The Power of Observation
How cigarette smoke taught me to see beyond my fears.
The following is a revised version of my essay “The Power of Observation” published in Issue 1 of Bravery Magazine.
It was November. The nurse parked my wheelchair on the sidewalk outside the hospital entrance as my husband, Scott, sprinted through visitor parking in a frantic search for our car. I was wearing a grungy, oversized bathrobe and my mangled, sweat-matted hair was pulled back with a broken elastic I had “fixed” by quickly knotting the ends into a loop. The nurse couldn’t stay; they were understaffed and needed help with an emergency C-section. As she hurried back through the automatic doors, I shifted in the chair, craning my neck to catch sight of our approaching car.
An ambulance siren blared, startling the sleeping infant in my arms. Her face wrinkled in agitation as her tiny body tensed from the sound. I looked down, gently touching the plastic hospital band wrapped around her frail ankle. The back of my hand still had a cotton ball taped over the vein where my IV tube was removed; I could see the bruise surfacing underneath the surgical tape.
A few feet away, an off-duty nurse was wrapping up a hushed conversation on her phone. Clearly agitated, she hung up, set herself down on a bench near me, and reached into her purse for a cigarette. With her head leaning back and her eyes closed, she sighed a deep stream of smoke into the air through pursed lips. The visible cloud drifted over to me and the sleeping baby in my arms. Appalled — but too uncomfortable to say anything — I sat in mangled-haired indignation shooting scathing glares in her direction, punctuated with the occasional, sharp, passive-aggressive cough.
Scott pulled up to the curb.
“Where’s the nurse?” he asked, opening the back door and searching the car for the car seat’s release lever.
“Helping with another delivery,” I responded, turning my head and giving another loud, exaggerated cough.
After a few failed attempts, Scott found the release and wrenched the carrier out of our back seat and set it on the curb next to my wheelchair. I could see his hands shaking as he worked to arrange its web of interconnected nylon and buckles to hold our baby. Feeling entirely unhelpful, I reached down with my free arm and tugged futily on a loose strap hanging out the back.
Nothing.
I flipped a metal lever next to the strap.
Still nothing.
It was clear at this point that countless late nights watching YouTube tutorials on car seat assembly had not been the most effective method to prepare for parenthood.
My husband flipped the carrier over on its side, kneeled down, and began inspecting it with attempted surgical precision. For two minutes we shot sharp, uninformed critiques at each other — our anxiety sparking friction within an impending storm cloud. Defeated, we looked up searching desperately for assistance.
“Do you think we’re supposed to tell someone before we leave?” Scott asked, scanning the hospital front entrance for medical personnel.
I said nothing. I couldn’t. My eyes and lungs and heart were pinched shut — an electric flood of terror suspended inside me. Nothing existed in that moment except the burning red and white inside my clenched eyelids; the crackling ache for oxygen in my tightened lungs; and the pounding, rushing sound of blood at my ear drums.
In this labored impasse, a fresh cloud of cigarette smoke drifted across us from the adjacent cement bench. The smell pricked hot tears of panic and anger to the surface of my clenched eyes. My mind raced to the soft, dozing infant breathing deeply in my arms. An emotional riptide slammed inside my chest, shattering the frozen chaos.
“We’re NEVER going to leave!” I exploded, startling my already anxious husband. “We shouldn’t leave! We’re not ready!” A torrent of reality was crashing through me — waves of fear breaking in succession.
“She can’t breastfeed!”
“We don’t have any formula at the house!”
“We’re not ready! We need more time!”
“We can’t even buckle the &@#$-ing car seat!”
Behind us, the hospital door slid open and shut.
Nothing.
Another heavy waft of cigarette smoke washed over us.
It was in that tempestuous moment, I knew I hated nothing more than that smell. I hated it so much. Everything about it.
In a fury, I whipped in my seat to confront the cement bench, poised with a combustion of fiery venom blazing through my mind. Vindictive tears streamed down my face.
But the bench was empty — the off-duty nurse was no longer sitting on its cold foundation. Instead, she stood directly over me, looking down at the baby in my arms.
My chest tightened.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” she said warmly. Dubious, I stared blankly back at her. Snot was definitely running down my face.
“And what a fine-looking car seat,” she offered. Scott thanked her quietly, keeping his gaze squarely on the ground.
Placing one hand on her knee and the other on the sidewalk, the off-duty nurse slowly lowered herself to the ground, grunting from the effort. She spoke carefully to the two of us.
“You know, I see hundreds of car seats every week at this hospital. And let me tell you…” We looked up at her. “This one,” she said patting the overturned carrier splayed on the sidewalk between us, “this one is a good one.”
Scott closed his eyes in relief. I wiped my face with the sleeve of my fleece bathrobe.
“However,” she cautioned in a careful whisper, looking us seriously in the eyes. “I couldn’t call myself a good nurse if I didn’t warn you about the one huge problem this particular model has.”
Our hearts dropped.
She motioned us to come closer, a thin line of smoke trailing the half-finished cigarette stowed between her fingers. Scott and I leaned in, baited with dread. Slapping her leg hard, she barked loudly, “I’ll be damned if this piece-of-shit isn’t the biggest pain-in-the-ass to set up!”
We stared, shellshocked. She smirked and casually leaned over to extinguish her cigarette in a crack of the concrete. As she twisted the cooling embers back and forth, our saving grace in scrubs looked up with a grin and asked, “So, do you two want some help or what?”
In one smooth motion, she loosened and readjusted the tangled mass of straps, buckles, and plastic slumped at our feet. Gesturing to me for our sleeping daughter, she unswaddled the pink and blue striped hospital blanket, gently laid her in the (now fully-setup) car seat, and fastened the safety buckles snuggly around her tiny body. As she worked, she talked us slowly through each step.
“You see how I did that there?”
“Okay, now you do this one.”
“There you are, just like a pro.”
With straps and buckles skillfully secured, she hefted the carrier off the curb and handed it to my husband, our tiny two-day-old daughter tucked safely inside. Gingerly, I pulled myself up from the wheelchair and, together, my husband and I worked to secure car seat into the back of our car.
We turned to our new friend, words of appreciation and apology stumbling out of our mouths. She waved it off, briskly. Instead she pointed to my husband and then to me, looked us squarely in the eyes, and stated firmly, “You’ve got this, babies. You know that?”
And for the briefest of moments, I actually heard her words and let them sit with me. They were words that spoke strength into a bruised hand taped over with a cotton ball. Words that voiced calm into a new father’s shaking hands. Words that cleared a fog just enough for me to witness a generous stranger soothing her own hidden hurts.
And then the hospital doors opened and closed.
The sound jarred me back into my first reality — a reality that wasn’t yet ready to make space for you’ve got this. I looked back at my friend, wishing her words could return and sit with me a little longer. Perhaps recognizing her own extinguishing hope in my eyes, she repeated resolutely, “Babies, we’ve got this.”
But that space I had found to hold her words was no longer inside me. It had closed with the hospital doors.
My head lowered, defeated. But as it fell, I felt my friend reach across our widening gulf of confidence and pull me in tight. She hugged me in spite of my snot-smeared face and two-day-old, sweat-dried hair. She hugged me in spite of my nasty fleece bathrobe and the even nastier glares I threw at her just minutes earlier. She hugged me like a person hugs themself during the apex of a wild storm — rocking, consoling, praying. And as she held us both, I could smell the cigarette smoke clinging to the fabric of her hospital scrubs. In that moment, I knew I loved that smell. I loved it more than anything. It was the smell of belonging. It was coming home after an ancient journey.
Then as quickly as she held me, she let me go. And with shoulders squared, she smiled at us and walked back into the hospital.
The sliding doors closed.
Scott and I stood at the threshold of that hospital door for a timeless moment; then we, too, smiled, stepped inside our car, and drove home with new life nestled securely inside.
Observation is complicated.
On its surface, observation is simply a collection of information. It’s cigarette smoke and an oversized bathrobe. It’s a tired labor and delivery nurse, an anxious new mother left at the curb of a hospital, and an overwhelmed father searching desperately for the family car. Observation is a very safe, obnoxiously-complicated car seat with black nylon straps and silver buckles.
But observation is also power. It’s the force that governs our judgements and guides our behavior — because it’s not just what we observe, it’s how we observe.
On that November day, observation saw only cigarette smoke when it should have noticed an overworked nurse shouldering her own weight of worries. Fortunately, on that same day, observation looked beyond the rude exterior of mangled hair and a fleece bathrobe and noticed new parents desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Observation threw them a lifeline.
So while it may seem odd, the bitter aroma of cigarettes reminds me of the way I hope to observe. It’s a reminder to me to defer my brash judgements and make space for context and empathy. It’s the way I want to treat my children and husband, my friends and family, neighbors and strangers. It’s the way I want to treat myself.
So I’m practicing how I observe. Because I need greater patience and forgiveness in my world. Because I want to heal and help heal. Because I want to respect the process of becoming: to recognize times when I should reach over and help, and respect the moments when it’s time to step back and sincerely say, “You’ve got this.”
Because we do.
