Up All Night

Like a shot in the night, I sat up in bed. I was stressing out about my new job, about turning in my letter of resignation for the old job and everything that leaving entails.
I tossed and turned, keeping my eye on the clock. It was 3 a.m., then 4 a.m.. By 4:30 I had flopped onto my stomach and my mind turned to an idea I have been kicking around for a long time. My book.
Doctors and nurses and others have encouraged me to write about genetics, about termination and testing and decisions and dead babies and exomes. I’m a writer by trade, so who better to discuss the process, put the pain into words?
The desire to write about it turned into my blog Beyond the Exome, but that was mostly because I couldn’t find ANYONE else who was going through the exome process. There is no emotional handbook for that long wait for possible results. No one holds your hand through it, though I do have a genetic counselor who should get paid double for her efforts as a therapist. She is amazing.
I chose to write about exomes to give other people a little bit of a roadmap through the process, but also to give myself a “nuts and bolts” topic: Not how I’m feeling as the mother of two dead babies — other women have already written about that.
The idea to write about the terminations and the genetics feels like the right thing to do, but how to start?
I didn’t have to start — my brain did it for me. I flopped onto my belly and the words started to form in my head. An abstract idea formed into an essay.
So like Ernest Hemmingway on a creative bender, I got out of bed and turned on the computer and started to type. I wrote it all at once, which probably means it’s crap. Nothing stopped me. I didn’t stumble over words or fuss with the phrasing.
I love what I wrote. This introduction feels like more than an introduction to a book - it feels like a warm welcome after a long day at work. Like I had to come to this or it had to come to me, the hard way. There could be no forcing it.
Even if I write this book and no one else ever gets to read it, I think I still need to write it. For me. And it feels really good to get that first part out of the way.