Panic and the Sublime

Yesterday, for a brief period, D wasn't sure where the boy was. I was on the phone with him and he was distracted and lost track of the boy while they were at the doctor's office. He was fine, but for those few minutes, we were not.

I was abruptly brought back to that moment of weightlessness, when your child's life is out of your hands. It's a fork in the road. Your child can be returned to you or the very worst thing can happen. Those are basically the options. In the life BE (before Eva), I always knew that latter prospect was out there in the mist of possibility and yet my reaction in those moments was to basically believe in a good outcome. But yesterday, I remembered the last big fork and I couldn't ... despite the fact that surely most panics end well.

I was thinking about this fork-in-the-road idea last night as I was frosting D's birthday cake and later as I was falling asleep. Maybe for that reason, a merciful thing happened: I had a sublime, euphoric dream about Eva surviving. In the way of dreams, she just was discovered after being dead a few weeks. She might have even been under the bed, not sure. In any case, I picked her up, put her to my breast and, given the effort of raising herself from the dead, she was hungry and nursed beautifully on her first try. But because I had so much milk for her, I did overwhelm her a bit. She sputtered and I burped her. But after that, she was all smiles, beauty, pure light and unqualified joy. It was a gift and I overslept trying to get back to it, to her.