Our daughter eats tomatoes like they are apples. She tells me she does not like them cut up. She will not eat them with a fork. She eats the large ones in two bites.

            I like to tell people I was in labor with her for three days, even though I was trained to know otherwise because I am a practicing Family Medicine physician. The obstetricians do not consider the time my uterus was an underripe melon, the time they gave me medicine to turn it into an open-watermelon “active labor.” And during this time, I held in my breath, I held in myself, as if I could delay the inevitable a little bit longer. My husband and I were planning our wedding when we discovered I was pregnant with our daughter.

            Before I went through it myself, I did not realize how fast the active labor phase would be. Three pushes, and my daughter was out in the world. The moments after her birth were in the slow motion of memory or dream. She was blue and quiet, and I could hear the tick-tock of the clock on the beige wall of the hospital room. When I heard sudden shuffling, I turned my head and saw several nurses give her blow-by oxygen. The air was so still. Then the crying started. I felt more a rush of relief than love. 

            Her first night in the hospital, an older nurse held her and sang her a song. She looked like an angel in her white hospital onesie. The nurse handed our daughter to me and left the room. And then, again, our daughter cried and cried. She cried while all I could think of was sleep. She continued to cry while I thought of all the ways I did not know how to mother her. I must have fallen asleep with her on me because the room started to have the glow of the pink of early morning, and she was asleep on my chest.

            Our daughter did not breastfeed. The lactation consultants showed me several positions to try; I tried the SNS tube, and I whispered in my daughter’s ear about how breast milk was best for her. But still she would not do it.

            My husband stayed home with our daughter while I finished my medical training and worked my first job as a primary care physician. I spent the nights at home wondering if I sent too few or too many patients to the Emergency Department. I spent the days with the guilt that I spent so much time away from my husband and daughter.

            She did not talk for the first two years of her life. A speech therapist worked with our daughter twice a week for six months. On a whim, we took a trip to the mountains for her second Christmas, and none of us had warm enough clothes, but my daughter laughed and played in her first snow anyway, making snowballs with her tiny bare hands. When we got back to the hotel room, our daughter was upset, and we couldn’t figure out why. I lay down with her in the bed and held her tight against my chest. I felt a long breath come out of me and finally felt how deeply I loved my child.

            After coming home, the next day, my husband, our daughter, and I walked to the park. She started talking. She told us that she was a bird. And that she was flying in an orange sky when everything started turning purple and that she grew tired and her wings were suddenly heavy, and that she used all her strength to fly to the warmth of the sun because the winter wind was cold.

            She closed her eyes, and then she was Ava.

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