Photo by carpediem37, via Flickr

It woke me up sometime around four this morning, less than an hour after being up to nurse: a dull sense of something not feeling right. I’ve had a sinus infection for two days, one I’ve been trying to self-treat with Sudafed because in the last 2 1/2 weeks, we’ve already spent $90 in doctor copays and $400 in hospital/ambulance copays and $55 in antibiotics, not to mention the sheer pain in the neck of taking multiple small children to the doctor repeatedly. I’m a grownup, I thought. Surely I can handle it.

The pain crept slowly upward until it settled in my ear about five minutes after waking. Dull pain, not that severe, but so pervasive that I simply could not get back to sleep. I tried what I had told the kids: put the aching ear on top so it can drain. Nope. With odd, groggy detachment I noted the way the ache radiated down my neck, the way it throbbed in my wisdom teeth and my eye socket. Must go to sleep…three small children to take care of. But sleep was elusive.

I got up, and the dark room took on a weird, distracting lack of balance as my brain struggled to process a world in which I can only sort of hear on the left side. I took acetaminophen and a few of the eardrops the doctor gave us for Nicholas. As the liquid trickled down the ear canal, I tensed against the tickle, remembering how he wailed and screamed about having to lie still, and I thought:

Now I understand.

These last 2 1/2 weeks, mired in the Realm of Sick, I’ve gnashed my teeth and wailed, Poor me! while my children suffered and I, I admit, did not sympathize. Now, at last, I get what they were going through.

And I am off to add to our accumulated copays and our tally of pain-in-the-neck doctor visits with multiple small children. Because now…I understand.

It’s easy to see how the beautiful touches confirm and uplift the experience of parenthood, but I choose to enjoy the not-so-beautiful ones, too. I will never actually like changing diapers, but the time on the changing table is ripe with opportunities for loving touch: for chewing, for kisses on exposed bellies, for tickles and nibbles on little arms, resulting in giggles galore. I hate washing my children’s hair, because the screaming reaches epic proportions–but once the baths are done, even the most confirmed non-snuggler wants to be wrapped in a towel and held close…and that’s nothing short of a taste of Heaven.

At these times, I’m less likely to be distracted from my children by my multitasking life. That’s not to say it never happens–a busy person’s phone rings without regard to those times–but more often than not, at those self-care times I’m really in the moment. When I’m holding a face still to brush teeth, I’m not paying attention to the scrub of toothbrush over pearly whites, but to the sensation of skin underlaid with baby fat beneath my palm.

Touch is especially necessary in sad times. Hugs are ubiquitous parts of any apology in our house. Perhaps all parents of tots do this? Before children can speak the words, before they can sign, they can hug an “I’m sorry.” For us, with a five-year-old just learning to speak, touch has held its importance far longer than it otherwise might have. And I believe, or at least I hope, that through it, my children are learning a beautiful truth about human interaction: that reconciliation is more than one-sided apology. If I tried to force an adult to hug the person he or she was being asked to forgive, it would be excruciatingly difficult–for both parties. Who wants a hug from someone who has hurt them? Bridging the physical distance between two people at odds makes it almost impossible to hold a grudge.

And this lesson carries over into discipline. My children want me to comfort them, to wrap them up in security and warmth, not only when they get a boo-boo, but when I have punished them. I used to hesitate to comfort them after disciplinary actions (you know that with small children, a lost bedtime story is one of the great tragedies of humankind), but I’ve come to realize that this is a gift, their desire to receive comfort from the one who has hurt them. It allows us to finish conflicts with a measurable act of love. And if I’m mad at them, which, let’s face it, I often am in disciplinary situations, it forces me to reach out to them and forgive.

Touch allows us to feel love, in a physical way, in our bodies, and the beautiful thing is that it is mutual gift; the giver receives, and the receiver gives. One of the most gratifying things for me is when Alex snuggles up against me at church. He wants my arm around him, in public. I don’t need to hear the words “I love you,” because I feel them in my every nerve ending.

Will this saturation of touch last into adolescence? Perhaps not. Probably not. But for now, this is what feeds my mother’s soul, what fortifies it against sleepless nights and bad attitudes and challenges that seem insurmountable: the visceral knowledge, communicated by touch, that I am loved by those I love most.

*

Part 2 in my practices of mothering, shared with Sarah & community at

For part one, click here.

This is a story about Tylenol. Or, since we’re a generic type family, acetaminophen.

Michael had his 2-month well baby visit on Monday. You know what that means–shots. Michael’s face went beet-red–I mean, beet–with two little yellow dots in the middle where his eyebrows came together. But then he was fine. The nurse wrote down dosages for the various formulations of acetaminophen and sent us on our way.

About bedtime, Michael became inconsolable. It seemed like any way we touched him caused him agony. We’ve never had an immunization reaction, at least not like this, so I ran upstairs and gave him a dropperful of acetaminophen without looking at the nurse’s notes. After all, it’s either one dropperful or two, .8 or 1.6, and I knew I needed the smallest dose. As the night progressed, he refused to wake up. At the 4 1/2 hour mark, feeling my own well-being reaching the danger zone, I went and got him up, but he refused to nurse. Flat-out refused. After fifteen minutes and a second dose of medicine, I managed to get five swallows of milk down his throat. I put him back to bed and went downstairs to pump. On the way, I tripped on a shoe left on the stairs and slid the rest of the way down. Temper tantrum. Bad mood. Resentment skyrocketing. Can’t sleep…though everyone else in the house is like the dead, even the one that shouldn’t be.

As I wandered around the middle floor, I decided to get out the sheets on immunizations, you know, the ones they hand you every time but you never, ever read. I figured I’d look at the reactions and see if extreme sleepiness and lack of appetite was par for the course. And I saw the handwritten dosage note: .4 mL.

My insides turned to a hard rock. I’d just given him .8. Twice. I thought a whole lot of words not fit for the public and turned on the computer to look up acetaminophen overdose, and by the time I finished reading I wanted to throw up. All reason told me that .8 mL is a miniscule dose and they build in huge margins of error…but the fact remained that his symptoms were right there on the computer screen.

I called poison control at 2:45 a.m., and a lovely woman named Janelle talked me down from the ledge. In the morning, Michael sort of ate, and began coughing, and it was soon clear that he was not overdosed, he had simply, and finally, succumbed to a full-blown virus.

But I didn’t give him any more medicine.

Fast forward to last night. At 1a.m., he woke up screaming. Not crying–screaming. He wouldn’t nurse, he wouldn’t let me put him down so I could go pump–he was absolutely inconsolable, and he kept rolling up in a ball like his tummy hurt. I managed to get him to sleep on my chest for a little while, but by 2:30 a.m. I was out of tricks, and I pulled out the acetaminophen again, this time turning up the light to make sure I got the correct dosage. And I discovered something that made the bottom drop out of my stomach again.

The dropper is not .8. It’s more like 1 or 1.2. And I gave him a full dropperful. Which means what I told Janelle on the phone last night about his dosage is wrong. And the web site said the symptoms of overdose usually show up 12 hours or more later, and abdominal pain is a big one on the list.

I cannot call poison control two nights in a row. I just can’t.

What if my baby IS overdosed, and I DON’T call, just because I feel stupid?

I thought about what  I’d read: liver damage, brain damage. I can’t imagine having another child with special needs, not when it was my fault.

I called.

Janelle answered the phone again, thank God, and after about three exchanges she remembered me from the night before. She talked me down off the ledge again (because let’s face it, at this point I was on the way to a second night running of less than four hours’ sleep, on the heels of a week or more with less than five. Let’s be frank, I was not in a good emotional place). “Let me do the math for you,” she said kindly. “How much does he weigh?” Calculation, dosage, division. “It’s probably a one-mil dropper, and he could have ten of those before he overdosed.”

Thank God…crisis averted.

I laid down with Michael on my chest again, in flagrant violation of everything anyone’s ever told you about baby safety, and I listened to his horribly stuffy nose…and didn’t get back to sleep for an hour. But at least I knew I didn’t poison my baby. And I am properly humbled. It’s clear to me that I will never, never have this whole parenthood thing figured out. Even the part I’ve done four times.

___1___

When I was pregnant with Alex, I was all about natural childbirth. I was one of those people that annoys the doctor by clarifying again and again and again that I DON’T want an epidural, I DON’T want forceps and episiotomy, and so on. Of course, all that assumes that the body is capable of laboring, which mine apparently isn’t. And after I became the classic case of spiraling interventions leading to C-section, I sighed and shrugged and said, “Oh, well, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. People should stop freaking out about C sections.”

___2__

I held that opinion until the third trimester of my pregnancy with Nicholas, when I realized that the damage and weakness done to my abdomen was the cause of all the pain that made walking excruciating–I could barely support my own weight. And realized that I had to restrengthen before I could have another baby. From the 6-week mark in 2009, I did Pilates 2-3 times a week and added exercises from my massage therapist, and we got by this time.

___3___

What I wasn’t counting on was that the fourth C section recovery would be as difficult as it has been. The pain has been stubborn, the bleeding has hung on, and then of course, we had latch issues that made nursing excruciating for several weeks. I can feel the difference in my body. The six and a half years since Alex’s birth, with three more C’s, have really taken their toll. I’m more aware of the incisions, the weakness in my own body. And the end of the incision rubbed raw and opened up in the last couple of weeks, defying all my attempts to heal it.

___4___

So yesterday I had my postpartum visit. The day dawned with snow that canceled school. Suddenly I was looking at a two-hour drive with ALL FOUR CHILDREN, with nothing but a doctor’s office at the end. I panicked and called my mom. She stepped up to the plate and kept the older three at home so I only had to take the baby with me. And the doctor found that there was a stitch hanging out there, refusing to fall off (because of the distance, he actually sews me up with dissolvable stitches instead of using staples). That was actually a relief to know; I thought I’d done something wrong.

___5___

However, yesterday was a rough day on the nursing front. Two hours, a quick doctor visit, and two hours back home = lots of sleeping baby interspersed with cranky baby. We nursed int he car at a rest area, and we nursed in the car in the doctor’s office lot before starting home. And what I thought was simple engorgement on one side (because he hates nursing that side) turned out to be my very first really nasty plugged duct.

___6___

Now, I have a history of plugged ducts. It comes with the territory when you have abundant supply and, ahem, abundant space. Usually these would be considered a blessing–certainly every mother in the NICU looked slightly green when I walked in having pumped four ounces in ten minutes. I have twenty-nine vials of milk residing in the deep freeze at present that I have no idea what to do with. In the NICU they called me the “Milk Maid.” I have been holding my breath these first six weeks, chowing on lecithin, massaging tissue, not multitasking much while nursing, to try to avoid plugs, because they’re such a horrid experience. I’ve had five or six already, but they were partial plugs, ones that, while achy, never caused me that panicky sense of lack of control. This one is one of those. I haven’t started panicking yet, but having three quarters of one breast blocked off, producing ridiculous amounts of milk that can’t get out…I’m getting there. Warm water, massage, and now I’m afraid I’m going to have to go pump. I just keep praying that the blockage will break quickly this time, and not hang around for three days like they’re wont to do.

___7___

Breastfeeding moms…if you’ve never had a plugged milk duct…fall on your knees and thank God.

Now. Off to the mechanical pump. (Envision me gagging.)

Luke 2:19, NAB

When I went into the hospital on November 30th, I gave myself permission to take it easy for a while. I was supposed to have a whole lot more done before that happened–a proposed table of contents for a new book, a couple of columns, some music. The early delivery rearranged my plans; the NICU stay gave me time to get done more than I thought. But when I came home, I gave myself until the first of the year to rest, to recover, to adjust…in short, simply to be.

Some of it has been stressful, some of it sublime. I’ve handled it with grace, and without. But at all times, I’ve tried to stop and really be present to the moment–to feel it in my body, not just in some compartmentalized corner of my brain, or with my eyes through the screen of a digital camera. In the past month, I have sat in my nursing corner in the darkness and watched Orion trek across the night sky. I have sat there on bright mornings, with the newborn sun aglow on the walls while my other children play on my bed, reducing each other to helpless, jelly-kneed giggles while they wait their turn to hold Baby Brother. I have gotten back under the covers with my family, three, four, five people lined up across two pillows, and run my hands over each one, glorying in the distinct progression against my palms as I touch arms and faces: adulthood, age six, almost- five, almost-three, and infancy.

I have watched yet another baby work his magic on everyone around him.  I have tiptoed around an umbilical cord stump that refused to fall off, tried to soothe him through very cold baths on a towel on the bathroom floor. Changed diapers that smell cheesy and yeasty, and didn’t hold my nose, admitting softly to myself that I actually kind of like that breastmilk-diaper smell.

I have slept in, napped in the sunny (and not-so-sunny) afternoons, watched movies, done very little housework, occasionally overdone it and paid the price in my incisions. I have gone to way too many medical appointments and never bothered to take work with me, choosing instead to hold a baby and be still instead of productive while I waited in overheated waiting rooms. The last two days, I have lounged back to enjoy the solid, warm soft weight of a child against my chest, pressing my nose to his head to breathe in that scent of Heaven, the smell of chrism, while my lips press against silky eyebrows and satin skin.

And now it is January third, and time is up. The baptism and extended holiday visits from family members have gifted me with some extra days, but now reality begins to settle back in, bit by bit: cooking, cleaning, laundry, lessons, deadlines. But the experience has taught me that I need a new balance for a new year–one that achieves fewer words or notes on a page and more moments. One that involves being present when my children are filling my soul instead of keeping my brain busy in the background working on some problem to be solved at naptime.

Today is bath day, and I think when I put Michael in the tub for the first time (his recalcitrant cord finally gave up the ghost on the last night of the old year), I won’t wash his hair. Maybe not the next time, either. The smell of chrism won’t last forever–the scent of Heaven will fade along with the inner hum of stillness found this past month, as normal life settles in once more. But while it lasts, I can use it to anchor myself in the resolve for this new year.

Fortunately, setting aside writing (mostly) has allowed me the luxury of long naps in the afternoon. Getting under the covers fully dressed has a wickedly indulgent feel that makes it even more pleasurable than in the middle of the night.

I had carpool duty on Tuesday, and when I woke up at 2:35, I knew there wasn’t time to do anything productive. Michael was stirring, but he wasn’t interested in nursing yet. So I put him in the bed beside me and curled up on my side.

Outside, thick clouds hunkered down, lengthening twilight backward along the clock, dropping a mist of precipitation on a world already saturated, soaking bare sycamore and cottonwood and walnut. Gloomy, silent, stealthy rain, buried beneath the perpetual growl of the interstate, pushing inward on the walls of my room.

But inside, warm purple walls radiated warmth and intimate quiet. My baby opened his eyes, kicked his legs and examined the recessed ceiling and ornate fan, then looked at me, looked through me…looked into me. “Hey there, sweetie,” I whispered, and he calmed his frantic limb flailing and wrapped his tiny hand around my finger. “I love you.”

And those eyes whispered back, I love you.

Truly, “it is no small thing that they, who are so fresh from God, love us.” –Charles Dickens

At four years and almost eleven months, she has finally entrenched herself firmly in the imaginative play stage. She loves dolls, and she doesn’t always connect the difference between cloth-and-plastic baby and real baby. It’s half-electrifying, half-terrifying, that his hands flap around and tap her face when she holds him. And she can’t seem to understand that she can’t drag him around by one arm or pick him up by the neck, the way she does her dolly.

She’s fascinated by nursing. “Baby–eat,” she signs, every time we sit down, and I have to remind her to use her words. “Buh buh,” she repeats dutifully. “Eh.” (We have a ways to go on speech, but she’s trying!)

So it is that after dinner on the Tuesday before Christmas, the first dinner in which I brought the Boppy to the table (although he didn’t actually nurse), I get up to start washing dishes and my husband says, “Kate, look at her!” I turn around and find Julianna sitting in my chair at the end of the table, with the boppy around her waist, grunting and reaching her arms out to have the baby put on her lap.

Christian and I chuckle. And then my mind races ahead a decade, two decades. “Oh, I hope she never has reason to nurse a baby,” I murmur. Christian hmmmm‘s his agreement, and Alex frowns. “Why?” he says.

“Never mind,” Christian says hastily.

I struggle mightily all the time to reconcile my own beliefs about sexuality–openness to life, the holiness of children, respecting the woman’s body as it was created and not imposing artificial infertility upon it in the name of convenience–with my wishes for Julianna. It’s very uncomfortable to see the conflict between my beliefs in general and my complete unwillingness to apply them to my daughter’s life.

Culturally speaking, birth control is absolutely a given for girls with Down syndrome. The nature of her chromosomes makes it a 50-50 shot that any child she bears will also have Down’s. And I don’t think she could raise a child, with or without Down’s. I know that any child my daughter bears will ultimately be my responsibility. And I don’t want to raise grandkids, with or without special needs–but especially, I don’t want to start down this road again at the age of fifty.

It seems sad, wrong somehow, to want to deny my daughter the fulfillment of womanhood. How can I, in conscience, willfully deny her what I spent years longing for myself, what has brought me so much fulfillment and joy?

Yet my greatest fear is that Julianna will be taken advantage of–in high school, in independent adulthood. She is beautiful, and she is vulnerable. I love that she’s beautiful, even by cultural standards, because it facilitates her ability to be an ambassador for special needs. But it also terrifies me. How can I equip her for adolescence, for the normal desires that she, even more than the rest of her peers, needs not to indulge? How can I protect her from being taken advantage of because of her beauty and her vulnerability? I want her to be independent, to have autonomy and the gift of independent living. But the more independent she is, the greater the risk.

Maybe I underestimate her. Maybe her very chromosomal giftedness will connect her more closely to God, render her impervious to what I fear. And maybe she’s perfectly capable of mothering a child.

I know for sure I’m borrowing trouble; for Heaven’s sake, she’s not even in kindergarten yet. But these are the things a parent of a child with special needs worries about. And I share it as one more slice of that life: the beautiful and the difficult.

I’ve been through difficult nursing times, but I have never faltered in my commitment.

Until now.

I feel terrible. As if everything that could plague a new mother postpartum is hitting me all at the same time. My neck, my shoulders, my back, the headache; the incision; the nether regions; worst of all, nursing is excruciating. I mean excruciating. All.The.Time. This week I’ve had diagnostic work, a chiropractic adjustment, conversations with the doctor’s office, conversation with the lactation consultant, and tomorrow I’ll have an appointment with her. I think it’s a ductal yeast infection. I’ve gotten through that before, I can handle it for another 36 hours, right?

Except I was in tears at 3:45 this morning. Michael has a habit of chewing on me without drawing any milk out. I keep thinking there’s something wrong with the latch…or maybe he’s just not awake enough…or the position’s wrong. I mean, this is my fourth child. I’m an expert breastfeeding mom now. I ought to be able to problem solve my way through most things. And I did…he got his feeding, it just took almost an hour. An hour of experimenting with latches and positions, and a lot of chewing on skin that was already raw. I thought about the several dozen vials of breastmilk pumped out during the NICU stay. How long will that last? Can I just quit?

Sore, stiff neck and headache greeted me this morning, heaping insult upon misery. It was getting better for several days, then suddenly took a turn for the worse. Every single time I sit down to nurse, I do neck stretches. I really thought it would be improving by now. I knelt in the hallway folding clothes and crying. Julianna came over and gave me hug after hug, shaking her head and signing “cry,” to say: Don’t cry. Don’t cry. What I really wanted was a long, comforting cuddle with my husband but he was trying to get out of the house with Alex.

Three ibuprofen later I feel marginally human, but life seems pretty overwhelming. I can recite verbatim everything everybody’s thinking, about taking care of yourself, taking a nap, asking for help, etc. etc. I am taking naps, and how much more help can I ask? I’ve already hit up two people for chauffering services this week, and a dozen more have either brought or been loosely scheduled to bring food. We could stock our deep freeze and not cook for the next three months—and it’s wonderful, it will be so helpful to only cook half as much for the foreseeable future. But how can I ask more? I’m not the only person in the world with difficulties, and I’m sure mine are less severe than most.

More than likely this freak-out is post-NICU-stress related. Life keeps marching on, I keep trying to take care of kids and take back all the overwhelming burden that Christian had to carry by himself for ten days, and it’s almost Christmas and I’m having to say no to the kids’ school parties because I just don’t think I can do any more, which makes me feel horribly guilty. I’m not writing, I’m barely cleaning, just trying to keep up with the dishes and the laundry, and when I look around me I see people carrying burdens truly crushing. I don’t have any justification for flipping out over perfectly normal postpartum blues and ordinary health concerns. It just seems like there’s no end in sight, no time to just sit down on the couch and simply be. Be with my husband, mostly, just be, not crisis-hopping, not problem-solving how to get child care so he can work, not working out grocery lists long distance, not trying to communicate the latest unjustified bilirubin flip-out the doctor had today, not trying to figure out why they want to do yet another PKU test, not trying to work in another doctor appointment or diagnostic test, not tearing our hair out because Alex can’t seem to get himself together and we can’t juggle one more thing for him, not gnashing our teeth because Julianna’s lost some of her verbal skills and maybe it’s because we ran out of green tea three weeks ago and can’t seem to get any more made.

Life right now just feels like too much. It’s not just the last two weeks; the crisis of early delivery and NICU blindsided us on the back end of a long period of stress. I just want a few days to breathe, without crisis, without chaos, without the phone ringing twenty times a day from Sirius XM radio and the pediatrician’s office. I just want to be for a while. Is that so much to ask, God?

Christian & the kids were at a concert on Saturday night when I walked into my kitchen and stopped dead, staring at the piles of papers waiting to be filed, gifts and school projects no one had had time to sort and put away, and toys—the toys that are supposed to stay in the basement—on every level of the house.
“Oh…my…gosh,” I said.

My mother went upstairs to start folding more laundry. My dad pulled Michael out of his car seat and started goo-goo-eyeing him. I hung up my coat and tore into the mess. It didn’t really look any better when I had to cease and desist for the night, in part because of the extra clutter my homecoming had brought into the house, but I did as much as I could.

What a difference six days can make. Every previous baby homecoming has involved a two-hour drive on a very sore abdomen, every bump causing me to wince and hold my incision. It’s involved the panicky not-feeling-good of engorgement. This time? This time I lit into the household tasks with an energy that amazed even me. All I could think was I had to do as much as I could before the kids came home and I needed to minister to the people in my household instead of the household itself.

I am way more interested in nesting now than I was in the last two weeks of my pregnancy.

Transition is tough every time. Thirty-six hours in, I’m already almost wild; Nicholas looks hurt when I shush him—because he never, ever, EVER shuts up. He just keeps repeating the same things over and over, right in my face while I’m trying to concentrate on making sure Michael is actually nursing and not simply tearing my breasts to shreds without getting anything out of them. Why is it that every baby is a stellar nurser in the hospital and then decides to be a fit-and-start-er upon arrival home? Julianna wants to breathe her runny nose and phlegmy cough on him, and everybody wants to hold him all the time. And ten days of hospital stress and nursing in a cramped corner beneath a vitals monitor that was beeping every minute and a half finally took their toll; I woke yesterday with the crick in my neck to end all cricks. Splitting headache, agonizing pain in my back.

Let’s just say it’s not conducive to house cleaning.

Transition, I whisper to myself. Just keep your cool. This, too, shall pass.

Besides, there’s this to counterbalance it. I just have to discipline my attitude.

Like another of my blog friends, I, too, like to pull it out and put it on once in a while, as my mother did when we were little. And Alex, who after attending a wedding recently is newly intrigued by this weird grownup ritual of wearing impossible-to-keep-clean, really big dresses, insisted upon being photographer instead of one of the subjects.

So, for a few brief, glorious minutes, I got to be my bride-self again…the juxtaposition of who I once was with who I have become: flowing satin amid piles of laundry, and jammie-clad little ones on my lap.

And when it was done, we resumed our routine as if nothing had happened. Resumed the world of books, prayers, tucking in, and procrastinating by protesting that the radio is hissing, by screeching for water…

…to the ordinary tasks of cutting hair…hair that once was all black, but now begins to turn white at the temples.

Beadwork and tuxedos. That is where motherhood begins: in a union of two who become one, whose union becomes enfleshed again and again. Praise God.

(Note: this is a repost from July of 2010. But with the possibility of a baby sooner than I expected, and me not feeling very good, I have a lot to do, and this post is one of my favorites–and it fit the writing prompt this week perfectly. So I hope those of you who’ve been with me a while will forgive the repeat!)