Worries

The panic doesn’t take hold of you all at once. At first, it’s just a numbness, a lack of understanding, as if someone has just spoken to you in a foreign language.

You are on an exam table in a dim room. On the ultrasound screen, your baby floats and kicks and sucks her thumb.

The doctor speaks, and you try to process the words and possible outcomes: Single umbilical artery. Kidney problems. Fetal growth restriction. Pre-term labor. 1 in 100 babies.

You glance at your husband. His face is carefully blank. He squeezes your hand.

The panic finally sets in a few days later, when you’re sitting at your desk at work. The feeling is swift, absolute, terrible.

What if the baby is not okay?

You call your husband and cry a little bit, and the tone in his voice makes you cry a little more. This is the first time that, as a couple, you’ve had the occasion to be scared about something that is this big, this real.

You comfort each other with the facts. Statistics are on your side, but the situation is something you can’t control or predict. There will be more ultrasounds and measuring and monitoring. And all you can do is wait for the next test. The weeks stretch out before you.

For better or worse, this is the strange process of becoming a family. You are more bonded now to your husband and child than you have ever been. You will hold hands and move forward, because that’s what families do.

Your husband whispers secrets to his little girl, his lips moving against your belly.

You know what he is telling her. It’s the same thing you whisper to her every night before you fall asleep:

Be strong, little girl. Be strong.