love for Ronan. When I could hold him I breathed him in and gave him my warmth. When I couldn’t hold him I cradled him in his isolet, cupping his head and feet in my hands, often sitting by his side, one hand resting gently on his head or his belly, reading Robert Frost’s collection of poems entitled “You Come Too,” eager for him to come too, home with me. My favorite poem was “I am Acquainted With the Night,” because I was, it was the backdrop of so much of my time with my son. I felt longing, but I never was truly frustrated or angry during that time. Ronan taught me to love what I could have in its own time and not my own, and embrace it with grace.