UP | Hanna Saltzman
I’m shoving a spatula through egg yolks when I feel a tug on the bottom of my scrubs. “Up!” my one-year-old son shouts, giving the word a long preamble and emphatic closing “T”: UuuuuuuuuuuppT!” He reaches toward me, chubby hands smeared with cheese. I take a swig of coffee and wonder if this morning feels as strange to him as it does to me. Instead of cramming my breast pump next to my stethoscope then leaving home in the dark, today I’m in the exact scene I dream about while watching the numbers on the hospital clock cruise from daybreak to bedtime: my beloved baby and I are together in our little yellow kitchen, June sunlight streaming through the windows.
But my head thrums with migraine, electricity shooting from that familiar knot above my right scapula up to my temporal artery, which pulses with pain. My shoulders are hunched, belly clenched, breath tight, my body folding toward the ground in this posture that has become my normal. This is the posture that my mental health therapist, who noticed my stoop even through the computer screen as I hid in a call room to do a therapy session over Zoom, labeled “overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system.” This is the posture that my bodywork therapist (I pay one therapist for mind, one for body, as though they were separate) called “appropriate activation” in the face of a large stress. “Your shoulders,” he said while kneading the hurt beneath my skin, “are your body protecting you.” Sometimes I forget that it is not normal to witness children die.
My bowed body, trying to guard me from the code-blue alarms, the crunch of chest compressions, the gasps of the small mouths that once opened begging for breastmilk and now open begging for air.
My bent-over body, trying to shelter me from the beeps of plummeting blood pressures and the whir of breathing machines and the teary whimpers of children who are dying but still awake enough to be scared and the guttural screams of their parents who cradle their children’s dead bodies like they cradled them as newborns.
My breaking body, trying to save me from the big black moons of pupils that do not move even in the harshest light, those dark unmoving moons that are circles not ellipses, that are eclipses, that are lives eclipsed and I need an ellipsis but there is no time for a pause, no dot dot dot just beep beep beep and dead dead dead.
Thus my shoulders fold over me, flightless wings wrapping me as tight as I imagine wrapping my body around my son until he dissolves back into my womb where he would be safe, flightless wings carrying my bag of breastmilk and binding my ribs into a cage to keep my breath held and my face turned toward the ground.
But right now as I am looking down, I see my child stretching his arms toward me like a V of wild geese. “Mama,” he says, his voice radiant as a bell: a meditation bell, a church bell, a summer bluebell so brilliant it’s impossible to just walk by. As a pediatrician I know that one year olds do not yet put words together into phrases or sentences. Nonetheless, as he says his words one after another, they soar to me like a spell to break my spell: “Mama! Hello! UuuuuuuuuuuppT!”
Hanna Saltzman is a writer, pediatrician and mother in Salt Lake City, where she is pursuing a pediatric rheumatology fellowship. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, Terrain.org, the Examined Life Journal, and numerous medical journals, including selection for the 2024 Notable Essay list by Best American Essays. Her essay “Split” appeared in the Spring 2021 Intima. Read more at hannasaltzman.com.