Sleep when the baby sleeps

TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2008

We are now a normal family with a newborn:  we exist on a 24-hour schedule.  Showering is optional.  We eat weird stuff at all hours.  The house is a disaster.  Laundry was a constant endeavor--until the washing machine broke down today.  All food can in some way look like baby poop.  Some times we panic, wondering how we are EVER going to function again, work again, think again.  We don't leave the house. We couldn't tell you what day of the week it is, or how many days we've had Clare home.  And of course, we sleep only when the baby sleeps--if then.  As Tim just said, "we look like we moved back in with our parents and never got jobs."

Clare is doing well.  She's eating like crazy.  I never had any idea babies made so much noise...and I don't mean the crying.  She chatters all the time, when she's awake, when she's half asleep, when she's asleep...it makes listening to the baby monitor downright funny.  (In fact, right now we're listening to her hiccuping.)  She appears to like it here at home.  She's also decided she likes us to pick her up and hold her.  Diaper changes make her crabby.  So far, though (and we know this won't always be the case), she isn't inconsolable.   

Clare went to her first pediatrician appointment yesterday morning.  We woke up less than an hour before it and didn't have time to shower, so we rolled in there looking like a couple of welfare cheats.  The baby looked good, though, and that's all that mattered.  I decided pediatricians' offices remind me too much of elementary schools, with their seasonal decorations and years-old copies of Highlights magazine laying around--you know, the ones where some other kid has already gone through and circled all the hidden pictures.  Can you find the frying pan?  Oh, Spoiler Kid already did--it's circled in the tree.  Can you find the spool of thread?  Yep, because Spoiler Kid got that one too, looking like a knot in the tree trunk.  The bicycle, the tea cup, and the pencil are all circled too.  Damn.  

Anyway, the pediatrician's appointment went just fine.  Clare is now five weeks old.  It seems so strange to think I'm still supposed to be pregnant for 3 1/2 more weeks.  When we think of it that way, it's hard to believe she's doing so well.  She was just a little over 2/3 of the way cooked.

On a more serious note, Tim and I are realizing how much we have to process from our five and a half weeks in the hospital.  We miss our nurses Peggy and Lisa.  We greatly appreciate Meg the nurse practitioner, who took such good care of us, and Sue, our last nurse who really took the time to explain things to us and reassure us.  But we are both pretty angry with a number of things:  the nurse practitioners whom we'd never even talked to, who walked up and made (what appeared to be) snap decisions about Clare--like when we were to room in with her.  We figured out early on that the staff was evaluating us all the time, and this was confirmed by check-off sheets and shift reports in Clare's file.  Afterward, it became clear to us that the evaluating was continuing during our rooming in period, and that none of us (Clare, Tim or I) passed muster on the first day of rooming in.  It made us feel like guinea pigs in somebody else's experiment and like we were being set up to fail.  Additionally, there were a couple other folks who were particularly discouraging or judgmental, and whose discouragement and judgment made things more difficult for us.  I won't say anything more than that, because in the end our daughter is healthy as a preemie can be, and we have her home, and all of us will recover.  But the whole experience smacked of a lack of control and sometimes even a lack of dignity.  Our powerlessness was profound. It's going to take us a while to process everything our little family has been through.  There was a lot that, at the time, we didn't have the energy or luxury to feel.  Now, we may not have the energy, but we have the time and luxury, so we find ourselves coming to terms with this incredibly big experience, fraught with fear and worry and helplessness and ignorance.  

I guess I need to cut myself some slack, too.  I tell myself that I don't have much right to feel overwhelmed by having Clare home, because it's not like I'm trying to recover from childbirth, and we brought home a baby whom we know well.  We've been trained by some incredible nurses.  We have some distinct advantages over the parents of term-babies who are booted out of the hospital within forty-eight hours of giving birth.  But then I consider the past six weeks and figure our fear and fatigue and concern are all warranted and justifiable.

But most of all, we are grateful that now our pretty, tiny little girl is asleep just ten steps from us and we can pick her up whenever she wants us to, and tell her we love her as often as we'd like, and dress her in her own little clothes.  Changing a diaper is not the worrisome task it was when we feared what we'd find--now we KNOW what we'll find by scent, and it isn't anything every other parent in the world is finding in their kid's diaper.  The funny thing is, Clare's been unaware of her predicament this whole time.  She has operated under the instinctive knowledge that everything is the way it's supposed to be and has had no fears for the future.  

Maybe she's the very smartest of us all.