Poppy caught my sickness. I had some strange hope that I wouldn’t get her sick. My breastmilk will protect her, I thought. 

Wrong.

Do I pack a hospital bag just in case? Can we get through this on our very own without the constant beeps and wires of the Children’s Hospital? God, I really hope so. 

I’m wondering where the break in the waves is. How do I catch my breath? I am certainly near drowning now. Postpartum depression is real… add a few (or twenty) additional trying circumstances and you get this : A continual  flux of absolute numbness and chaotic meltdown. And there is NOTHING that I can do but wait it out. Pray it lets up. Cover my eyes.

AND… The icing on the cake – tomorrow my son celebrates his 4th grade graduation at an amusement park. I was supposed to be a chaperone and spend the day watching my first baby be “cool” with his friends. Instead he will go with some other parent. He will enjoy himself and probably not even be too upset about my absence. I will ask him to tell me all about it and he will say “It was fun. I hung out with my friends and stuff.”

That will be all I will have from this moment in time. That, and a fever competition with little miss Poppy. 

No one deserves this. Not even me. Sure, I have toyed with a few hearts, broken a few rules, even fallen short on good-intentioned promises, but this is cruelty. Poppy is a fourteen pound, brown-haired, temperamental, gorgeous-smiling-princess-of-a-girl. She likes chimes and bells and rattles and swing music. She hates being in the car. She just ate rice cereal for the first time. She screams about most things. She is perfect and she doesn’t deserve this, either.

I am so sad. I can still see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s probably just a flashlight pointing toward the next tunnel. The world is terribly thick and sticky right now.