Sounds of Hope

I was living in a four-plex on Weymeyer Drive northeast of Columbia. Ironically, his cousin, on his father’s side, owned it. A cousin he barely knew. Now married again, he moved in with me. Nathan had started kindergarten. As a harbinger of things to come, Nathan had spent his first day of kindergarten with the principal. This is the actually apartment, second floor. Many were the exploits of Nathan. He had been thrown out of Sunday School because he would climb in the windows and bark like a dog. Nathan was just like his mother. He learned even more quickly than I, that attention comes by acting out. He also had tremendous energy and creativity. He had the nerve to do the things he thought about. Considering all the trips to the ER, it is a wonder he lived. I had gotten a job, a real job. I worked for what is now Shelter Insurance, then call MFA Insurance. I would descend to the bowels of the building on West Broadway to file thousand of little papers in hundreds of five drawer fil...

Nathan was over three weeks old when I was finally able to hold him for the first time. I had no way to go to the hospital except when my mother took me. When I did get there, I would only look longingly at him through several layers of glass. Years later, with yet another child in an incubator, they let me scrub and reach my gloved hand into the holes to touch her. This time, no courtesy like that was permitted. Then the day came when he was no longer in the NICU. His tubes removed. He could suck. He still had no eyebrows but fingernails were forming. At church people were reconsidering whether my story of his premature birth was true.  He finally weighed five pounds. I asked about my child. An older nurse working the regular nursery was sitting in a rocking chair, holding him, giving him a bottle. I had thought about breast-feeding. I knew no one that breastfed. It just seemed natural to me. I didn’t know then how much better it is for the new infant. I just thought I’d li...