I just noticed the article, just skimmed it; I was on the crapper and there’s only so much newspaper you can handle in 15 minutes, after the juicy financial scandals and the drug scandals on the sports pages, how much else can you read? I got the headline – Premature Births something something, and the picture – someone inside an incubator – with a descriptive caption, and something about trends and whatever. My wife mentioned later she had read the article, she reads every one that crosses her path, because she is interested and not as haughty and let’s be honest, vain as I am, not as convinced that she knows all about it because we do know something about it, having had two ourselves. Rather, she had them, of course, I was in the vicinity. She said the article was full of scary statements about what can go wrong when you are born early, and it is a long list indeed. The first guy I met in Vienna, showed me around town, he was blind, too much oxygen in the incubator. When our first one was born too early, on my first visit to her, the doctor told me, 90% chance she will have a normal brain.
So there is a great deal to worry about. A long, long list.
Journalists love that aspect. Scaring people is a big industry now. So with that disclaimer, that caveat, whatever, let me tell you this: it is theoretically possible for things to go well. There is a good chance they will, and that chance gets better with time, as technology and medical practices improve.
I would like to list for you the things that I know from experience can go right, but I have foresworn bragging about my children, and if I told you about them in any detail it would sound like bragging. So it’s all a big secret. All I can say is, things can go very well. You can have a fright like this, seeing a child born at 1272 grams and shrink down to 1000 before starting to gain weight, that forms your expectations to a point where seeing your child sit up on her own, let alone walk, makes every day feel like Thanksgiving Day and then the child can develop into someone so very exceptional and excellent that you don’t know where to start thanking whom. Things, I can’t tell you exactly what, can be so amazing; you can have such unexpected adventures, which remain secret.
And despite all that, you can also forget it for an instant, get mad, get impatient, whatever. We are only human. But you can also remember. You can be sitting there at a table in a slow Asian restaurant with a sore back, tired and hungry, and be overwhelmed by your child’s beauty and perfection, by the way her muscles move beneath her skin and the way her dark hair falls, the color of her eyes and shape of her nose, the way she makes conversation and the fact that she can sit up straight and walk under her own steam, not to mention all the excellence I can’t tell you about. Things can go very well, pray they always do.