‘Everything Will Be Fine’

Emerson Little (he/him/his) is a visual artist who received his MFA in Creative Photography & Experimental Media from California State University, Fullerton, and his BA in Digital Media Production from the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College. His artistic practice merges art and cinema, exploring liminal spaces with his camera that are both alive and dead.

Everything will be fine

“You’re not going to die”, she says, amused, like I’m being silly, and I look at her and I’m neither amused nor silly, and I don’t believe words coming out of doctors’ mouths anymore, not since they said I was fine when I clearly wasn’t and it almost killed me and my unborn daughter. “You’re not going to die”, she repeats, “but we will get the results of the biopsy soon and we can take it from there, does it sound like a plan?”. Taking it from there doesn’t sound like a plan. I want answers and I need to know how a tumor the size of my child was missed when it was growing so close next to her. I need to know if she will get out of my sick body alive and if I will live to watch my two daughters grow up. I don’t say any of this and I walk out of this hellish place and ride the elevator down to the underground parking and I sit in my car, frustrated and angry, angry at God and doctors since neither religion nor science seems to answer my questions, angry at myself for not feeling grateful for being alive, like everyone seems to think I should feel. “You’re both alive” is what I hear most these days, as if being alive is the best thing you can aim for, as if breathing should be just good enough. People complain about the most trivial inconveniences and yet I should be grateful for not being dead. I am angry like I’ve never been before and even though I can decipher the reason, I’m overwhelmed and confused by the intensity of the pain and the anger. Sitting in my car in the dark underground parking, I feel like I’m drowning in a thick cloud of my own feelings. I feel guilty too, even though I know too well that guilt and anger are like gas and fire, a dangerous combination that can only blow up everything around, and soon enough I’ll learn how to navigate those feelings, if not accept them, but not today. 

From inside my car, I watch people walk to theirs. Pregnant women and tired new parents with tiny newborns in brand new car seats, sick, old people and young ones too, kids with arms and legs casts, some faces beaming with joy or relief and some wet with tears and hollowed by grief. I don’t want to leave this place anymore as it’s giving a space and a context to my feelings and I don’t want to go back to my normal routine, where we complain about the weather or our weight or the new waiter at Borschardt, but somehow have to be grateful terrible things haven’t killed us yet. I wish I could drive far away, somewhere no one could find me to tell me everything is fine when it’s not, but I have a child at home waiting for me to come tell her everything is fine, even if it’s not. I close the seatbelt over my round belly and drive myself home, where I lie in bed and tell her to hold on. I tell her how proud I am. She stayed inside while they opened my abdomen in all its lengths to clean the two liters of goey tumor liquid that had spread from my ovary into every corner between my organs. She stayed inside while they removed everything they could. We removed the appendix and the omentum, they said, you won’t need those. We had to remove the tubes and the ovaries, they added, you could have probably needed those, but we had no choice. She stayed inside as they stitched my body back together, this exhausted body that doesn’t feel mine anymore. She’s the only part that still feels familiar and I’m dreading the moment when she will have to come out, leaving me empty without her and without the children I’ll never grow. 

She comes out four months later, the last day of August. The day after her birth, I sit in the NICU in the middle of the night. I watch her tiny body struggle to breathe, her thin skin full of tubes and needles, the thick, hard plastic of the oxygen ventilator mask stuck on her gorgeous face. She doesn’t look sick, her cheeks are pink and round and she seems unbothered; only her breathing is strenuous. The doctors ruled out an infection or a birth defect on the lungs or the trachea and seems to think she was simply not ready to be born when they performed the C-section. She needs time, they said, so that’s what we’re giving her. I feed her every three hours. I am scared to mess up the wires and the tubes so I sit on the beige fake leather armchair next to her bed and they bring her to me, and I push her little mouth to my cracked nipples and she drinks without opening her eyes, until she falls asleep again. I watch her sleep as long as I can withstand the pain and the heat; the room is kept uncomfortably hot to maintain preemies in womb conditions and my back is so damp with sweat that it sticks to the armchair. I see a nurse and I whisper that I need to go now. “I got you,” she says, and she takes Clémentine back to her bed where she wraps her inside a little blanket, and I thank her as she leaves while I stay a little longer to watch my perfect child sleep like everything is fine. I whisper to her too. I explain that I need to go now just for a little while, that doctors also need to check me in my room, even though they don’t care all that much about women’s bodies when they’re empty – they have been making me run from the maternity ward to the NICU and back every three hours to breastfeed, and nobody has once asked if I was doing alright. It’s been three days and the nurses have barely been looking at my C-section scar. I’m only addressed to when I need to feed the baby. The night after the C-section, my phone rang and a voice in the night told me “Clémentine hat hunger”, Clémentine is hungry, and hung up, and I had to pull my broken body out of the bed and walk through the deserted hospital corridors, dark and silent as if the world outside had stopped existing, to offer it to my child. They never asked if I wanted to breastfeed. I was planning to, but they never asked for my breasts and my milk and they just took it, pushing her on my swollen body, leaking with sweat and blood and colostrum. It’s been three days but days don’t mean much here, only my three-hour feeding schedule matters, a rhythm I follow religiously until someone says otherwise. Days are easy, my husband stays with Clémentine until my body is required and I’m summoned to the NICU, while I lie in bed eating pastries. Nights are long; the pain awakes and the fear is overwhelming without anything to distract me from it. I sit in the NICU at night, where I can hear nothing but the beep sounds of the machines that keep those little bodies alive, some nurses whispering and a mother crying. I can barely see her, it’s dark and she sits in the back corner of the room behind the enormous incubator bed where her 850-gram child is lying. She cries through the night, snuffling discreetly, and she too whispers to her child that everything will be fine, and I want to go hug her and tell her that I’m sorry she’s going through that, but I never do. I feel guilty that my child is doing better than hers.

Three months later, in the midst of another cold German winter. Christmas is around the corner and Clémentine has been growing into a pink, plumb baby. We are rushing through the night. There is no window so I can’t see outside of the ambulance, and inside the light is cold and makes the white walls seem blue/gray. The higher part of the stroller sits in the middle, where the paramedics safely strapped it on top of an adult-sized stretcher. They removed the lower part and the wheels that are now lying in the back of the vehicle with my coat and the weekender I packed in a hurry before leaving the flat. I’m sitting on a cramped seat on her left and even though I am wearing a seatbelt I’m holding on to her in case of a sharp turn or sudden braking. The paramedic fills in paperwork and asks me questions about her insurance and allergies and other things I’m struggling to hear with the noise and his mask and the pain in my chest. I hear sounds coming out of my mouth but I have no idea what I’m saying and I just want to scream that it’s a mistake and they need to drive us back home. She is sleeping soundly and flaunting her little fists in the air like she’s having a blast as the vehicle accelerates when we enter the autobahn, and my hands hold the stroller a little bit tighter. 

The next morning in Bernau. She is sleeping next to me, an IV line poking out of her head and breathing support blowing into her nostrils and my heart is breaking. The doctor said bronchiolitis can get much better or far worse quickly so I spent the night watching out for any sign of deterioration, scanning her face and analyzing her movements. A machine is monitoring her breathing and heart rate, the same one she had in the NICU. She gets coughs so strong that the nurses have to vigorously slap her back to expel the mucus blocking her lungs while I sit powerless on my side of the bed. She gets fluids from the IV line but I feed her once in a while so she knows that I’m still here, even though I am scared to mess up all the tubes and wires every time I pick her up. I barely ate yesterday, but today I can’t stop eating. I eat in the bed, and I eat on the chair by the window, while watching a thick gray fog filling the space between the sidewalk and the clouds. I could be anywhere but I am in Bernau, but Bernau doesn’t mean much to me yet. I have never been before, and wouldn’t be here if COVID hadn’t filled Berlin hospitals with babies. I don’t know how long we will stay. I want to go home but I’m with her and that’s all that matters. The hospital in Bernau is actually not so bad. It is small and personal, and it feels as if we’re starring in a sad German Christmas movie nobody’s watching. It is quiet during the day, and at night it seems lost in time and space. We have a huge room and we sleep together in co-sleeping beds that are stuck to each other. Mine is a regular hospital bed, hers is a kids’ bed with drawings of blue teddy bears and pink balloons. We sleep holding hands and it feels good, and I think I need that even more than she does. The staff is mostly available and empathetic, and they’re coming regularly to check how she’s doing physically and how I am doing mentally. They are impressed by my savviness with the wires and the machines, and how I know things before they show them to me. That’s a skill I wish I wouldn’t have. I meet other parents sometimes, when we step outside to breathe the crisp air to remind our numbed bodies that we’re alive. We don’t talk much, but we usually exchange basic information the first time we cross paths. “My two month-old son Jonas has COVID” or “My three year-old daughter Mia has a broken arm”. Our own names don’t matter, we’re only Mia’s father or Clémentine’s mother here. The food is decent, but I eat mostly Christmas sweets. My guts burn from all the sugar but I keep stuffing my stomach to leave no space for fear. Today is Sunday and on my breakfast tray was a little printed note about how God is there to give us strength when we don’t have any. Franck arrives to take care of Clémentine, and he complains about the traffic and the internet connection and the chair and everything that is not really what we need to talk about but don’t really want to. I walk up to the prayer room on the floor above us and I stare at the huge wooden cross in the middle of the space, full of tiny pieces of papers that people write and stick in there. I grab a blank one on the table in the corner of the room, and I write “Clémentine” out of superstition because I don’t believe God will go through the notes, and I hang it on the cross with the rest of the prayers. I sit and ask God why she has to go through this again, and as I’m staring at nothing inside those four bleak walls, I realize that with one change of perspective, maybe she’s simply being saved again, and for a minute I feel ok. I know it’s not going to last, but right now I feel ok.  

A few months later, spring pulls us out of this endless winter. We healed with each week spent without visiting a hospital. Clémentine is growing up, and developing a terrifying personality that makes me certain she will handle whatever life throws at her with courage and violence. I learn to breathe again, and to sleep without drowning in nightmares. Routine check at the cardiologist; I had forgotten about it until I checked this week’s schedule. The three of us go together, we’ll make a date out of it, go for lunch afterward, and have a coffee. The cardiologist is a beaming tall blond, until she starts Clémentine’s ultrasound, and she’s not beaming anymore. I have seen too many doctors, and I’ve been in too many of those rooms. The sudden atmosphere change, the deafening silence, the fading smile on the doctor’s face, my husband’s slowing breathing. I don’t want to be here for what’s next. The room is spinning when she says surgery, and I grab my child from the examination table, and I say there must be a mistake, and I say we’ll get another opinion, and I’m shaking with my naked baby in my arms. My husband asks polite, reasonable questions and I want to punch him just to get a reaction out of him for once, and they whisper like I am a child who can’t handle the truth. Clémentine will need heart surgery. Clémentine will need heart surgery. Clémentine will need heart surgery. I listen to those words but I can’t hear them, and I look at the happy child giggling in my arms and can’t believe her heart could need anything else than our love. “Everything will be fine,” my husband says for the hundredth time as we walk back home, but this time I can see that even he doesn’t believe it. “It’s just a surgery,” we say, “they do that all the time”. We tell each other all the things that we want to believe, as we look for silver linings we can hold onto. We are back home but I’m not really back, and it will be a while before I do, if I ever. A part of me died today, the part that was holding everything together, the part of me that assumed that “things will be ok”, the part of me that carried my faith and my optimism, but because I have two daughters, I keep smiling. I smile and I eat and I purge and I sleep, then I wake up and I do it all again. People tell me they pray for her and I say I do too, even though I only kneel in the bathroom now. People say we are both strong but I know only she is. I am hopeful that she will be fine, but I am not sure I will ever be again. And I think about her sometimes, the crying mother in the NICU. I wonder if they made it alive and unscathed, or if she’s still crying for her child when she thinks nobody is watching. I never knew her name, she was Maria’s mother and that’s all that mattered. When a child isn’t doing well, there is no space for parents to be anything else than just that, parents. We can’t remember who we were before we walked hospital corridors alone at night, when life felt light and full of possibilites. I think about her sometimes, and when I do I don’t feel as lonely, even if it is just for an instant. 

Ludivine Massin was born and raised in Paris, France, and has been living for the past ten years in Berlin, Germany, where she works and raises her two daughters. She mostly writes nonfiction essays about motherhood and addictions.