Regarding miracles.

Maysie sent me this article yesterday. I read it and immediately empathized with the feeling behind what the author had written since I am all about stripping away over-sentimentality and coming at things with hard-boiled common sense. Her point was that people often call premature babies 'miracle babies', but that for their parents those tentative months in the NICU feel anything but miraculous, when all kinds of health problems and complications are a part of day to day life.

It's very terrifying. The uncertainty you feel is exhausting even when, like us, you are blessed with a relatively strong and tough baby that has few if any problems that require invasive treatment. You compulsively count the days, adding them into weeks, waiting for them to equal months until that magical term is reached, the time when your baby should have appeared in the world.

We have weeks and weeks left until then. We are still the anxious parents beside the incubator, peering in at our little girl, delighted just to be in her presence. The sheer luxury of having a baby you can pick up and cuddle on a whim is entirely unknown to us. The privilege of holding her is something that is still meted out to us by her nurses, something we ask for and hope that we asked at a convenient time. When it is offered it's a treat.

On the other hand it is difficult not to refer to these little ones as miracles. When we sit by her side or gaze at the other one of us holding her we are impressed by every little thing that she does. Remembering all the time that she is doing things far, far ahead of schedule for her tiny little body constantly amazes us. Since her birth I've felt a brand new desire to push myself, seeing how she has had to push herself and do it with a determination I never expected to see in such a frail little individual.

Perhaps I am romanticizing the situation, ascribing something to her that isn't really there. It could be argued that she's doing well because her body is simply capable of it and that it isn't taking any sort of spark of personality to drive it along. But I see her irritation and anger at the CPAP she has to wear, how she clearly wants it off of her head and tries to pry it off with her hands or scrape it off on the surface of her blankets. Her nurses tell me all the time that she's a funny, charming little baby and that she makes her wishes well-known, nurses that deal with a constantly changing influx of babies and who have seen it all.

She yawns, she hiccups, she holds on to whatever she can grab and grips it for all she's worth. She opens her eyes and peeks out at the world she's in, unaware that all the blurs will someday coalesce into recognizable objects and loving faces. She cries very little, using her voice to squawk in short-term displeasure rather than kvetch for long periods. These are all things that most every baby does, yeah, but she's doing them all uphill in a way that full-term babies don't have to. Even if she's not technically a miracle, I find her to be the most thrilling, life-affirming thing to ever happen to me and it feels just a teeny bit magical. Even for a lover of hard-boiled common sense.