Delusional Hope

Spring comes to Florida first, and if the rising temperature and wave of humidity sends you running for air conditioned shelter, you’ll miss the bougainvillea, and the butterflies, and the last bit of crisp morning air.

My three-year-old daughters and I have been sitting on the back patio in the mornings. I carry a coffee cup; they carry a brood of two stuffed monkeys, a bear, an elephant, and a pair of beluga whales. Their identical brown curls fall into their faces as they stand on chairs and peer into the butterfly nursery to watch me mist the six chrysalides. Their tiny piano hands—genetic copies of mine—reach for the spray bottle, and they plead with me to let them help.

“More water,” they say.
“Vivi can do it,” one says.
“No, Margot do it,” insists the other.

The butterfly project is our first unofficial homeschooling module. My mother arrived with live caterpillars and a manual, and wished me the best of luck. I thanked my mom, and Vivienne used her baby voice to talk about how small the caterpillars were. Margot let me know no fewer than eighteen times that they were very hungry. And when the caterpillars turned into chrysalides, my toddlers wondered where their active, twelve-eyed friends had gone. I assured them something beautiful was coming soon.

With the spring sun beginning to steal the shade from the patio, I pull old plants from our hydroponic garden. I show my daughters the long roots, explaining that roots are how the plant draws water and nutrition.

“Plants need light to grow. They use their leaves to soak up the light,” I tell them.

“Soak up the light,” they repeat in unison, and I expound on how we all need nutrition to grow from seedlings into plants or from tiny babies into big girls.

As I say it, I notice just how big my girls have become. Their bodies, at first fragile and floppy and later short and round, are so long and strong now. They walk and run with confidence. Margot’s extra chubby cheeks used to make me wonder if the twins were truly identical, but they are barely there now. All that’s left of their infancy are the extra long eyelashes and the scars across their bodies.

“Vivi was a very tiny baby, mamá,” my daughter says to me in a whimper, and I can tell where this is going.

“Show me photos,” her twin sister chimes in.

The more we talk about butterflies and babies, the more often they ask to see these photos. I’ve shielded my daughters from the most gruesome photos of their seven and a half months in the neonatal intensive care unit, but they’ve seen a picture here or there. And lately, they’ve noticed things they didn’t before.

In December of 2019, my daughters were born more than seventeen weeks early. Just days before the longest night of the year, they ushered in the darkest season of my life. They came into this world on the cusp of viability. Their eyes were still fused shut; their skin was so thin, I could see their heartbeat fluttering just below the surface. The medical community called them periviable, meaning around or about the time their bodies had potential to work. The thing about potential is most of the time it’s unrealized.

I open my photos and scroll to the winter that bridged 2019 to 2020. The first picture is Margot. She weighs one pound and four ounces, and measures eleven inches long. She’s partially swaddled, her eyes are covered with the tiniest mask. Her skin is dark with bruises, and there is not a gram of fat on her body. The next photo of Vivienne is almost the same, but lacks the bruising.

The girls ask me about the tubes in their mouths and their noses and about the ostomy bags attached to their bellies. They remark on how large everyone’s hands are, not yet understanding how one-pound babies affect the perspective of a photograph.

Through the winter, we lived in a neonatal intensive care unit. Despite floor to ceiling windows, the room was always dark to protect their developing eyes. For the better half of a year, I sat in a blue hospital chair, while my daughters’ lives were sustained by machines. They were cut open, disassembled, and put back together half a dozen times. Their condition was so critical that to hope felt delusional and irresponsible, but how could I not? Mothers are wired to hope for their children.

Then Margot stopped breathing.

In that dark, cold hospital room with beige walls and blue chairs, her heart stopped. Her nurse rang the code bell and gave chest compressions. My husband watched a dozen medical personnel storm Margot’s hospital room while the lines on her monitor went flat.

It doesn’t make sense that a baby so small could withstand such an intervention, but my little girl rose from the dead that day. Her resurrection gave me permission to believe in impossible things—like a future with my daughters.

With the bougainvillea in bloom, Vivi was discharged from the hospital the spring after she was born. When we get to the photos of her homecoming, Vivi asks me, “But where is Margot, Mamá?”

“Yeah, where is Margot?” She questions her own whereabouts in the third person, as three-year-olds do.

“Margot was still very sick. She couldn’t come home yet.” I tell them. My whisper cracks as I feel their feelings and remember my own.

At three, my daughters understand more about being very sick than most adults I know. This past Christmas Margot spent a week in the hospital with pneumonia. It was the first time my daughters had been apart since Margot was discharged after 224 days in NICU in the summer of 2020. Our Christmas at the children’s hospital gave the girls context for what it means to be very sick. It gave them context for the story of their birth, which I’d been telling them for quite some time.

Just before Easter of 2020, I dragged my mother—or abuela, as she is known—to a tattoo studio. She nearly passed out in the ten minutes it took to tattoo Talitha Koum on our forearms. “Little girl, I say you, arise,” Jesus said in Mark 5:41, and the little girl got up.

For the three months between Vivienne’s discharge and Margot’s, I had more questions about God than faith in him, but I needed someone or something else to be in control of the mess, so I kept praying. While we waited for Margot to come out of surgery, and then again during her recovery, every time I rested my head on the side of her bed, I whispered, “Talitha koum. Get up, Gogo. Get up!”

The day we brought Margot home from the hospital, the crepe myrtle in our front yard was flowering, an explosion of pink, and a few monarchs were still flitting about. I skip all the photos from the time my daughters were separated, and I land on a family photo in which my husband and parents surround me holding my two baby girls. I am beaming. My mother is in tears.

“Abuela is crying,” Margot tells me.
“Yes, Abuela is crying,” I confirm.

I explain that sometimes something is so beautiful and so happy it makes you cry—like when a new baby is born or chrysalis turns into a butterfly. I remind them they were the tiniest, sickest babies, who, against all odds, turned into these wondrous, inquisitive big girls. And this makes us all so happy that sometimes we cry.

“Abuela is crying. She is happy,” Vivi summarizes for her sister. Margot nods in understanding and lets out a giggle.

For twelve days, my daughters press their faces up to the mesh of the butterfly nursery every morning. They wonder aloud how this tiny, ugly cocoon could possibly turn into something beautiful.

“A butterfly is going to come out of that, Mamá?” Vivi asks.

“Yes, a butterfly is coming!” Margot reassures her sister, before turning to me to ask, “But how?”

When the butterflies finally emerge, my toddlers watch in awe as I gently release them from the nursery. I watch my girls chase the monarchs across the yard, until the last of the bright orange wings are out of sight. Perhaps delusional hope is just what we need to lay the groundwork for wonder.

Guest essay written by Laura Diaz Freeland. Laura is a blogger, author, and mother to a pair of the tiniest twins. Her debut book, Lindy the Penguin, sold five copies in 1994—four of which were purchased by her parents—but she’s still trying to make writing work. Her memoir, Not What I Had in Mind: A Motherhood Origin Story, chronicles her twins’ births and the fight for their lives and will be published in November 2023.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.