Flotsam

Aug

367.

Since finishing my…confessional? Elegy? Ecrivatory deluge? (Well, not that last one, because according to Google the word “ecrivatory” doesn’t exist)—since finishing last week’s whatever-it-was, Ames is suddenly a real person to me in a way he wasn’t before, and when I think of him I am sad in a way I haven’t been before now. This sounds like a bad thing, but I promise you, it’s not. The guilt that used to swell up at the thought of him has dissipated, and left unmuddied grief, for the first time. Odd as it may seem at seven months past his death, I feel like someone just told me this weekend that I had another baby, a son, and he died. And I know it must be wearing a little thin, my constant marveling over the oh-so-original observation that People Can Be Happy and Sad All At Once, but I really do find it amazing that I am so full of joy that the loss can only seep in around the edges, in tiny pinpricks or in a brief rush before I fall asleep. I was terribly nervous about posting some of those pieces last week, and your kind stewardship of them meant everything. For some reason I am always prepared for a virtual stoning to break out in my comment section, but of course it never does. I have the nicest readers.

Simone is teething, and I am very peeved about the whole process. Not at her, mind you, at the fact that nature has seen fit to have solid teeth thrust their way upwards through the tender flesh of infant gums. WTF, evolution? My poor baby is reduced to mouthing her hand and my shoulder, constantly sliding her tongue over her gums or sucking on it to make little clicking sounds. She is producing a ridiculous quantity of frothy drool and while there is no tooth out yet, I am fairly certain that this is what we are dealing with. And the screaming! Oh, the screaming. Luckily Simone is a very decorous baby and only screams for relatively short periods, but the screams are so sad and so piercing that they would make a grown man cry. And possibly lactate.

My daughter was one year old yesterday. On August 25th of 2007—after I emerged from a pleasant fog of Versed to find myself 22 ova lighter—a sperm and an egg came together in a petri dish and created the girl who is now chewing on her blanket in the swing across the room. A year ago Thursday, I saw her outside of my body for the first time, when an embryologist named Christopher led her father and me into a dark room to peer at her through a microscope. She and Ames were three days old, and only seven and nine cells big. They were beautiful. A man in a bow-tie and head lamp snaked a catheter into place, and Simone was sluiced through it. And 167 days later, I saw her again.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (40)

Aug

Coda.

If you could see me this week, live and in person, you might be confused. Why, she looks fine! you might think, Look at her, chewing on that baby’s foot! See her giggling at the television! Shouldn’t she be gliding, wraithlike, through the halls at night, wailing and clutching a tiny shroud?

Yes: I have trouble seeing twins. And double strollers. If I don’t hear from a pregnant woman for a few days I assume something terrible has happened. In fact, most things pregnancy-related make me vaguely jittery, and the sight of happy-looking pregnant women sometimes inspires a sentence to float, unbidden, from some sarcastic nook of my subconscious: How nice for you. Neither Scott nor I have eaten peanut butter since I was on bedrest, because we ate so much of it then. I remember the surreality of breakfast at a favorite restaurant, days after my discharge, fighting tears because I’d been there last pregnant with twins, and a month later even the waitresses were the same while I now had a tiny daughter in the hospital and a baby whose ashes we would be picking up later that day. I remember it seemed impossible that so much could change so quickly and leave so little impression on the rest of the world. Sometimes now I look at my daughter and see a reminder of what Ames should be. And the thought of the nights Simone spent alone in the NICU, when she cried around her ventilator tube and no one could hear her, and I wasn’t there—that thought can still reduce me to tears.

But in truth, I had to purposely set aside the time to write these last posts, because if I had waited for grief and guilt and memory to have enough of a presence in my daily life that they demanded to be written about…well, it would never have happened. In reality, these things come to me only in flashes. I see a little boy in a magazine and what if floats up, and then Simone squeals at the sight of her newly-discovered feet, and just like that, it’s gone.

If you could see me, I think you would be embarrassed, the way I smile at nothing these days, the way I mimic the sounds Simone shouts at me and shake my hair at her. I may be A Woman With A Troubled Past, but I don’t act the part. I think sometimes we try too hard to fit our lives into the shapes of the stories we know. I doubt we’ll ever really stop doing that, so I believe the best we can do is to make sure there are as many stories out there as possible. The women who have written honestly about motherhood—the good and the bad—helped me through moments of my pregnancy when I wondered if I’d be too anxious and overwhelmed to be a good mother. Whatever I felt, I knew that it would be ok, that others had felt it too, and had sent their reassuring lighthouse beams out into the murky waters for me. After I brought Simone home, I almost felt guilty posting about how much I adored motherhood (this is VERY ADVANCED GUILT—don’t try it at home), because I didn’t want someone who enjoyed it less to feel bad. Obviously, I was missing the point.
In elementary school we had a program called U R UNIQUE, a sort of cork-board precursor to a blog. Each week a new classmate would festoon the appointed corner of the room with artifacts of herself: pictures, favorite toys, trophies. They would give a presentation of everything Them, and the display would remain up for the rest of us to look at, to see all the little ways we were the same and different.
I like French fries dipped in blue cheese dressing. My house? Is FILTHY. Having a baby was the best thing that ever happened to my sex life. I’m a morning person. I wish I didn’t wish I were thinner. I drink my coffee black. My daughter was a twin. I’m sad about her brother sometimes, but not as much as you’d think.

Right now, I am happier than I have ever been. Ok, maybe there was a time in childhood, picking out school supplies for the new year, or chipping rocks out of the black-top with a crochet hook for my extensive collection. But with the possible exception of my wedding day, I have never been both this excited about the future and content in the present. I’ve been very lucky. I am full of plans, and I like it here, right where I am.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (69)

Aug

Part Three.

When Simone was in the hospital, my emotions were mostly practical ones, tied to her condition: fear and hope, often all twisted up together. But sometimes there was something else—I was angry. Often I didn’t realize it until I was on my way to see Simone, walking past a room with a big, healthy-looking baby in an open-air crib, or being nursed by its mother. I would feel my eyes narrow involuntarily. Simone was having surgery, stumping nephrology, failing CPAP trials, too fragile to be held. I saw the parents of these fat, four-pound babies looking terrified, and instead of sympathy, I felt scorn. You have no idea, I thought, with a cruelty I am ashamed of now, you know NOTHING. And then I strode past with a tight jaw to Simone’s room, to peer at her monitor and whisper into her porthole.
Quite a bit of my anger was directed at the chaplain, a perfectly nice woman who came around every once and a while to talk to me about my “journey.” Now, I do not happen to believe in god, but I have no problem with those who do. I loved hearing that someone was praying for Simone, and I even like to think it helped, all those people all over the world thinking of her. But something about this woman rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the tiny, useless backpack she wore, or her constant, impatient-making insistence on asking about me, when I WAS FINE, IT WAS MY BABY WHO MIGHT BE DYING. I was rude when she visited—or as rude as I ever am, which mostly involved not offering her anything to drink—and I sat there with my teeth clenched, just DARING HER to say anything to me about “God’s plan,” or “finding meaning.”

I have always found the idea of “finding meaning” in a tragedy to be rather repulsive. As if Ames’ death and my daughter’s potentially crippling prematurity were ultimately about me, about teaching me some lesson about the resilience of the human spirit. The very idea makes me feel like taking a shower, and then possibly burning a stack of cloying angel-themed poetry. I wasn’t interested in meaning. But I did want to find a cause.

For your reference, there is no way to make the reading of an autopsy report festive. Believe me, I tried. I received the report, after many frustrated phone calls, more than four months after Ames’ birth. My perinatologist was kind but busy, and not particularly helpful when it came to interpretation of the findings. There is more to being a doctor than vocabulary, and though I understood the words in the report, I did not understand their significance. But happily, my brother had the foresight to become friends with a medical examiner, and she agreed to come over and explain it to me.
I chilled wine, I washed the good glasses, but it would have taken something with more than 12.5% alcohol to render the situation anything but awkward. “Welcome to my home! Come, let us read about the autolytic changes to my son’s brain!”

The doctor at our 20-week ultrasound had been right all along: there was not a thing wrong with Ames; his chromosomes were normal. Given different circumstances, he would have flourished.
Ames’ placenta showed “severe, acute chorioamnionitis,” an infection of the placenta and membranes. His umbilical cord was thin—as small as .3 cm in some places—and his placenta was only 77 grams, well under the 10th percentile. For that matter, Simone’s placenta was small as well, only 116 grams at nearly 26 weeks. When she was born, they said she seemed younger than her gestational age. Ames measured 20 weeks. The autopsy report states: “The etiology of intrauterine fetal demise of Twin A is likely due to the severe chorioamnionitis.” However, there was no fetal infection. The medical examiner I plied with wine believes the infection compromised Ames’ placental function, clogging the vessels, depriving him of oxygen, bloodflow, and nutrients. And that is what killed him. I wouldn’t imagine it is a pleasant way to die.

It is impossible to know for certain, of course. A month had passed since his death, and Ames’ sac had been ruptured for almost half that time. The infection could have been introduced post-mortem. But the medical examiner does not believe that was the case. It is nobody’s fault, if by fault you mean intention, but the fact remains that my body’s job was to protect and nourish its charges, and instead it deprived one of sustenance. There were other contributing factors—I had gestational diabetes, which affects the formation of the placental vasculature. I was on prednisone for the first 18 weeks to prevent miscarriage, and prednisone is a drug that both decreases glucose tolerance and can increase chances of infection. I was diagnosed with a bacterial infection at 17 weeks, and though I was treated with a course of Flagyl, I was never rechecked. I had trouble keeping the medication down. Maybe I shouldn’t have been on the prednisone. Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped the prednisone at 18 weeks. Maybe I pulled dirty underwear out of the hamper one morning when I was out of laundry and gave myself an infection. Maybe I should have been more insistent about the amount of pain and pressure I was feeling—by 22 weeks, I could barely walk from my desk to the bathroom. Maybe I should have insisted upon heparin. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It is useless to think this way, but inevitable.

In the end, an autopsy report has a sort of poetry:
“The fetus is well-formed.”
“Right foot length: 3.1 cm”
“Hair follicles are present on the scalp.”
“The ears are appropriately positioned and exhibit normal folding.”
“The lungs are unremarkable.”
“Fingernails and nailbeds are present.”

I’ll wrap this up tomorrow.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (51)

Aug

Part Two.

I have started several posts about Ames in the past month, but have finished none of them. Every night for the last week I have rearranged sentences in my head before falling asleep, trying to find some way to talk about him, and I am foiled again and again by how complicated it all seems, and how tired it makes me to try to tease any order from my thoughts. And the longer I let it go, the more there is to say, and thus the more daunting the task of saying it becomes. The talented Tash wrote a post in which she quoted Amy Bloom: “Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.”

I switched psychiatrists recently, and during the obligatory first appointment evaluation, he asked whether I ever feel guilty about anything, and I laughed. Not a tight, sarcastic laugh, but the laughter of the genuinely amused. If there were an Olympics for neurotics (and just imagine the opening ceremonies—the narcissists fighting over the torch, the claustrophobics streaming for the exits), I have no doubt that I would be a medal contender in that category. Sure, anxiety is my specialty, my meat-and-potatoes, but everyone needs a hobby, and guilt is mine. I sometimes read the stories of other women who have had stillbirths or lost a twin, and after sympathy, guilt is my primary reaction, because I should have been where they were, and I wasn’t.

I was devastated when Ames died, but more than that, I was scared. Simone was still in what felt like a uterine death chamber, and when my cervix began to soften, my contractions to increase, the equally terrible possibility that she wouldn’t remain there until viability reared up before me. Within a few days after the no-heartbeat ultrasound, all of my focus had shifted to keeping my remaining baby alive. They say people form strong bonds in times of stress, and after learning Ames was dead I felt closer to Simone than I had to either of the babies before that point.

You know what happens next. Bedrest, bedrest, and more bedrest. A hospital stay, labor, and my eventual C-section. And after it was all over I was giddy with accomplishment, and an amazed, joyful love. I had a BABY, I kept thinking over and over to myself.

They brought Ames to me in recovery, dressed in a pale blue outfit with a hood, a sort of cloak. I would have preferred him wearing nothing at all, as the contrast between his body—marinated for a month after death—and the frou-frou gown was grotesque, like a macabre Little Red Riding Hood. I was on morphine, high from the exhilaration of birth, the long siege over, and all I could think, looking at Ames in his blue hood, was that he looked like Skeletor. Scott held him and cried and I sat staring into his tiny face, wondering what was wrong with me.

With a stillborn baby, you get only one concrete physical image, and it is the image of a corpse. There was beauty, even so: Ames’ perfectly formed feet and long-fingered hands. Still, I could never understand the insistence upon regarding his body a month after death—a time when none of us would be at our best—as essentially him. I could feel Ames stomping inside of me when he was alive, I saw him kick and twist and wiggle on the ultrasound screen. He was not his corpse. Some relatives wanted pictures to display, and this bothered me more than I can express to you. It was not how I wanted him remembered, and I considered his appearance at birth to be private. He still felt very much a part of me, and one of which I was protective. No one else got to know him as he was before he died? Tough. This is an unfortunate fact of biology—I don’t make the rules.

I decided I wanted to see him again, and so the next day we were to say goodbye and send him to be autopsied. There was some confusion about when he’d be brought to my room, and a long wait, and then a nurse (insistent on giving me my 5:00 laxative and changing my bag of fluids) bursting in while we held him. I had arranged for a visit from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, an organization that takes photos of stillborn babies for their families. Ames was naked, fragile and softening. Because of how much time had passed since his death, he weighed only a little more than half a pound, and his skin was a nut brown. I had come down from my post birth high enough to register emotion, and finally, I cried. My in-laws came in to see him, briefly. And then it was just the three of us.
I held him, touched him—we had to be very careful—and gave him a kiss. I think I sang him a song. Scott thought he would have looked like me, that he had my chin. We could see so clearly who he might have been, something I search fruitlessly for in the pictures we have from that day. I gave him my middle name: Michel.
The worst part of the protocol is that the time you have is open-ended, and it is up to you to notify the nurse that you are “ready” for them to take your baby away. Ready! It feels like the worst kind of betrayal. We had a few false starts—I handed Ames to Scott to return to the bassinet, and then wailed for him back, sobbing. But eventually we did it, we wrapped him up and called the nurse, and he was gone.

If Ames had been a singleton, his death would have been the beginning of a fierce, consuming depression—this I know. Four years ago, after my miscarriage at seven weeks, I cried every day for months, quit my job, gained fifteen pounds, and obsessively tracked where I would have been in an alternate universe where that baby had lived. I can only imagine how incapacitated I would have been by a loss at the cusp of viability. But as Ames was wheeled to the morgue, Simone was very much alive, having perfusion problems from blood draws and dobutamine, and there was talk that day of her losing her hand or a finger. I was focused on learning to pump, and re-learning to walk so that they would let me go to the NICU. If Ames had been a singleton I would have been alone with my husband as my still baby was rolled away down the hall, my leaking breasts a mockery, my head empty and black inside. IF Ames had been a singleton.

But he wasn’t. And instead of mourning him as he no doubt deserved to be mourned, I gave him little thought in the coming months while I sat at Simone’s bedside, feeling judged and annoyed by those who insisted upon talking about him, and too guilty about my lack of mourning to post about him here. In case you imagined I was grieving him in secret, let me be clear: I wasn’t. First my fear and later my happiness left room for nothing else. If I thought of Ames at all it was in shame; it seemed unfair that others had to endure the crushing grief of a late-term loss, and instead I had somehow snatched Simone from the snappy jaws of fate and skipped neatly over the sorrow with my name on it.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (78)

Aug

Part One.

“Even the miniscule, erratic wireless signal at the window seems to have been extinguished, so heaven only knows when I will be able to post this.”

That was the first sentence of the entry I was writing at 12:30 p.m. on February 7th. I remember noticing as I wrote that it felt remarkably like the first day of my period.

“Thalia asked why they aren’t giving me anything for contractions, and the answer is that contractions are often a sign of infection (which could be dangerous to Simone), and they don’t want to mask them. As soon as my water broke I was started on antibiotics, which were discontinued a few days ago. So they are certainly trying to prevent infection, just not contractions.”

That was the last paragraph I typed. An hour later I was in labor.

I wasn’t going to write a birth story. But in the interest of this week’s ENEMA OF THE SOUL, I will give you the facts. It was a Thursday. I was 25w5d. I had been on hospital bedrest for almost two weeks; Ames had been dead for nearly a month, his water broken for 12 days. It had been OVER a month since this picture was taken, so thanks to my short torso, I was shaped like a sideways camel, a paranoid camel who felt compelled to store lots and lots of extra water in his hump—you know, for the apocalypse.
As awed as I was by the quality of care I received on bedrest, and that Simone received in the NICU, my labor experience still upsets me. I am not talking about the loss of some patchouli-scented experiential ideal. My birth plan had been downgraded from “get the babies out alive” to “get at least 50% of the babies out alive,” so I think my expectations were pretty well managed. What I am talking about is a complete lack of communication, leading to the impression that while I was ostensibly a patient in the antepartum unit (I was never moved to Labor & Delivery), I had essentially been left to my own devices. It strengthened my newly-forged opinion that pregnancy and birth are a miracle not in some pseudo-spiritual sense, but in that it is a goddamn MIRACLE anyone makes it out alive.

I started having painful, regular contractions at 1:30 p.m. At 2:00, a cervical check revealed that I was not dilated. Simone was transverse, and I’d been informed that if I was really, truly, no-turning-back in labor, I was likely to deliver by C-section. They would “try to keep me comfortable.” I was given some stick-on heating pads. A new nurse started at 3:00.
The new nurse put me on the monitors and, as always, had a hard time picking up Simone’s heartbeat and my contractions. She picked up contractions at two minutes apart for a while and then got nothing for 15 minutes while they continued. I was given a dose of Vistaril to relax me; it helped a bit and spaced the contractions to five minutes apart. By five o’clock the Vistaril had worn off, and the pain felt grinding and insistent, like some efficient German industrial process. I remember telling Scott in a low voice that this was it. Dinner arrived and I asked the nurse whether I should eat, figuring they might want me NPO for surgery. She said she would check with the doctor and disappeared.
Over an hour later Scott and I had asked for our nurse at the nurses’ station several times with no response. I was starving, and nauseated from the pain and lack of food. I ate half of my sandwich, one bite at a time: chew chew chew, stop for contraction. The nurse returned and told me the doctor had said not to eat, just in case.

During contractions, Scott would watch the monitor and tell me when the numbers stopped rising, indicating that the worst was over. I was half-watching episodes of Sex and the City, trying to focus and keep myself calm, but the relentlessness of the contractions—one after another—had started to make me edgy and desperate. We asked the nurse to call the doctor. I wanted to know what the plan was, and I wanted something for the pain. The nurse vanished for another hour or so, and when she returned she said the doctor had ordered Demerol, but that the pharmacy hadn’t sent it up.

More time passed. It was quiet and dark. Still no Demerol. It’s hard to remember what happened during this time. They had me on the monitors at some point, adjusting the disks over and over, failing to get a consistent strip. I had started passing blood and mucous. I asked again about The Plan, and the nurse said the doctor wanted to see how I was in the morning. I said I didn’t think I could make it that long, and was reminded that I hadn’t been dilated when they checked me at 2:00. Eight. Hours. Earlier. I was told they couldn’t reexamine me because of the risk of infection. The nurse left. My cervix was never checked again.

More pain, for I don’t know how long. I was shaking. I finally got my shot of Demerol, which might as well have been a single, expired Tylenol. I threw up. They gave me more Vistaril and said I should try to sleep. I told Scott to go to bed. There didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do. I lay on my side facing the window, holding the bedrail, the contractions seizing me in what felt like one undulating wave. I could feel a pushing down and leaking with each spasm. I was afraid I would give birth to Ames in bed, terrified he would come out in pieces. Everything smelled like death. I was making noise—Scott later told me I sounded like a porn soundtrack, and you could hear me in the hallway.
There had been a shift change. The new nurse heard me moaning through a contraction and told me to breathe. I wanted to say that I was hours past “breathe,” and instead I begged her to contact the doctor on call. “It’s an EIGHT,” I wheezed, referring to the pain scale. EIGHT was the highest number I’d ever used, higher than my kidney stones and miscarriages. I always figured I’d save my TEN for an attack by bears or a slow dismemberment by spork.

At some point I went to the bathroom and passed more unpleasant goo, and then I fainted, pulling the emergency cord as I fell. I was surrounded by nurses who helped me onto a chair and back to bed. They all told me to breathe. I wanted to kill them, but was too tired.

It was after 4:00 a.m. The doctor on call from my perinatology practice appeared. I had met her once before, when she pronounced Ames and Simone “ideal” at my 20-week anatomy ultrasound. She said I was “probably in early labor.” Because of Simone’s position, we needed to decide whether to do a C-section or attempt to stop the contractions with another bag of Magnesium. She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she meant I needed to decide. I said I was confused, as the other doctors had told me it was best NOT to stall labor. She nodded again, thoughtfully, and waited.

It had been 15 hours. I did not want to be the one deciding to deliver my child at 25 weeks. How would I ever know whether I had made the decision because of the pain, the horrible pain that would not stop? I kept asking the doctor what she thought I should do and she kept demurring. Finally she said she didn’t think the Mag would buy us more than a few hours and recommended the caesarian. I was relieved, and ashamed of being relieved.

Scott was whisked away; I was given something foul to drink, and then briefed by an anesthesiologist who had missed his calling as an auctioneer. Nurses from Labor and Delivery had come to take over, among them my favorite from the night I was admitted, who’d held me while I panicked and retched and went into shock after Ames’ water broke. Now she prepped me, and I was wheeled to the OR. I leaned into her while they swabbed my back. I’d always thought I’d be terrified of the spinal, but by then if they had told me that plunging a red-hot serrated bread-knife into my eye would relieve me of all sensation below the waist I wouldn’t have hesitated. I had one more terrible contraction…and they were gone.

I started babbling gratefully that I couldn’t feel a thing. Scott held my hand. We stared at each other. I heard the time called and realized the incision had been made. Something happened with my blood pressure, and I threw up for the last time in my pregnancy. I felt a rolling and a rustling, and heard the doctor say “Poor little thing.” Ames was out.
More pulling. Then, 5:35 a.m.: they held up a wormy purple-red bundle. I saw a leg moving—oh my god, it was moving, it was a live person! I gasped and gasped and laughed and cried and they took her away and I told Scott We have a baby! We have a daughter!

Scott left with Simone and I heard the doctor talking about how much she loved her new staple gun. I heard the CHUNK, CHUNK of the staples. She appeared by my head to tell me that my uterus had been completely thinned out by contractions. “I’m sorry,” she said, “You didn’t seem like a woman in active labor.”
In recovery, a nurse asked whether I had any pain and I burbled the same words I would repeat for the next two days: “But no contractions!” That night I would have nightmares about contracting and wake to find it was only the automatically-constricting pressure cuffs on my legs.

They wheeled Simone into recovery on her way to the NICU. She had cried before she was intubated, they told me. I was so proud. Her eyes were fused shut, she was red and wrapped in plastic, her head the size of a bulb syringe: she was beautiful. I reached my hand into her isolette and she gripped the tip of my finger. In a few hours I would spike a fever, and they’d hang my IV poles with festive bags of broad-spectrum antibiotics. We got her out just in time.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (87)

Aug

Prelude.

Imagine you are driving peacefully along, and the car in front of you loses control, skids wildly, hits the rail and flips over. Without thinking, you jerk your steering wheel to avoid the crash, and then swiftly, automatically, pull your car to the side of the road, dial for help and hear yourself talking in a calm voice that is not your own. Only after you have hung up do your hands start shaking and your chest heaving and your eyes tearing and your mind spinning oh my god oh my god OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.

After Ames’ death and Simone’s early birth, I lived for a long time in Crisis Mode! As odd as it may seem, considering my long-standing anxiety issues, Crisis Mode! agrees with me. I was scared, certainly, but there were things that needed to be done, and panicking wasn’t going to solve anything. Panicking never solves anything, but the only time I seem able to remember this is when I am in Crisis Mode!
Now, with Simone off oxygen, her monitor, and most of her medications, our days have settled into near-idyllic normalcy, and I am finding myself surprised by occasional blebs of unpleasantness. The other day in my car, I put on a CD I listened to quite a bit while Simone was in the NICU—mind you, this was during the happiest part, when she was in a crib and her homecoming was clearly on the horizon—and first I felt a churning in my stomach, and then I remembered listening to said CD in the hospital parking garage, and finally, to my utter shock, I began to cry.
Sometimes you can only deal with the emotional aspects of a crisis once it is safely over. I had seldom felt anything but matter-of-fact about Simone’s need for oxygen until the pulmonologist’s nurse told me to discontinue it, at which time I surprised myself with sobs—of relief and gratitude, of belated fear and sadness.

Stumbling around in the dark, it was easy to focus only on what was in front of me, but now that it’s lighter I see the cluttered corners, the closets stuffed to bursting, the discreet piles of dirt under the rug. This is all a very long-winded way of saying that there are things I need to get out, unpleasant, unamusing things, and I’m going to be doing this over the next week, so you might want to forgo reading Flotsam in favor of that Google image search for “baby goat” I’m always recommending. I feel in need of AN ENEMA OF THE SOUL—not the most poetic metaphor, certainly, but a serviceable one nonetheless, as it handily conveys the messiness involved.

I see no point in doing this unless I am scrupulously honest—who ever heard of HALF an enema?—and I should warn you that it will not be pretty. Perhaps especially for those who have lost babies, these entries may be difficult to read. But while my situation was unusual, it was almost certainly not unique, and if someone similarly afflicted is Googling “delayed grief,” “twin died not sad enough,” or “infection stillbirth,” I hope they will find me here and feel my virtual arm around them.

Part One tomorrow.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

Comments (65)

Aug

Sandmandinista.

Simone is on strike. Unfortunately, she remains silent on the subject of demands, which is too bad because at this point, I am willing to give up anything, anything, if only she will reconsider her position on sleep. Which is that it is overrated. For both of us. I know one is not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but the child has not taken a nap for weeks, excepting the occasional 25-minute snooze—which, in case you are reading this, young lady, DOES NOT COUNT. There have been two exceptions, but naps should be the rule, don’t you agree?

The strike extends to bedtime as well, a protracted battle extending from six to nine o’clock every evening, during which time Simone fights to keep her eyes open, finally swaddled in her swing with—hand to god—one eyelid cracked to watch us. When she can’t take it anymore and drops off, Scott and I transfer her to her crib in a complicated Black Ops procedure that ends with us tiptoeing frantically back to the living room and pumping our triumphant fists in the air.

If it weren’t for the swing, she’d never sleep at all, and today it ran out of batteries. I called Scott at work, and we had the following conversation:
PHONE: Brring! Brrring!
SCOTT: This is Sco—
ALEXA: THE BATTERIES DIED. IN THE SWING. DON’T YOU COME HOME WITHOUT MORE BATTERIES.

I have a copy of “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” (I am so tired I typed that as “Happy Speel Habits” THREE TIMES before getting it right—Exhibit A, People V. BAD BABY) but have not had time to read more than the first paragraphs. I feel certain that the solution lies somewhere between the covers of that book, but unless I am able to absorb the contents via osmosis, I have no hope of finding it. Of course I did get as far as the part where the author asserts that children with poor sleep habits are seven times more likely to grow up to knock off liquor stores in whatever time they don’t spend Not Calling and Never Writing their mothers. Thanks doctor! I feel better already.

It’s a good thing that babies are so fetching. In fact, I am willing to bet that this is how they evolved those winning smiles in the first place. Probably earlier models were pointy and unattractive, and when they stopped sleeping, their parents simply left them out on a hillside to be eaten by vultures. I imagine a meeting up on Mt. Olympus or someplace, all the gods offering suggestions:
“Try making the thighs fatter.”
“Have you considered a rounded cheek?”
“Maybe you could add a sort of powdery, milky smell to the head.”
Eventually something worked, and parents grudgingly kept their sleepless babies. And that is how the vulture became extinct. The End.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |

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