You have always been my sunshine: Reflections on the past, learning to live in the present

I recognize the song, “You Are My Sunshine…”

The time is about 8 a.m., very nearly nine years to the moment that I sat in the maternity ward just hours after she was born, singing that same song to her. I swallow hard to get a grip, not out of positive emotional feedback remembering that day, but out of trauma.

You see, on the day she was born, we came very close to losing it all.

With a shaky voice, I say to her, “That’s the first song I ever sang to you.” I’m barely holding on.

This time of the year, the couple days before new year, hits different for me since Little Bean was born. I’ve never written in detail about those days when she was born, and I won’t now. I suspect I never really will – the irony of not writing about one of the most frightening events in my life and writing a parenting and family column at the same time does not escape me.

I wasn’t ready to write about it nine years ago and I’m not ready now, but I can say this. A few minutes after Little Bean was born, there were complications which led to my wife being rushed into emergency surgery and, to be honest, the next few hours have become pretty fuzzy to me.

I remember a nurse named Deb – someone who has since become a family friend – taking charge of me, walking me down to the maternity ward where, in order to distract me and literally keep me from going insane, helped me bath my daughter for the first time and taught me how to swaddle.

I remember sitting in a wooden rocking chair. I swear as I write this, I can feel the chair’s slate on my back. The chair faced the door so I could see when the doctor came.

And I remember thinking, I can’t do this alone. Please God, or Shiva, or Zeus, I cannot do this alone. So, I prayed. And that prayer came out in a song, because it was the only song I knew how to sing to my two-hour-old baby.

I rocked and I cried and I sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” And the minutes turned to hours and my legs fell asleep along with my baby, and finally the doctor arrived with the news that my wife had pulled through. It was going to be a difficult recovery, but we would be a family.

My memory of the new year during those harrowing couple days was of sitting in our hospital room at midnight, near my recovering wife and looking out our window over my two-day-old daughter’s bassinet and watching fireworks over Manchester.

The new year had arrived. We were together. Resolutions? Goals? Ball drop? None of that mattered. And that’s mainly how I’ve continued to view the change of years since then.

So now, as I sit in my kitchen, with my wife and daughter, on Little Bean’s birthday morning, I feel the same. As the years go by, this time of year feels better, feels like I can be less anxious.

Only this time, my daughter is the one serenading me. This time, “You are my sunshine” isn’t a prayer. It’s a devotional, a hymn played in thanks and out of gratefulness. At least it is to my ears, and that’s as good a way as any to ring in the new year.