An ode
to mythical miracle:
Eleven years this week,
my forty-eight-year-old body
buckled under eleven pounds of
babies and sixteen-point-three-two
liters of amniotic fluids – fluids filling
my fingers with brine, my legs with oceans,
the three of us going under to the roar of the
riptide rushing protein through my veins while
whitecaps frothed at the surface, stippling my sight in
the sequins and certainty of preeclampsia and premature
births. It’s time. the docs proclaimed, even though it wasn’t,
wasn’t, wasn’t time. We still had six weeks to go. The boys and
I weren’t ready. But ready or not we got swallowed up in a wailing
ambulance sailing up I-75 in a 180-degree, magnesium-fueled fever
dream of worry and fear. All that prep work and all those prayers from
the past thirty-four weeks, the prescriptions and needles, the hormones
and protein shakes, ice packs and ultrasounds, body pillows and bedrests
hanging like flotsam in the balance: seizures, strokes or worse on one side
and babes with wet tissue lungs on the other. And I the faulty fulcrum, no
way of knowing which way that I’d tip before the cold scalpel’s tip could
untimely rip my battered mermaid’s purse and
pull
our
boys
free
from
the
danger
of
me.