Then David was born.
He came into the world ten weeks early, blue and furious and smaller than a loaf of bread. The NICU smelled like sanitizer and fear. Machines breathed and beeped around him. I learned how to read monitors before I learned how to be a mother. Marcus learned how to stand very still and ask doctors questions in a controlled voice that broke only when he thought nobody was listening.
For a while, the crisis made us a team. We held hands over incubator walls. We whispered promises to our son. We told each other we could handle anything.
The cerebral palsy diagnosis came later, not in one dramatic moment, but in a gradual tightening of the world. Delayed milestones. Muscle stiffness. Specialist appointments that multiplied like weeds. Therapists with kind voices. Pamphlets. Insurance battles. Terms like spastic diplegia and adaptive equipment becoming part of our daily language.
I loved David instantly, completely, with the wild and terrifying certainty only a parent knows.
Marcus loved him too, I think. At least at first.
But Marcus loved easy things best. Things that reflected well on him. Things that fit into the sleek architecture of the life he imagined for himself. A son with appointments and braces and therapy schedules and inaccessible restaurants and unpredictable fatigue did not fit.
