Subtle Damage
This is all speculation. A memoir by Erin Jamieson
A week after I was born, you had seizures.
You’d never had anything like that, nor had you displayed any abnormalities after you were born. Mom didn’t know what to do, she had a newborn baby and for some reason, Nana and Papa must have been away or somehow unable to help. She was terrified, I think, that she was going to lose you. I wonder if that week, that fear of losing you, and not knowing what to do with me, stayed with her more than she or any of us will ever fully know.
So she took me to her best friend’s house, who herself had had a son only about a month before. And she took you to see if anyone could stop the seizures.
But the thing is, they stopped on their own.
It was a miracle or a nightmare, depending on how you look at it. A miracle that they stopped, bad luck that they started in the first place. I of course cannot remember any of this and maybe that is a good thing. I would not have wanted to be there to witness Mom getting so upset. I wouldn't have wanted to be there to see your tiny scared face as seizures rocked your body. If you were able to be scared at all that is. I doubt you fully understood what was happening at all.
I imagine how things went. I imagine Mom came home with you in her arms, I imagine she did not ever want to let go. I imagine that was one of the most frightening times of her life, and I can tell in part by how often she tells it.
But eventually, time passed and you had no more seizures. Eventually, even Mom let you start to resume your normal toddler activities.
You went on play dates with her friend's older children as I stayed wrapped up in a blanket stroller. As you got older, the two of you went to garage sales where you selected action figures, or “men” as you called them. You lived as any toddler would, with the exception of having at times an overprotective mother.
She did ask, many times, if there would be any lasting damage. Suppose the seizures had done anything to harm you long-term. I imagine this as a stressful time, although I have no way of knowing if she poured over articles the way she looks up symptoms and cures on the internet for various aches and pains to this day. I know she did everything to find her own answers herself. She never did believe in trusting physicians completely just at their word, and while sometimes she was wrong or paranoid, later, as we both know, her insistence would prove her right and quite possibly even though I don't want to admit it, in part saving my life.
But then it was a toss-up, the way things always are. It was a toss-up whether back then she had a reason to doubt the doctors or something about her was terrified, even then to lose you. Even though the doctors insisted there would be no damage, she did everything she could to make sure you would be safe, and I suspect that trickled down to me by default.
This is all speculation. Of course, I have never had a child, and you have not when I last checked.
But when the doctors said there would be no lasting damage, they did truly believe that. And there is no sign that they were wrong, from a medical perspective. There is no evidence, for example, that the exhaustion seizures you would suffer from shy of two decades later were related in any way, though Mom always insists that they were.
The problem is this: when we talk about damage, we all sound like we are having the same conversation but we really mean many things at once. There are too many ways someone can be damaged to put a firm label on it, to quantify or qualify it.
There is no way of estimating emotional damage, invisible scars we wear every day as we put a good face on others.
Those seizures may not have changed you in any way the first time, but they changed Mom. They showed her just how vulnerable a happy life was. They showed her that the most terrible and unexpected can happen no matter what you do.
Because sometimes damage isn’t obvious, and sometimes damage comes in forms and ways we can do little to control.
Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairytales (Bottle Cap Press.) Her debut novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams, was published by Type Eighteen Books.
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