Foust 2nd draft of first assignment (much shorter)

Trimesters

1.

Welcome to your second trimester, also referred to as the "golden trimester" by many!  This is referred to as the "golden trimester" for many reasons:  First of all you are no longer experiencing many of the initial symptoms of early pregnancy.  You are also in that middle period where the baby is not yet big enough to create new pains in your body.  Gone (for the most part) are the nauseous feelings and sleepless nights.  You are starting to regain that energy that you never thought would return and you are very optimistic about your pregnancy.  http://www.babychitchat.com/5/second-trimester/

In my mother’s second trimester of carrying me, she begins to bleed. The bleeding stops when she is given the DES that, 56 years later,  Wikipedia tells me causes defects in the reproductive organs of female fetuses—defects often leading to miscarriage. DES gave my mother a pass on miscarriage, and she passes it on to me.

I spend most of my golden trimester in three hospitals: St. Vincent’s in New York and Marin General and Pacific Presbyterian in San Francisco. During that time and on through the even-less-golden third trimester my son grows in a chemical soup of the magnesium sulfate that drips from an IV into my wrist and terbutaline pumped through a needle inserted into the muscle of my thigh.

In his second trimester, my son grows from an invisible blastula into a comma, a grain of rice. On the ultrasounds, his heartbeat looks like a pulsating star. He swells into seed, a lima bean, and I feel him move. He is a blind, newborn kitten, and I can see his face. I see him bring his thumb to his mouth. I see him open his eyes.

2.

The life expectancy of a male born in the US in 1988 is about 77 years. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html .On the first day of the first trimester of my son’s expected life outside the womb, the doctor delivering him reaches inside me to slip a finger underneath the cord wound that is wrapped like wire around my son’s neck. When the cord breaks, it bleeds like any torn artery, and my son loses two- thirds of his blood volume, most of it onto the green wall beyond my stirruped feet.

My son spends an indeterminate number of seconds lasting an eternity still in the birth canal, disconnected from his placenta. During another indeterminate number of seconds lasting an eternity, he lies in terrible silence on a steel table surrounded by a thicket of green scrubs whose hands work over and over him with a hand pump. Until at last I hear it, one tiny, exhausted sigh.

By the time he is 12 years old and about halfway through the first trimester of his expected life, my son is diagnosed with ADHD, nonverbal learning disorder, panic disorder, various psychosis, and finally with Asperger’s Syndrome. I look down the long, dark corridor of future and see at its end: institutionalization, jail, death.

But when my son leaves middle school, things begin to change. He moves up the social ladder from actively-shunned-and-beaten-up-bullied to merely ignored, an improvement that lessons the frequency and duration of his panic attacks. He learns to tell time with his cell phone and how to drive. In tenth grade, he makes his first real friend since kindergarten. Boys come over after school, and I hear voices and laughter behind the closed door while they play board games, video games, computer games. An agnostic on my best days, I sometimes find myself kneeling outside the basement rec room, one ear pressed to the door.

When he is 25 and in the second trimester of his expected life, my son moves with three friends into an apartment three miles from our house. Driving both ways across the Richmond Bridge three times a week, he finishes a ten-year-long college slog and graduates with a math degree from Berkeley.

3.

Parents of children with autism are haunted by the thought of their children outliving them. In the movie Autism: A Musical, one father says he wishes on each evening star that his severely disabled daughter will die before he does. I know a mother who says that she makes her son hold hands to cross a busy street, but that she cannot cross without thinking, I could just let go.

The life expectancy of a female born in the US in 1957 is about 80 years. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html  When my son reaches the second trimester of his life and turns 50 I will, if I am still alive, be 80 years old. The doctor whose hands, at the moment that mattered--slipped--will be long since gone.

If my son reaches his life own expectancy, he will live for at least 25 years—the last trimester of his life—without his father or I. Who will love him, then? Remind him to pay the rent, to shave, and to eat? Who will love him?