The doctor said, “Sputtered.” For weeks, I devoured the word searching to understand it, to see if it held answers to what was happening to my infant son. On dictionary.com, there are several meanings, but in general it meant to strongly emit or eject anything such as food or saliva. To me it sounded banal and routine as if it were merely a scraped knee, a fallen ankle, or the way the pediatrician described it as a pause in an otherwise perfectly healthy engine. When you are a new parent recovering from childbirth, in the throes of hormones and sleep deprivation, things can get blurry. The image of that day, however, is sharp. My husband held our four-pound one-week-old newborn on the white couch. The sun sliced through our window, shining on him like a spotlight. “Do we still have the parent handbook?” he asked. I passed my son to my husband after a failed attempt at nursing and was in a stupor searching for something—probably a drink of water, possibly a moment to...
