From the moment I was born, I was already a problem.

Not the quiet, colicky kind. No—I went full drama: blue lips, ICU alarms, and a father who couldn’t even follow a sign to the nursery.

My mom only realized something was wrong after she noticed my dad kept wandering the hospital hallways in the wrong direction.

The nursery was clearly marked with an arrow pointing right. He kept turning left, like a man convinced his newborn had been assigned to another wing, maybe near the vending machines.

Eventually, she realized: he was going left because I wasn’t in the nursery at all. I was in the NICU.

Turns out, I couldn’t breathe very well. After a few days, the doctors patched me up, declared me fine, and sent me home.

***

That’s when the real fun started.

Six months in, I began stopping breathing altogether. Full-on blue baby. A tiny Victorian fainting lady. A Smurf before Smurfs were even invented. A pint-sized Houdini with a death wish.

And my mom—either through instinct or creative desperation—did what no doctor suggested: she held me under the kitchen faucet until I gasped back to life.

But only for her. I never pulled my little blue routine for my dad. It was strictly a mom-only act.

Other mothers had baby monitors. Mine had a brushed nickel Delta faucet and the reflexes of an Olympic lifeguard on espresso.

***

She barely slept. She’d catnap upright, clutching coffee like it was a talisman. Eventually she started setting her alarm every fifteen minutes just to check if I was alive.

Which, technically, isn’t sleep—it’s interval training.

She begged my dad to take a shift so she could nap. He said he had work in the morning.

True. But so did she. Hers just involved keeping her infant from dying in the kitchen sink.

***

Doctor after doctor told her nothing was wrong. Perfectly normal baby. They said this while my lips were still the color of denim.

In the seventies, “blue” was apparently just another shade of healthy.

And the more exhausted she got, the more unhinged she looked.

Which, in that decade, meant one diagnosis: postpartum depression.

Back then, “postpartum” wasn’t so much a medical condition as a polite way of saying, We think you’re hysterical, but we’ll still be needing $40 an hour for the privilege.

***

So one day, my parents left me with my grandparents while they went to see a therapist—not to figure out why I was turning into a Smurf every other night, but to figure out why my mother was, allegedly, trying to drown me in the sink.

And that’s when I finally pulled my little blue routine for someone else.

Right there in my grandparents’ living room.

Nothing says “family bonding” like paramedics stepping over the coffee table.

***

It turned out my lungs had been slowly filling with fluid since I left the hospital.

I wasn’t dramatic. I was drowning.

And my mom wasn’t crazy. She was right.

I’m alive thanks to my grandparents, the paramedics, but mostly my mother—who trusted her instincts when doctors told her she was unstable.

Though in her defense, if you had to choose between a husband who couldn’t find the babies and a child who required regular sink dunkings, you’d start to wonder who the real problem was.

Still, somehow, she kept me breathing.

And honestly? That faucet didn’t just save me.

It saved her too.

Which is why, to this day, I still trust brushed nickel more than most doctors.