Reflections
It’s that time of year again where I go back to 2009 to relive the anxiety of having micro preemie twins in the newborn intensive care unit. Or maybe…I go back to relieve the anxiety of then. Like some kind of time-travel transference.
At the time, I wanted to be strong enough to accept any outcome, so hope was out of the question. When a nurse gave me an article that profiled micro preemies who were now teenagers, I stared at it in disbelief. That was definitely too much to hope for.
But now we’re there. To commemorate the milestone I wrote a reflection for the Alta Bates website. (I didn’t mention the “no hope” part. I saved that observation just for you!)
My twins were born on December 30, 2009, at 25 weeks, four days’ gestation. Baby A weighed one pound and 12 ounces; his brother weighed even less.
“Can I see them?” my daughter asked.
I wasn’t sure what to say. In her world, there was only today and tomorrow. Her concept of the future was just a blurry jumble of aspirations: going to park, marrying a garbage collector, maybe even eating some ice cream.
“Not today,” I said.
Read the full article here.
“Every day we were measured against our future selves,
which meant that every day we fell short.”
February 2021. I’d just had my monthly confab with Minal Hajratwala of the Unicorn Authors Club about my essay “Saved by the Hooters”, a snarky tirade about boobs and San Francisco Ballet School.
Originally the essay had been read at Lit Camp’s Basement Series and at Lit Crawl back in 2015. But as I started to imagine the piece in print, my snark sounded defensive and bitter.
I needed to unearth the emotions that hid underneath the sarcasm. But that is so not fun. Besides, I was really sick of this Boob Essay, as I thought of it. I decided to revise the essay without actually looking at it. I holed up in a room at the Inn San Francisco and turned off all my devices for two days.
Writing revisions in my journal, I explored the piece from memory, addressing passages where I opted for a self-deprecating joke rather than the truth. It stung to get the nerve of the story but gratifying to put it into words. I renamed it “The Shine Inside.”
Last January, after 49 (!) submissions, “The Shine Inside” was accepted by the Santa Fe Writers Project. This week it appears in their winter issue.
(Spoiler: not a lot of boobs in the final version.)