Touching
🤧
‘Her right arm looked like a chicken wing. Her other arm started to hang limp. It was rotated inward, as if it were dislocated. I wanted to scream, ‘WHAT ARE YOU NOT TELLING ME?!’
“I didn’t have to wait long. At our two-month check up, our worst fears were confirmed.”
‘As our children become teens, they tell us THEY WANT independence. That THEY NEED it. They tell us they are grown up. That we are suffocating them.’
“’We don’t want a baby who is too attached.’ So we spend those early years pushing our children towards independence. They don’t need us as much as they think they do. We tell them they are big boys or girls. And we push. And we push.”
‘I received a message. My entire body began shaking. To the woman who called me SICK for talking about my children who died, my heart hurts for you.’
“You need to get past this, it’s so sick. Please, please get help. It’s so sick. Lay them to rest and move on. Get therapy but don’t drag your husband and child through this. So so sick. Please stop.”
‘When you hear, ‘twin one is fine, but…’ your life is about to change. When I finally saw him after his birth, I could hardly process the absence. It was a blank, featureless canvas.’
“When I woke hours later, my partner and I were met by the serious face of one of the pediatricians. There is no way to explain how I felt at that moment, other than devastated. I was convinced I must have done something during my pregnancy to cause this.”
‘His eyes would shake back and forth. He started throwing his head back, screaming at the top of his lungs. He had lost so much weight. Something was terribly wrong with my bundle of joy.’
“Three doctors came in. They told us we needed to sit down and relax. Nothing could ever have prepared us for what they were about to say. I just sat there, blank. He’s just a baby.”
‘If she says mama, I won’t be able to go through with it.’ I never would have imagined the child we adopted would be my own cousin.’
“She never told him she was pregnant with me. To this day, he has absolutely no idea I exist.”
‘Mom! You are white and I am brown, and that means Martin made it so you could adopt me!’ He grabbed his little brother’s hand. ‘Look! Martin’s dream came true.’
“He was 4 the first time kids told him he couldn’t play with them on the playground because he was black. I wasn’t prepared for any of it.”
‘This was our secret. How do you tell people something this big, but also tell them in the same breath it’s not a thing anymore, and also that you have no answers or explanations? So, we didn’t.’
“He instructed me to go home, and come back in a week to find out. There are no words to describe what it is like to drive around, go to the grocery store, go to work, etc. and wonder if today will be the day.”
‘We talked about meeting all year. So many feelings were running through me. In a perfect world, they could have both been saved, but that isn’t our story.’
“It was different with them — almost as if he’s known them for ages. We would give anything to have our baby back.”
‘He pushed his way in. ‘Sit on the couch!,’ he demanded. He told me he was going to stay all night. I begged him to leave. Then he came up with an idea: ‘I’ll leave if you have sex with me.’
“When he was finished, he uttered the words, ‘You didn’t think I was actually going to leave, did you?’”
