Bathroom Re-Model: Finished!

The 99% finished bathroom- two years later!

YorkFest 2019- First Place Nonfiction

YorkFest Literary Arts Competition- 2019
1st Place Nonfiction
Asahel Church

Resolution

I am married to an older woman. And while there’s a certain prestige that comes with this, one disadvantage is that there’s always a chance that your wife’s biological clock will quickly outpace your own clock for unencumbered, two income, pre-rugrat fun. But I love my wife and I did want kids. So it was just a matter of time.

Getting pregnant was disappointingly easy. I remember that night clearly- I had been doing some some soul searching lately and so I cuddled up to my wife and said- “I want you to have the desires of your heart. So I think I might be ready…” And just like that, she was pregnant.                                                                       

Pregnancy was great. What I mean is, my wife, Laura, was a great at it. Calm, healthy, glowing, pumpkinesque... And while delivery was not so great, when our daughter was born after two days of labor, I really couldn’t believe how lucky I was. She stared at us with deep thoughtful eyes that turned out to be blue- just like mine.

            Parenthood brought with it some positive changes. It inspired me to stop complaining and get a new job. It brought me to York, PA, a fabulous place to raise a family.  But as the daily grind set in, I was pretty miserable. I was in that pathetic stage of early fatherhood where your cute kid is deep down basically competition for attention from your lover.

            We tried to be hip parents- trucking our infant into bars and packing her along on wilderness trips. We told our friends, “Parenthood doesn’t have to change your life! Look at us!” But everything was different. And harder. And took longer. The truth is, I became resentful and lost sight of the precious gift I had received.

In the fall of our daughter’s second year of life, we joined my extended family for a weekend up at French Creek State Park. Our daughter was running a fever on Friday as we arrived- and we didn’t have a reliable thermometer. To make things worse, we had recently heard a story of a family who fatally overdosed their infant on Tylenol. So we were using it sparingly and hoped she would feel better. We were complete rookies. Of course, the hard work fell to Laura, who spent a lot of extra time up at the cabin trying to make sure our daughter was getting lots of sleep and nursing as much as possible. I was alternately glum and oblivious.

Saturday afternoon we were all hanging out at the main camp building. I was playing ping-pong inside and Laura was rocking our daughter, her fever higher than ever, in a hammock on the porch. Suddenly our daughter began to jerk wildly. In panic, Laura shrieked and stood up. She nearly threw our daughter into the hands of my brother, a neurosurgeon resident who happened to be standing nearby. My mother was yelling at him, “Do something! Do something!” Of course there wasn’t anything to do at that moment but hold that tiny little girl gently and wait for the seizure to pass. As I sprinted out the door and on to the porch I saw a small bubble appear at the corner of her mouth- and then she was still. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

Tears streamed down my face and all I could think of was how poorly I had loved her, how profoundly I had failed to value my own child.

Someone ran for a wet towel while someone else stripped her down to a diaper. Of course, she was far too hot. She lay comatose, but she was alive. We waited for the ambulance, and then the long drive to Reading Hospital, x-rays to check for infection, and ultimately the wonderful news. She was fine. Nothing that the right dose of Tylenol couldn’t have probably prevented. 

The upside of your child having a febrile seizure is that the long term outcome is relatively benign while the event itself is an incredibly effective wake up call to being a much better parent.

Since that day I have often thought of others, who have suffered loss. To anyone who is childless and infertile, to the heartbroken parents who have lost a son or daughter, I am sorry. How could I hold something so precious to be so inconvenient? Somewhere in the panic of it all, a resolution had grown in my heart. I wasn’t going to be the same. I was going to love our daughter, Jericho Faye Church, just as much as I possibly could.

Hear my oral telling of this story at StorySlam.