Last week
I cleaned out our Important Documents Box. Lest you get the wrong
impression and start to think that I am, in fact, a responsible adult with a
metal filing cabinet, a lockbox, or anything resembling a system, let me
clarify. Our Important Documents Box is a Huggies cardboard box that once
held diapers for my infant twins and now contains our marriage and birth
certificates, teaching credentials and employment contracts, medical bills and
financial statements. It has faithfully held up as we have schlepped it
from Santa Barbara to our rental in Nashville, then into our home, later onto my
grandparents’ house in Franklin, and back here once again. It is very
humble and just a bit tattered and, well, it’s a diaper box full of our
family’s most important papers. If you are my dad or any of our financial
planner friends, I’m sorry I’ve let you down.
Once
every year or so I pull it out and weed through it, putting into place the many
papers I have inevitably tossed into the top at random when I am in a hurry or
have a baby in my arms. I pull out things we no longer need to hang onto
and then feel very superior as I carry my Huggies box back to its spot in the
laundry room, neat and clean as any old filing cabinet with a system. I
cross “Important Docs” off my to-do list, decide what needs to be shredded, and
don’t think much about it for another 12 months.
This
year, though, as I was combing through everything, I actually stopped and
noticed several folders that I usually leave untouched.
Santa
Barbara Radiology.
California
Children’s Services.
Santa
Barbara Neonatal Medical.
I picked
them up, opened them, and there it all was. The chest x-rays and the
brain C/Ts, each individual day spent in the NICU, everything itemized and
lined up in neat rows. And then my own notes scribbled across the tops
and bottoms of each page, this amount paid this date, that amount paid that
date, arrows and question marks and dated notations after phone conversations
with insurance companies and hospital billing offices and county services.
I
remembered those initial days of terror after the twins’ birth, the eventual
rhythm of the NICU that we fell into, the almost-as-scary first days of having
the girls home with us. I remembered
the incessant beeping of the monitors, the unique smell of the NICU soap, the
dull scratching of the sponge I’d use to scrub away any invisible threats to my
children’s health that might be lurking on my arms and under my
fingernails. I remembered the way Elijah
looked reading a bedtime story to his babies as they lay inside their
incubators, eyes screwed shut and tiny bodies red and wrinkly, the way Sophie
looked with an IV sticking out of the top of her head. I remembered the way the nurses taught me to
never set anything on the floor of a hospital and the way I begged God with
every breath to send my babies home.
I
remembered my joy and fear and gratitude and utter exhaustion as I looked at
those scribbled notes, and I felt so much love and compassion for us as we were
then, a Mama and a Daddy in way over our heads. We were confused and we
were so, so tired and we were overjoyed. We would look at each other and
say, “Can you believe we have TWO babies?!” We were practically babies
ourselves.
These
statements, mostly medical bills, were all 8 and 9 years old. Technically,
it was well past time to off-load them. I had the girls’ medical records
tucked safely into different folders. I grabbed the bills to toss them
into the shred pile, and then I hesitated. It felt strange, almost
sacreligious, to banish this history of our early life as a family to the
recycling center. Because what would we be - where would we be -
without it?
Trauma of
any kind is so formative and aggresively shapes us. The entrance of our
children into the world completely rewrites everything we previously knew and
believed about our lives. Trauma involving the entrance of our children
into the world? That is some intense stuff. It has the power to
inform - even dictate - every thought, action, and response that we have about
and toward our kids. Sophie and Aida’s time in the NICU was a clear and
physical manifestation of my fears, and what I imagine are the universal fears
of parents all over the world - will my child be okay? What will happen
if she’s not? What will happen if she is hurt, maligned, wayward,
unhappy, dissatisfied, injured? What will happen if my child dies?
After
some significant internal back-and-forth, I tossed them. I’m focusing
this year on shedding things, on clearing space in our home and in my mind, on
letting go of things I thought I needed but really don’t. Material
possessions, certain beliefs about myself and those I love, old and lingering
fears – I am out of patience and out of strength to carry things that only
weigh me down.
Here’s
what really matters – we lived those days.
They changed us. My body bears
scars and my heart does, too. The joy, the exhaustion, the tears, the laughter
– they have been woven into the fabric of our family’s history, an embroidery
of sorts that is constantly being added to, amended, new colors and designs taking
form on every side. And the fear? We looked it square in the eye. We lived with the suffocating
discomfort. We walked through it. We came out on the other side. We developed a little bit of grit and a few
calluses and these things have served us well as we’ve again faced heartache
and the fear that it can bring.
I
don’t need a stack of papers with scribbled notes to remind me of all of
that. I can see it in the 5 pairs of
blue eyes that look into mine each night around the dinner table. Here
is where our history exists. Here is where our story lives.
