"Sugar Baby"

Yesterday we read the story of Bonnie H's harrowing, miraculous delivery of her first child. Today, the heartbreaking follow-up where her mother cruelly ignores her baby in the hospital!

By Bonnie H

It’s been 39 years, but I remember it like yesterday. My baby was two days old. I was sitting alone in my hospital room. The other moms had gone home. I had to stay longer since I had had a C section. I wouldn’t have left anyway, since my baby was lying in an incubator. She was considered a preemie, having been born five weeks early.

My baby was no bigger than a bag of sugar. So pink and beautiful. But she was a bit jaundiced. Common, they said, in preemies. Overall, she was healthy. Just tiny.

My beautiful gift from God. Holding her, I knew I had been blessed.

But my mother hadn’t bothered to visit me, or to meet my daughter.

One day, Ma came into my room carrying the biggest bag from Kmart. She told me that my cousin M and his partner, a woman who was my supposed “best friend,” had delivered their baby early that morning. Ma told me she was there to see my cousin M’s baby girl.

I hadn’t seen Ma since the night my baby girl was born and she had yelled at me for taking so long in recovery. But here she was, appearing for my cousin.

Ma sat down and showed me, item by item, everything in that big bag. All shades of pinks and yellow. Sweaters and booties. Blankets and dresses. Everything for a new baby girl.

I had a feeling. Not a good one. Ma didn’t let me touch anything. Just let me look.

Then she packed it all back up in the bag.

I asked if she wanted to see my baby. She said “I have to go.” So she took her bag and left.

*******

I watched her walk out. She never said who those things were for. I didn’t need to ask. Later that afternoon, I walked down the hall to my cousin and “best friend’s” room.” It was my first real walk since I had delivered.

It was a whole new experience in pain, but I went anyway.

I walked into my cousin’s room and on her bed was everything that Ma had shown me. My cousin and her partner were gushing about how wonderful it was of Ma to bring all these gifts.

I mumbled something like congratulations, then turned and walked out. Back to my room.

Alone.

*******

I was alone most of the time in the hospital. HE would come by but usually HE came with friends. Two days after Ma’s visit, the hospital gave us a steak dinner to celebrate. While we were eating, I got the best news! My baby girl’s jaundice had improved enough that we were being discharged that evening.

HE left to borrow his father’s truck again. When HE returned, baby and I were ready to go. It was a rainy, cold evening that October night. I don’t know why we had to stop by his father’s house, but we did. HE took way too long inside and I got upset. We argued the whole ride home.

My brother was there and so was my uncle when we walked into Ma’s house. I knew this would not be wonderful.

No one really seemed to care that we had come in. No one seemed the least bit interested in greeting my precious new baby.

They were in a deep conversation about my brother’s kids. I asked Ma if she wanted to hold the baby. She held her in such an off handed way that I told HIM to take the baby back. I said I wanted to lie down.

That’s when I found out that HE hadn’t done a single thing he was supposed to do, as far as setting up the bassinet or anything else. Again, I got upset. We argued.

I sat in the living room with baby girl in my arms while HE went upstairs and did what he had promised to do five days earlier.

That was just the beginning.

Bonnie H, an author who lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, is writing a memoir called Trauma Drama. “Sugar Baby” is the third chapter in this project. At age two, Bonnie contracted juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but the autoimmune disease wasn’t well understood in those days, and Bonnie was the victim of experimental ORTHOPEDIC treatments that no one, especially a young child, should ever have had to endure.

Bonnie never saw a rheumatologist. A local public health nurse specifically told Bonnie’s mother, Rose, to bring Bonnie to Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield but Rose, refused, saying it was waste of time.

Bonnie’s mother chose to let the orthopedists in Pittsfield, and North Adams, MA, tie her daughter up in excruciating tractions. The three sets of tractions the doctors performed on Bonnie when she was only four or five years old were absolutely torturous, and worst of all, they didn’t work. In fact, the tractions accelerated the damage to Bonnie’s joints, to the point that, when she was 25 years old, a doctor told her that she had the bones of someone in her 60s.

Today, Bonnie H — the H in my mind stands for HERO and for HOPE — is 62 years young, having survived a lifetime of agonizing physical pain and some of the worst emotional abuse imaginable. Few people could endure it, but Bonnie has managed not only to survive, but to thrive. In the four months we’ve known each other, I have only grown more awed by Bonnie’s story. It is truly one of the most inspiring I’ve ever heard, and Bonnie herself is an unbelievably courageous woman, as well as one of the most natural and gifted storytellers I’ve ever met.

One amazing coincidence — and only one of the incredible connections that Bonnie and I share: I had my second baby, Lindsay, exactly two days after Bonnie did, in the very same hospital where she suffered so much in labor and delivery.

I’ve told Bonnie repeatedly that she is more talented a writer than most of my best graduate students were at Georgetown University when I had the distinct privilege of teaching there during my sabbatical year in 2009. I’m not certain, but Bonnie finally might just be beginning to believe me.

Stay tuned for more of Bonnie’s story!