Still Loud Enough to Hurt

One afternoon in the NICU, while trying to nurse Briggs with my shirt off, I asked his primary nurse,

“Will I ever care about my breasts hanging out again?”

I was exhausted and sad. Briggs was so tiny that most of his calories came through a tube threaded through his nose. The milk in the tube was breast milk fortified with formula, every calorie optimized.

I mostly pumped, not because I did not want to nurse, but because at first he was too little to do what full-term babies are meant to do: suck, breathe, swallow. It is a complex brain function that develops in the last stretch of pregnancy. We did not get that far.

For months, the feeding tube did most of the work. Then, slowly, we moved to breast and bottle.

In the meantime, I was topless every three hours, around the clock. It was easiest to pump in the hospital, where I could smell him, see him in the incubator, and trick my body into cooperating.

It also seemed that no matter how carefully I timed it, someone was always walking in just as I was taking off my shirt or putting it back on. A doctor. A nurse. An orderly. A visitor from the other baby’s family.

I remember saying something like, “At this point, the entire Patriots team could walk through, and I would not even flinch.”

The nurse laughed and told me my modesty would come back.

I told her that before Briggs, I had worn a two-piece bathing suit exactly once in my life. I could not wait to be done with this part.

She was right. My modesty came back. And once it did, it stayed. Since then, I have always noticed whether I was covered.

What has been harder to recover is any instinct for how to be kind to myself when my suffering is not in service of Briggs.

Motherhood asks a lot of me. It keeps rearranging my life, my body, my priorities, my sense of who matters most. But with him, even the hardest versions of myself have always felt usable. Necessary, even. For my son, I can almost always find some reserve of strength, resolve, comfort, or guidance.

For myself, I am far less merciful.

I am angry at the fatigue that lives with me now. Angry that I cannot simply override it. Angry that I can still get up, still move, still do things, and so often do not want to. That’s the part I judge most harshly. Before all this, I wanted to do nearly everything, or at least try. Now, more than anything, I want to rest. Sleep.

Sleep feels like surrender. It feels lazy, wasteful, almost ungrateful, even though I know that what is truly wasteful is the amount of time I spend judging myself for needing it. The judgment changes nothing. It helps no one. I still return to it.

That, more than the fatigue itself, is what wears me down.

I do not want to go away. I do not want my life to be over. But I do want some more familiar version of myself to return, and the longer I live with this diagnosis, the less convinced I am that she is coming back intact.

I would rather try to become who I was. Instead, I am left to learn how to live with who I am.

I think about who I once was, how little patience she had for wasted talent, unfinished things, a life not fully used. I can hear her asking me the cruelest possible version of the question: So what did you actually do?

She is not right just because I can hear her clearly.

But she is still loud enough to hurt.

Briggs was just the sweetest little thing ever…even at 2lbs.