You almost died.
You were five days old and five weeks early and you almost died.
When the doctors and nurses rushed into your room, this little world within a world within the NICU, your dad and I looked at each other and we knew it was bad. We were told to go to the family room while they called in an emergency x-ray. As you howled in pain, in confusion, in trying to understand life at five days old while your intestinal walls filled with air bubbles that almost burst through into your gut, your dad and I looked at each other and we vowed:
No Googling about NEC.
Only when you were in the clear did we finally do the reading, did we look at the statistics. Only then did we realize how incredibly, amazingly, blessedly lucky we were.
“Necrotizing enterocolitis is a serious disease with a death rate approaching 25%.”
When we tell people about why you were in the hospital so long, when we talk about NEC, we talk about morbidity and mortality rates. We don’t actually say, “Our son almost died.”
But you very nearly did. We don’t drop the “D” word like it’s some taboo, some Voldemort, some verböten verbiage never to be uttered in front of the newly born.
You almost died.
In another Universe, in another version of events, you’d have been gone just as quickly as you came into our lives.
* * *
In the almost two months since you’ve arrived, I wonder if now, I feel like I have to step up my game for every moment you’re awake, for every breath you take. Even with the NEC long gone, that 1 in 4 statistic still looms large in my mind. It makes us vigilant, sometimes even hyper-aware. We worry over every fussy feeding, the spit up, the gas. Is it too little of a poopy diaper? Too much poop? The crying – my G-d, the crying after he eats…
We worry and we think, “My G-d, is it coming back?”
* * *
Sometimes I feel that because we almost lost you, we have no right to complain. Because we dealt with infertility, I should be a trooper about all of this.
That we should cherish every single second of your life – and we do, believe me, we do: when your room is dark and quiet and you’re nursing at my breast, your breath punctuated by that soft suckling sound and the tears roll silently down my cheeks as I blink them away, thanking G-d with every breath of mine that you’re here, my G-d you’re really here now after all this waiting, after all this time, after all the heartache and pain and shots and morning sickness and gestational diabetes and NICU and NEC you are really and truly here…
Who am I to talk about how overwhelmingly exhausting, challenging, confusing and bewildering it is to be a new parent?
Who am I to complain?
Who am I to voice anything except praise and humble joy at this living answered prayer in my arms?
* * *
I have never known guilt like I have in the last eight weeks.
I should have taken better care of myself so he wasn’t born early. I shouldn’t have gone out shopping with my mom in the morning the day he got sick in the NICU so I could have seen that something was wrong earlier. After everything with the NEC, I shouldn’t be giving him formula two times a day. I should be producing more milk, so that he could have gained more weight a few weeks ago so he shouldn’t even be on supplemental formula in the first place. I should answer his cries sooner instead of playing the wait-and-see game in the middle of the night. I should be picking up around the house more. I should be writing more. I should finish start my baby shower(s) thank-you notes from two months ago at this point. I should be getting out of the house more. Getting dressed on a daily basis. Showering more regularly. I should be talking to him more, engaging him more, making sure he’s developmentally okay.
Should. Shouldn’t. Should. Shouldn’t.
I vacillate between priority and obligation with no clue what the hell I’m doing at any given moment, trusting my gut as much as I can, pinging into that “mother’s intuition” that doesn’t really feel intuitive at all.
* * *
You are in the trenches when you have a baby. To the untrained eye it seems pretty straightforward and easy — you feed them, you bathe them, you pick them up when they cry — but it’s more than that. It’s perpetual motion with a generous layer of guilt and self-doubt spread on top, and that takes its toll. (Source.)
And you’re falling into a love you’ve never known. It’s like quicksand; the more you struggle the deeper you fall. Only you’re not struggling, because it’s a gorgeous catastrophe, and there’s nowhere else to go. (Source – and worth the full read.)
And while… I certainly asked myself whether I might have PPD [post-partum depression], I generally didn’t find that line of questioning helpful.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s an important question that we should keep asking ourselves and each other, and we should seek treatment unapologetically if the answer might be yes. But the problem with that question as our primaryapproach to the struggles of new motherhood is that it suggests that the post-partum experience itself is just fine, unless of course you have a legitimate clinical illness that distorts your perception of it. And the post-partum experience is not just fine. It is immensely, bizarrely complicated. It is, at various times and for various people, grueling and joyful and frightening and beautiful and disorienting and moving and horrible. There’s a lot going on there that will never make its way into the DSM V. (Source.)
We know it’s true that they grow up too fast. But feeling like I have to enjoy every moment doesn’t feel like a gift, it feels like one more thing that is impossible to do, and right now, that list is way too long. Not every moment is enjoyable as a parent…
You’re an actual parent with limits. You cannot do it all. We all need to admit that one of the casualties specific to our information saturated culture is that we have sky-scraper standards for parenting, where we feel like we’re failing horribly if we feed our children chicken nuggets and we let them watch TV in the morning. (Source.)
* * *
Body odor and personal hygiene aside, I really do need to shower more.
The sound of the water from the shower head is a kind of white noise. Between that and the bathroom fan, I can’t really hear anything when I’m in the shower. Not the noisy window air conditioners that run 24/7 because of this ungodly heat, the cats meowing for more food, the baby that cries and cries and cries, often inconsolable no matter what we do.
The shower is my retreat, my escape. A fig and honey and orange and cherry blossom body wash scented escape.
It’s the reset button. It’s when I’m washed anew, when the water washes away the dried milk, the dried spit up, the dried pee, the dried poop, the dried, salt-stained trails on my cheeks – and the still very wet tears.
The shower, a baptismal of quiet relief, however momentary, however fleeting, both blessing: “Thank you G-d, for this moment, for this child, for keeping him alive and safe” – and prayer:
“Grant me the strength to keep going.”
