The slap came so fast I never saw Patricia Miller raise her hand.<\/p>\n
One second, I was standing in the dim hallway of our house in Columbus, Ohio, rocking my three-week-old daughter, Lily, against my shoulder.<\/p>\n
The next, Patricia\u2019s palm cracked across my face hard enough to make my ears ring.<\/p>\n
It was midnight, and Lily had been crying for what felt like hours.<\/p>\n
Not the soft, fussy whimper people imagine when they think about newborns.<\/p>\n
She was crying with her whole tiny body, red-faced and exhausted, while I moved through the same checklist I had already gone through twice.<\/p>\n
Diaper.<\/p>\n
Bottle.<\/p>\n
Temperature.<\/p>\n
Burping.<\/p>\n
Breathing.<\/p>\n
I checked the blanket around her legs, then loosened it because I worried she might be too warm.<\/p>\n
I held her against my chest and walked slowly up and down the hallway because sometimes the movement helped.<\/p>\n
That night, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I was wearing pajama pants and a formula-stained shirt.<\/p>\n
My hair had been twisted into the same loose knot since sometime that afternoon, and every muscle in my shoulders hurt from carrying Lily and trying to sleep in twenty-minute pieces.<\/p>\n
Still, I kept walking.<\/p>\n
She was my daughter.<\/p>\n
She was three weeks old.<\/p>\n
If she needed me awake, I was going to stay awake.<\/p>\n
Patricia did not see it that way.<\/p>\n
She had already complained twice about the noise.<\/p>\n
The first time, she had opened her bedroom door and told me to take Lily farther down the hall.<\/p>\n
The second time, she had walked into the kitchen while I was warming a bottle and asked how a baby that small could possibly be that loud.<\/p>\n
I had been too tired to argue.<\/p>\n
I told her I was doing everything I could.<\/p>\n
By midnight, apparently that was not enough for her.<\/p>\n
I heard her bedroom door open behind me.<\/p>\n
I turned slightly, still bouncing Lily against my shoulder.<\/p>\n
Patricia walked toward me with her jaw tight and her robe pulled closed across her chest.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe has been screaming all night,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen do something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am doing something.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lily cried again, louder this time.<\/p>\n
I shifted her carefully and tried to guide her head back toward my shoulder.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s three weeks old, Patricia. She doesn\u2019t have an off switch.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was when Patricia hit me.<\/p>\n
There was no warning.<\/p>\n
No raised voice first.<\/p>\n
No argument long enough for me to realize the situation was changing.<\/p>\n
Her palm struck my cheek, my head snapped sideways, and the hallway seemed to tilt beneath my feet.<\/p>\n
My ears rang.<\/p>\n
My balance went sideways.<\/p>\n
\u201cShut her up, or get out of the house!\u201d Patricia shouted.<\/p>\n
My arms opened for one terrible fraction of a second.<\/p>\n
Lily slipped.<\/p>\n
I felt the weight disappear from my chest before my exhausted mind understood what was happening.<\/p>\n
Her tiny body hit the hardwood floor.<\/p>\n
Then the crying stopped.<\/p>\n
The silence was instant.<\/p>\n
Wrong.<\/p>\n
Impossible.<\/p>\n
\u201cLily!\u201d<\/p>\n
I dropped to my knees so hard I barely felt the impact.<\/p>\n
She lay motionless, eyes closed, one little fist curled beside her face.<\/p>\n
For the first few seconds, I could not seem to process the size of her against the floor.<\/p>\n
She looked impossibly small.<\/p>\n
I had spent three weeks watching every breath she took.<\/p>\n
Now I was staring at her chest, begging myself to see movement.<\/p>\n
\u201cLily, baby, come on.\u201d<\/p>\n
I reached toward her, then hesitated because suddenly I was terrified that touching her the wrong way could make things worse.<\/p>\n
The sudden quiet was worse than every scream that had come before it.<\/p>\n
Daniel came running from the bedroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened?\u201d<\/p>\n
He stopped when he saw me kneeling on the floor.<\/p>\n
Then he saw Lily.<\/p>\n
His expression changed immediately.<\/p>\n
\u201cCall 911!\u201d I screamed.<\/p>\n
Behind me, Patricia had gone pale.<\/p>\n
For one second, I expected her to rush toward Lily.<\/p>\n
I expected her to apologize.<\/p>\n
I expected her to look horrified by what she had done.<\/p>\n
Instead, her voice became strangely controlled.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe dropped the baby,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I turned toward her, still on my knees.<\/p>\n
The side of my face was burning where she had hit me.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou hit me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI barely touched you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel looked from me to his mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cMom?\u201d<\/p>\n
I will never forget the hesitation in his voice.<\/p>\n
It was not agreement.<\/p>\n
It was not disbelief either.<\/p>\n
It was uncertainty.<\/p>\n
And in that moment, with our newborn daughter lying motionless on the hardwood floor, uncertainty felt unbearable.<\/p>\n
Patricia did not hesitate at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s exhausted,\u201d she said. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t know what she\u2019s saying.\u201d<\/p>\n
I stared at her.<\/p>\n
The accusation was so quick, so practiced in its certainty, that it took me a second to understand what she was doing.<\/p>\n
She was not talking about Lily.<\/p>\n
She was building a story.<\/p>\n
A version of the night where I was the exhausted new mother who had lost control of my baby and then blamed someone else.<\/p>\n
That hurt almost as much as the slap.<\/p>\n
Not because I believed her.<\/p>\n
Because I saw Daniel trying to make sense of two versions at once.<\/p>\n
My newborn was lying on the floor, and somehow Patricia was already trying to turn me into the unreliable one.<\/p>\n
I stopped waiting for my husband to decide who he believed.<\/p>\n
Whatever argument was happening in that hallway could wait.<\/p>\n
Lily could not.<\/p>\n
I scooped her up and ran.<\/p>\n
I moved through the house with her pressed against me, barely aware of Daniel calling my name behind me.<\/p>\n
I grabbed my keys.<\/p>\n
I did not change clothes.<\/p>\n
I did not find shoes that matched.<\/p>\n
I did not stop to pack a diaper bag.<\/p>\n
Every ordinary new-parent rule disappeared except one.<\/p>\n
Get Lily help.<\/p>\n
The nearest emergency department was less than ten minutes away.<\/p>\n
I got into my car, called 911 on speaker, and started driving while the dispatcher tried to keep me focused.<\/p>\n
My hands were shaking so badly I had to grip the steering wheel harder than normal just to keep them steady.<\/p>\n
The dispatcher asked where I was.<\/p>\n
I gave the location.<\/p>\n
She asked whether Lily was breathing.<\/p>\n
I looked toward her at the next red light and felt my throat close.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. \u201cShe isn\u2019t making any sound.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dispatcher kept her voice calm.<\/p>\n
An ambulance could meet me, but by then I was already only a couple of blocks from Riverside Methodist Hospital.<\/p>\n
I remember every red light from that drive.<\/p>\n
I remember staring at them like they were personal betrayals.<\/p>\n
I remember checking Lily again and again.<\/p>\n
I remember begging her to cry.<\/p>\n
Five minutes earlier, I would have given anything for thirty seconds of silence.<\/p>\n
Now I wanted the loudest scream she had ever made.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on, Lily,\u201d I whispered. \u201cPlease. Please make a sound.\u201d<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The formula stain on my shirt was still damp when I pulled into the hospital entrance.<\/p>\n
I barely remember getting out of the car.<\/p>\n
I remember saying the word newborn.<\/p>\n
I remember saying she fell.<\/p>\n
I remember trying to explain that somebody had hit me while I was holding her.<\/p>\n
Then hospital staff took Lily from my arms.<\/p>\n
For three weeks, I had been the person who held her when she cried.<\/p>\n
I changed her.<\/p>\n
Fed her.<\/p>\n
Counted her fingers when I was too tired to think straight.<\/p>\n
Checked the rise and fall of her chest in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n
Now strangers were carrying her through emergency-room doors, and I had to let them.<\/p>\n
There was nothing else I could do.<\/p>\n
I stood in the hallway in pajama pants and that formula-stained shirt while people moved quickly around me.<\/p>\n
Someone asked for my name.<\/p>\n
Someone else asked Lily\u2019s date of birth.<\/p>\n
I answered automatically.<\/p>\n
The questions felt almost absurd beside the fact that my daughter was behind a closed door and I could not hear her.<\/p>\n
I touched my cheek.<\/p>\n
It was still hot.<\/p>\n
That physical pain felt distant now, almost irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Twenty minutes passed.<\/p>\n
They were the longest twenty minutes of my life.<\/p>\n
Every time a door opened, I looked up.<\/p>\n
Every time footsteps came down the corridor, my stomach tightened.<\/p>\n
I kept expecting someone to tell me everything was fine.<\/p>\n
I also knew, somewhere beneath that hope, that if everything were fine, someone probably would have said so already.<\/p>\n
A physician finally approached me.<\/p>\n
His name was Dr. Aaron Blake.<\/p>\n
He had the careful expression people wear when they are trying not to frighten someone who is already terrified.<\/p>\n
I knew before he spoke that something was terribly wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cMrs. Miller?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYour daughter is already in cardiac arrest.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a moment, the words did not connect.<\/p>\n
I knew what each word meant individually.<\/p>\n
Together, they seemed impossible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had no detectable pulse when you arrived. We\u2019re performing CPR now.\u201d<\/p>\n
My knees gave way.<\/p>\n
A nurse caught my arm before I hit the floor.<\/p>\n
I heard somebody tell me to sit down, but I could not stop looking at Dr. Blake.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you save her?\u201d<\/p>\n
He did not give me a comforting promise.<\/p>\n
He continued carefully.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are signs of significant head trauma. We need to know exactly what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sentence brought me straight back to the hallway at home.<\/p>\n
Patricia\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
The slap.<\/p>\n
My balance shifting.<\/p>\n
Lily slipping.<\/p>\n
The sound of her hitting the floor.<\/p>\n
And then Patricia saying I had dropped her.<\/p>\n
I started explaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was holding her. My mother-in-law came out because Lily was crying. She hit me across the face. I lost my balance, and Lily fell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Blake listened without interrupting.<\/p>\n
I could hear my own voice shaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t throw her. I didn\u2019t\u2014she slipped when Patricia hit me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before he could respond, I noticed movement at the far end of the hallway.<\/p>\n
Daniel and Patricia were coming toward us.<\/p>\n
Daniel looked terrified.<\/p>\n
His face was tight, and he kept scanning the corridor as if he expected to see Lily somewhere nearby.<\/p>\n
Patricia was different.<\/p>\n
She walked quickly, but her attention went directly to me.<\/p>\n
Not to the doors where the medical team had taken Lily.<\/p>\n
Not to Dr. Blake.<\/p>\n
To me.<\/p>\n
She reached us first.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
I looked at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cTell them it was an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n
For several seconds, I could not answer.<\/p>\n
I thought maybe I had heard her wrong.<\/p>\n
This was the woman who had hit me while I was holding a newborn.<\/p>\n
My daughter had been carried into an emergency room without a detectable pulse.<\/p>\n
Doctors were performing CPR.<\/p>\n
And Patricia\u2019s first concern was the story I told them.<\/p>\n
She was not asking whether Lily was alive.<\/p>\n
She was not asking what the doctors had said.<\/p>\n
She was not asking whether there was anything she could do.<\/p>\n
She wanted me to protect her.<\/p>\n
Daniel stopped beside us.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily, what did the doctor say?\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at him, then back at Patricia.<\/p>\n
She kept watching me.<\/p>\n
Her face had the rigid, controlled look she had worn back in the hallway after Lily fell.<\/p>\n
As if the biggest danger in that hospital was not what had happened to Lily.<\/p>\n
It was what might come out of my mouth.<\/p>\n
Something inside me settled.<\/p>\n
Not grief.<\/p>\n
The grief was still there, huge and terrifying, waiting behind every thought.<\/p>\n
Not fear either.<\/p>\n
I was afraid of what was happening behind those emergency-room doors in a way I had never been afraid of anything before.<\/p>\n
What settled inside me was clarity.<\/p>\n
At home, Patricia had acted immediately.<\/p>\n
She had denied hitting me.<\/p>\n
She had blamed exhaustion.<\/p>\n
She had told Daniel I did not know what I was saying.<\/p>\n
Now, at the hospital, before even asking about Lily, she was telling me to call it an accident.<\/p>\n
Those were not the actions of someone focused on a baby in danger.<\/p>\n
They were the actions of someone focused on protecting herself.<\/p>\n
I thought about Daniel\u2019s hesitation in the hallway.<\/p>\n
I thought about Patricia saying, \u201cShe dropped the baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought about the burning on my cheek.<\/p>\n
Then I looked toward the emergency-room doors where doctors were trying to bring my daughter back.<\/p>\n
There was no version of this night where I was going to make Patricia comfortable by changing the truth.<\/p>\n
Daniel said my name again.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily?\u201d<\/p>\n
Patricia moved half a step closer.<\/p>\n
Her voice dropped.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about what you\u2019re saying.\u201d<\/p>\n
I did.<\/p>\n
For the first time since the slap, I felt completely certain about what came next.<\/p>\n
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The slap came so fast I never saw Patricia Miller raise her hand. One second, I was standing in the dim hallway of our house in Columbus, Ohio, rocking my … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family","category-inspiration","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37441,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37440\/revisions\/37441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readingdairy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}