Free It Will Come to Me by Emily Fox Gordon

viewer of these photographs was no longer the insupportable “Here am I.” Instead it was “Here is Isaac, and here am I, his mother.”
    Naturally, the happiness of those years had a converse side. Over the course of Isaac's first year she called the pediatrician's office at least twice a week. There was the incident at four months, when Isaac ate an ant. “A little extra protein,” said the pediatrician's famously patient nurse, but Ruth couldn't get the words “formic acid” out of her mind. There was the late-night trip to the emergency room when she was sure she'd discovered a lump in his armpit. And there were dozens of other panics, not all of which prompted her to call the doctor's office. Sometimes fear of seeming crazy stayed her hand.
    And there were the fights with Ben, which had always been bad but got worse after Isaac was born. His first attack of nightterrors happened during one of their late-night kitchen shouting matches. That episode was followed by many others, most of them seemingly cued by raised voices. Ruth called the pediatrician's office and arranged a consultation. “What's the nature of the problem?” asked the nurse, an edge of asperity in her voice. Ruth told her she'd rather not say. “Are you
sure
this isn't something I can help you with?” asked the nurse. Ruth told her no, her voice quavering. She wanted to talk to Dr. Mead privately.
    She arrived alone and was shown into a treatment room, where she wedged herself into a child-sized rocker and leafed through back issues of
Parents
magazine for forty minutes until Dr. Mead arrived. He was a buoyant, exhausted-looking man with a green pipe-cleaner puppet riding in the pocket of his lab coat. This was the first time she'd talked to him outside of Isaac's presence. “Mrs. Blau,” he said, “how can I help you this afternoon?” Ruth burst into tears and blurted out something about fights and night terrors. She hadn't brought it up in Isaac's twenty-four-month checkup, she confessed, because there'd been a medical student in the room. Dr. Mead went into listening mode, propping his back against the examining table, removing his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose, nodding steadily—”Got it,” each nod said. Ruth struggled to give a rounded picture of the situation, but her powers of articulation were squeezed by contrary pressures: it was important to acknowledge that the fights were very bad and getting worse and that on more than one occasion she and Ben had gone on screaming at each other for some time even after they'd heard the eerie mechanical cries coming from Isaac's room. But Dr. Mead should also understand that their marriage was stable and actually very close and that they'd been together for severalyears before Isaac's birth and had gotten used to feeling free to air their differences …
    At this point she saw that he was stealing a glance at his watch, a big one with visible internal workings that had always fascinated Isaac. She allowed her account to run aground. Dr. Mead paused to make a note in Isaac's chart and sat down on a swivel chair, his widely splayed knees bracketing hers. Leaning forward, looking her deliberately in the eye, and speaking slowly and clearly, he explained that the thinking on night terrors had changed. They were no longer understood to have their origin in trauma or in any psychological problem, but instead were seen as a kind of sleep disturbance, a purely neurological phenomenon. They were very scary for parents, but also quite common and really nothing to be alarmed about. And Isaac—here he consulted Isaac's chart—at twenty-eight months, was smack-dab in the center of the average age of onset.
    The nurse knocked softly on the door. Dr. Mead was instantly on his feet and Ruth was on hers too, thanking him effusively. Dr. Mead gave her a tired smile and a no-thanks-necessary shrug as he edged past her. When he was gone Ruth sat down heavily in the rocking chair for a few