Bleeding heart
Mar 13th, 2008 by heidi
That term, “bleeding heart,” isn’t generally used as a compliment. These days it generally means someone who thinks about the rights of an individual over the rights of society as a whole.
At the moment, my heart is bleeding a little and it’s not about society, or promoting the welfare of an oppressed group. It’s over a website that someone linked to from one of the Livejournal parenting communities. It’s a blog kept by the mother of a little boy named Joshua, a little boy only 66 days old who suffers from one of the rarest forms of neural tube defect. A little boy who may be dying or dead right now, based on her last entry, as he suffers through the effects of his condition.
I worry about my son. I’ve worried about him since that first moment that I discovered that I was pregnant, fearing that this pregnancy, like my last, would end in miscarriage. I never knew my first baby. I named her Hope and grieved (and still grieve) for her but she never had a heartbeat, never had a face. Eight weeks after she was conceived she was gone again; I never knew the feel of her kicks inside me, never heard her cry or kissed her head. I was terrified the same would happen with Ciaran, that I would never know what it was like to hold a baby in my arms.
Ciaran survived. He thrives. This morning, for the very first time, he showed a reaction when I called down the hall “Ciaran, I love you!” The sweetest smile in the world crossed his face and, a minute later with Daddy, he said “Ov oo!” I don’t know what he thinks when I say those words but I think that he knows that they mean love. As I sent him off to nursery, I couldn’t help but think of his trip to Gran’s this afternoon. Last weekend seven victims were killed in a car crash – two kids are still in the hospital but their grandfather, who was driving the car, died. When you send a child off with their grandparents they’re supposed to be safe, but even then they are at risk.
My fears are hypothetical. Joshua’s parents know that they will lose him, that their son will almost certainly not live to his first birthday, much less to adulthood. Reading his story, remembering how it felt to have a healthy newborn, I cannot imagine what it is like to know that your newborn is going to be taken from you and know with equal certainty that there is nothing that you can do. I cried reading that website and it takes a lot for me to cry.
I have no words for Joshua’s parents. Nothing that I can say can change anything that is happening to them or to their little boy. But my heart bleeds anyway, a slow wound that remembers my own loss and recognises how much greater theirs must be.
