PREFACE

She remembers exactly where she was when the idea came to her that she must break her son's hip; oddly, it is the clearest memory of her life. 

Before that moment, the clearest memory would have been when they put him in her arms for the first time, a few hours after he was born.  She had not held him right after his birth - a C-section, they had whisked him away, a rushing contingent of pediatric doctors and nurses, his father fluttering in their wake, anxious about his newborn son, whose gender he had not seemed to care about until now.  She was left behind, splayed and open and bleeding, the remainder of the medical team left to the anti-climatic task of stitching her closed, and tucking her battered, unfeeling, anesthetized body into a recovery bed.  They did show him to her, for a brief moment before they all seemed to disappear, with the scrap of baby that all this waiting and planning and discomfort and, finally, agony had been about.  But she was too tired to care at that point.  She heard herself say, "Oh! He looks like my Dad!" but felt nothing about those words, and was happy to see them take him away.  She could not muster anything more.  She knew she had failed at her first task as a mother - her baby had to be cut from her body, she had not given birth - so this inability to feel anything upon first seeing her son seemed a very small slight.

The moment that would produce that wonderful, exquisitely clear memory came a few hours later - in the deep hours of the morning when only those who are very sad or very happy are awake.  She was alone in a regular hospital room now.  Her husband had made all the necessary calls to announce his heir to the world, adding the postscript that she was ‘resting comfortably,' and had gone home for what was left of the night.  The hard edge of pain and fear inside her slowly softened; she began to think about her baby - no longer in her, breathing, eating and excreting through her, but in the world, a separate being, existing wholly apart from her body.  Her son, out there alone, without her protection. 

"Nurse!" she yelled, as her thumb hit the call button furiously, imperiously.  She had never heard this tone in her voice - the sound of a sovereign, one who would not be denied.

"My goodness, what is it, Mrs. Genco?   Is something wrong?"  Beneath the annoyance there was concern in the nurse's voice and speed in her step as she entered the room.  The staff was not used to patients on this floor behaving this way.

Drained by her sudden burst of energy, she lay back on the pillows.  "My baby... I mean... well, I was sort of out of it earlier.  He's OK, isn't he?"  She laughed nervously. "I mean, he has all his fingers and toes?"

The nurse's world righted itself, her face relaxed.  "Would you like me to bring him to you?" she asked kindly.

And there he was, a warm sack of flesh, precisely the dimensions against her belly as he had been inside, just spread out more comfortably and loose.  She held him higher than her uterus, closer to her breasts, away from the soreness of her incision.  She studied him closely, starting with his wise face and sleepy blue eyes, his wild hair - black & spiky like a punk rockers, she thought, with an incongruous patch of golden blond above his left temple - and worked her way down to his toes, counting and measuring and marveling at each tiny part, fully imprinting the image of her child, in an untaught, unrecorded ritual repeated millions of times before her.  Like all mothers engaged in this ritual before her, she had never felt such fear at what could be taken from her, nor such power to stop any enemy who tried.

And until 18 years later, when she decided she must break his hip and save him, this moment would be the most intense of all her memories.