What We Didn’t Know by Sharon Gusky

In our first trimester we took vitamins and drank milk. In our second, we felt for movements and carried home ultrasounds. When asked what we wanted, boy or girl, we resorted to the obvious—”as long as they’re healthy,” we said. 

Our mothers told us baby showers were given only shortly before. “Just in case,” they whispered. We brought home gifts packed in our hatchbacks: baby monitors, bottle sterilizers, rear-facing car seats, rubber-dipped spoons.

In the delivery room we listened for their strong cries. We looked them over, inspected their tiny faces, felt their downy backs. We had them vaccinated. Polio, rubella, smallpox: worries of an earlier generation.

We kept them from honey and cows’ milk. We counted nubs of teeth. We laid them on their stomachs and watched them as they slept. We read up on SIDS, and retested nursery monitors, again, and then again.

We rested when we could.

When they rolled over, we checked it off our list. When they responded to their name, waved goodbye, played peek-a-boo, we checked those off. We followed them when they crawled, and encouraged first steps. We noticed children who walked, and children who talked. We noticed those who didn’t. We consoled parents. “Children develop at different rates,” we said. We consoled ourselves. 

We benchmarked and measured. We memorized charts. The first years, we knew what to expect.

We learned about the suspected link between vaccines and autism. When they passed the critical age of onset, their fourth birthday, we were relieved. At eight, concerns about Asperger’s diminished. Some of us wondered why we’d been spared; some of us, why we hadn’t.

We heard about their classmates: ADHD, bed wetters, chronic fatigue syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia, Tourette’s, bipolar, bone cancer. We shook our heads. They’re only children! We wondered what those parents’ discovery had been like, what it would have been like for us, if it had been us. 

Before we understood the behaviors were symptoms, had we been impatient with their complaining, their noncompliance, their constant-intentional-rebellious-tedious-infuriating disregard? Had we gotten frustrated with their laziness, with their wet sheets? Had we gotten angry? Had we punished?  

Once we understood, did we feel guilty? Did we try to explain to them? Apologize? Did we ask ourselves if we should have known? Question why we hadn’t? 

Did we wonder what else we didn’t know?

Was what we didn’t know in a bottle behind the vent grate in their bedroom? In a Ziplock bag taped above their dresser drawer? 

Was what we didn’t know anorexia, or anxiety, or depression? Was it cutting? Was it the surreal moment EMTs got to our house; would we enter into someone else’s tragedy, a nightmare with red and blue lights pulsing across living room walls, a horror we wouldn’t accept or believe was our own? Was it the strange cast of emergency responders and officers passing like a blur, in and out of rooms, their voices muffled by garbled static from two-way radios that hung from their belts?

Was it the meals brought to the house? Sympathies left by the door? Condolences kept warm in CorningWare, sealed in Tupperware? That we’d wade through forms, brace for a service, choose a cemetery, a plot, a casket? That we’d be guided to have the obituary say “unexpectedly,” and that for the rest of our lives we would pause at an obituary that read “unexpectedly?” 

Was it that we would have to find photographs for the service? Birthdays, kindergarten, soccer, summer vacations, the eighth-grade dance.  On the first page of their photo album: the grainy ultrasound, in which we had once made out a head, a torso, a hand. The image we’d brought to work, kept on our desk.

Was it that we would have to go into their bedroom to pick out the clothes—that we would let no one else do this?

That the church would organize a buffet, a choir, a reception? That at the end of the service we would be given a few moments, which would somehow become our last few moments. We would pour ourselves into these; drape ourselves across the closed casket; have to be pulled away. That years later we would remember only fragments of that day.

That counselors would be stationed at the schools that week, made available. That a Facebook page would become a forum for grief, daily posts, online mourning, a virtual gathering place we would leave up for years so their friends could grieve—so we could. 

Was it that we would spend hours, then months—when no one else was home—sitting in their room? That their room would become a shrine we’d allow only family to enter. That we wouldn’t move from the house even when we’d lost our job and should’ve moved.

That we’d linger on posts of mementos left at their gravestone: bouquets, stuffed animals, poetry on school-lined paper, tickets to a prom. That we’d check their page every few hours; sometimes, every few minutes. That we’d keep our phones in our hands. 

Or was it that after posts began to dwindle, when their friends left for college, married, moved, moved on, we’d start to leave their bedroom door open; we’d donate clothes, pack awards, tuck concert tickets, journals, and yearbooks into cardboard boxes we’d move to the attic. That despite the promises we’d made, though we swore we never would, we’d stop pausing to linger at each memory; we’d let the details fade.  

Sharon Gusky earned her MFA in fiction from Bennington College and has been a Fiction Contributor at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She divides her time between Wisconsin and Philadelphia. 

24 June 2022