In Restrospect

In retrospect

After my stay on the psychiatric floor, I had a little secret that helped hold me together. I had regained enough common sense to know that I had to take care of myself in order to take care of my kids. But I also realized that if Jacob didn't know me enough eventually to know that I existed or that Jeremy existed - caring for him would be impossible for me. Maybe it was selfishness, expecting recognition for all that he required, but I knew myself well enough to know that caring for him physically would be hard enough, much less emotionally, and socially. I loved him, but I had the rest of my life to consider, and that of Jeremy's. I couldn't see myself sacrificing our lives for a vegetable.

Understand that even before he was born, they were saying he'd be a vegetable.

In the month after he was born, I was the vegetable. After that first month, I began to know that he wasn't as bad off as they said. He wasn't totally motionless, deaf, or retarded. There was something to him. It wasn't that I had something against mentally challenged people, or paraplegics, or people with handicaps. My motherhood accepted him as he was and I loved him with all my heart. It was the rest of Jeremy's life (and mine) that I was thinking about.

Although they scared the hell out of me about him before he was born, it was I who thought about having a baby for the rest of my life, an adult baby, and what would happen to him after I died? As crazy and disoriented as I seemed to everyone - it was because I was looking not only at the present, but also the future.

So his smile was incredibly important to me. I knew even before the first smile that he was a person, and he was everything to me, but his smile was a public notice that he was okay. Even if he was okay only to me.

I remember the first smile. Jeremy and I were baking cookies. In between sheets of cookies, I had the brilliant idea of trying baby food on Jacob, to see if he could keep that down any better than formula. It was one of those rare moments when I saw him with "normal" eyes and trusted motherhood. So we tried some rice cereal and Jeremy had a try at feeding him too. After we finished, Jacob kept watching Jeremy prance around the kitchen, and every time Jeremy approached Jacob, Jacob smiled.

Jeremy couldn't understand why I cried.

Jacob still threw up.

The second time he smiled was for Dr. Seppa, who looked over at me and said "It's nice to see that, isn't it? Makes him a person".
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