Before and After Birth

When Finnegan was born two years ago, it took me nearly two months to announce his birth. 

When I was pregnant, I pre-wrote so many birth announcements. At first, I endlessly edited lighthearted missives peppered with jokes about how Emmett and I had named him after Ice-T’s Law & Order: SVU character and a James Joyce book I never finished. Then, later, when my pregnancy got very complicated and Finnegan’s odds of survival were unknown, I wrote them as a form of wishful thinking. The motherhood equivalent of a teenager endlessly writing the name of her crush in loopy cursive in her notebook.

But after Finnegan was born, I couldn’t write a thing. That time was so dark and hard and doing anything that presumed his continued existence felt like tempting fate. For months, I left texts unanswered, let DMs languish, and filed emails without reading them. It was only when we finally began to see the light at the end of the proverbial NICU tunnel that it felt safe to post about him. And even after that, it took a long time to write more than a paragraph or two before falling apart.

Today, Finnegan’s birth story – the beginning of that tough time – was published in Entropy. The link is a bit buggy, but if would mean a lot if you’d hit refresh and then read it. I’m proud of this piece, and of the incredible little kid who somehow emerged from it all beautifully.