The CPR Class

By Justine Feron

I once read a study asserting that losing something brings twice as much pain as gaining something brings pleasure. Since I became a mother, I’ve wondered: what if, instead of something, it’s someone?

When I had a child my whole self rearranged, parts moving and clicking into new formations like the Transformers I played with when I was young. My son Finnegan was born sick, perilously so, and my brain, heart, and skeleton grew like tree branches around him. I sat by his NICU bedside every day, stroking the soft skin of his hand until nurses warned me against overstimulating him. Then I just held it.

Through all that sitting, all that stroking, the same question ran laps around my mind: what if I lost him? I could not have simply reverted to my childless self, the one whose organs had not yet been pushed aside by the surgeon who lifted my son from me. The one unschooled in so many gradations of fear, pain, and hope. The one who would have felt no need to track down that study about loss aversion, conducted in the late 70s, as if it could explain why the possibility of Finnegan’s death loomed so much larger than the beauty of his birth. Not twice as painful but 10 times. Maybe even 100.

For months, all I could do was imagine the end – the bleating alarms, the squeal of sneakers on linoleum, the crowd of scrub-clad hospital staff, and, then, the silence – and hope that, like most of the things I imagined, it wouldn’t happen. Finally, I decided to do something that would help me picture the scene differently: me swooping in to save my son rather than standing by, frozen in place. I enrolled myself and my husband Emmett in an infant CPR class.

When we arrived, the instructor directed us to a circle of men and women sitting on exercise balls, desk chairs, and flattened pillows. At the circle’s center were dozens of dolls, a mixed-race heap with plastic heads and fabric bodies. Some of the dolls wore clothing – faded ringer tees, overalls, or rainbow-striped leg warmers – while others lolled about naked, their sexless crotches splayed.

This simple arrangement – a group of people staring at the same pile – flooded my mind with unwelcome analogous images. Campfires. Funeral pyres. Immolations. I pictured flames licking the foot of the doll closest to me, sniffed involuntarily for the smell of plastic hair burning.

“Welcome,” the instructor said as she weaved between us. “I’m here to teach you how to save your child’s life.”

The other couples shifted uncomfortably in their seats – ‘Surely it won’t come to that,’ I could practically hear them thinking – but Emmett and I sat statue-still. Ever since Finnegan had been born seven weeks early, with dislocated limbs folded like a street cart pretzel and lungs too weak to breathe on their own, it had seemed entirely plausible that he might need to be brought back from the brink. And I needed this instructor to teach me how to do it.

For the next three hours, she did. Between describing the dangers of window blind cords and admonishing us to never let our babies sleep in their car seats, she gave me something that all our time in the NICU hadn’t: a plan.

I memorized the steps of that plan with good-student diligence, mouthing each one aloud as we got down on the ground to mime them. Flick your doll-baby’s feet to try to rouse them. Move them to a hard, flat surface. Open their airway. Do two minutes of CPR. Call 911. Continue CPR until help arrives. Our instructor shouted “30 compressions, 2 breaths” with the force of an irate gymnastics coach as we leaned the full weight of our bodies onto our dolls’ chests and administered life-saving breaths to the paper guards atop their mouths. Several of the women were heavily pregnant, and I watched as they struggled to lower their bodies to meet their dolls’ mouths. I heard Emmett’s breathing grow labored as he tended to a leg warmer-clad baby. In my peripheral vision, I saw another man rise up from the floor and wipe his hands on his pant legs. “She’s gone,” he said dryly, to no one in particular. “Just have to accept it.”

A chorus of chuckles rose up in response.

“You gave it your all,” laughed one woman.

“She didn’t have much of a chance anyway,” said another.

“When you’re this floppy, it’s already over,” added a third, flapping her naked doll in the air for effect.

Suddenly, the whole group was giggling. Even Emmett abandoned the project of reviving his doll and sat up, smiling. Not wanting to be the only person mirthlessly pumping away at my doll, I stopped too. But beneath my mask of good-natured amusement, I was shaken. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to joke about babies dying. Not even if those babies were, in fact, inanimate.

—

As in high school, where the taxonomy of teendom is so precise, moms are often classified into types, anointed with titles like ‘tiger mothers’ and ‘attachment parents’ by Time magazine. But the titles ignore the trauma. The obsession with achievement that makes a mom raised with high expectations pass those standards on to her kids. The latchkey childhood that makes a mom overcompensate, tethering her infant to her chest for every waking hour. Or, in my case, the close calls that make me an ‘oversensitive mom,’ bristling at every glib joke and take-your-child-for-granted aside. My sense of lightness might be as dead as those dolls.

—

The next day, as I sat by Finnegan’s bedside and repeated the CPR instructor’s “30 compressions, 2 breaths” shorthand like I was reciting the rosary, I thought of a school assignment I was once given: to keep a raw egg intact for a week.

Determined to succeed, I made the egg a home by pasting the fluted edges of a cardboard carton to the inside of a shoe box, encasing the egg in bubble wrap, and laying a canopy of Kleenex across the top for good measure. I was building an incubator, like the one my son would later live in. And my goal, in essence, was the same: to shield the thing inside it from harm. Except this time, I had to keep shielding for a lifetime.

It didn’t work out so well for the egg, in the end. After five days, I fell down the stairs while carrying it and the force of my landing shattered its thin shell. So when Finnegan was finally discharged from the NICU, I wondered: would it work out any better for him?

Objectively, it did. After months of sloshing around dangerously, the contents of Finnegan’s world began to settle, solidifying into something better than before. He ditched his casts, weaned off his medication, and made it through his battery of post-discharge assessments unscathed. Doctors stopped using the word ‘if’ to describe his continued survival. I found myself, quite suddenly, at the helm of a manageable life.

But it didn’t feel that way. Instead, the intense anxiety of our hospital stay yielded to a more insidious sort of worry. The kind that didn’t make sense. The kind that could co-exist with a perfectly nice day during which I had sex with Emmett, made a big family dinner, and thrilled at watching Finnegan tentatively slap his bath water as if it was alive and could slap back. The worry might have even been worse on those sorts of days, days when Emmett put a hand on the small of my back, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I feel so lucky.”

“Me too,” I agreed. But what I really felt was fear. Because the better the day, the more I stood to lose.

Every night, meanwhile, I had the same dream. In it, I heard Finnegan crying and brought him to bed with me, where we fell back asleep together. I awoke from the dream with some vague memory of this co-sleeping arrangement and immediately began to panic, patting the bed sheets in search of him. I imagined that he was a pillow, some bunched-up bedding, or a mound made by Emmett’s sleeping body. I was convinced that, when I did find him, his face would be grey and his body stiff. I usually started to cry.

Even when I was awake, fear dogged me. As my mom carried Finnegan down the street, I imagined her tripping and slamming into the concrete sidewalk. I pictured myself stepping over my injured mother to tend to my son, the necessary horror of casting her aside. When I was in the shower, I imagined an accident happening while Finnegan was in Emmett’s care, the animal sound of Emmett screaming rising above the din of falling water. Would I bother throwing on a bathrobe? Or would I fly from the shower naked, breasts thumping and wet hair slapping against my back as I ran to them?

In these hypothetical scenarios, it crossed my mind that at least Finnegan’s death wouldn’t be my fault. Because, more often than not, what preoccupied me most were the infinite ways I could inadvertently kill my own son. A few years ago, two blocks from our apartment, a man accidentally ran over his wife. She was trying to help him back out of their driveway when he lost control of the car and crushed her against the wall of the house next door. What, I wondered, if I became the husband of the situation? I pictured myself slipping as I followed a toddler-aged Finnegan down the stairs and crushing him, much as I’d crushed that egg. Can you imagine, killing your child with the weight of your own body? You’d feel his small bones snap beneath you and never be able to think of anything else again.

—

When a friend asked me what caring for a child was like, I, recalling that accident in my neighborhood, told her it was like driving. It was so constant, so habitual, that you did it almost without thinking. Most people did it many thousands of times. But if something went wrong even once, it could be devastating.

“Huh,” she said. “But you haven’t driven since you were in college, right?”

It was true. The everything-can-change-in-an-instant nature of driving was so existentially scary to me that I hadn’t done it in more than a decade. I could never shake the feeling, as I navigated a winding road or stared down an unending stretch of highway, that I was just one lazy second or miscalculation away from annihilating my life and the lives of those I loved. And yet here I was, driving every day. Every time I picked Finnegan up, I was at the wheel.

One of the side effects of all this anxiety was that I never felt like Finnegan’s life was a given. A child’s life could be taken away. Children choked. They drowned. They were crushed by marble fences. They suffocated in unsafe sleep positions during their first day at daycare. They died of organ failure after faulty radiators spewed scalding steam into their Bronx bedrooms, burning 70% of their bodies. The only things more outlandish than the ways to die I dreamt up were the ways to die I saw on the news. I collected these children’s stories like macabre baseball cards, committing stats and details to memory. As if by knowing the stories I could inoculate Finnegan against them.

Yet months later, he almost became one of those stories.

It happened on the stairs – the shiny, slippery hardwood that traveled from our apartment’s main floor to its basement – and almost exactly as I’d always imagined it.

Finnegan and my mom were playing downstairs. Kids songs, her encouraging words, and his uproarious laughter wafted up to meet me. I, meanwhile, was working from home. A COVID-19 case had just been reported in Westchester and I saw threats to my son’s sensitive respiratory system everywhere – in the exhales of subway mouth-breathers, in my office receptionist’s persistent cough, and in every fingerprint-mottled elevator button I encountered out in the world. As I stood in the safety of my kitchen, I congratulated myself for exhibiting that soon-to-be-overused phrase: an abundance of caution.

Then I stepped on a creaky floorboard. I heard the rush of small feet as my eagle-eared son ran from one end of the basement to the other. “Mama?” he cried, rattling the safety gate at the bottom of the stairs. I listened to my mom’s feet behind him and the sound of her unlatching the gate. “Let’s go see Mama,” she said.

Instead, I decided, I’d go see them. “Mama’s coming!” I called out as I padded to the top of the stairs. What a nice perk this was, I thought, to be able to take a break from work to play with my kid. It was the last thought I had before I fell.

It happened, as these things do, so quickly. My stockinged feet slipped out from under me and I tumbled down the stairs at precisely the moment that Finnegan was climbing them. The effort required to stop myself from barreling into him split my pants, bruised my side, and wrenched my arm from its socket. I still can’t raise it above my shoulder. Finnegan, however, was fine. And it’s those simple words – he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine – that I’ve repeated like rosary beads ever since.

He’s so fine that his dislocated limbs can run.

He’s so fine that his collapsed lungs can breathe deeply.

He’s so fine that he escaped the fate of my elementary school egg.

He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.

It’s me who isn’t.

Maybe it’ll come – the sound sleep, the casual jokes, the confidence that Finnegan will continue to exist. Until then, I’ll take solace in being his mom. In the great luck of his recovery. In the fact that he’s fine. And in the hope that, someday, I will be too.

—

About Justine Feron

Feron is a writer and advertising executive whose essays about pregnancy and motherhood have been published in outlets including the New York Times, Slate, and Romper. Born in Canada, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons. She’s an artist-in-residence at The Studios of Key West, studied creative writing with National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien, and won honorable mention in the Bellevue Literary Review’s 2021 nonfiction prize. She’s currently completing The Almost Maybe Finally Mother, a memoir that begs a not-so-simple question: what makes someone a mother?