trip I & II

Trip Part I
06.40am

It is still pitch black outside. Oscar and I are going on a road trip. The moon last night was a super blue blood moon and still hangs bright in the sky. The water logged tractor tracks in the field across the way glow in its light. Our car is a capsule travelling through the darkness. Oscar cries. I try Max’s trick and turn on the overhead light. He stops instantly and looks heavenward, rapt. Like an ancient Inca worshipping the sun. I look at him in the rear view mirror. The way the light catches him reminds me of the moment I first saw him after he was born. So tiny yet puffy of face.

We drive on into the blue. Clichés perhaps but the sky is inky in its lightening darkness and the trees are pencil sketches. Branches are filigree in their fineness. He sleeps on. I turn on Lyric FM and bring some music to our pod.

We drive on into the day, everything now touched with a warm glow. We glide through the pink, the clouds uplit, the hedgerows purple, the ferrous branches dip over the road. It feels good to be moving to be going somewhere new. Nothing too glamorous, but an adventure nevertheless. Our first road trip. A step out in to the world.

The day is with us now. We are no longer two in a capsule, we are one of many commuters driving through the yellow sunlight. One of many going somewhere.

We make it to our hospital check up on time, we wander the shops, have lunch, go to acupuncture, buy some plants. Pots of herbs and ferns and little dainty trailing fellas I’ve wanted for the bathroom. We go to Rachel’s and sit by the fire, catch up, I learn to bake bread. Oscar starts to cough and I hope it is nothing. We eat Arthur’s Aubergine Parmigiana and chat some more. Lucy and Sam cuddle him in bed. Lars is unsure what to make of him.

As I go to sleep I think it has all been lovely, this road trip out in to the world, but I’m ready to go home now, back to Max and Martha and Brian and that magic moon.

Trip Part II
It is the next morning and he is still coughing and not himself. We say goodbye to Rachel and set off on the 2 hour drive home. He won’t settle and so I pull over by the Forty Foot and call CareDoc as I give him a feed. People slip into the January sea without a wince. A flock of seagulls flip from a shimmer to a shadow as they play on the wind. ‘Take him to A&E straight away’ the doctor on call tells me.

And so our next road trip begins. I decide it’s ok to get him back to Wexford first, I can’t do another stretch in hospital hours away from home, but as I drive I worry about what I would do if something happened along the way.

It doesn’t. We listen to scores from Jesse James and Mary Poppins and Rebecca. I eat oatcakes and watch the rear view mirror.

***

So here we are again, back in hospital. He’s got bronchiolitis. Which we all get and get over. But tiny people can’t blow their noses like we do and they struggle to breathe through the inflammation of their bronchioles. ‘It’s like running a marathon for the little man’ a nurse tells me. And so once again our world has become tiny. It is me and Oscar in our capsule as the outside world falls away. He sleeps in the crook of my arm or belly to belly and head to chest. He is pale and tired as he looks with deep trust in to my eyes.

I read a question someone posts on Facebook; in 30 years time what will you do this week that will still matter?

I don’t even have to pause to consider.

I will have been here.