Loren Gomez

Biography

Loren Gomez is a parent, a school psychologist, and a Medford resident.  She enjoys writing and painting in her spare time, when there is spare time!

Contact:
lorengomez@comcast.net

Susan (excerpt)

The doctor found Marc in an alcoholic stupor, lying across two chairs in the maternity ward waiting room.  “Marc, you have a child. Marc?”  Susan touched his arm.  She wondered if he needed a detox, or just to go home and sleep it off.  With the news she had to deliver right now, it was going to be hard to convince him to sober up.  But Laura was going to need help with their little baby at home, when she got home.  Susan tried again, a bit louder and more forcefully.  “MARC!”  He opened his eyes, slightly, just enough to see who was calling him.  “Hmmm?” he asked quietly.  Susan’s words were beginning to register through the sleep and heavy drunk fog.

Marc mumbled, with eyes still closed, “Why are you saying child?  Is it a boy or a girl?”  Susan was sitting next to him in the quiet room.  “Let’s go see your new baby.  The complications pressed our luck.  He’s in an incubator in the NICU.  Marc seemed relieved that she said “he” and he brightened at the word “he”.  She was sure he was proud that he had a new son.  “The operation was complicated.  The repair went well.  The baby will have a bag for now.  We hope it will mature and we can do another operation to repair it in a year or maybe two.”  Marc seemed unfazed by the news of a permanent colostomy bag.  Instead, he was stuck on the gender neutral language.  “Why do you keep saying baby?  I thought it was a boy!” he managed to slur, before he passed out again. 

Susan let him sleep.  She wasn’t going to deliver the news to him, when he was in that state of mind.  She looked down at him.  His mouth was open slightly, revealing crooked but white lower teeth.  His dark lashes covered his eyes completely and his thick eyebrows were almost black.  He had a day or two of beard growth on his face, and was handsome, if she didn’t notice the red scars on his chin and over his left eyebrow.  Those don’t look too old, she thought.  Maybe six months.  His wife was probably pregnant already when he got those.  Knife fights?  She sincerely hoped it hadn’t been from a fight with Laura.  With all the needs that little baby in the NICU had, it sure did not need a violent home life.  She put the thought out of her mind, at least for now.  Just take it one step at a time, she told herself.  She knew she shouldn’t actually touch him, but she gently picked up his dangling, left arm and placed it back on the chair arm.  He had a tattoo that resembled a sponge on the inner part of his upper arm.  She couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be.  Fine black hairs covered his arms.  He had another, more recognizable Celtic knot or braid tattoo around his right wrist.  Irish, she thought, he doesn’t look it.  The Celtic tattoo was remarkably intricate and almost feminine, she thought, for such a tough looking sort of guy. 

Susan sat down, exhausted, next to Marc and closed her eyes.  Truth was, the baby was born a boy.  His internal organs were not developed, and were outside, rather than inside, his abdomen.  The baby was small, born at 37 weeks, slightly premature, and 5 pounds, 1 ounce. Not an official preemie, because he was only three weeks early.  All other systems were working.  There was a similar case at the hospital two years ago.  Although she did not do that surgery herself, she followed the progress of the baby, also born a boy, and he was considered a success case.  The surgeon was commended at the hospital, and in a medical journal, he was given a credit as a consultant on exstrophy surgery in a recent article she had read.  Laura’s baby, still as yet unnamed, looked nothing like a he and much, much more like a she, albeit a lopsided one.  Susan wondered what they would name the baby.  She couldn’t bring herself to think of him as a boy, although she knew he was a boy.  There was something unmistakably female about him, or maybe it was just that he was born small. 

The next morning Susan woke up early.  She had the elusive feeling that she just had an amazing dream, but she couldn’t recall a bit of it.  She tried to call up an image, any image, just to jog her memory.  Was it about a tree?  A rock?  A baby?  Sometimes she could recall her dreams like that.  She wasn’t able to today, though.  She became distracted by her own thoughts and the hazy dreamlike beauty was gone.  Her mind kept coming back to Laura’s baby.  What will life be like for him to be so like a female in appearances.  Will he be feminine in other ways as well?  Sometimes, she wondered what it would feel like to look like a man.  At times, she would have a glimpse, a glimmer, a very small thought, in a deep part of her brain that another way to be in the world existed.  She sometimes wanted to go there, to experience a different point of view.  But then she would notice everything she liked about her life now.  She brought the small yin and yang charm from around her neck up to her lips, in a gesture she did countless times every day, hoping it would bring her some peace.  Yin and Yang is the order of the universe, she told herself.  If she could remember that then she would know that there is no all, there is no none.  She was never really all present, neither was she ever all gone.  No one ever is.