spark of life

Big news! I’m pregnant! And… due in ten days! Uh, and absolutely terrible at updating this blog. Sorry. But anyway, baby #3 is coming soon, and we’re very happy and excited about that, despite knowing full well that the impact of a newborn will be a mixed bag for our family. With a 10 year old and almost 7 year old, we’ve gotten accustomed to the luxuries of life without nap schedules, or diapers, or choking hazards, and revisiting all that will be… interesting, especially for the big kids.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably blocked me by now, because in recent weeks I’ve gotten very vocal (ok whiny) about wanting to get this baby OUT already. I feel like an asshole about it, because I know so many people would give anything to be pregnant and can’t, or have had horribly frightening experiences with preterm birth, and that my seemingly “I’m so uncomfortable I can’t stand being preggo ANY MORE” tweets must appear shallow or offensive or both. I don’t want to offend or alienate anyone, of course, yet I can’t be disingenuous about my own truth, either.

Here’s the thing. I want this baby out NOW because I am absolutely terrified what will happen if she stays in another minute more. My last baby was macrosomic, and his shoulder got stuck during childbirth. This is called dystocia, and is highly risky both to mother and baby; because the head is already delivered but not the chest, the cord is compressed against the baby in the birth canal and the baby suffers oxygen deprivation. This can be fatal, or cause brain damage, or permanent nerve damage and paralysis, or or or. 

There are a few things the medical team can do to help free the stuck shoulder, including breaking the baby’s collarbone (GAH, I KNOW) or performing something called the McRobert’s maneuver on the mother: pushing her knees up somewhere behind her ears and then applying significant pressure to her pubic bone to release the baby’s shoulder. The latter is what they did in my delivery experience, resulting in a perfectly healthy baby, thank the stars, and a separated pubic symphysis and dislocated pelvis for me. This took months and months to recover from, was extremely painful, and limited my physical activities (such as, you know, walking) severely. But I eventually recovered, and life went on, save for the occasional modified yoga pose so the teacher wouldn’t get sued if I dislocated my hip.

Flash forward to this pregnancy: pubic bone separation begins around month 7, which, ow, but ok, I’ll try to work with it. And then an ultrasound at 36/37 weeks shows the baby is already clocking in at eight and a half pounds, “on track” to be a little more than 9 and a half pounds by my due date (same as my son was), according to the doctor. I sputter something about margins of error with ultrasound sizing and am reassured that a previous history of macrosomia reduces that margin. Not to mention, a previous delivery with shoulder dystocia significantly increases the odds for a repeat scenario.

So. My pelvis is already destabilizing, there’s a giant baby percolating in my belly, and she’s likely to get stuck. Obviously the risk to her scares me, obviously I’d prefer not to dislocate my own bones to get her out, obviously this is a double-plus ungood scenario and excuse me if I feel perfectly justified in eating pineapples, eggplant and sriracha in an attempt to jumpstart labor. Yes it’s early and generally not recommended, but: macrosomia, dystocia, pubic symphysis — maybe not on the same panic scale as preterm labor and NICU stays for some people, but definitely waaaay up there on mine.

We all have the lens of our own personal experience that colors how we view the experiences and decisions of others, and I am not guilt-free when it comes to judging others based on my singularly anecdotal evidence in some situations. But lately I’ve felt guarded in expressing my fears and frustrations with remaining pregnant, because the common party line is that it is always better to wait for a fully cooked baby than risk getting her out early, and I feel like people must thing I’m some kind of shallow idiot to want otherwise.

I’m lucky that my OB has made me a solemn vow to do everything to protect both the baby and I no matter what happens, that we will make decisions together as a team, that my fears are completely valid and if the baby gets stuck we can try some other techniques first (for example the Gaskin maneuver) if time and circumstance allow. She supports my idea that going without an epidural will give me greater flexibility to get into positions that could reduce the risk for dystocia and promises that the nursing team will also be very supportive in helping me get through an unmedicated labor. She gives great and reassuring hugs at the end of each visit and I feel safe in her hands. I wish I felt just as safe in talking about it out in the world at large, but the truth is, I don’t. 

And I know that’s part of the joy of living in a world of free & unfettered speech; that we don’t always hear what we want to hear, or get validated in the way we hope. That people may not agree with or even disapprove of our ideas. That even a civil and respectful dialogue about it may still hurt. I know all this, and yet, a part of me wonders if my body isn’t releasing the baby yet because my heart is still in its own infancy and needs the validation and support of entire, multiple communities before it can let go and fully trust that all will be well. 

This self-doubt, it’s frustrating. And also oddly reassuring; I’m just one little human, trying to make another. Wish me luck?

a girl’s weakness, a woman’s heart

There’s the kind of person who may appear to be over-invested in their child’s emotional health. Perhaps this investment appears unhealthy in itself; I’m not sure, being one of those kind of people, and lacking in enough perspective to see the situation clearly. But I keep forging ahead, trying to do what I think is right for my kids: filtering media content, sitting at the bedside of an anxious child, staying an extra five minutes at drop off for the nervous child, carefully choosing my words about diet to reflect health rather than image, making sure to validate feelings and separate them from behaviors and actions in both praise and punishment. I try not to helicopter, I try to encourage discovery and agency and initiative, to teach critical thinking as well as compassion.

The tricky thing is that I’m married to someone who is practical, pragmatic through and through, and has a very difficult time valuing the emotional realm, let alone acknowledging its existence. Through my lens, his insistence on things “making sense” and “being smart” above how things might just feel is myopic and puts us all at a disadvantage. To me, yelling at a child for having feelings he or she can’t work through appropriately on his or her own is tantamount to abuse.

So the question is, if I know I would immediately take the kids and leave a spouse who physically harmed them, first strike you’re out, why is it so much less clear when I feel like he sometimes emotionally harms them? Do I subscribe to his theory, that it’s a cruel world and they need to learn how to navigate it? Do I allow the generous excuse that his upbringing did not teach him how to have a healthy emotional life and he’s still working on it forty years later? What are my children learning from me, as I protest but don’t altogether stop the way their father speaks to them?

take everything on evidence

Common wisdom holds that parents should maintain a united front when making decisions, disciplining, and setting expectations with their children. Kids shouldn’t be given the opportunity to play one parent against the other, or feel insecure about who is really in charge. I’ve heard some divorced parents talk about how this is (or, sadly, more often isn’t) a sustainable practice, but I’ve heard less about how parents who are together also struggle with this.

Nature abhors a vacuum and all, so! Allow me to fill that void with vexations and frustrations from my own experience. 

I’ve always been pretty thin-skinned. My husband can make comments like “It would be better with more cilantro” or “Is that what you’re wearing?” or “I see you didn’t balance the checkbook” and I take it as a personal affront. His comments or observations vary on the scale of actual offensiveness (from not-at-all to WTF) but I perceive them pretty much universally as criticisms. Of me. Of how I am lacking in awesomeness, or even adequacy. Most of the time he feels he is just making a comment, and even if I point out that it technically was a judgement or if even the tone of this observation was snarky or mean, he reassures me that it wasn’t his intention to make me feel bad. After more than twelve years together, I feel kind of like an old tree covered in ivy; it’s hard to tell what is supporting me from what is tearing me down.

My dad was pretty critical and disapproving when I was a kid, too (yes, Dr. Freud, I did marry my father, thank you for noticing). He had a cold stare that could stop my heart from across the room. I just knew when I’d disappointed him, the way you just know when you’ve been impaled on a pointy, sharp sword. (I mean, I imagine you’d know that pretty well, if it happened.) By the time I reached my mid teens, I could hardly talk to him. I felt misunderstood, belittled, and unloved. It took a not small amount of therapy to untangle all that, and a lot of time. Today my dad is my confidant and my champion, but I remember what it felt like back then, the immeasurable divide between us, the bottomless hurt.

And, as it turns out, my daughter is temperamentally very much like me. Emotional, earnest, and very, very sensitive. Most of the time we’ve all muddled through, resolving misunderstandings and hurt feelings quickly and easily. In the last few months though — perhaps not uncoincidentally as she enters her tweenhood – things have changed. She hurts more deeply, and for longer, and withdraws into sarcasm or silence instead. She reacts to my husband’s every comment with sullen eye rolls or wounded sighs. He snarks back, and she storms and stomps, and like a wildfire in the wind suddenly they are both in aflame, burning each other with disappointment and despair.

I hear her sobbing upstairs, and go to sit with her. I don’t want to take sides, I don’t want to unbalance the perception of parental unity. But I think he has been an utter ass, and I ache for her. What can I say? How can I comfort? “Why does he hate me?” she cries, snot bubbling out of her nose in tiny, sad pearls. I am stricken. I know he loves her, yet I know how it feels to feel unloved. I’m in an impossible middle ground: I must defend the indefensible, find the grace in the grimness, speak the truth in the midst of hypocrisy.

Yes. I know he hurt you. I also know he loves you. It doesn’t make sense; it seems like two opposite things. But they are both true. This is a paradox. Hang on. You will be able to understand both truths one day. For now, trust me, there is love. There really is, I promise.

You might wonder why I tolerate this. Typed out it sounds awful. It is awful. But it is how he grew up, it is what he knows: he was never good enough. And now, he is trying so hard to undo his knotted history, to smooth his own scars and be a different kind of parent than his own were. I respect the hell out of his effort, and how far he has come. He has done much more and much harder work than I have. For me, this is enough: he loves me, he is trying to be better, he wants us to have a happy and healthy relationship.

But for my daughter? Is this enough? Is it fair to ask her to be patient, to try to understand? To believe the love is there, even when she can’t see it?

I wish I knew.

 

*Great Expectations

in the shadow looking on

Well, it turned out I was not pregnant after all, though it took a considerably long time to establish the fact. The odd thing was, so invested had I become in being prepared for the possibility, that when all was made absolutely and finally clear, there was, I had to admit to myself, a little regret mixed in with the relief.

As one part of me kept listing all the many reasons a third child would be a disruption to an already syncopated family rhythm, another grew excited at the prospect of feeling again the flush of new life and all the promise it holds. The possibility of beginning again, reveling – perhaps even hiding – in the uncomplicated newness of an infant, the simple care of love, feed, hold, nourish.

So much of my life now is governed by uncertainty and worry, there is an appeal in retreating to the safety of that warm, post-partum bubble. My many now-pregnant-with-their-second-baby friends would guffaw (if it didn’t put them in danger of vomiting) at my romanticizing life with a newborn, and while I understand it’s not all sweetness and light (particularly with older children still carrying on demanding things), and that things like colic and reflux and sleep deprivation can really rip a hole in one’s sanity, I still think of those early days as beautifully simple.

My oldest is entering the tween years, and my youngest is dealing with a mental disorder. As exhausting and uncertain as their early childhood was, it all seems even more so now. And perhaps all of parenting feels this way, to everyone, no matter their situation: always new and difficult and slightly opaque. Always the questions of what to do, how to navigate challenges, how to help your children grow and learn and love and be healthy, happy, independent people. From here, the diapers and the sleepless nights and the breastfeeding saga, even at their worst, look so manageable. But I have to remember that I was operating far out of my comfort zone then, just as I am now. It felt then there was just as much at stake as it does now.

The difference is, the further along the path you get, the farther your future’s endless possibility recedes. The lens narrows, the children take shape, your faults helping to form them as well as your better aspects. I don’t feel that I have failed my children, but I do see now that I could have done better. If only I could have carried that protective envelope of love forward, that their lives didn’t need to become burdened with such pain and confusion. Naive, perhaps, but isn’t it human?

In wishing, however faintly, for that third baby, I think I was really wishing for a chance to try again with the two I already have. When it became clear there wouldn’t be one, it also became clear that the only steps I can take with them are forward. We are where we are. It’s the curse of the path not taken – you don’t even see it until you have missed the turn.

wonders in the deep

If you follow me on Twitter you may know I’ve been ensconced in the throes of a drama entirely too comedic and youthful to be my real life. On the evening I was due to remove my Nuvaring, I discovered it missing. Tormented by visions of it floating lazily, Saturn-like, somewhere in my abdominal hinterlands, I phoned the doctor the next morning. Much embarrassing discussion resulted in an appointment for the next day, and, on her own thoughtful initiative, a prescription for Plan B. Which, as supportive as I am of the existence and availability of Plan B and many choices for women and family planning, I elected not to take it. My father always said not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and one may suppose that goes for any prize chute, including fallopian tubes. So, uh.

A rousing game of speculum peekaboo revealed I’d indeed been correct in my assessment of the situation, and even worse, it had probably fallen out a week or so ago, meaning the, ahem, relations I’d had with Monsieur Shriek more recently had been of the very unprotected sort and a biological supernova could quite possibly now be taking place Within. I bought an EPT at the pharmacy on my way home from the doctor, and have been staring apprehensively at the box for the last twenty or so hours.

It’s funny to be on the other end of the stick – in years past, I couldn’t wait to test because my hope of two pink lines was so overwhelmingly great it nearly undid me. I wouldn’t say my hope of a negative this time is in equal proportion, but. We are done. Or – we were done. Our two are so wonderful and amazing and impossible that adding another seems absurd. Unfair, even. With the youngest’s developmental issues lately, even the oldest has gotten shafted in the time/attention department. What would a squalling pooping sleepless infant – even assuming (ptui ptui) a normal, healthy one – do the two who are already here and struggling for secure and happy childhoods?

It’s an infinite loop, this line of worrying. And I am trying to give it up. What dreams may come, et cetera. I cannot know how it would work, only that that we would work, my husband and I, to make it the best it could be. We have our struggles, this family, yet more and more what they reveal to me is that we have enormous strength in love. Even as the world seems to be collapsing around us, my faith in the human heart grows every day. And perhaps even a new heart grows within me, too. I’ll let you know.

love will carry you all lengths

At pickup one afternoon this week, my kindergartner’s teacher asked if I could stay and chat a few minutes. I turned my kids loose on the playground, and followed the teacher inside. She talked about how he has been acting out, how he is so easily angered, how he hits and pushes and yells and threatens. How he’s been sent to the principal’s office because his level of disruption was just plain unfair to the other students. She also talked about his sweet side – how he engages with the work, helps her with various things, asks interesting questions, cooperates in joint tasks.

It was clear to me that she really sees the whole child, and wants to work with me to be his advocate. He’s not a problem, she said, but he does have problems, and we are all going to help him. She’s already spoken with his private therapist, and arranged for him to have regular pull-out sessions with the school counselor. She reads books with the class about feelings. She told me she can see that I’m doing all the right things, that this isn’t my fault. And then she looked at me with such gentleness, such concern, and said, “You must be so worried.”

Of course I started crying. Mostly with gratitude – that she understands, that she really sees him, that she’s not writing him off or giving up on him. She suggested trying some approaches that she has used successfully with autistic kids (“not that I’m saying he’s autistic,” she quickly added), some activities that can be calming & therapeutic for kids with sensory issues. She loaned me a book. She described how she would modify some expectations for him in order to build his confidence and let him experience success. I felt so hopeful about the potential for helping him this year, that maybe, even, with love and understanding and help on all sides, he could become a “regular” happy and healthy kid.

And then at back to school night, several parents accosted me with tales of my son acting out. I couldn’t tell if they innocently thought whatever they witnessed was an isolated incident, just a quirky kid getting all up someone’s grill kindergarten-style, a fun and amusing little anecdote. Or if they truly see my kid as That Kid, the jerky, out of control one, and were uncertain how to tell me this directly so instead relied on a lame, jokey delivery. What was clear was that people were noticing he’s outside the bounds of expected, acceptable behavior, even for 5 year olds. I put my best Stepford smile on and thanked each one for letting me know. “Boys,” they all laughed. “What are you gonna do?”

Good question.

I came home and told my husband, and he reminded me that we have to have faith, that we’re doing everything we can, we have support and professionals on board, and most of all that we love him. He’s right, it’s all true. So why do I feel so sick?

 

forever dimly seen

I’ve spent the summer telling myself “he’ll settle in, it just takes time” and while I still believe this to be true, it is now also clear that it will take a lot of time, and a lot of help. He’s been seeing a child psychologist for the last several weeks, and I met with her recently. The nutshell is, I’m not crazy, he’s not crazy, but he has… issues. Problems with sensory integration. Emotional development deficits. It is possible these things are contributing to his rages and his shutdowns, to his violence and aggression. She – the psychologist – is still exploring possibilities. (It is amazing to me what she can extrapolate out of a sand tray.)

Anyway the sensory stuff, even though I know about it, even though I read many of you describing your children with sensory issues, even though he has sensory-induced freakouts on a regular basis… it never once occurred to me that he has sensory integration issues. Not once. Now, of course, the hindsight makes a neat little clicking noise as it all falls into place: the faucet is too loud, the fan is too loud, the socks are too bumpy, the fleece is too scratchy, the sunscreen is too gooey, the light is too bright, the car is too fast, the peanut butter is too smelly, TAKE IT OFF GET IT OFF ME MAKE IT STOP TURN IT DOWN DON’T TOUCH ME I CAN’T EAT THAT. How did I possibly miss this? He was so obvious in his distress, so unable to cope, so much in his world was and is completely unbearable to him and I wondered why he had so many tantrums?

And the emotional deficits… you guys. He can’t recognize emotion in other people. How did I miss this?? I am a feeeeelings kind of person. I always acknowledge feelings, whether they are mine, my kids’, other peoples’. I name them, I honor them in that way only a child of the 70′s can. And he… just never connected with that. Certainly I knew he couldn’t talk about his own feelings, but I assumed that was because he was having such intense and painful emotions that he was unwilling to deal with them head-on.

Right now, I’m trying to identify and reduce his triggers, the therapist will keep working with him and trying to uncover more of the pieces contributing to the picture. I don’t know what it will look like in the end. This feels like a jigsaw puzzle without the box to refer to. I’m stomach-clenchingly afraid of what it will reveal, and at the same time relieved to know we’re in good hands and there will be more and more opportunities to help him. It is agonizing to realize what a struggle each day is for him. But I am so hopeful we will learn how to work through the challenges, that one day he will be happy, and comfortable in his skin. I have to be, right?