second day of a new year (+ surgery)

She was not to nurse six hours prior to arrival, and somehow, her little internal timer ding! woke at twenty to, filled, and at 1:44 a.m., she turned back to the pillow.  She woke at five, angry, and he rocked and then I rocked and forty-five minutes later, I slowly leaned back and we slept just a little longer.

We woke so early, my husband's arm snaking out of bed, ten more minutes ten more minutes, and then, a bagel and cream cheese, a weather check, and we bundled ourselves up and away and on the same path we took almost a year ago today. 

She's not like her mommy; she's not a monster when she wakes up, growling and begging please don't talk to me when I haven't had enough sleep.  Instead, she smiled at all the nurses and wandered the hallways, padpadpad, in her oversized pajamas, the shirt hanging from her like a dress, her curiosity driving her from doorway to doorway, chanting Hi! Hi! as she'd meet someone new.

Eventually they came and tagged her, as they did my breast for the biopsy so many years ago, a little X marks the spot (X mars the spot), which she far from loved, and we were told about it all again:  the anesthesia, the mask, the fight, the excitement, the eyes-rolled back, the IV, the depressor, the shelling of the pea.

I wore yellow and told her it was to match her.  I wore blue booties and a blue cap and thought of how Ryan looked a year and a day ago.  I carried her there, to that cold room, and she stood, leaned into me and wailed as the heart monitor was affixed to her back.  I lay her down and kept my face close, telling her, I know, I know, I'm here, I love you, you're so brave, so good, I know, I know and the mask went on, that small, small mask, the one that fit her too well, and I thought of how awful it is for such small, small masks to exist at all.  Her eyes slowly closed.  They had her wrapped in blankets and as her eyes began those last flutters, they said, "Mama, this might be the time when you give her a kiss."  So I pulled the mask off my face, so glad she knew it was me from the eyes only all that time, and kissed her and hoped.

In the hallway, I had to be guided.  I had promised myself I wouldn't be that mother, the one who would wail or get in the way, the one who would frighten her daughter.  I promised myself I would save any crying for later, that I had to keep that brave face on for her.  But as I stepped to the other side of the door, I pulled the cap from my head, the mask from my mouth and the nurse cooed, "No, no, we need you to keep that on."  As she tried to raise it to my head, I kept turning the wrong direction, kept trying to leave in the opposite way we were supposed to go.  She had to help me back into the cap, and when we got onto the other side of the safe doors, the sterile zone behind us, she prompted me to take off the gown and I began and she gently said, "Here, let me get those ties for you."  We shocked one another a few times, a zap of cold air, static electricity I hoped I carried away from the operating room, left none behind, and when I sat back down into the seat in the prep room, I bawled.

And I kept myself busy, after I found myself twitching:  I watched all the videos of Maya on Ryan's cell phone, hoping that would carry me to the end of the time.  It didn't.  We played Mah Jongg.  I read a little.  The nurses came, then the doctor, and all had gone well:  they removed a plump cyst from her left eyebrow, this creature that formed as the plates fused, this ebb-and-flow cyst that would never go away and was a threat of rupturing if she fell on it just right, infection and painful disruption to follow.  Maya, my little offspring and his, would be the toddler to fall on it just right.

Then we found out this happened:  she woke up, bright-eyed, as the anesthetist said, and rubbed the spot and it began to bleed again.  (Did you know cysts have their own blood vessel?  Cruel pathway.)  And her brow began to swell, a halved golfball, and she had to go back under, a false start at awake, her brow wrinkled in that way it does (the nurse imitated it).  They cauterized the vessel and we waited again.  In my head, I chanted I want my baby back I want my baby back I want my baby back.

The surgeon came again, telling us it was the right thing we did, which is, somehow, exactly what I needed to hear, because I've questioned myself so much since we decided to do it--she may never fall that way, am I just bothered by it aesthetically?, is this something she'd like?, what if that turn that no one wants to happen happens?  The doctor held out his hand, his thumb and finger looped in the OK-gesture, showing us the squashed-coin, the egg of it, the depth that went beyond that surface dome, the permanence of it and the permanence of the solution.

She came back to my arms sleeping.  Ryan reads a text:  Are you a nervous wreck?  I ask:  Who thinks I'm a nervous wreck?  Pause.  Do I seem like a nervous wreck?  Ryan nods and says frankly, Yeah.  Yeah?!  I thought I had composed myself quite well.  Nervous, yes.  Wreck, no.  Jumpy, OK.  Eavesdropping as the doctor read his notes into a recorder, hearing about the bleeding during surgery--it's worth keeping in the notes, oh no--before it broke back open, threatening to bruise half her face.

She was angry we wouldn't let her pull away the metal patch, angry at the IV still in her arm.  We watched the breathing and heart monitor rise and fall--dropping to 90% and 180 beats when she was most irritated, slowing back to 100% and 130-some when she was resting, listening to the soothing music, watching the birds and muskrats on the small television monitor.  Mostly, the angry came in flashes and she remained still and peaceful.

She was sweet and heavy in my arms, the nurse building a nest around us, my body the warmest edge, and she in the center, the warm heart.  My warm heart.

She's fine now.  We're on the other side of a three-and-a-half hour nap, and she remains bandaged and slightly more mellow than usual.  Just now, she's tapping Penelope on the head with a bowl from her play-kitchen, proclaiming, "Da! Da! Doggie!"