Internet Grapes

everything I am

Monday, June 07, 2004

Remember when you were a kid, and people asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I don't know about you, but I always wanted to do something that would reflect the essence of me. I wanted to do something that would utilize the person that I am. I wanted to be an actor - I wanted to use my face and my body and my voice and my sense of humor and my emotional vulnerability. I wanted to be a writer - I wanted to use my words and my intelligence and my sense of humor and my vocabulary and my vision of the world. I wanted to be a teacher - I wanted to use my words and my ideas and my voice and my connection with other people and my handwriting (up there on the blackboard). I wanted to be a photographer - I wanted to capture what I thought was beautiful or colorful or interesting; I wanted to capture the things that I noticed in the places that I'd been. I wanted to do something that made the world, or at least my corner of it, a better place.

Right now, my day job doesn't fulfill these needs. For the past few years, the only ways I have fulfilled these needs is by writing in this journal and taking pictures. There are a lot of times when writing in this journal and taking pictures aren't nearly enough. There are a lot of times when I can't make myself believe that writing in this journal and taking pictures matter to anyone but me.

I wanted to do something that engaged me wholeheartedly and whole-mindedly. I wanted to do something that I felt passionate about. I wanted to do something that made the days go by with lightning speed. Even though I might sometimes spend hours trying to solve a particular problem, and might get frustrated while I was trying, it would all be worth it in the end, because finding a solution to the problem would be incredibly rewarding. I wanted to do something that I could share with my friends and family - here, see what I did? What do you think? Do you like it? I worked really hard trying to get it right - I'm proud of it. Isn't it cool? I wanted to do something that mattered to me, something that mattered to me way deep down in the core of myself. I wanted to do something that nobody else could do the way I could.

And I have discovered: this is what it is to be somebody's parent. (It also makes me realize just how important it is that I not give up on someday doing a different job for a living.)

Because as frustrating and boring as it can sometimes be to take care of a baby, it is also immensely rewarding. (When I was a kid, I wanted to be a mother, too.) Even on the days when you feel like crying and giving up, it will almost always be a more satisfying job than the job you spend your week days doing, because you never stop caring about the outcome. It always matters - and not just in the grand scheme of things, but deep down in your very own heart. (I can say with certainty that it is always more satisfying than the job I currently spend my week days doing.)

It is a job where you are valued for everything you are. It's your smile, your laugh, your silly sing-songs, your goofy babble. Your big heart, your chubby fingers, your bouncy belly, your warm hands. Your responsibility to decide when it's bed time, where to go for a walk, what toys to play with, how to spend your time. Your influence on what's fun, what's good, what's important, what's right, what to believe in. Everything you do, everything you know, everything you care about - it all matters to your child.

Everything I am - and everything Geoff is - it matters to Katie, because we are her parents. That is amazing, and frighteningly challenging, and wonderful.

No wonder so many people choose the job of parenthood.

Hard to Go

Friday, May 21, 2004

I feel like I should write something to commemorate these last few days of my maternity leave - the end of this brief phase in my life when I was a stay-at-home mom.

I can't say that I completely loved it, or that I'm sure that I would like to be a stay-at-home mom for a longer period of time if I had the option (maybe, or maybe not), but I can tell you that almost every time I think about going back to work on Monday, I start crying.

It's not that I dread going back to work. In fact, I'm kind of looking forward to it. It seems like a far off world, but a world that I kind of enjoyed - the world of being an adult, in my own office, with my own adult job to do, dealing with lots of different people both in our department and in many different states for which we handle claims. It's a foreign but welcome idea that when I need to go to the bathroom or eat lunch, I will be able to go right that very minute, without waiting until the baby is asleep or soothed or has finished eating her own lunch, or until Geoff is available to take her. I don't love title insurance, but I must admit that I am actually kind of excited about solving intellectual problems as well as child-rearing ones.

And Geoff will be home with her, so I'm not worried about her well-being the way I might be if I were leaving her in a day care situation (not that I think day care is a horrible scary place, just that I know it would make me worry at least a little bit, at least for the first few days, to leave Katie in a strange place with people who are as yet strangers, and I know that she's better off with her dad). She's staying at home with her daddy, and she's not old enough yet that she'll even miss me. She'll be glad to see me when I get home (I hope), but she won't really notice that I'm gone (other than possibly thinking, "hey, why do I have to eat from bottles during the day now, instead of from my mommy's boobs?").

But I am going to miss that little round smiling face.

And that little round sleeping face.

And those little round chubby legs.

And those beautiful blue eyes.

And her round soft kissable cheeks.

What I'm going to miss the most, I think, are those unexpected moments in the middle of the day when, for no apparent reason, she looks at me, and I look back at her, and she babbles at me and smiles and laughs her weird little coughing-laugh, and I tell her things and laugh with her, and we are both so obviously delighted by each other.

I'll still get to be with her for all of those things, of course. It's not like I'm leaving forever, or even close to it.

I guess I'm just saying that when Monday morning comes, it will be hard to go.

A Birth Story (by Geoff)

Triumphant Katie

I had never really given much thought to having children. Oh, I had always assumed that I would settle down and have a family, a wife, a couple of kids, and a dog. But beyond that, I hadn't thought about when, or why.

Jessie's always wanted children, for as long as I've known her. She loves children, and babies - especially babies. She has this knack for making friends with them - there's something in the way she talks to them, and interacts with them, which just puts them at ease with her. I think it's obvious from the beautiful photos she's able to take of children - she connects with them in ways that were foreign to me. I always felt a little awkward and nervous around kids. I didn't know how to play with then, or bond with them.

Even before we got married, Jessie would commonly ask me, "when are we having a baby"? To her, having a child – having a family – was like a divine petition. It was something she needed. At first, I was reluctant.

My being younger than Jessie had never been a problem. Sure, there were the occasional pop culture references that I didn't get, and some minor maturations that she'd already lived through, but overall we meshed really well - my age wasn't a factor in our relationship. Regarding children, however, it could have been. I'll admit it - I was nervous to have a child. I knew that I wanted to have a child – I just wasn’t quite sure of when. So I put her off as gently as I could, murmuring platitudes like "soon" or "when we're ready." As became increasingly obvious, Jessie was ready - and it was my divine responsibility to be ready too.

Would being a father be so bad? I asked myself. What about my career? I'm still in graduate school. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that we were - I was - ready to have a child - at least as ready as we ever would be. People have careers and kids. People get degrees and kids. People achieve financial security and have kids. When is the right time to have a child? In our case, now was the right time. We could wait for a few years, until I had graduated and was working, and we had two nice incomes, but by that point, Jessie might be on the wrong side of 35, and what if we wanted to have a second child? In our case, there was a biological time limit. With the realization that now was the best time for us to have a baby, that I could still do all the things that I wanted to do with my life with a baby in the house, it was like something inside me relaxed and opened up, and I realized that having a baby was something that I really wanted.

Jessie’s pregnancy was truly a wonderful time. We grew closer together over the course of the nine months, through the numerous OB visits, the car rides to work and the excited anticipation of our newest family member’s arrival. We ended up with a routine; I would drive Jessie to and from work most days, and ask her “what do you need? What can I do?” – being pregnant is difficult work and I wanted to do all that I could to help. I learned a lot during that time about how to care for another human being. I learned to anticipate Jessie’s needs and desires. I fell even more in love with her. She was so beautiful while she was pregnant. She had that radiant pregnant woman glow, her hair was thick and lustrous. She was a happy woman, even with the raging pregnancy hormones. She was tough and brave and fun and wonderful. I was proud of her.

The nine months of pregnancy really seemed to flow by. I guess nine months is right on the cusp of short and long time. It’s a funny time really – it takes so long to get used to the fact that yes, we are in fact pregnant, and that yes, there really is a baby growing in there, and that yes, that baby will have to come out of there at some point. But just when I came to terms with that, just when we really relaxed and knew that our baby was healthy (good strong heart beat each time!), our perception of the pregnancy shifted – we began to anticipate the birth.

Jessie and me, one week before we went to the hospital.

We tried to do all that we could before the baby was born. Jessie went to Atlantic city to visit some friends. We went to Las Vegas with another group of friends. We visited the grandparents-to-be several times. We switched bedrooms in our apartment. Jessie painted the living room. I built a computer from scratch. We spring cleaned in February. We wondered if today would be the day. We wondered if there would be a complication (of course there wouldn’t). We were irritated at Jessie’s insurance, which refused to extend her additional life or disability insurance because of her “condition” (what a fucking RACKET the insurance business is). We waited, and wondered, and watched Jessie’s belly grow, seemingly by the hour. We dealt with the inevitable rude or clueless comments people would offer up: “You look like a watermelon! A watermelon with legs!” a woman at church told Jessie. “Just kidding, just kidding!” she quickly exclaimed, to make sure that we understood her incredibly witty joke.

We went to see Starsky and Hutch two days before our daughter was born. 

It was Saturday morning, and Jessie and I had been looking forward to the birth of our daughter with quiet anticipation. We'd been hoping that our baby would decide that today is the day - we were eager to see her, and eager to avoid an induced labor the following Tuesday. With that in mind, we'd been trying to hurry thing along the "natural" way - evening primrose oil is highly recommended as one thing to try, so Jessie had been taking that for the last week or so. Castor oil is also mentioned a lot as something that can induce labor naturally - so we picked some up to try out. Jessie was nervous to drink it - I can understand - the thought of drinking even a small amount of that nasty oil is quease inducing. She was a trooper, though, and gulp, down it went, followed by a swig of diet coke to chase the taste.

Jessie on 3/6/04, around 2:00 p.m.

Nothing happened, of course - it was kind of anticlimactic. So we continued our business, ate some dinner, watched some TV, continued to finish tidying up the apartment.

Later in the evening, I was letting Molly out when Arek came downstairs with some food for us to try. I invited him into the kitchen while we chatted. I knew Jessie just had a shower and might be indisposed - "Hey Jess, Arek's here." Arek and I made small talk for a few minutes. After he left, I went looking for Jess, wondering why she hadn't come out to say hi. As I walked down the hall, the bathroom door opened, and there she was, sitting on the toilet, an inscrutable expression on her face. "My water just broke."

The room shifted around me, inside I felt light and heavy, dissociated from myself, and keenly aware of my own life changing. "Get outta here," I said, remembering the words I used when responding to our first successful home pregnancy test. Time took on a strangely malleable quality - I started rushing around, gathering the things we'd need at the hospital, while Jessie got up and started looking for pants to wear and something to clean up the mess of amniotic fluid on the couch. She put on another pair of pants - and then more fluid promptly gushed out, soaking them. We decided that perhaps she shouldn't put on her last pair of clean, dry maternity pants until we were en route. We called the doctor - she advised us to come in. We called friends and family - we're going to the hospital!

I packed the car, putting down towels in the passenger seat for Jessie. We went over our checklist one last time, and then we were in the car, driving - carefully, not rushing, safety first – to the hospital, where I parked the car in the driveway, got Jessie through security, up into the family birthing unit, attended by nurses, then went back to park the car, and then back to the room.

Jessie laboring in the tub, around 1:00 a.m.

Jessie's labor seemed to be progressing rapidly. In the car on the way over and for the first while at the hospital she managed her contractions easily. She was speaking through them, and in good spirits. The nurse hooked up two monitors, one for the fetal heartbeat, and another to track the contractions. It would become something of a game during the night, watching these monitors to see which contractions were big ones and which weren't. Before long, her contractions had progressed from easily managed to intense, though they weren't yet completely overwhelming. Jessie found it easiest to deal with them by rocking her head back and forth while practicing the breathing exercises we learned at the birthing classes we took.

Some time during this, her father, brother, and mother showed up. They were nice to have there - quietly supportive and friendly. Jessie's mom and dad and I would alternate bathing her forehead with a damp washcloth and massaging her feet. I fed her ice chips in between contractions.

The night was surreal. We both were fading in and out of consciousness – I would fall asleep sitting by her side, without even realizing it. We had The Jerk playing on the TV in the room - I remember Steve Martin talking to Shithead the dog "Is it trouble boy? Is it Fire? It is?! FIRE!!" (As an aside, can I say that I’m glad that Shithead the dog will forever play an integral role in my memories of my wife’s first labour?) The nurse would come in, check signs, rearrange the monitors. At one point she laughed at some scene in the movie. Later on, when the movie was finished, there were infomercials playing - what better to do while you're laboring but shop for ginsu knives?

Jessie in labor, around 2:00 a.m. (the last time I took pictures before Katie was born).

At some point, I put on some CD’s to play. I don’t remember what order I played them, but I do remember that they included U2, Bruce Springsteen, Ben Folds and Dan Fogelberg (which was playing during the delivery – the doctor commented on it) and some others.

By the early morning hours, it was quite apparent to me that the contractions were at the nigh unbearable stage. Jessie was fatiguing, and as I helped her in the bathroom, she cried a little bit, wondering if she was going to be able to do it.

Of course she'd be able to do it - but she was exhausted, that much was obvious. She was also the strongest I've ever seen her, laboring and beautiful. We talked about her getting an epidural - I assured her that there was no shame in taking medication, that a completely natural child birth is a nice idea but isn't necessary. We agreed to make our decision after being assessed the next time by the doctor. We wanted to know just how far along Jessie was.

The doctor didn't come until sometime around 8:00 AM. By this time, Jessie had been in labor almost 12 hours, had been up all night (after being up the entire day), and was ready for some good news. All of the family was thinking that the time to push was right around the corner! Her contractions had been so strong for so long, that surely it was almost time! Right. While Jessie was 100% effaced and thinned, she was only dilated to 4 cm. The doctor told us that this was great, the hardest part was over. We felt like we'd been punched. We asked for the epidural.

The anesthesiologist didn't come for another couple of hours. In the meantime Jessie signed some frightening sounding consent forms and managed the contractions the best she could. Finally the doctor showed up and administered the drugs. Jessie felt immediate relief. We had everyone leave so we could try to nap for a short time, which we managed to do. Finally, around 1:00 the doctor came back and checked Jessie again. Now, she was 10 cm dilated - time to push? Not quite. She wanted Jessie to "labor down" for an hour - basically let the contractions of the uterus start pushing the baby out, while Jessie is still under the effect of the medication.

We were anxiously counting down the minutes until 2:00, when the room magically started to fill with nurses and machinery. Our doctor arrived at 2:15, and the pushing began.

I don't know where Jessie got the strength. She had been awake for 32 hours, save a couple of small naps. She had labored for the last 15 of those. She pushed.

She pushed for 30 minutes. She pushed through contractions. The baby's head began to crown - all dark haired, covered in muck. There was blood everywhere. Suddenly the baby was out - this huge curly cord connecting my daughter to my wife. The doctor didn't let me cut it - the baby was covered in meconium which they had to suction. I held Jessie's hand, and heard a baby cry - strong, loud, beautiful.

Katie was born.  It was 2:50 PM.  She weighed 8lb 13oz and was 21.5 inches long.

Kathleen Matilda, a little over an hour old.

Jessie was tired and beautiful and triumphant. She had just done the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen anyone do, ever. I couldn’t imagine loving her more than I did then (though I do now).

The rest of our stay in the hospital is something of a blur. Later in the evening we were transferred to the Mother/Baby unit (where fathers are second class citizens!) and began the adjustment to life with a child. Our time at the hospital was mostly frustrating. We were both exhausted and Katie wouldn't sleep unless she was being held. Often, it would seem like we'd just get her to sleep and some nurse would show up to do some test on her. Family and friends visited. We slept, cried, tried to get her to eat. We were happy, a family of three. What a beautiful first.

It's wonderful being a father. There are few things as rewarding as having your baby daughter smile at you when she sees you. Sometimes, it feels like Jessie and I have this parenting thing down - everything works like clockwork. Other times, it's incredibly difficult and frustrating - she doesn't want to sleep, but she needs to sleep, so she cries and cries. Only rocking her seems to help then. It's worth it, though. Worth all the late nights, worth all the tears.

People kept telling us before Katie was born that "we didn't know what we were in for," and "it never gets any easier." We think they're wrong. It will get easier - and more difficult. In some ways, you can't help but know what you're getting into. And as our love for our daughter grows, as she learns new and essential life skills, as we guide each new step she takes on this long journey just started, we realize anew how much better life is, now that we are parents.

My daughter.

The Story of Your Birth

Dear Katie,

This is the story of your birth. This is the story I will tell you when you are older, maybe, and you want to know everything I can remember about what it was like to meet you for the first time, and to become your mother.

Your due date was March 6, 2004, although for some reason your doctor said your due date was March 8th. But March 6th was a Saturday, exactly 40 weeks after the date of my last monthly period, which is how a baby's due date is calculated, and so as far as your daddy and I were concerned, March 6th was your due date. (We think maybe the doctor's date was different because of leap day, but we're not really sure.) In any case, you ended up splitting the difference between the two due dates, since your birthday is March 7th.

Before you were born, our obstetrician Dr. Trendai had talked about inducing labor, which meant she would have started certain procedures to try to make me go into labor. Since the only day she was on call at the hospital was every Tuesday, you would most likely have been born on a Tuesday if labor had been induced. There were a lot of reasons why I didn't like the idea of having labor induced, but one of them - a very small, silly reason - was that it seemed like we would be giving you an "artificial" birthday; you would be born on the day that fit into the doctor's schedule, instead of being born on the day that God and nature planned for you to be.

That's probably an especially silly thing for me to worry about, because in the end, we weren't completely content to let nature take its course, and we decided to try some "home remedies" of inducing labor.

When you were born, you were a big baby, but before you were born, the doctor thought that you were going to be a huge baby, which is why she wanted to induce labor. We were originally scheduled for an induction on March 2nd, but it turned out that my body wasn't ready to give birth to you yet, so the doctor rescheduled an induction for March 9th, and she sent us home. We were supposed to check into the hospital on Monday, March 8th, so that they could start the induction, with the idea being that you would be born the next day. The doctor and your daddy and I all hoped that I would go into labor before then, though, so that labor wouldn't have to be induced. We wanted my body to go into labor naturally, because if it's possible, that is usually easier and better for the mother and baby. The doctor said that if we wanted to try some home methods of inducing labor, that it couldn't hurt.

So the weekend before you were born, your daddy and I went and had breakfast with our friends Rebecca and Candace at a place called Uncommon Ground, and after breakfast your daddy went home, and Rebecca and Candace and I went to Osco, and I bought some evening primrose oil, because I had read that evening primrose oil could help a pregnant woman's body get ready to give birth. I took my first dose of the oil right there on the street, while we walked along on that beautiful hot spring day, and after that I went and got a manicure and pedicure with Rebecca and Candace and Erin, who met us at the salon. (I was wearing the nail polish from that manicure and pedicure when you were born, and today as I type this, almost two months from your birth day, I still have a few tiny chips of that nail polish on my fingers. I repainted my toes awhile ago, though.)

I kept taking the evening primrose oil for the next few days, and when we went to see Dr. Trendai on March 2nd, she was very pleased to discover that my cervix - which had to open up before you could come out into the world - had started to open up! We were very happy about that, and that is why when we left the doctor's office that day, we believed that I might go into labor before we were scheduled to go to the hospital to be induced.

I had that whole week off of work before you were born, so we ran errands and cleaned up the apartment and waited for you to be born. At the beginning of the week, I kept thinking things like, "well, if the baby is born now, then we won't have that room cleaned up the way we'd like!" or "well, if the baby is born tonight, we won't have that set up the way we wanted to," but by the time we got to the end of the week, there was nothing else waiting to be done. And on Friday, I decided that it was time for another home induction method, and I told your daddy that we should go and buy some castor oil.

Saturday morning was warm and sunny, and we went to the Jewel and we bought castor oil. We also went to a store in our neighborhood - the Paper Trail - and we bought a baby book to take to the hospital so that we could have your hand prints and footprints put into the book when you were born. And then we went home, and we tried to think about what else we should do, and your daddy (who was not yet your daddy) and I (who was not yet your mommy) spent some time just the two of us, because we knew it might be one of the last times we were there together, just us, before we became your parents. And then I drank some castor oil - I swallowed it as quickly as I could, because I had heard that it tasted really bad (I threw it back like a shot, not that I've ever done shots, and not that you should know anything about doing shots), and then I drank some diet Coke to wash it down, and then I sat back and we waited.

And nothing happened.

I didn't feel any different. But after a little while, your daddy and I started to get hungry, so he went to fix dinner, and somewhere in there I took a nap. I didn't sleep very well during the last month or two while I was pregnant with you, so I liked to take naps when I could. I had been wearing these stretchy velvety pants that day - I wore those pants probably every day the week before you were born, because at that point my stomach was so big that I had no other pants that were comfortable. The only bad thing about those pants is that they had the tendency to stick to other fabric - when I wore them in the movie theatre, they got stuck to the seat cushions, and I had to reach behind me and try to pull up my pants when it was time for me to stand up. They also stuck to the bedsheet, so when I took my nap, I took off my pants and went to sleep under the covers.

We ate dinner at some point, and you would think that by then I would have had my pants back on again, but I didn't, and the reason I know this is that I was not wearing any pants when my water broke, and my water didn't break until after we had eaten dinner. I was pants-less, and I heard a knock on our back door, and Geoff went to answer it, and he told me that it was our friend and upstairs neighbor Arek, and I said ok, and since I didn't have any pants on, I went and sat on the couch and pulled the covers up over me.

And it was then - right then - that my water broke. I had read that sometimes women couldn't tell the difference between their water breaking and having some pee leak out, but I will tell you that I had no doubt at all. Fluid gushed out onto the couch, and I freaked out and stood up and listened to Arek and your daddy talking in the kitchen, and after a few seconds, even though I knew Arek might see me in my pantsless state, I scurried from the living room into the bathroom, and I waited until I heard Arek leave. He left, and then your daddy came walking down the hall back toward me, and I opened the bathroom door and caught his attention, and I said, "uh, I'm pretty sure my water just broke." It was about 8:20 p.m.

Your daddy got kind of nervous then! We both kind of laughed, because it was very exciting and a little bit scary to know that we were going to meet you very soon. The doctor had told us not to come in to the hospital until I was having contractions that were 3 minutes apart (we lived a little more than five minutes from the hospital), but I was pretty sure that we were also supposed to come into the hospital if my water broke, without waiting for close contractions. So we called our doctor's office's answering service, and we told them that my water had broken, and they said that they would have the on-call doctor call us back. The on call doctor was not our doctor - it was another doctor who worked in the same office. Her name was Dr. Thorpe, and she delivered you - she helped me give birth to you.

While we waited for her to call back, we ran around the apartment a little bit like chickens with our heads cut off, going back and forth from room to room. We were a little taken aback - we weren't going to get to time contractions, and gradually prepare to go to the hospital, and wonder whether I was really in labor or not. I tried to remember everything that was on my list of things to bring to the hospital - most of it was packed, but some of the things on the list were things we used every day, so we needed to pack it - and I couldn't find my printed list. So I put on my stretchy velvety pants, and I turned on the computer so that I could check my list and print out a new copy. While I was printing it out, I saw your Aunt Laurie get online, and so I told her that we were about to go to the hospital. She was very excited, and then we lost our internet connection, so she called and I talked to her for a few minutes. Then while I was sitting there at the computer looking at my list, I felt what I thought was maybe a very mild contraction, and at the same time, I felt more fluid gush out! I stood up quickly and managed to avoid having it get all over the chair. It landed on the floor, and it splashed!

After that, I took off my pants, and I put on my robe, and I decided that I would not put on pants again until it was time to go to the hospital, because at that point there was just too much water! I worried for a second that you might not have enough fluid left in there to survive, but later the doctor told me not to worry about that - you still had plenty.

Dr. Thorpe called us after that, and I talked to her, and she said that since my water had broken, we would need to get our things ready and come in to the hospital. I told her that we had assumed that we would need to come in, and that we would be there soon. We called my mom (your grandma), and we called my dad (your grandpa), and we called my brother (your uncle), and we told them we were going to the hospital. We wanted to tell them as soon as possible, because they were all planning to drive up to Chicago to see you as soon as they could. Geoff called the upstairs neighbors Heather and Arek, and told them we were going to the hospital, and asked if they could take care of our dog Molly for the evening, and they said yes. We gathered up our things, and your daddy collected some CD's to bring with us, and we carried everything out to the car, and we left for the hospital. By this time, I was having contractions regularly, but they were very mild - instead of having to focus on them, I just found them interesting. In the middle of a sentence, I would stop and tell your daddy, "oh, I'm having one now, I guess," and then it would go away.

In the car on the way to the hospital, I started looking at the car clock to see how far apart the contractions were, and right from the start, they were between 3 and 6 minutes apart. They were pretty close together!

We got to the hospital around 9 or 9:30 at night. We had to follow a special procedure to get in to the hospital, because it was after hours - we had a sheet of paper that told us what we needed to do, though. We had to push a button, and then stand in front of a security camera, and then talk into an intercom. A voice asked us what we needed, and your daddy told the voice that his wife was in labor, and then the voice told us to come in and go to the third floor, and something buzzed, and we went into the hospital. We left the car in the circular driveway in front, just like the sheet said to do. We went up to the third floor, and as we walked toward the reception desk, a nurse came out of someone's room and walked behind us. "Are you joining us for the night?" she asked us, and we said yes, we guessed so, and she said that was good.

It was all very surreal, like we were just practicing to have a baby, instead of getting ready to really have one. Even though I'd been feeling you kick around in my belly for months and months, at that moment, you still didn't seem real!

We told them who we were, and they checked us in, and they took us to a room. Your daddy went back downstairs to move the car and to get the rest of our stuff out of the car. Our nurse turned out to be the same nurse who had followed us down the hall, and she had me get undressed and get into a hospital gown (actually two hospital gowns - one for the front and one for the back). They asked me if I was sure my water had broken, and that it wasn't urine, and I told them yes, I was sure. Dr. Thorpe came and said hello, and that she would be around. They put two monitors on me, across my belly. One monitor was to measure your heartbeat - for hours and hours, while we were in that room, we listened to the sound of your heartbeat, and we knew that you were ok. The other monitor was to measure my contractions. By that time, I was starting to really feel the contractions. They still weren't very strong, but now it was a little harder to talk normally while they were happening. All night and the next morning, every time someone came by to check what the monitors were recording, they said that everything was going wonderfully. They said that you, especially, were doing just fine in there, with a good, strong heartbeat the whole time.

I had been up since 5:15 that morning, and by that time it was after 10 at night. I was excited because we were going to get to meet you soon, but I was also already tired. Maybe it's because I was already tired that I don't remember everything that happened that night in the order that it happened, so I can't really tell you all of the specific details. Or maybe labor is so intense that that's just what happens - you can't possibly remember it all clearly.

But I know that we listened to some of our CD's, and I know your daddy kept telling me nice, supportive things, especially when I had contractions. He would tell me that I was strong, and that I should "breathe, breathe," and that I was doing such a good job, and that I was beautiful. He would stand next to me, on my right side, and sometimes he would lean over me with his face close to mine. Every so often, the nurse would come in and check on us, and at some point she asked me if I would like to get in the Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, and I said yes. We went into the bathroom and took a little bath, and the water was not nearly high enough to cover my belly that was full of you, so I got some towels wet and stuck them in the hot water, and draped them over my belly, and your daddy took some pictures. I still felt pretty good, then, so I didn't mind. I was starting to feel like I was working, but it was more like a good workout than anything else, so it was not too tiring. Our nurse asked me if I needed anything for pain, and I said no, at least not then, and she said ok, and that I was doing great.

Around 11 at night, the nurse who had checked us in went off duty, and a new nurse came on duty. Her name was Maureen, and she was there with us until 7 in the morning. She had curly hair, and I liked her even more than I had liked the first nurse. Like the first nurse, she also kept telling me what a good job I was doing, and when I had a really strong contraction, she would say that it was good to have strong contractions, because those were the contractions that were doing lots of work to get my cervix opened up so that you could be born. That made me feel a little bit better about those really strong contractions.

Sometime around midnight, your Grandpa and Uncle Josh got there, and sometime around 1 in the morning, your Grandma got there. They said that they had thought maybe you would already be born by the time they got there - ha! None of us knew it then, but there were still a lot of hours left before you would be born.

Like I said, I don't remember a lot of the details in chronological order, but these are things that happened between midnight and 8:00 the next morning, which was the next time that the doctor came back to see whether you were ready to be born:

When I had strong contractions, I would swing my head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, on the pillow, while I breathed in a rhythm that our teacher had suggested in the birthing class we took. I had my head on a pillow with a green pillowcase - it was a pillow we had brought from home. Your daddy would stand next to me and hold my hand and encourage me. My hair got all crazily tangled from all of this head swinging!

At some point, we decided to put in the videotape we had brought. When we took our birthing class, we found out the all of the labor & delivery rooms had VCR's and CD players, but that there was no cable tv, so hardly any tv stations would come in. We were encouraged to bring videotapes, so when we were packing up our overnight bags, in the week before you were born, I stuck my videotape of The Jerk in my bag. I figured that later we would go through our tapes and pick out a few more to bring, but that didn't ever happen, so when we got to the hospital, the only videotape we had was The Jerk. And now my memories of those hours in the night are interspersed with scenes from The Jerk. My contractions were too strong to let me pay attention to more than a few minutes of the movie at a time, so I remember seeing the scene where Bernadette Peters' character has snails on her plate, and I remember hearing the scene where the homicidal guy is shooting oil cans ("He hates these cans!" and I remember hearing the scene where the guy staying in the hotel tells Steve Martin that he should call his dog "Shithead." And in between, I was flinging my head from side to side, side to side, and breathing funny, and occasionally I would carry on a little bit of conversation with my husband or my mom or my dad or my brother. In between contractions, I could talk and smile at them, and when I would smile at them - especially at my parents - they would look relieved to see me smile. I think they were feeling a little bad for me, because they could tell that it was getting harder for me to deal with the contractions than it had been when they first got there.

At some point a nurse came in and put an IV in the back of my left hand, and it really hurt. It was a sharp pain, and even though I was in the middle of a contraction, the IV needle made me say "ow!" out loud. The contractions weren't painful to me in the way that I normally think about pain, and I understood what my mom had always told me about how her contractions had felt like intense pressure, but not like pain. For me, there wasn't any agonizing pain - just pressure so intense and overwhelming that after hours and hours of it, I didn't think I could handle them anymore.

Afterward, I tried to figure out how to describe what the contractions felt like to me, and the best I could do was to compare it to how it might feel if you had to lift weights over and over and over, except that when you're lifting weights, you have the option of putting the weights down and walking away when you get tired, and with labor contractions, you don't have that choice. Your muscles are in charge of you, instead of you being in charge of your muscles. Even when you are so tired that you would never choose to keep flexing your muscles, your muscles just kept lifting the weights anyway, involuntarily. Not only do you keep lifting the weights, but each time you lift, the amount of weight you're lifting gets heavier and heavier. You might start to wonder if your muscles will be able to keep lifting, or if you might rupture something, because the weights are so heavy and your muscles are so tired! At least that's sort of what it felt like to me. That's not exactly right, but it's close.

The doctor had checked my cervix at midnight, and at the time she told us that I was 2 centimeters dilated, and 75% effaced. We knew it wouldn't be time to push you out into the world until I was 10 centimeters dilated, and 100% effaced, so I still had a lot of work to do before you could be born. The night went on and on, and remember when I said that arriving at the hospital was surreal? That was nothing compared to how surreal everything felt at 2 or 4 or 6 in the morning. While I was in the middle of a contraction, the seconds and minutes went so slowly, but overall, the night seemed to pass quickly. Each minute took forever, but then I would look at the clock and it would be an hour later than it had been the last time I really looked at it, and I would feel like we were making progress.

I remember after The Jerk ended, the tv was showing infomercials, and at some point my mom, I think, was asking me what else I wanted to watch, and I kind of grunted at them all that at that point, I really didn't care at all what we watched, because I wasn't watching it, anyway. Not too long after that, I think, somebody turned off the tv, and your daddy played one of our CD's. I also remember that sometimes your daddy would go to the bathroom or lay down for a minute, and when he did that - and some other times, too - my mom or my dad would come over and try to make me feel better. My dad would rub my feet, and my mom would put a cold washcloth on my forehead, and they would smile at me uncomfortably, like they were trying to pretend they weren't worried, or that it wasn't painful to watch me struggle through the contractions. I remember feeling bad that I didn't have any extra energy to hide how hard I was working, so that they wouldn't worry at all, because I knew that I was ok.

I remember that at one point, Geoff was standing next to me, holding my hand, and telling me what a good job I was doing, and by then I think I was getting more tired, because I might have said something about whether or not I was going to be able to do this, and he told me that I could, and that I was doing great, and my mom looked at us, and she said, "I think the two of you are doing great," and she looked proud of us and happy that Geoff is your daddy and my husband. I remember my mom and my dad talked some about what had happened when she went into labor with me, over 33 years before then, and what things had been different, and what things had been the same. One time my dad asked our nurse what time she thought you might be born, and she didn't want to guess, but dad told her to go on, just guess, and she guessed that maybe you would be born around 8 or 9 in the morning.

All this time, I was so thirsty, and the nurse kept bringing me water with chunks of ice in it. I would take big swigs of water every so often. After I drank the water in each cup, I would eat the ice. Later in the morning (maybe even after 8:00 a.m.), they brought me a tray with lots of different liquids on it - broth and juice and I don't remember what else - but I didn't drink any of it, because I didn't feel hungry. Later I wished that I had eaten something, because it might have given me more energy - it turned out to be about 24 hours between meals!

Since I was drinking so much water, I had to get up and pee several times. It was awkward - something about the way you were positioned inside me made it difficult for me to pee, so instead of sitting on the toilet, I ended up standing up and just barely bending my knees so that I could pee in the toilet. It was very strange, and very uncomfortable. Your daddy came to the bathroom with me each time. After I had an IV in, he helped me drag my IV stand around behind me.

It turned out that the only position I was even close to comfortable in during labor was on my back in bed, with the bed raised to a semi-sitting position. It's not that that position was actually comfortable, it's just that every other position was so much more uncomfortable. Squatting was awful, kneeling was awful, and standing was awful. Lying in bed was at least tolerable. It was too bad, because by the end of the night, my body was getting really tired from staying in the same position, but every time I attempted a different position, I ended up abandoning it to go back to how I'd been to begin with.

By morning, I was getting really tired, and I figured it must be getting close to time to push you out. Our nurse Maureen went off duty at 7, and we got a new nurse, Eva, who asked me again whether I wanted any pain medication, or whether I wanted to keep dealing with it myself. I said that I'd keep trying on my own, and she said that was fine, that I was doing well with my breathing. I remember she and the resident doctor who dropped by seemed impressed that I was still laboring without any pain medication, and I remember being proud of that. I also felt very, very tired, and I was just starting to get a little bit worried about how much longer this was going to go on, so we asked if the doctor could come back and check to see how much my cervix was dilated by that point. I thought that she would say that I was 10 centimeters dilated, and it was time to push, and then I would get to rest!

Dr. Thorpe came back around 8 in the morning, and she felt to see how far I was dilated, and she said that I was four centimeters dilated and 100% effaced, and I felt so crushed that I started to cry a little bit. The doctor and the nurse said that I was doing well, but I was so disappointed I felt like I was going to crumble. I tried to blink back tears, and after the doctor left, your daddy came over and stood next to me, and I told him, "I don't know if I can do this," and he said yes, yes, I could, and I cried a little bit. My parents tried to make me feel better, too, since they could see how disappointed I was feeling.

Nurse Eva asked me if I wanted to get back in the Jacuzzi tub or the shower, and I remembered reading that for some women, being in the water helps make contractions easier to deal with, so I said ok. You were doing great in there, so they unhooked me from the monitors and detached me from my IV tube, and the nurse ran me a hot bath. When it was ready, I got in, and the water did feel really good. But after a few minutes, I had a contraction, and a few minutes later, I had another one. And they weren't any easier to deal with, and all of the feelings I had when the doctor told me that I wasn't as dilated as I thought I would be came back, and I started to cry again. I was so tired - I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life. Your dad was there next to me, and I told him that I wanted to ask for an epidural. I was having a hard time not crying then, and your daddy told me that no one would be upset with me if I wanted an epidural, and I had been very strong and worked very hard, and I still had more work to do.

So Eva came back, and I told her that I wanted an epidural, and she said ok, that she would get the anesthesiologist. I had to get back in bed so that I could be hooked back up to my IV. They started an IV going so that I would have plenty of fluid before they started the epidural, and after a little while, the anesthesiologist came to my room and introduced himself. He was very friendly, and I was very glad to see him, because now that I had decided that I wanted an epidural, I was having an even harder time dealing with the contractions. By this time, it was about 10:30 on the morning of your birthday.

I had to sit on the edge of the bed and bend forward - which was hard, because my belly was so big that I couldn't bend forward very easily! - and after a little while, the doctor gave me a local anesthetic, and then he put the epidural needle in my back. The needles didn't hurt very much - the most uncomfortable part of the whole procedure was having to stay as still as possible while I had contractions. I think I had three contractions while I was sitting on the side of the bed, hunched over. By the fourth contraction, the epidural was starting to work, and I felt so relieved. My legs got all tingly, and I could feel where the line for the epidural was taped to my back. The doctor made sure I was ok and that I could still move my legs, and then he left the room, and I laid back down in bed, and your dad laid down in the foldout bed next to me, and I actually slept, on and off, for at least an hour.

Sometime around this time, I told my mom and my dad and my brother that they should go ahead and go back to our apartment and take naps, because it would be at least a few hours before you would be born, and we had all been awake all night long. So they left, and your daddy and I slept a little bit, and during that time, I could hardly feel any contractions at all, but after a couple of hours, I started to feel them again, and they were strong enough that I couldn't sleep through them.

The only major things that happened between then and 1 in the afternoon was that I threw up several times, enough so that I was no longer allowed to drink water, but could only eat ice. I also started shaking and shivering harder than I ever have before. My teeth chattered, and the shaking went on and on, and oh, my God, I was so thirsty! Geoff stood next to me and fed me ice chips.

And then it was almost 1 in the afternoon, and Dr. Thorpe came back to check me again, and lo, and behold! I was fully dilated! It was almost time for you to be born! Dr. Thorpe said that as long as I was relatively comfortable, though, she didn't want me to push yet. Instead, she wanted me to wait another hour, to let my uterus "labor down" and push you (you! I didn't even know you then!) toward the birth canal without me having to voluntarily push.

At the beginning of that hour, I really was pretty comfortable, but toward the end of the hour, my epidural was wearing off, and I was having to rock my head back and forth again and do breathing exercises to get through each of the contractions. (My hair, by the way, was looking insane by this point, because first I had gotten it all matted up with rocking it back and forth all night long, and then I got in the bathtub and shower and got my hair all wet, and then I got back out and laid down in bed and started rocking my head back and forth again! By the time you were born, it was a matted mess!)

But we made it to 2:00, and around 2:15 or so, the doctor and nurse were there by my side, and it was almost time to push you out. They pulled the bottom of the bed away, and had me lean forward and hold onto my legs, and whenever a contraction happened, the doctor would count to ten, and I would push as hard as I could from 1 to 10. Then she would count to ten two more times, and I would push each of those times. And then the contraction would be over, and Geoff would feed me ice chips (sometimes I didn't even have the energy to ask, really, I would just motion frantically at the cup of ice - I was so thirsty that I remember wondering if I would ever not be thirsty again, ever), and I would rest until the next contraction. I was really starting to feel the contractions by then, and I discovered this amazing thing - that if I was pushing during a contraction, I didn't need to do any other special breathing or head rocking to get through it! The pushing itself carried me right through the contraction. While I was pushing, I remember we were listening to a Dan Fogelberg CD, and the doctor commented on it. But at the moment you were born, I think a U2 CD was playing.

When I first started pushing, it felt like nothing was happening. I'm sure I was still partially numb from the epidural, or maybe I would have felt you moving downward, but instead I just had to believe the doctor when she would say, "oh, good work! you're pushing very well! we're going to be done with this quick!" There was a mirror up in the ceiling tiles, and while I was pregnant, I thought that there was no way I'd want to see my own private parts when I was giving birth to you. But then when you were being born, and the mirror was there above me, and I was pushing you out, I couldn't help looking, watching, waiting to see the top of your head.

And then all of a sudden I could see some hair! It was during maybe the fourth or fifth pushing contraction, and when I stopped pushing, the hair disappeared. But it appeared again the next time I pushed, and somewhere around the eighth contraction, right around 2:45 p.m., your head came out! It was amazing and bizarre to see your head there, looking so small and purple (and disembodied). The doctor told me to stop pushing so they could suction out your nose, because they had discovered that there was meconium in your amniotic fluid. By the next contraction, they told me to push again, and this time your whole body suddenly slipped out of me - I had the impression that you were moving so fast that you could have sped across the whole room. They wanted to take care of you right away, so they cut the umbilical cord (instead of letting your daddy do it), and they took you over to give you a bath and check all of your vital signs. And somebody said something about you, but I couldn't hear for sure what they said, and I asked, "it's a girl?" and somebody said yes, you were a girl, just like we thought you would be. Then we knew you would be named Kathleen Matilda instead of Charles Geoffrey.

Before long, you cried, and it was one of the best sounds I've ever heard. I lay there for awhile after that, waiting for it to be time to push out the placenta, and waiting for the doctor to stitch me up (it turned out that I had a small tear), smiling at your daddy, and watching you. While I was pregnant, I saw a lot of those baby stories on tv, and whenever I did, I cried when the baby was born. I just knew that I would cry when you were born. But when the time came, I didn't cry. I was so relieved and happy that you were born, but I was so tired that it was all I could do to lie there and look around and listen to your first sounds.

But right after you were born, I looked at your daddy, and he was crying, and I was so glad. After a little while, after you were cleaned up and the pediatrician at the hospital had made sure that you were ok, they gave you to me, and I held you on my chest, and I looked into your face.

You were perfect, right from the start. 

This is you, today.

Now you are almost two months old, and you are sleeping in your car seat on the floor next to my chair. And already, I love you so much more than I did on the day you were born, that I can't really imagine how much I will love you by the time you are old enough to read this, but I know - and I hope you know - that it's a lot. A whole bunch. Oodles and oodles. Your daddy's and my lives were made better when you were born, in ways we don't even know about. You made us a family. Thank you for that.

One Month

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

All I'm writing about these days is our new baby Katie, and I guess maybe I should be writing about other things, too, but right now taking care of her is not only my full-time job, it's my full-time life. Some days I don't get to take a shower. Some days I don't get to eat a real meal until Geoff comes home from work and fixes a meal for us. Some days I don't get dressed. Some days I don't leave the house or talk to anyone but Katie and Geoff (and Geoff is the only one who talks back). I haven't read a book or a magazine since she was born, and the apartment hasn't had a thorough cleaning all month. (Thanks to my dad, I got to eat and get dressed every day for the first week. Thanks to my mom, I got to eat and get dressed every day for the second week. Thanks to Laurie, I got to eat and get dressed this past weekend and the beginning of this week. Thanks to Geoff, I get to eat and get dressed more often than not.)

But every day, without fail, I feed her and I dress her and I kiss her and I pat her head and her hands and her warm little knee. Every day I talk to her, and almost every day I sing to her, and a lot of days I read to her. Every day I burp her and change her, and almost every day I clean up her spit-up. Every day I watch for her smiles, and I listen for her grunts and cries and the occasional coo. Every day I watch her getting bigger and stronger and more alert and more beautiful. Almost every day I wonder what I could do better, and some days she makes me so frustrated I can't help but cry.

Right now, with few exceptions, Kathleen Matilda is what I spend my days doing, for better or for worse. Her smiles make me laugh, and the worst of her cries make me cry. It's not profound, but it's true.

She has eyelashes now. (She didn't when she was born.)

She's been to Border's and DSW (discount shoe warehouse - twice!) and the grocery store (several times). She's been to church and to choir practice (she sleeps the whole time).

She's been for walks in her stroller around the neighborhood, at the mall, on Northwestern's campus, and downtown.

She's been to my office and Geoff's office.

Now when she starts crying in the middle of the night, she stops as soon as I pick her up to feed her - she's learned that at least then, in the middle of the night, I know what she wants, and I will give it to her.

She's nursed from me morning, noon, and night (today for almost an hour at a time, more than once). She's drunk several bottles of her mother's breastmilk, most of them from her daddy, but one from her Aunt Rebecca and a few from her Aunt Laurie.

Most nights now, she sleeps at least 4 hours in a row. Sometimes twice.

She's stayed with other people (her grandma, her Aunt Laurie) while Geoff and I went out somewhere else.

She's had her hands and feet and cheek licked by her fierce protector, Molly dog.

She's been held by members of my family - her Grandpa, her Grandma L., her Grandma Celia, her Uncle Josh, her great-grandpa L. (who sings "K-K-K-Katie" to her every time), and lots of friends (Rebecca, Laurie, Erin, Candace, Allen, Elizabeth, Heather, Chris).

She's held herself up on her hands for almost a minute.

She's had her diaper and outfit changed countless times. She's spit up and burped. She's cried and cried. She's smiled. She's started making noises other than grunts and cries.

She loves to look at the black Ikea shelves on our living room wall. (We imagine her thinking, "I love you, shelves!") Sometimes she smiles while she looks at them. Sometimes now she smiles while she looks at us.

She's posed for a gazillion and one pictures.

When we were still in the hospital, I started talking about how well she was tucking into her breakfasts and lunches and dinners (and mid-morning, mid-afternoon, mid-evening, and middle-of-the-night meals), and I started calling her "tuckus," as in "she is a grumpy tuckus!" or "what a good little tuckus" or "poor little tuckus." I still call her that today. She is the sweetest tuckus I know.

She's been to Augie's (a restaurant in our neighborhood) and McDonald's.

She's one month old today.

I can't believe it's only been a month, and I can't believe it's already been a month. Before she was born, I remember thinking that babies were wonderful, amazing, touching beings. But I also remember thinking, after hearing stories about poor parents who had lost their children at a very early age (two days or two weeks or two months), that their loss was not really so very tragic as it would have been if the child had grown up a little more, because after all, a newborn is not a person the same way that an older child is.

And now that we have had our daughter for a month now, and I know what an amazing monstrous tragedy it would be if we lost our daughter, I am stunned that I ever had that thought, because how can you compare the loss of one child to the loss of another, anyway? It very well may be more difficult to deal with the loss of an older child than with the loss of a month-old baby, but what is the point of comparing? Losing Kathleen at any age would be unspeakable. Losing her would be like losing my own heart.

And there is so much more I want to say, about what she is doing, and what I am thinking, and how I am feeling, and what Geoff and I say to each other, and how we marvel over her on a daily basis, and how we are frustrated by her on that same basis. I want to tell you about how there is something new to love with every passing day. I want to tell you that loving this baby is at once the easiest and the hardest thing I've ever done, and how I am always tired, often overwhelmed, and consistently overly emotional. (I could tell you about how her neediness today kept me from finishing this entry, for hours and hours, and that after a day during which she consistently wanted to breastfeed for an hour at a time, over and over, I told Geoff that "I feel like a prisoner!" and then later felt sad and guilty.)

I want to tell you about how her little hands clutch at me - at my hand, at my breast, at my face - and how sometimes I am so overcome with love for her that I want to clutch her more tightly than it would be safe to clutch her tiny chubby body. I want to tell you how she goes from big to small in an instant - as we carry her around and look at her chubby arms and legs and face and compare her size to the size she was when she was born, she is huge - and as we look at her lying in her car seat or stroller, or nestled on the chest of me or her daddy, she is tiny and so helpless.

The days go by so fast right now that I lose many of the specifics. One thing we won't lose are the specific images that we've captured with my camera. We won't forget how she looked when she had her first bath or took her first trip in the stroller, or how peaceful she looks while she is suckling, or how her little nose turns up at the end, or how her little mouth turns upside down when she starts to cry.

Happy one month, Katie girl. I love you. (That's something else I won't lose.)

Scenes from the First Week

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

---

Day One – Sunday

About an hour or so after Kathleen was born, I was still lying in the same bed I'd been in when Kathleen was ejected from my uterus, and I still had my bare feet pressed against the little footpad things at the end of the bed that I'd propped my feet in when I was pushing Katie out into the world, and my doctor was still stitching up the tear in my perineum that was created by Katie's then-seemingly-huge head (now it seems so tiny!), and the nurse, Eva, was standing on my left side, taking my blood pressure or handing the doctor things, or something. And in the middle of this, the nurse and my doctor (both women), started talking about my pedicure.

"Well, your toes look great," said the doctor.

"Thanks!" I said. "I went with some friends last Saturday to get a manicure and pedicure. The manicure doesn't look too good, but the toes have held up."

"Yeah, that is a great color red!" said Nurse Eva. "What is that color called? I am always trying to get a color like that, but the place I go they never seem to have it."

"I don't remember the name of it," I said.

"Yeah, that's a great color," said the doctor.

"I am going to have to go somewhere new," said Eva, "because that is a much better color than the one I usually get."

I nodded, and at the time the fact that we were having that discussion in that time and place didn't strike me as very strange. Everything was strange and new, anyway. As surreal as the conversation was, its only real importance, I guess, is that it happened a few minutes before I held my daughter for the very first time.

---

Day Two – Monday

On Monday we got a visit from Ann, the hospital's lactation consultant. "Let's see how you're doing," she said, and I got the baby out of her bassinet and pulled down one of the cups of my nursing bra. (All modesty temporarily disappeared while we were in the hospital - not only did I breastfeed in front of anyone who happened to be around, but I actually sat on the toilet and peed in front of some nurse I'd never met before, while she critiqued the thoroughness of my wiping. Amazingly, and probably due in part to my extreme exhaustion, I wasn't even self-conscious.)

"I've been using the cradle hold, just because that's what seems most comfortable," I told her.

"Well, that makes sense," she said. "That's as good a reason as any to choose something." She looked at us. "Let's see how your breasts are doing."

And so I said that it had been hurting a little, and that I think I might be getting a little bit of bruising, and I showed her, and she winced a little bit. "Oh, yeah, that shouldn't be happening!" she said.

She watched Kathleen latch on and start to nurse. "Oh, you're doing well," she said. "You just need some fine tuning." And she helped me get Kathleen to open her little mouth much wider than she had been doing, and she gave me a tube of lanolin, and she watched us. "Oh, yeah, you are going to be fine," she said.

She watched us. "Oh, yeah, she's a good baby." She smiled at us. "She's a good baby."

I looked at our baby, there on my chest, her little eyes squinted mostly shut, her perfect little features in action, and I was very proud. We knew it already, of course, but now we have official confirmation. We have a good baby.

---

Day Three – Tuesday

About an hour or two after Geoff and I brought Katie home from the hospital, Dad and Geoff went to the grocery store and left me at home with Kathleen. She cried some, and when she did cry, nothing I did to calm her down seemed to make any real difference. She cried so hard that between each scream she would inhale with a sob that sometimes made her choke on swallowed air. It wasn't a new kind of crying - it was the same crying she'd been doing in the hospital for the last couple of days and nights, but this was the first time I'd been alone with her while she was doing it.

And it's not that I felt worse, really. In fact, I felt better just to be home. I felt more relaxed. I was more willing to just let go of the serenity I'd been working hard to hold onto. When Katie stopped crying, I sat down on the bed with her, my back propped up against pillows, and her little body touching mine. I had my arm under her, and her face was near my face. And I turned over on my side a little bit, so that I could put my nose against her sweet-smelling face and hair, and I rubbed my nose into her face, and for the next five or ten minutes, I cried and cried, and I told her important things.

"I love you," I told her. "I love you, Katie. I love you. And if I am doing this wrong - if I am doing something wrong - if I mess something up - then I am sorry. I am so sorry. I love you."

And then I cried a little bit more, while we waited for Katie's daddy and grandpa to come back home, until both of us fell asleep.

---

Day Four – Wednesday

The morning after a night of screaming and wakefulness, Geoff and I were sitting in bed while Katie slept in her crib for the first time, and I got out one of our baby books and started reading about the first few days of life, and it all seemed so exactly dead-on that I was overwhelmed by the urge to cry. The book was talking about how stressful birth is for a newborn, and how much our tiny new daughter has to adjust to - air and light and non-muffled noises, and breathing and eating and pooping and peeing, and people touching her, and getting hungry, and sneezing, and unpredictability. And although it is possible to feel love for a newborn, said the book, the type of love you will feel is an automatic love that you may feel because this is your baby, and you love them just because of that. However, the book pointed out, it's impossible to love that baby the way you love other people with whom you have relationships, because you don't really know her yet. You don't know each other - your baby doesn't even know that you are a separate entity from her, and you have no idea what her baselines are. Let's face it, the book said, at this stage in life, your newborn "is neither lovable nor loving."

I read that sentence out loud to Geoff, and I started to cry.

"What did you say?" Geoff asked me. "She's neither lovable nor loving?"

"Right," I said.

I looked over at him, and he was crying, too. And I thought that if my dad, who was in the bathroom or kitchen at the time, came into our bedroom and saw us sitting there, exhaustedly and quietly crying while we sat there next to each other, our best explanation would probably mirror Katie's own reasons for her non-stop crying the night before.

"We're tired!" we would wail. I think he would have understood.

---

Day Five – Thursday

Sometime very early Thursday morning - like maybe around 3:00 a.m., I had been breastfeeding Kathleen while I struggled to stay awake for the required 20 to 30 minutes. She was struggling to stay awake, too, which made it harder to get the job done, because when she falls asleep, she stops sucking, and if I'm not awake to jiggle her back into re-starting her sucking, then there is just that much more sucking to be done before we can both go back to a sounder sleep. When she forgets what she's doing and starts to fall asleep mid-suck, I have taken to telling her to "suck it up, buttercup," and although I know she doesn't understand the words, sometimes the words do have their intended effect, and as a bonus, I make myself laugh when I say it.

Anyway, this time she kept falling asleep over and over again, and I was starting to get so frustrated I could hardly stand it, because I knew that if she didn't eat more than she'd eaten, she would just be awake again in another hour, and neither of us wanted that. And it's not like Geoff can help with this particular part of the child care, but still, the fact that he was lying next to me in bed, sleeping like a rock, while I had to force myself to stay awake, after I had been the one, for pete's sake, who gave birth to this baby just a few days ago, so we both know that in the contest of "who is the most tired?" that I would so win by a mile - anyway, that fact made me cry a few self-pitying tears in between drowsy nods of my head.

We made it, though, through about ten minutes of feeding from the left boob, at which point she let go and flopped backwards onto her Boppy pillow, arms raised over her head, and I saw that there was milk all around her mouth, and a tiny baby smile on her face, and instead of being irritable, I felt lucky for the late night arrival of the breast milk, helping this amazing little creature grow into her own person.

---

Day Six – Friday

Katie needed her diaper changed, so Geoff and I took her into the bedroom to change her. We put the changing pad on the end of our bed, then put down a receiving blanket, then laid her down. While Geoff started taking off her little gown, I grabbed a diaper and the diaper wipes from the changing table (which, strangely enough, we do not actually use for changing purposes). He took off her diaper, which was filled with baby pee and poop, and started to wipe her before putting on the new diaper. And then, while he was wiping her, she started to pee.

"If she'd been a boy, we'd have gotten it in the face," we laughed. We waited for her to finish peeing, and then we put a clean diaper under her while we wiped her off again. And then, before we started fastening the diaper, she started to poop. This is something that hasn't happened in my life before - watching somebody's butt while they poop - and Geoff and I started laughing. We wiped her off again, and noted that we would have to change her outfit, and while we were wiping her, more poop. It went on like that for at least a minute - wiping, pooping, wiping, pooping. And the whole time Geoff and I were laughing so hard we couldn't even manage to get a new diaper fastened. My dad was sitting in the living room, and every time we'd start laughing, he'd say, "Again?" And "I think I'll just keep my distance until this is over."

Perhaps I should mention at this point that all of this poop was liquid? Because then it happened - while we were helplessly laughing and watching her little butt repeatedly explode, she projectile pooped. Poop shot out of her at least a foot, and landed on the edge of the comforter near the flood, and landed on the floor in several places. "Oh, my God!" we said, still laughing.

We fastened up her diaper, managing to avoid stepping in what was on the floor at the foot of the bed, and we fastened a clean diaper, finally, and Geoff (thank you, Geoff!) cleaned up the floor and took the comforter down to the washing machine.

"We've had our first poop shenanigans!" Geoff said. We bet it won't be the last.

---

Day Seven – Saturday

Dad went back home on Saturday. Before he left, though, he and Geoff went to the nearby hardware store and bought supplies to make some shelves in our front closet. While they were building the shelves, I was sitting in the living room with Kathleen. She was feeling fussy, so I had to keep moving her. We tried looking over my shoulder (with attempted burping), lying on my lap, walking around the room, sitting in the rocker, putting my face close to hers for quiet soothing sounds and Eskimo kisses. Eventually she got quieter.

"You should take her outside in the back yard," Dad said. "It's really beautiful out there. You should take her out just for a few minutes, and sit out there with her."

 

I hesitated. Since we got home from the hospital, I hadn't even left the apartment, except once to let Molly out in the backyard. And even though I was feeling a little stir crazy, and had been feeling a little jealous of Geoff, who had left the apartment several times already, I wasn't sure if I was ready to go out. It's easy to get used to a cocoon, I guess.

But after Dad suggested it again, I bundled Katie up in some blankets, put on my slippers, and went out into the backyard with her. It was a bright sunshiny day. I could feel a little bit of a breeze. Katie squinted in the sunlight. I was still feeling a little weak, so I walked over and sat on an upturned container and held her on my lap. I shaded my daughter's eyes and watched her face relax a little. I rocked back and forth a little bit, and I felt the air against my skin, and I wondered how the air felt to her, against her skin. I leaned over and put my face against hers, and she was so quiet.

She is so beautiful and tiny and perfect.

We sat there for about five minutes, feeling the fresh air, looking at the golden day. Me and my daughter.

Kathleen Matilda

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

On March 7, 2004, sometime between 2:45 and 2:50 p.m., one day after her due date, I gave birth to a baby girl we named Kathleen Matilda. She wasn't the huge baby my obstetrician had been fearing. She was 8 pounds 13 ounces at birth (besting my own birth weight by only one ounce) and 21.5 inches long. Her head is covered with dark brown hair. She has a snub nose, an adorable coo, and a heartbreaking scream. So far, we know she likes: my boobs, being held by me or Geoff or my dad or my mom, sucking, breastmilk, being swaddled, sleeping (on her terms, of course), and lying in her Boppy pillow. So far, we know she hates: having her diaper changed, having to lie by herself (unless she is on her Boppy), having a nasal aspirator stuck in her nose, having snot in her nose, having to deal with a cruel world in which such things as bright lights, cold air, and non-immediate gratification exist. We love her. We adore her.

To say that Geoff and I are overwhelmed would be an understatement. To say that Katie is the most amazing thing I've ever been a part of creating would also be an understatement. To say that the last few days have been difficult, as happy as they have also been? You guessed it - understatement.

Pregnancy Journal Entry 48 - December 30, 2003

It's been too long since I wrote! 

This Friday I will be 31 weeks pregnant, and all of a sudden the birth of our baby seems close instead of far away. After this week, I plan to work 8 more weeks, then have the week of my due date off. Eight more weeks! That's barely anything! Eight weeks ago it was already after Halloween!

The baby moves and kicks often, and her movement remains by far my favorite part of pregnancy. Emotionally I have been a little overwhelmed, and my frustration tolerance level is extremely low (what, we have no dressing for my salad? I must weep bitter and resigned tears!) I'm also feeling conflicted, because I'm so happy and excited about this baby - when I look at the baby clothes we've bought and been given, I often make the clothes do a little happy dance - and yet I'm so tired of being tired and blue and breathless and big that I feel a little guilty. I should be nothing but happy about this baby and everything associated with her! How would she feel to know that I was sick and tired of carrying her around in my belly for the last few months? I remind myself that it is normal to feel this way, and that my sadness is not related to her, but to my own discomfort and feelings of helplessness. Still, I am tired, too, of feeling sorry for myself when I know that I have it relatively easy - everything is going smoothly with me and with the baby. During the busy holidays, I've felt good and happy and mostly strong, and when people ask me how I'm doing, I truthfully answer that I'm feeling great. But since the holidays have mostly passed, I have been feeling sad more often than not, and it's a free-floating sadness that seems to be out of my control - it comes and goes when it wants to.

Physically, I'm pretty good. No more nausea, only rare back pain (and then very mild), not much more acne, and less heartburn than a few months ago. And did I mention that my migraine headaches seem to have disappeared for the duration of my pregnancy? The only really awful thing at this point in the pregnancy is the pain I'm suffering from my overly loose ligaments. First my left knee, then my right hand, then my right shin - all sprained and painful under certain circumstances. And unlike all of the other discomforts, this isn't guaranteed to heal itself almost immediately after giving birth - if I strain any of my body parts badly enough, it could take me a good long while to heal, assuming I am able to keep from doing any permanent damage.

Since the last entry, we had two work holiday parties, Christmas with Dad & Celia & Josh (the weekend before Christmas), Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Mom and Josh and Grandpa and cousin Marge. At the Christmas concert service at church (the Sunday before Christmas), I volunteered to do one of the readings, and I ended up reading about how Mary was "great with child" and there was "no room at the inn," and when I got to "great with child," I choked up and never quite got my voice steady during the remainder of the reading. I sang a song called "The Beautiful Mother" at church last Sunday (along with Geoff playing piano and another woman playing the recorder).

Geoff and I did our Christmas shopping together, and we bought and decorated a tree, and we cleaned up the apartment, multiple times, for visitors. A week and a half before Christmas, I spent a fun day making cookies with Candace and Erin and Rebecca and Joy - the third annual Cookie Making Day. Geoff gave me a new digital camera for Christmas, and I gave him a coat and a humidor, and before Christmas we shopped together for stocking stuffers for the members of our family who would be with us on Christmas morning. Mom and Josh and Geoff and Josh and I opened our stockings together, in our pajamas. On the weekend before Christmas, we made ham & mashed potatoes and corn, and we ordered a cake for Dad & Celia from the same bakery where we got our wedding cake, and had them put "happy anniversary" on top of the cake (their anniversary was yesterday), which made Celia tear up a little.

My mom decided to host a baby shower on January 10th, and I helped her a (very) little bit with the planning. Josh came up twice in a two week span of time and brought us thoughtful excellent gifts. Dad and Geoff put our baby's crib together (with just enough swearing and frustration to make it memorable - easy for me to say, since I got to sit back and watch). Last weekend Geoff and I went to Babies R Us and Target to add to our gift registries in preparation for the shower. We got Christmas gifts in the mail from Tracy & Tim, Geoff's family, and Laurie. Allen is coming today to spend New Year's with us.

And we looked at all of this through a glass that is colored by the fact that I am pregnant. Lots of things (like shopping for hours) were more difficult, and some things (ok, many things) were not more difficult, just more emotional. But everything was altered by the knowledge that next year at this time, everything will be different - we don't know exactly how it will be different, but we know it will be. The future is known and unknown.

This holiday season, from Thanksgiving until now, two recurring thoughts have been running repeatedly through my mind, and each feels like an epiphany of some sort, and yet each feels like it is much too simple to be an epiphany.

I don't know if I can explain either, but they have run through my mind for so long that I thnk I should let them out.

The first is that people are fragile. On the inside, we are so fragile. We are also incredibly strong, of course. We can make it through storms and death and fear and pain and come out the other side stronger, even, than we were before. We can stand up to those who argue with us or judge us, and we can believe in ourselves and our own value and our own goodness. We can stand together and make ourselves even stronger than when we stand alone. We are not usually fragile with strangers. We are most fragile when we allow ourselves to be - when we let others into our hearts, thereby giving them the power to hurt us even with only a few words. And despite the fact that we are exposing ourselves to the possibility of pain, we willingly and repeatedly expose the chinks in our armor, and we let other people in.

I think back to the times that I have hugged people I loved in those times when they or I needed hugs the most - when one of us or both of us was moved to tears and was willing to share the crying with the other. When Geoff or my father or my mother or Celia or my brother, or one of my friends who is a friend by blood but who is family by heart, cries and hugs me, or when I let myself cry in front of them and be comforted by a hug from them, there is a connection forged that lasts maybe forever. With some people, there may only be one hug like that, and yet sometimes it is enough to bind the two of you together through everything that follows. With those people, you have shown your true heart, and they have loved you anyway. And what more can you ask than that?

All of this is just periphery to what I really mean to say.  We are fragile.

The other thought is something about "lights against the darkness," and I usually think it when we are in the car driving past houses covered with twinkly holiday lights, and I think about how perfectly fitting it is that to most of us (those in the northern hemisphere in particular), the holiday season means putting up lights during the days when there is more darkness than at any other time of the year. The days are short and the nights are long; the light is rare and the dark is dominant. And all around us, at stores and restaurants and dry cleaners and condos and apartments and houses, we look around and see decorations that not only create more light, but also ward off the darkness. Once you see the lights of decorations, you start seeing all of the other lights, too. Light is a beautiful thing.

When I think these two thoughts, as I do almost every day lately, I usually cry a little bit. And I'm not sure what either of these thoughts has to do with pregnancy, except that, like everything else that's happened this holiday season, it's happened while I was pregnant with mine and Geoff's first child, who will likely be a daughter, who we will love more than we know.

Happy new year.  I think 2004 will be a good one. 

Pregnancy Journal Entry 31 - September 5, 2003

For more than two months now, most of me has believed that I'm pregnant. Furthermore, I understand what "pregnant" means, at least on a rudimentary level - it means that there is a future person growing inside me, and chances are good that about six months from now, that future person will cease to be a person only in the future, and will become a person in the now (then).  I know this.

But on a deeper level, I haven't felt really deeply aware of this pregnancy, and what it means, since the day when we got our first positive pregnancy test result. On that day, I was overwhelmed and speechless and shocked and overjoyed and terrified and amazed. I was either in between laughing and crying and shaking, or doing all three. Since then, I've gradually calmed down. And over the last couple of months, the reality of my pregnancy has been more about how I feel (am I sick? am I tired? am I worried?) than about the future person who lives within me. And no wonder - the future person has done nothing, all this time, to make his or her presence known.

During the last month I've gotten more morbid and weird about whether or not there's even a baby in there at all. "Maybe I'm not really pregnant at all," I told Geoff. "Or maybe I am, but all that's growing in there is a shapeless blob of flesh, just bobbing around, brainless and lifeless."

I mean, seriously. I know that we were all created this way, by a couple of cells meeting and then wildly dividing and rearranging and forming and growing, but it's a huge thing to wrap my brain around. Now, let me get this straight - I'm supposed to just trust that my body, all on its own, can make a brand new person?  From scratch?

You know what happened the last time I made a cake from scratch? Everyone pretended they liked it even though it was kind of awful, that's what happened. My cake-from-scratch attempt went haywire. And if I can't even make a cake from scratch, using my amazing adult human brain power and my own two hands, and highly delicious and superior ingredients, then I don't understand! How does my body brainlessly create an entire human being who may someday fail at making a from-scratch cake of his or her own?

So yesterday I went back to my obstetrician. Geoff had to work, so I went by myself. The receptionist asked me how I was and told me to go pee in a cup and called me "pretty girl," and after a few minutes the nurse called me back into an examining room. She weighed me (up 4 pounds from the beginning of this pregnancy, and my OB is slightly freaking about how I have already gained "too much weight" - this will be an issue, I can tell) and took my blood pressure and left the room. A few minutes later, the doctor came in. "Today you are 13 weeks and 6 days," she said. She said that everything looked fine, except that she wanted to see me gain less weight (and if I need a snack to keep my stomach full, to keep from vomiting, I should eat celery!), and then she had me lift up my dress and lie down on the table, and then she put gel on my belly and a machine on the gel, and we listened.

It sounded like a cross between static, and something underwater. She moved the end of the machine around a little bit, but no regular sounds came out. She didn't seem concerned. She kept chatting and moving the thing around, until suddenly she stopped and looked at me. "There it is," she said.

And "Oh, is that it?" I said at almost the same time. And there it was. The whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh that meant that we were hearing the heartbeat of the future person who lives inside me.

"Shh," she said, as I spoke, and we were silent and listened. "So it's real," she said, smiling at me. I told her that that was how I felt, that I'd been worried that it would only be a shapeless blob of flesh, and she smiled a little, and we listened for a few seconds more.

I didn't cry then. I talked to her for a few more minutes, and she said she'd see me in four weeks, and I went and waited at the counter and made my appointments for the next three months, and then I walked out of the office and down the empty hallway.

That's when I cried, while I was walking down the empty hallway, thinking about the baby that's in there.  Not the shapeless blob of flesh, but the baby that I've wanted and been a little too afraid to fully believe in. I smiled, and I cried, and I rejoiced, and I stopped crying long enough to get my parking ticket validated, and when I got into my car to drive home, I cried a little more. I drove down the levels of the parking garage, crying a little bit.

And even though I couldn't hear the heartbeat anymore, I knew that it was still there, and that the baby was still in there, growing and moving and living. I patted my belly a few times. "Good baby," I told my future child. "Good baby."

your daughter

Friday, August 01, 2003

This is what I think about when I think about Schuyler Hudson.

I remember a night last August. I remember riding in Rob's Beetle to some ice cream place, with Schuyler in the back seat, and with Julie and Geoff in her car, following behind us. I remember that when I got out of the car and lifted up my seat and reached toward Schuyler, she lifted her arms up to me and smiled, and I unfastened the buckles on her car seat and lifted her up and carried her into the ice cream place. She held onto me. I remember feeling honored and pleased - that Schuyler had accepted me as a friend.

I was holding Schuyler, so somebody else (Geoff? Rob?) bought my ice cream cone and handed it to me where I stood with her. She reached toward my ice cream, and I let her grab a bite of ice cream (which she loved), but when she reached for another bite, her hands were covered in slobber, so I started laughing and trying to tear off a piece of ice cream myself so that I could hand it to her, but I didn't have enough arms to hold Schuyler and hold the cone and tear off a chunk of ice cream. Either Rob or Julie came over and took Schuyler from me, and held her for awhile.

We all went out on the porch, and we ate our ice cream, and at some point we got Molly out of the car, and we gave her some ice cream, too. After we ate our ice cream, we ended up in the back yard behind the building.

It had been twilight when we left to get ice cream, but by the time we'd finished eating, it was almost fully dark. It was a warm summer night. We were all happy and maybe a little tired. There were fireflies flashing in the air. And somehow it happened that instead of standing around in the tall grass, in the darkness, we started moving. Molly wanted to run, and she wanted us to chase her. And then Schuyler wanted to run, and she wanted us (and Molly) to chase her. So Molly ran and panted, and we took turns running after her. And Schuyler ran and laughed, and we took turns running after her, all of us making sure that neither the little girl nor the dog ran too far away. We made a protective circle around them. Rob got out his flashlight, I think, so that we could see a little better, but by then our eyes had mostly adjusted to the dark. And besides, it turned out to be a perfect place for running and laughing - no large obstacles, no hidden things to trip over, no holes to fall into.

That's the moment that pops into my head when I think of Schuyler. I think of a warm night, and tall grass, and bellies full of ice cream, and a circle of friends watching over a beautiful little girl who was laughing, laughing, laughing.

I knew then, of course, that Rob and Julie were worried about Schuyler - about her future, and about why she didn't speak. Because of that, during our visit I worried with them, a little bit, as if I could spot some clue or figure something out. In spite of that (or maybe because of that), what struck me the most (and what's stayed with me the longest) were those moments in the grassy yard, and the way every part of that whole evening, Schuyler included, seemed completely normal. Perfect, even.

And now that there is an answer, this is one of those times when my heart hurts for someone else. I want to do something to help, and yet I realize that there is nothing, really, that I can do. But Rob - I can tell you that when I think of your daughter, I think of sweetness and that warm summer night, and that those moments of perfection will live with me forever.

I hope this comes across the way I want it to. It's meant to be full of love.