Letters I'll Never Send: II. A premature baby, or preemie, is born before the 37th week of pregnancy.

You weighed about 2 pounds when you were born. We have a picture of you as a baby, just curled up in your dad's softball glove. My Mom


Mom,

It isn't fair.

I know you hate foul language, but it isn't fucking fair.

I tell everyone I have to believe in the inherent goodness, of everything. Of people. Of many people thrown together. Of the cosmos. Of God or whatever. I believe this because of you. Because of Dad. Because two people who thought it was the right thing to do picked a scrawny, sickly baby out of an adoption catalog, and paid the money, and signed the forms, and gave that baby a better life.

That baby was me.

And here's the thing: that's all they're trying to do, too, Mom. They're just trying to have a baby and give that baby a good life. And that baby is small, Mom, smaller even than I was, just a pin's head on a chart somewhere, on a screen that monitors vital signs: lung sounds, brain waves, heart.

How do you measure heart? How do you reach in and feel around and come up with the strength it takes to survive, to thrive against the odds everyone's set for you? They just want what you and Dad wanted: a healthy, happy kid. Someone to call their own. He's got needles in him, Mom, and IVs, and every day something else seems to go wrong, but we all keep hoping, don't we? We all keep saying 'it'll be OK'.

Because it has to be.

Because if it's not, it means that awful, unthinkable, unjust things happen to good people. To the best people you know.

To people who deserve happiness in ways that only those who have suffered prejudice and funny looks and snide comments and heartache deserve to be happy.

Because I'll lose it, Mom, if it's not OK.

I have to believe this, that the world is a just place. A place where a couple of good people who love each other can decide to spread that love to another being, can bring that being into the world and can raise it to love like they do.

And here's the weird part, the part no one will understand, the part that sounds crazy: I envy them this.

If you read the things she's written, maybe you'd see the picture too, the tableau in your head of how we hold on, one to another. The misty and blue-tinted portrait of what it means to love, when one's a seething ball of rage and worry and grieving and the other's got her legs in the air, trying desperately to hold life inside, hospital-gowned and prone.

Maybe you'd see what it means to love, when the chips are really down, when the whole table's been overturned. When you think you can't.

Because even if this does go south, even if this does go the way that everyone' dreading it will, won't they really, truly still have each other?

And most days, this is what I envy, Mom. This is where I see you, see Dad at the bassinet in the middle of the night, or in the dark at our house, when the power's out and all six of us are crying. I see the hard times, the penny-pinching, and then I see us all now, twenty-some-odd years later, knowing our Mom and Dad are still together.

Most days my heart aches, and there's no one there to share it.

It's not that love is pain. It's the other way around, the burden we try to take from one another, the hurt we don't try to hide, because we don't have to.

We're all praying for this tiny baby, in any way we know how.

Somewhere in the southern states, they're doing it too, hands clasped, voices quiet. And if it comes to that, they'll still be together, a tensed muscle and a contracting pain. A wave of hurt and an inadvertent outcry. What it means to force it, to strain, to cling a little. What it is to cry and to cry, and to refuse to let it all go.

They'll still have each other.

What is it that's I've got?