{Originally published on Okay. Fine. Dammit.}

One of my best friends lived for some time with her great aunt in the finest home in which I have ever set foot.

It’s not that it was a mansion or anything, although I suspect by some definitions it was. Auntie was a wealthy woman, advanced in age and experience, and the widow of a founder of a large grocery store chain. Her home was modern, tucked like a jumbo gumdrop on the curved cul-de-sac window of an elaborate gingerbread-home-neighborhood in a wealthy Minnesotan suburb. From the outside it looked like your average run-of-the-mill parade home, as cookie-cutter and interchangeable as any McMansion. On the inside, it was anything but.

At the time, back in 1997, Dave and I were newlyweds and we had just purchased our first house. It was large, and fine, and I was utterly intimidated by it. When I went to visit my friend I had lived in my new home for several months, but the overwhelming majority of my belongings were still packed in boxes. I was so afraid that I would ruin my beautiful new house with my silly, shabby, adolescent stuff. I used to walk through the door of my own home and feel like an uninvited guest, or worse, like the girl invited out of pity, out of place among my fancy, rich, important peers. The modest apartment we’d moved from may have had sloping floors and a two foot gash through the front screen door, but it was home. It didn’t make me feel inferior, unworthy.

Auntie’s house changed my life. Even all these years later, I still recognize and honor the impact. I don’t know how to describe the decor, and that’s the point; She didn’t follow a single rule. She didn’t care what you thought, or how you defined her. She was patently original.

There was an entire room devoted to her ethnic roots, wallpapered in the colors and traditions of her home flag. There was art everywhere, and mostly in unexpected places - like above the dog bowl, or sideways and at eye-level next to the couch where you might like to lie. There were books everywhere, and places to sit and dream at every turn…

Originally posted on Okay, Fine, Dammit

The minute Emma was born, I knew something was wrong. I’d swallowed a horse, fought its hellish bucking to the death, turned myself inside out, until I won. Until she slid breathlessly — literally — into the world. I listened for her bourning cry but it did not come, because she was not breathing.

I lie there, split apart at the seams and bleeding out, and watched
the scene as if from above. I bore witness while the midwives pumped
oxygen into someone else’s baby for eleven minutes before they called
9-1-1, before two ambulances delivered both of us to a nearby hospital.
It was all for naught anyway — by the time we got there, she was
breathing on her own as if nothing had ever happened.

When we left the hospital for home, Emma was perfect in every way
but one: she would not nurse. She could not suck. I knew the
powers-that-be wanted to remedy the situation with a feeding tube, to
rapidly ameliorate the problem and neatly close out our file, but she
was our second child and so I had faith in my body, and in my baby.
Somehow I held patience as she lost weight.

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