Jack Pratt, now 9, was born nine weeks early, spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit, and underwent several surgeries.
I’ve learned too much about the toxic ways we prize “healthy” babies, congratulate “successful” parents, and continue to see disability and illness as an imperfection and a failing.
How could I fail at the most human task: bringing a child safely into the world? How do I answer well-meaning questions about his future? I tell myself the other parents don’t know how they are being hurtful; their innocence is blissful.
He knows—or he should know—the pain of hearing another parent congratulated for bringing a healthy baby into the world, as though it’s an achievement we might have any control over.
And I know that Chris Pratt knows all this because he has been an outspoken advocate for preemies and children with special needs.
Yet he’s still saying he values his second wife for giving him something very specific: a healthy baby.
My baby was born! He was here, and he was the light of my life, and the source of my joy, and every gram of his tiny body amounted to a goddamn miracle.