During that fateful ultrasound to determine our baby’s sex, the technician noticed pockets of fluid inside our son’s lung cavity. We were told that our baby was a boy and then, instead of going to lunch to celebrate, to dream, to plan – we were immediately sent to the hospital to wait in nervous silence for someone to tell us what was going to happen.
I know your child’s birth and the days that followed weren’t like you imagined when you became pregnant. I know that on the day your baby was born, after you blew a kiss goodnight to him in the NICU, you headed back to your room, and, as you tried to sleep, you heard the cry of a healthy, normal baby in the room next door, being calmed and snuggled and fed by his mother, while your baby was on oxygen on a different floor, weeks away from being able to eat on his own.
I’m pathologically independent. Ok, I made that up, but sometimes I need to ask for help and don’t. The most I come up with is some passive-aggressive statement like “Mommy can’t do five things at once.” Not that I don’t try. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I cry in the shower and eat copious amounts of chocolate. More often, I feel overwhelmed and lose my shit. I seldom ask for help.
Our children have a way of seeing us. Really seeing us. Past the masks we wear and beyond what we say (or do not say). They have a way of forcing us to face the parts of ourselves that we have otherwise been able to overlook, stifle or ignore.
Imagine that phone call, in which you as parent have to tell your child’s brand-new counselor they’re three years behind the curve.
Now imagine guiding that same kiddo through Of Mice and Men, wherein the intellectually disabled character, prone to violent outbursts, is put out of his misery with a bullet in the back of his head, fired by his guardian. Or To Kill a Mockingbird, featuring the “not right” Boo Radley spending his adult years under family-imposed house arrest. Next up, Romeo and Juliet, the story of obsessive teenage lovers kept apart, wherein one character decides faking suicide and running away from home are her best options, and the other character kills himself in despair.
Is this canon really the best we can do? If the literary characters with mental health issues students read about are always marked for confinement or death, then we’re not moving the ball on diversity, acceptance, or even opening pathways to conversation.
