The Photo That Left The New Mother Out

Nine hours after they cut me open, my mother in law walked into my hospital room with eleven people behind her and told me to wait outside so the family picture could be just family.

I want to start there, in the middle of it, because that is where I was living. Not in some calm memory of a nursery. In a bed with an IV taped to the back of my hand, a catheter bag hanging off the rail where everyone walking in could see it, and compression sleeves squeezing my calves every thirty seconds with a sound like a small bellows. My incision was four layers of gauze and tape under a gown that did not close right. My daughter was asleep on my chest, one fist against my collarbone, and I had held her for maybe forty minutes total in her whole life.

Lynette came through the door first. Behind her came her sister Pam, Pam’s husband Russ, Tanner’s cousins Dana and Kyle, a great aunt named Verna from Nevada, Missouri who I had met exactly twice, and Kyle’s wife with a tripod folded under her arm like she was covering a wedding.

I should say here, before anybody asks why I did not simply tell Lynette no myself the second she walked in, that there is a difference between having the right to say something and having the strength left in your body to say it. I had been awake for most of thirty hours. I had a six inch incision across my abdomen that had been closed less than half a day. Every one of those compression sleeves on my legs was there because a blood clot after major surgery can kill a woman my age, and the nurses had told me more than once not to try sitting up straight on my own yet. Telling eleven relatives to leave would have meant raising my voice, and raising my voice would have meant tightening muscles that had just been cut through, and some fear deeper than manners kept me from finding out how much that would hurt. I was not being a doormat. I was doing math a healthy person never has to do, about what my own body could survive saying out loud.

“Just the family this time,” Lynette said, already moving the vinyl recliner out of the way to clear a spot by the window.

I want to be fair to her, because by the end of this I understood her better than I ever had before. But in that moment all I understood was that she had said the family and looked at everyone in that room except me.

My husband Tanner stood by the blinds with his arms crossed, and he did not say anything. Not yet. I will get to why.