A year ago, I submitted the essay below to the New York Times’ Modern Love Column. Modern Love accepts less than one percent of the over 8,000 submissions they get each year. So here I am, on this beautiful Sunday morning, sharing my rejected essay. Because, why not?
When my daughters were born, I didn’t want to love them.
The doctors asked us to choose between invasive and statistically ineffective intervention or a peaceful death in our arms. We chose the latter because the former felt selfish. I may have chosen the latter because I thought it would hurt less to lose them if I had not yet grown to love them.
It was so early in my pregnancy that I thought the labor pains were false. I debated whether or not to go to the hospital for hours, and even when I was admitted, I didn’t believe I was in labor. But then I coughed, and Vivienne came flying into the world, landing between my legs on the hospital bed. My husband told me she was beautiful and my mother told me she was trying to breathe, so when the neonatologist arrived, I changed my mind. I asked him to save her.
Two days later, Vivienne’s identical twin sister, Margot, went into distress and arrived via emergency c-section.
My decision to give the girls a chance to live did not change my compulsion to self-protect—to keep myself physically and emotionally distant from them. I didn’t want to see them because I didn’t want to love them. Neither the odds I found on the internet, nor the doctors’ facial expressions would allow me to imagine a version of the story that would end with two healthy babies.
At 22 weeks and 5 days gestation, my pregnancy apps congratulated me on being five months pregnant. They told me my babies had tear ducts and tiny eyebrows. They said my babies were about the size of a spaghetti squash. Whoever wrote the week-by-week pregnancy play-by-play for these apps has seen neither a one pound baby nor a one pound spaghetti squash.
Twenty-two weeks is the cusp of viability. It’s the line at which it’s still acceptable for hospitals to deny care. At 22 weeks gestation, there aren’t enough alveoli to sustain life without intervention. These tiny air sacs that make up the lungs are stuck together like plastic bags you have to coerce apart between your fingers. Even if the air sacs are fully functional, the brain doesn’t have the neural pathways to remember to breathe. The skull is not yet formed, leaving the smooth little brain susceptible to injury. The kidneys aren’t ready to work, and the skin is so thin it can’t serve as a protective layer between the baby and the fungus in the air.
While I was in the recovery room, my husband brought me a photo of Margot that a nurse had snapped in the OR before they intubated her and took her away. She looked like a fetus from one of those anti-abortion billboards near the Florida-Georgia link. I mentally stashed this away as further evidence that I should keep my daughters at a distance.
Some people saw my lack of distress as a sign of great faith, but It wasn’t. In my post-traumatic-partum haze, I had to believe I would be ok with whatever outcome, because if I thought about the tragic ways this could end, I would start crying. And I didn’t want to cry because I had just been cut open from hip bone to hip bone, and crying was painful. I also feared that if I let myself feel the weight of the situation, it would crush me, and I couldn’t be crushed because I had two daughters I was trying not to love who were depending on me.
I eventually made my way to the NICU to meet my daughters. Their translucent skin and fatless bodies made them look more like baby rodents than baby humans; yet I beamed with pride, which surprised me. In the photos of our first meeting, I am smiling and crying tears of both despair and delight. “I have two babies,” I said over and over, trying to convince myself of what my eyes were seeing but what my head and heart could not digest.
Three days after my discharge, both my daughters suffered bowel perforations. The surgeon sat across from us in the waiting room and said, “I may open them up and find there’s nothing I can do.” He told us even if they survived surgery, there was no guarantee they would live; there was no guarantee about their quality of life.
I would later learn the odds of survival for the exploratory laparotomy performed on my daughters are about 50% for babies their size. Three babies went to surgery that day, but only two came back. I wondered if this was a sign that it was ok to let myself love them.
A couple of weeks later, Vivienne’s nurse told me she found two white spots on her back. She said it was probably nothing, but they were going to do a biopsy just in case. Before the biopsy results came back, the white spots became gaping wounds. It was a flesh-eating fungal infection that would eat its way to the muscle before the treatment started working. The next day, Margot received the same diagnosis.
I’ve never been as shaken as I was when I saw those wounds on my one-pound-12-inch-long Vivienne. She wasn’t supposed to be on the outside for another three and a half months; yet here she was, squirming, scrunching her nose, and trying to cry around the endotracheal tube. She was suffering.
Shouldn’t I suffer too? Wasn’t I the one who decided to keep her alive with machines breathing for her? Did I not sign the paperwork to take her to surgery—to increase her risk of infection? I felt guilty, but not for the reasons I expected.
I felt guilty for trying so hard not to love her. I kept my trips to the NICU short, and when the nurses invited me to touch my daughters or change their diminutive diapers, I always declined.
As I watched Vivienne writhe in pain, I put my hands into the portholes of her incubated world, and I let her wrap her micro preemie hand around my giant pinky finger. They needed me more than I needed to protect my heart from the possibility of their death.
The walls I had been holding came toppling down when I first held my daughters more than two months after they were born. With their skin on mine, I saw their oxygen saturations and heart rates stabilize. I felt them relax, as if they trusted I would protect them. In those hours of kangaroo care, I feared how much I loved them because I knew I loved them enough for it to destroy me.
Six months into our NICU stay, Margot started vomiting. While an infant throwing up a little milk means nothing to the parent of a healthy child, a micro-preemie with a history of a bowel obstruction vomiting bile feels like a death sentence.
I had let myself love my daughters, and I wondered: if it all ended right now, would it have been worth it? If I had to do it all again, would I make the same decisions? Would I let myself love them if I knew I would lose one? If I consented to another surgery, it would have been for me, not her. I felt a bitter blend of sorrow, anger, and anxiety that was void of any hope. It was over, and my heart ached so much I thought I would be the one who did not survive.
I didn’t sign another surgery consent, because I didn’t have to. The vomiting and the distended abdomen subsided. No one knew what caused her illness or why it got better, but I allowed myself a lengthy, snotty, and unrestrained cry of relief.
When my daughters both came home from the NICU, our home was brimming with joy with undertones of grief and worry. I was still waiting for shoes to drop and lungs to collapse. In retrospect, it felt easy to love them through surgeries, bandage changes, and half a dozen intubations, but it was paralyzing to love them through the unpredictability of how their prematurity would affect the rest of our lives.
Prematurity had left us all with scars from surgeries, and flesh-eating fungus, and the trauma of it all. Sometimes good-intentioned people with no couth see the girls’ glasses or their belly scars and ask, “what’s wrong with them?” I roll my eyes and wonder “what’s wrong with you?” But then I worry that one day Vivienne and Margot will turn into 13-year-old girls who wonder what’s wrong with themselves.
I put money away for college and cosmetic surgery, and I jot down words, hoping I will one day be able to explain to them that their lives are extraordinary—that if not for modern miracles, I would have never known a love like this.
More than a year after discharge, I climbed into a kiddie pool fully clothed. A pair of healthy, almost-two-year-olds with big hair and brown eyes crawl into my lap, pleading for shelter from the sprinklers. We laugh, and I let myself love them so much it hurts.
I know that if I lost them right now, I would never be ok again. And I know that if I lost them right now, it would have been worth it to let myself love them.