The Hanged Man
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I still hear her screaming that night, I still feel the pain, the
throbbing, the helplessness. I remember what that night felt like
and remember what the room looked like with the pale outside
light filtering in and her little outline squirming, inconsolable
in my useless arms...
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* * *
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When we finally moved out of our house, the weather had
changed. My commute went from 20 minutes back to 2 hours,
give or take. My son went from an in-home day care of 4-5 kids to a preschool of 20, give or take. I went from working out 5-6 days a week and then slowly decreased to the point where I wasn’t working out at all. I had no time. I woke up, made breakfast, went to work, came home, barely had time for dinner, went to bed; woke up and did it all over again.
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The only part I liked about my commutes was I started listening to audiobooks. I would keep a thermos of coffee near me and usually finish it on my way to work. In the mornings the sun was just so on the horizon that I felt I was constantly adjusting my visor to block the light, so any cloudy morning I considered a good one.
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Before we moved I told my school I wouldn’t return the next year. I didn’t have a job lined up, but I knew I’d have the summer to look and I wasn’t worried. Our lives were in limbo, but there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it at that moment. We waited for time to pass, for news about our daughter, for news about my dad. My son had to adjust, I had to adjust, our pets had to adjust, but they seemed like the only ones who didn’t seem to mind.
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From the moment my daughter was born, I felt like she was constantly taken away from me. The doctors plugged tubes in her, so I had to be careful holding her when she was in the hospital. She had regular doctor visits, which my wife took her to since I was so busy. My wife breast-fed her exclusively so I never bottle fed her like I did my son. I felt like the only time I touched her was to change a diaper or hand her off to someone else. As much as I looked forward to having a daughter before her diagnosis, now I didn’t even feel like she was mine, like I was taking care of someone else’s; a constant babysitter…
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The commute was killing me, every day it drained me more and more. I could feel it deep inside, like the drive was sucking something from my being. Even the weekends weren’t enough to recharge me. The only thing I looked forward to or hoped for were cloudy mornings. I was on autopilot. Working just to get through the day, trying not to think about the spreading cells that were killing my father, or the misplaced cells that were harming my daughter. Everyday: drive, work, drive, sleep...drive, work, drive, sleep, drive work drive sleep…
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One day, not sure when, Spring time maybe, which meant my daughter was about 9 months old, I had a migraine. It was one of the worst in my life. I’ve had migraines before but there are only about 3 or 4 I remember. This was a new one, top of the list. I felt like one of my eyes was being squeezed from behind and it was going to pop out of my skull at any moment taking a chunk of my brain with it. There was a taste in my mouth like I had been chewing on a penny, and any light was blinding.
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I came home. I couldn’t do anything but trudge upstairs and lay down. My wife put the kids to bed. She went to teach music lessons at someone’s house and wouldn’t be back for a few hours. I lay on the bed in a raging pain, the house could’ve collapsed on me and I would’ve been grateful, or if my eye actually did pop out of my head, that might’ve spelled relief. Then, out of the quiet darkness, my daughter started crying.
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And she didn’t stop, sometimes she would coo or moan, but then find her pacifier and go back to sleep. But this night, that was not the case. Her cries from down the hall and through the doors tugged at my already swollen brain and I knew I had to check on her. I sauntered into her dark room like some undead ghoul. She had her pacifier, so I struggled in the dark to check her diaper. It was clean too. I picked her up and swayed her, but she continued to wail and I had no idea when my wife would be home.
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There was a rocking chair in her bedroom, so with her in my arms and no relief from my migraine, I sat down and began to rock her. I closed my eyes, because even the pinhead sized lights from the sleeping computer in the room pierced into my brain like needles. Her cries bore into my head, converting my migraine into something I’d never felt before; it was beyond pain and the discomfort morphed and twisted into some weird out of body experience. It was something similar to a runner’s high, or the endorphin rush after you eat face burning spicy food.
As I rocked, I recalled when my son at her age, the 3 a.m. feedings when sleep deprivation takes you to some different realm of consciousness. I remembered our rental house and sitting with him on our glider as I fed him. I would count the rocks after he stopped crying before I picked him up and put him down for sleep, usually 100 rocks did it. If he moved while I was counting I started over, I wanted to be sure he was asleep.
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I started counting as my daughter cried, but the pain in my head didn’t let me concentrate enough to keep count. I just rocked, and she cried. I thought of her, newly born, in the hospital, and how hard it was to pick her up with the plethora of tubes and stickers she had to wear, coming out of every surface, even her belly button… but I’d never heard her cry this much. I thought about all the times someone took her from me; nurses, doctors, my wife. I thought about how much things had changed in the past year, in two years, in three. I rocked her, wondering what her pain was, while wallowing in my own; and somewhere, at some point, in that darkened room, we both, in our own pain together, spiraled down the shadowy abyss of unconsciousness.
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* * *
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The light in the room suddenly turned on. “Oh my god. You scared the shit out of me.” I heard my wife say. I jerked awake and so did my daughter. My wife continued: “I didn’t see her on the monitor, and you weren’t in our bedroom so I didn’t know what was going on.” My daughter began to stir, the sudden light shocked her just as much as me.
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“She wouldn’t stop crying,” I managed to say. My head felt like it had been squeezed by a vise but the pressure had been recently and suddenly released. “I came in to rock her. I guess we fell asleep.”
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“I’ll take her. She probably needs to feed.” My wife came to pick her up. For the first time, I didn’t feel like my daughter was being taken away, I felt like I was handing her over, for someone else to hold.
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