crooked house: Babies in Literature Series: Rick Bass's The Wild Marsh

I first read this excerpt from Rick Bass's forthcoming book The Wild Marsh in last month's issue of O magazine and I was thrilled to discover it just now on her site. (It's all Oprah all the time around here, isn't it?) In the following passages, Bass writes about how his daughter Mary Katherine stopped breathing twice the night she was born. After the first time, Bass stayed awake all night to watch her and caught the second time. This really resonated with me -- I did the same thing, only I tried to do it for about six months instead of one night.

I think that when you save someone, you become saved. I think something passes between you and the rescued person, something almost entirely unnoticed, as if some thin and perhaps artificial barrier—a gauzy curtain that gives each of us a bit of necessary distance from all others—has been pulled away: as if such distance, believed to exist at the heart of all things, might really exist only in our imaginations.

Mary Katherine stopped breathing the night she was born. Elizabeth had delivered her, and we were in our hospital room; Mary Katherine was still in her first 24 hours of life. Her vital signs had been perfect at birth, and remained fine. But only a few hours after we moved to our room, she just stopped breathing. Her face scrunched up and turned red as she gasped and sucked and waved her fists, and then she wasn't getting any air at all.

I grabbed her and went running down the hall. It felt like football days, the narrow unoccupied hallway a path to travel as quickly as possible with a dire force in close pursuit, and time the most vanishing, valuable thing.

In the meantime, Elizabeth had called down to the front desk, and an elderly nurse, a tiny old woman, came hurrying around the corner.

Before I had time to explain, the nurse flipped Mary Katherine over so that she was holding her facedown, cradling her belly in the palm of one hand, and tapped her on the back, then lifted her upright. And just like that, she was breathing the clean, sweet air of life again.

Back in our room, Elizabeth had gotten disentangled from her bedsheets and was running down the hall in her robe, barefooted, trailing tubes and towels and blood, and by the time she reached us, she was faint, terrified, and it was hard to believe that, this quickly, everything was all right again.

I was already amazed at the astonishing miracle of life, and to receive now, scant hours later, a second miracle—salvation—was indescribable. I remember feeling joyous and terrified both, and wondering how other parents did it, if every hour was to be filled with this intensity of emotion.

They put Mary Katherine in an incubator for the rest of the night, with some kind of sensor taped to her, so that if she stopped breathing again—for longer than 10 seconds, I think—a buzzer would go off. The nurse said it wasn't uncommon for newborns to stop breathing, but that usually they started right back up again. She said Mary Katherine must have gotten some kind of obstruction, milk or phlegm, and briefly choked.

I hated that she couldn't be with us, her first night in the world, but the nurse assured us she'd be asleep anyway, and would never know we weren't there.

Still, I stood on the other side of the glass and watched her for most of the night. If she opened her eyes, I wanted her to see that someone was there; if the monitor failed, I wanted to be there to back it up.

I watched her sleep, and breathe; I counted the seconds between inhalations and exhalations. Once, later in the night, she stopped a second time—I was counting, with increasing concern, eight, nine, 10, as Mary Katherine stirred, increasingly uncomfortable—and by 11 I was rushing back to the nurses, though by the time we returned, she was breathing easily again.

The nurse unstrapped the monitor, examined it, recalibrated it, and tested it against the side of the bed; when it had been motionless for 10 seconds, it began to beep.

I can't remember what the nurse said, or how she explained it, though she did allow that sometimes the monitors weren't always perfect.

Bleary-eyed, I watched for the rest of the night. Mary Katherine kept breathing, and the monitor never beeped. The nurses were just across the hallway, but what was one night of lost sleep to me, in the grand scheme of things, and her very first night, at that?

What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was nothing, and she was everything.

How such knowledge saves a person, I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land where the self dissolved, and another was born. I still feel that way, anytime I look at either of my daughters, Mary Katherine or her younger sister, Lowry, and I know that other parents feel that same way—I have heard them speak of it, had in fact heard such things even before I became a parent myself, though in those earlier days, such discussions had held no meaning for me, possessing the quality of sound of a radio playing faintly in another room, with the language of the radio's music identifiable, but with the individual words, and their message, indistinguishable.

There is nothing like it, that feeling of love and responsibility you have for a child, especially a child in danger, and it's true, it's as if the self completely dissolves when you experience it. It's not a feeling that lasts forever, obviously -- but it's certainly an experience akin to a moment of spiritual transcendence. And it's not necessarily a comfortable experience at all. It can feel huge and terrifying and powerful and true. I think of this when I think of childless friends -- what would I tell them if they asked me whether they should have children? The experience is more difficult than anything else in the world, the work is so easy to screw up, and all of it is so rewarding in ways that don't necessarily feel rewarding in any way you're familiar with. And yet I feel like, at least for me, not having children would be much worse than never having fallen in love.