My Baby Nephew

After a few therapy sessions with Sara, I was beginning to see that my childhood had been chaotic, more chaotic than I had thought. It's difficult to know what's "normal" when you don't grow up around it. You don't know what to expect. Sara looked over my completed timeline, wide eyed, and explained that we would need a lot of time to go over everything I had constructed. By Sara confirming that I had, in fact, gone through chronic trauma as a child and had survived an especially difficult childhood, I felt relief. I felt validation. Finally, someone with trauma treatment experience was not telling me to "suck it up" and "you had it better than some." Validation, I believe, is one of the first steps to giving yourself permission to grieve. By documenting what has happened to me and saying to myself, "this was traumatic," I've completed the first step in validation. I would now need to mourn the traumas that occured as well as the loss of my childhood. But first, Sara and I had to complete the task of getting through my timeline. By this particular session with Sara, we had finally reached the age of nine.

When I was nine years old, my fifteen year old sister found out she was pregnant. The family debated on whether my sister should have the baby or not, but collectively decided that the final decision was my sister’s. My sister and her boyfriend decided to have the baby.

It was a chilly, yet sunny day in March when I received a note in class to come to the office. I knew this was it – I had insisted that my mother call my school if I was in class when my sister went into labor. After school, I ran to the nearest city bus stop going downtown and jumped into my seat, my arms and legs fidgeting with excitement. The bus stopped a few blocks away from the hospital. I ran to the hospital to find that I hadn’t missed it – my sister was still in labor. I waited in the waiting room, my foot tapping the legs of the chair in which I sat. About two hours after I had arrived to the hospital, my nephew was born. My mom came to get me from the waiting room and shuffled me into the birthing suite. I squinted, entering the dark room. I saw my sister’s boyfriend in the corner of the room with a small bundle in his arms. I slowly approached my sister’s boyfriend, not wanting my excitement to scare the brand new being I would meet. I looked into the blanket to see a wrinkled, crying, slightly purple being. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, I thought to myself. I giggled with joy. I slowly settled into a chair next to my sister’s boyfriend before he placed my new nephew into my arms. I cradled him in my arms, not moving an inch. I loved him. I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t grasp why or how I already loved this little being.

During the 48 hours that followed my first meeting with my nephew, joy would give way to terror, anxiety and pain as we learned that my baby nephew had contracted a rare disease during delivery which affects the immune system. Before the end of his third day on earth, my baby nephew’s compromised immune system had allowed him to contract pneumonia, beta strep infection and meningitis. He was rushed to infant intensive care. In the days following my nephew’s birth, I got onto the same city bus each day after school, got off at the hospital and went to work on my homework in the hospital cafeteria. This had become my routine; I insisted that I would be in the same building as my nephew. I was in the hospital cafeteria on the third night when my mother came to tell me that the doctors gave my nephew a 25% chance of living through the night. My mom went back up to my sister’s hospital room. The cafeteria was silent. I walked to the hospital chapel. The chapel was also quiet and bare. I knelt down before the alter, my hands squeezed together – as if the harder I squeezed my hands together, the more likely my prayers were to be heard. I closed my eyes and prayed on my knees, tears streaming down my face. I didn’t understand why I was so upset. I didn’t know this baby, yet I already loved him. I asked God not to take him away.

I stayed that night with my grandmother. She knew I was upset. She tucked me into bed with her. In the dark she told me a story of the Saint for “lost causes.” We prayed together to this saint. She held me and warmed my feet with her own. The next morning, I would wake up to find that my nephew had lived and he would live the next night and the night after that.