Our daughter’s fever hit one hundred and four, and the night split my life in two. In the humming fluorescent quiet of the ER, with June burning in my arms and the smell of antiseptic in the air, I watched my husband call his mother to come rescue him from his own child. When Sylvia walked in and screamed that he hadn’t signed up for this, something old and sour uncoiled in my chest. I saw every woman who had ever been left holding the baby while a man rehearsed his exit. I saw the way this story would calcify if I let it. So I shifted June higher on my hip, squared my shoulders, and decided this night would not end the way his moth… Continues…
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