Happiness
By: Heather Harpham
A memoir.
Finding happiness in the unexpectedness of life.
From the cover:
Happiness begins with a charming courtship between hopelessly attracted opposites: Heather, a world-roaming California girl, and Brian, an intellectual, homebody writer, kind and slyly funny, but loath to leave his Upper West Side studio. Their magical interlude ends, full stop, when Heather becomes pregnant—Brian is sure he loves her, only he doesn't want kids. Heather returns to California to deliver their daughter alone, buoyed by family and friends. Mere hours after Gracie's arrival, Heather's bliss is interrupted when a nurse wakes her, "Get dressed, your baby is in trouble."
This is not how Heather had imagined new motherhood – alone, heartsick, an unexpectedly solo caretaker of a baby who smelled "like sliced apples and salted pretzels" but might be perilously ill. Brian reappears as Gracie's condition grows dire; together Heather and Brian have to decide what they are willing to risk to ensure their girl sees adulthood.
Why should you read this book?
Heather Harpham shows us how unpredictable life can be. She loves a man who’s unsure if he wants children. She gets pregnant and moves across the country to live with her mom. When her daughter arrives, the joy is replaced by fear as they find out she has a rare blood disorder. Now she has to manage life with a sick child thousands of miles away from the man she loves. This book is about the struggle of parents who have a child with a chronic illness. It’s also about a struggling relationship and rediscovering what’s most important in life.
Excerpts:
“My first child, my girl, was born just before seven on a spring night, perfect. She was compact and fully formed, a little over five pounds. She smelled like sliced apple and salted pretzels, like the innocent recent arrival from a saline world that she was. But the midwife was worried. “She’s small for gestational age,” she kept saying. “Any problems or issues during pregnancy?” I wanted to ask her if heartbreak counted. If sharing a bed with a good-hearted dog, rather than the baby’s father, might do it. “Also,” the midwife said, “she looks a little jaundiced.”
“The 4 a.m. doctor was short and bespectacled with a round, soft face. A pleasant-looking bearer of bad news; he seemed personally pained by what he was about to say. He started by explaining the baby had high levels of something I didn’t catch, emphasizing the need to transfer “the patient” to a larger hospital. “Right,” I said, trying to muster a little dignity in my flapping nightshirt. “But what is actually wrong with her?” “Your baby is at risk of brain damage or”—he paused and glanced around the room as though looking for something he’d mislaid—“death.”
“He explained that her red cells lacked stability and were breaking apart in the bloodstream. The iron inside each cell was spilling into the blood and floating freely throughout her body, at risk of lodging into the soft tissue of her brain. “So you are saying what, exactly?” I said. “She’s at risk for rust head?” He looked at me, appraising. A long silent moment went by. “That’s humor,” he said finally, “common coping mechanism.”
At the door he added, “We need to clean her blood immediately. We’re transferring you to UCSF Med Center. The ambulance is waiting.” University of California San Francisco Medical Center, the place I’d elected not to give birth. The big-city hospital. The tall, silver fortress on top of the hill, across the Golden Gate. The last place on earth a brand-new baby wants to go.”
When Heather found out she was pregnant, she told her boyfriend Brian:
“I love you,” he said. “That is as much as I know.” He began to cry. I had this shock; he felt as abandoned as I did. My choice was making it impossible, from his point of view, for us to continue to be together. His choice, from my point of view, was the worst choice of all time. I understood his dilemma on a cognitive level, sort of, but on a gut level I just kept thinking, If two people are in love, and one of them is pregnant, show me the problem! Point to it! There is no problem.”
“Maybe I’d been viewing his resistance too narrowly. Maybe Brian’s fear of being a father was not about losing his identity as a writer. Maybe he was afraid to love another human being as profoundly as one loves a child. He was empathic in the extreme; his child’s worries, his child’s trials, would be Brian’s, millisecond by millisecond. It would be as if they shared a central nervous system. Such a symbiotic existence sounded almost unbearable, even to me. Maybe he was accepting himself for who he was, someone with finite limits in the realm of human attachment.”
“By the time Amelia-Grace was three months old, she had had four blood transfusions. Four times she had been readmitted into the hospital. The staff poked and poked to obtain samples of her blood to compare with the samples of the donor blood. Poked and poked to get an IV into her infant veins. Hung the bag of blood above her head, attached the tubing to the IV, attached the leads for the heart and pulse/oxygen monitors to ensure her miniature organs were not swamped by the flood of new blood. Waited for the slow drip. Unhooked the leads, slid out the IV needle, and discharged her. Four times.
Brian hadn’t been there for any of this. Not one second of one hour of one day. He’d heard about it all in detail. He’d looked at it from every angle on medical websites. But that was nothing, just words, images, information. Not a lived moment with a breathing baby.
And then one night he said, “How would it be if I came there?”
I wanted him to want to see her. I wanted him to demand to see her. I was determined not to poison Gracie’s relationship with her dad with my own lingering anger or expectations. My mother had always, even when she was furious with my dad, fiercely protected my right to love my dad, to know my dad, free from her critique. I would try to do the same for Gracie. But personally, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him.”
About the Author
Heather Harpham has written several solo plays, including Happiness and BURNING which toured nationally. Her fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in MORE Magazine and Water~Stone Review.