A Womb of Many Babies

As I go about my life, wherever my life may be happening at the time, I sometimes forget about the other worlds.

For a while, I didn’t even really truly know that there were other worlds. Of course, I saw them on television as a kid, I heard about them in school and I read about them in books. But I saw and I heard and I read from the perspective of MY world, which is to say that I did not fully believe in them and I certainly did not remember them as I walked around my own life.

There was one reality and it was mine. The others were more around the concept of stories.
Until one day, either out of curiosity or out of fate (or maybe as a friend suggested, out of boredom) I flew straight into a cold little Greek island and entered the world of refugees.

Bam! Right into another world. No screen, no page, and no teacher between me and this world.

There I learned that as I had been making breakfast, teaching classes, taking baths, or walking my dog, there had been moms putting their children on small boats in the middle of the night because the risk of them dying across the water was less horrible than the certainty of them dying from what was happening in their own current world. They chose another, unknown world over their reality.

There I learned that as I got in my car to drive to the grocery store, parents were using their whole bodies to cover their babies and try to keep them alive in the frigid air of many hours of nighttime because somehow, someone had made a mistake and sent summer tents as the weather had turned deadly cold.

I learned about the joyful ways men dance with each other once the day’s work is done. I learned how to wrap a beautiful scarf over a woman’s hair and I learned about how one thousand flavorful meals can be prepared in a makeshift shack with whatever food was donated that day. I learned about how kids can forget everything for just a moment if only given a soccer ball.

I learned how many maddening steps and sometimes years it can take to get off such an island and I learned that doing so is only the beginning of many, many other steps.
I learned what humans can do to each other when feeling afraid or entitled.

I learned a lot.

And as I left that island, I took all of it with me.

Now I know, and I will not forget that I know.

This knowing means that as I walk around a foreign city and a tall black man insists on selling me a bracelet “that he just made,” I am not annoyed but rather I am curious as to how many other men share his room, how long he has been there and what is in his heart that day.

It’s different.

Last month, I entered another world, a world I had barely been aware of, a world whose name I had occasionally heard on other people’s lips, a world outside my world, a world outside of space and outside of time.

The first time I walked into The Womb of Many Babies was a month ago tomorrow. My baby grandaughter had made her entrance into this world and an intense entrance it had been. A portal of sorts. A secondary, week-long birth canal of beeping sounds and medicines and science and care.

For one week, her parents and I took turns day and night holding her and assuring her that she was deeply welcome here, soothing her little heart while her body did what it needed to do.

As the sun came down and then came up again, we sat in a recliner, aware of the “no sleeping at bedside” rule, rocking her and whispering to her and aligning our breathing with hers. There were tubes and procedures and pokes and awaited reports. Numbers we knew nothing about hours before became paramount. Soft blankets and protein bars. More than anything, there was love.

And as the hours passed and she grew plumper and calmer, as the long nights of no sleep became a new routine, I became able to take tiny bits of my laser focus beam away from her and pay attention to what was happening a few meters away from the recliner.

Women. Women and machines. Women and babies. Beeps and cries. Beeps and silence. Laughter, sacredness. Bright lights, dimmed lights. Low-volume classical music. An awareness of the importance of the tasks mixed with years of joy and heartbreak and study and practice.

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. NICU. It almost sounds like it could be a friend’s nickname.

“Our” NICU had pods and our special little guest was in the Eyore Pod, right across from Tigger’s. I don’t think the babies cared but every time I walked in from the hallway towards the Eyore sign, I was grateful that someone had taken the time to do this, to not let it be Pod #6. It’s the little things, the tiny drops of sweetness.

So yes, the women. The Women of NICU.

I know that in many hospitals there are men giving all they have to keep tiny babies alive and this thought makes my heart warm, but in our story, it was all women. All goddesses, moms, magical mermaids of some underwater, out-of-time healing cave. Talking to each other the way women do, adjusting machines the way highly trained women do, and holding tiny bodies the way women do. A powerful blend of science and heart.

Day after day the place became more like home and once our baby was looking pinker and plumper and her numbers were doing what they were asked to do, once the oxygen came off and then one tube, then another, I wanted to hold other babies, soothe them when there were not enough hands to do it. I wanted to rock that tiny one who had already been there a month even though her twin was home. She was having such a hard time. I certainly could hold two tiny babies on my lap. But there are rules and this rule made sense: No holding someone else’s baby. I couldn’t help but think that in Mexico, they would have happily handed her to me.

The shifts are long and I never saw any of the nurses waver. If anything, they sometimes got a little giddy as the nights or days ended. Are they all friends? I wondered. Do they hang out together outside The Womb of Many Babies? Probably not. But they sure did a graceful ballet together.

So now I know.

On our last night in the hospital, they gave us our own room right outside of NICU. We had graduated and even though I had started to feel as though we had been taking a whole lot of room and maybe they were tired of us being there, I was told - and shown - that it wasn’t the case. Two nurses joyfully escorted us to our new little home down the hall, one carrying pillows and blankets for me (“Get some rest, no one will bother you there”) and one pushing the little clear bed with our sleeping baby in it. It felt like a parade. One nurse joked that the one with the bed was a race car driver so to watch out for her. Turns out, she was not joking at all. This 20-something beautiful, highly capable woman, when not healing tiny humans, loved to drive 140 MPH all over the country’s circuits. I had many questions and mostly the once again humbling knowing that .. we don’t know. We don’t know about so many other worlds.

The next day, before going home, the nurses from NICU, the ones who had brought pillows and blankets, came in to check on us, and say goodbye. After hours and hours in The Womb of Many Babies, they still had it in them to give a little bit more love.

As I go about my life down here in Mexico, or wherever I might be, I also now know that all over the world, in various levels of comfort and equipment, full-grown humans are giving all they can to keep tiny humans alive. I know that there are parents not sleeping, parents in fear, and because not all stories end with a growing baby at home, parents grieving the sharpest grief there is.

Sometimes I close my eyes and mentally teleport myself to The Womb of Many Babies and I send out all my gratitude and love-wishes.

To all the people who make it their life’s work to care for others, to all the people who take the time to talk with someone who is scared, who use whimsy in the midst of struggle, who hand out an extra blanket, a touch, or even a smile: Thank you. You are the heroes.