excerpt tid-bit

Excerpt from a manuscript I'm currently working on... 

A long-lost memory opened up in my mother’s mind the night I turned forty-five. She’d forgotten it until she saw a photo I texted to her on my birthday. Time and major life events dismissed its strength long ago. In the picture, my husband and I were lying together, propped up and as cozy as can be in a single hospital bed as my husband received his initial treatment on the oncology floor at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs. I wore a sleeveless red summer dress speckled with white and blue flowers. My head leaned in on his left shoulder, content and restful. Brian’s favorite trucker hat cast a shadow over his eyes. The port attached to his chest hung out at the neckline of his black workout shirt.

“I remember crawling into your hospital crib to curl up next to you,” my mom reminisced over the phone. “It was draped in a covering, but I could climb in to feed you. It was tight for me to fit in there, but that was the only way to stay close enough to nurse. You were receiving treatment for… well, I don’t remember what exactly, but you had to stay for, I think, a week.” 

“What? I can’t believe I’ve never heard this before!” I exclaimed. “Was I sick? Are you sure you can’t remember what I was in the hospital for? How come you and Dad have never told me this?” I was not angry. I was extremely interested, and with that interest came a barrage of questions, most of which neither of my parents had solid answers. 

“I wish we could remember. You had some breathing trouble, probably the croup, so we had to stay and make sure you were alright,” Mom confessed. 

“The photo of you curled up close to Brian there in the hospital was so sweet, it took me back to when I had to climb into your crib in order to sustain your life. You were only one month old.” My mom’s voice was tender and I could feel the heartbeat of a mother who loved and still loves her child deeply. She did what she could to remedy the physical separation in the days and nights during my hospital stay. I belonged to her, and she instinctively knew I would not thrive without her. 

She and Daddy had labored with prayers and tears through my bout of sickness, so fragile a time as my life had just begun. A short-lived scare from long ago, and the only way I was going to hear about it, was by walking through a current health scare with the person closest to me. 

Like my mom, I knew exactly where I belonged in the moment.