Max was born eight years and 359 days ago, in an OR where I later spent the majority of my work life, tying the OB’s gown too tight if he had annoyed me and giving cricoid pressure,until anesthesia said go. I don’t remember it. It’s partly the interposing nine years, it’s partly the decade I haven’t slept a full night, it’s mostly the Versed I got because I was crying with anxiety. Versed is an anxiolytic, and a good one; it’s also an amnesiac. I don’t remember anything from grabbing a CD for the OR until an hour later, when I feebly protested Max being supplemented with formula until they told me his glucose was 22.

When I see my section scar, I don’t think of my surgery, or of how it changed his sister’s birth so profoundly four years later. I think of the hour I’m missing. An hour, it’s such a short time — it’s a medium-long commute, half of a movie, a CD length — but in that particular hour was my son’s birth. He had beautiful blue eyes and an Apgar of 4. I’m not sorry that I don’t remember them bagging him, or the studied calm of the pediatrician as he listened; I know all of those things and how they look and how the Ambu bag smells faintly of plastic and the feel of it refilling in your hand. I know that everyone was calm and spoke in measured voices and that the laryngoscope and ET tube appeared smoothly at the pediatrician’s right, and I know that their eyebrows raised above their masks as they considered intubation. I know all these things, because I did them for hundreds of babies later while their mothers were sewn back up, usually not even aware that their baby was not breathing. I don’t need to remember them.

This is what I remember: my son, 3900 grams at 36 weeks EGA, nursing like a full-termer. I remember his carseat tolerance test. I remember the oh-so-slow laps we took around the unit. I remember nursing him in his room on Infants Medical at Children’s during his readmit. I remember taking him home for good. I remember waking up in the night to look at him, so improbably there. I remember how his head smelled,when he slept. I remember all the days and nights in the nine years since, and that missing hour matters less to me. Last night I checked,on him as he slept, sprawled open-mouthed in his too-small pajamas, the blankets kicked down around his feet, and if I closed my eyes he sounded just like he did those first long nights together. I still marvel that he’s here. I still kiss him while he sleeps and whisper in his ear. I still remember.