I focus on the trash can emblazoned with biohazard warnings. The doctor knocks softly, as if not wanting to disturb. She is the same woman I cried on last year. She is kind and comforting, knowledgeable and respected, all things a woman wants in the one caring for her unborn. She is a high-risk specialist, a perinatologist assigned to women with problem pregnancies. My first had tried to come three months early. My second had died. And now was my third time at bat.
She squirts clear jelly across my lower abdomen, then uses a device called a Doppler (not the weather-forecasting kind) to listen for life. I watch her face for clues, but it is relaxed, no frown lines. She moves the Doppler across my tummy, but the only sounds are from my own body, not someone else’s. She tries again and again but can’t hear a heartbeat. My throat tightens. My head is light. Not again, please, God. Not again.
“It may still be too early,” she says, as if reading my mind, knowing it has returned to last year, the silent screen, death in the womb. “Let’s see if we can get you in for ultrasound.”
Moments later I am in another room with the equipment that deals news in glowing black-and-white images. I force my eyes on the screen, a blur of shapes I can’t make out. The seconds that pass seem to go on forever until at last I see the unmistakable pulsing of a beating heart, the outline of five tiny fingers and an arm jutting above a head. I see legs kicking and can even count the toes on my baby’s feet.
I hug the doctor, this time leaving no trail of tears. I take the printout of black-and-white images, my baby’s first portraits, and hold them carefully in my hands as I walk into the biting wind.
It’s going to be all right, I tell myself. Thank you, God, I pray, not knowing another challenge was right around the corner.
I am now just over four months pregnant and sitting in the audience at my son’s preschool Christmas program. It is December 1997 and tears run down my face as I try to watch and smile, videotape his antlers and Rudolph nose while he mumbles out songs and seems completely uninterested in the entire pageantry of the event.
An hour earlier I was at work, trying to hurry and get out the door when a nurse called my office, but she couldn’t reach me so she had a coworker track me down. Urgency edged her voice and she told me to come in as soon as possible.
“But my son is in his Christmas play.” I wasn’t thinking clearly.
“It’s very important.”
And then I remembered. Last week, I’d had a panel of genetic testing designed to prescreen for birth defects. I knew then, with a sinking feeling, with breath I couldn’t catch, what the call was about. I’d agreed to the maternal serum screening tests that are becoming routine to check for potential birth defects. About 95 percent of the time, the test results are fine. Another 5 percent of women have results that could indicate birth defects such as Down Syndrome, neural tube openings and other conditions, some incompatible with life and characterized by mental retardation and a number of physical abnormalities.
“We have some concerns with your test results,” the nurse said. I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach. “We would like for you to come in right away, as soon as possible, and talk to one of our genetics counselors.”
I begged her to tell me what was going on. First, she gave the news she considered good. That the levels did not indicate Down Syndrome or a neural tube defect. Then, the bad news. The blood samples did point to trisomy 18. She may as well have been speaking German for all I understood. I did a search in a medical book and froze in horror. The condition was one in which most babies never survive in the womb, and if they do enter the world, they die within days or weeks in most cases.
Within two hours, after my son’s Christmas program, attended with tears streaming down my face, my husband and I were sitting in front of the genetics counselor, a woman with enormous compassion.
Trisomy 18, she explained, occurs in extremely rare situations when each cell in the body has three copies—instead of the usual two of the chromosome 18. Most of these babies die shortly after they are born, rarely living past their first birthday.
The tests showed my baby’s odds had increased dramatically—from 1 in 8,000 to 1 in 50 or less. It affects baby girls much more often than boys and is characterized by severe physical and mental handicaps.
The doctor suggested amniocentesis, but I didn’t want it. The year before, at 35, I’d already lost one baby to miscarriage and, most likely, an age-related chromosome condition. My husband and I agreed against further testing. I’d felt this child move, seen its heartbeat and tiny fingers opening and closing on ultrasound images. If the news was bad, I’d deal with it gradually, believing that by carrying the child, I might possibly reach a peaceful acceptance in time.
“We really should do amnio to rule this out,” one doctor said.
“No. I can’t. I’m sorry. Are there other options?”
She said there were higher-level ultrasounds that could pick up more on-screen than standard equipment can, but there were no guarantees other than amniocentesis.
“We’ll just do the ultrasound,” I said, my husband agreeing. A few minutes later a technician wheeled in the machine and once again my belly became wet and cold with gel. The doctor scanned and clicked, freezing images to print out. She nodded and emitted positive sounds.
“Everything really looks fine,” she said. “I can’t see anything on this ultrasound that would indicate trisomy 18.”
They were searching for the usual signs: clenched hands, small heads, severe heart and kidney problems. They had no explanation why the tests were showing something else, something fatal in most cases. Though I’d gone online and read the beautiful stories of children with trisomy 18 who have lived for several years. I was particularly struck by what one parent wrote, daughter in arms:
Sometimes love is for a moment.
Sometimes love is for a lifetime.
Sometimes a moment is a lifetime.
Seeing my daughter on the screen, so active, so vital, gave me hope to continue the pregnancy with joy, with the baby showers and optimism of other expectant mothers. I really didn’t think about the possible birth defects or chances for death. I had faith, a mother’s intuition, that all would be okay.
On May 11, 1998, my daughter, Lindsey Hope, was born. Healthy. And full of energy. Prayers had been sent. Prayers had been answered. I wept with joy and the appreciation of a mother who knows how fragile new life can really be.
I took my new baby home and within hours another fear set in, a panicky feeling that once again, this time at 36, I had become a new mother. You’d think time and experience would make round two a little easier, but it hasn’t. It won’t. It won’t because I’m a worrying sort of woman who reads too many books about child care and all that can go wrong instead of all that can go right.
As with my first baby, I fall into an exhausted sleep with my face pressed against her crib railings, listening for breathing, watching with worry the staccato rhythm of an infant taking air and wondering if those rolling eyes, those whimpering lips, are all a part of normal newborn behavior.
I still honk at every other car on the road, figuring they are coming too close to the yellow line, too close to my cargo who remains fastened yet fragile, each bump in the road, every pothole, making my heart race and hands reach out to protect.
I still rush my baby girl off to the restroom every time a stranger paws her or coughs within 50 yards, and I scrub her like some crazy woman with a baby wipe or soap or the antiseptic towelettes I collect from multiple trips to the pediatric
ian’s office.
I still fret over everything that either comes to mind or that I bring to mind, all with somewhat conflicting advice and opinions.
Is she sleeping too much? Wetting enough? Is her jaundice getting worse? Is my breast milk thin as water, no more nourishing than Kool-Aid?
Hadn’t my own father looked at the spit-up dribbling from my baby’s chin and whispered to Mama, “That milk sure looks weak to me.” And hadn’t one pediatrician weighed her and announced she was losing precious ounces during a time she should be gaining?
How was I to know his scales weren’t correctly calibrated? How was I to know that in that office every single scale—a dozen or more—would give a different weight, the main criterion of newborn health and progress in those crucial early weeks.
And why is she so good? Why doesn’t she cry more, like my son who suffered from colic and unexplained needs?
You’d think that this time, I’d relax. But I didn’t. I don’t.
I am, in my husband’s words, the “fierce mama lion” who growls and barks orders: “Prop her head.” “Make sure to burp her.” “Please don’t bounce or jiggle or put her in direct sunlight.”
As I write this, May is ending, finishing its term with hot afternoons and not a hint of rain. But I don’t notice. The world continues spinning around me, news happening, people triumphing or dying, making headlines, but all I know is that my daughter is two weeks and three days old and this is the world as I see it. The only world I can handle at the moment.
In this short span, it seems as if a lifetime of drama and hilarity has befallen us since her birth at 1:21 PM May 11.
I will never forget the moment in the delivery room, just after an injection of painkillers, when I turned to my husband and promised him a TV upgrade and cable if he’d just consent to naming the child Lindsey.
It was a name that, for me, had deep sentimental meaning. A coworker, H. S. Lindsey, whom I’d worked with for years had died the year before and I wanted to honor his memory, the grace and dignity he brought every day when he walked into the office until he retired at age 70.
Promise cable to a channel-starved man during baseball season and you can pretty much name your child anything you want. Throughout contractions, as I tried to focus by looking at a photo I’d brought of my son and me, a small Rhesus Monkey grinning on my shoulder, I imagined my husband’s mind wandering toward TV town at Circuit City.
Panasonic with surround sound? Or the flat-screened version with picture-in-picture?
My thoughts, however, were along these lines: Should I get an epidural, end this wretched pain? Or should I go for a natural delivery, experiencing everything? He opted for the Panasonic and I settled on an epidural, and for the next several hours, life was lulled by the sweet harmony of painless anticipation. I didn’t worry about trisomy 18. I had a peace that was unexplainable and that she’d be fine.
Then my baby was ready for arrival. I will never forget her quick delivery, the great gushes of amniotic fluid that ended up on the doctor’s head and in his ears, despite the protective shield across his face and surrounding his head.
And thus began the roller-coaster ride of renewed motherhood, the hills and free falls and accompanying fears—the thrills and terrors and adventures that tag along when you fall hopelessly in love with a new baby.
The first postpartum adventure hit just minutes after the birth, when my precious daughter wouldn’t “latch on” properly, referring to her initial breast-feeding efforts. I had seen all the birth videos, newborns squirming to the breast as instinctively as baby sea turtles scuttle toward the water.
I had envisioned my Earth Mother self, tired and elated from a natural (well, at least my eyes were open) delivery, and my infant looking, finding and attaching herself to me the way warm puppies find their mother’s milk.
After hours of attempts, a nurse finally looked at my goods and announced with not a hint of tact: “Well, maybe you’ll have to hold them up some. They’ve probably sagged since your last baby, right?”
Regardless of gravity, my child did finally latch and catch on, which is what she was doing beautifully at four days old, back in the hospital, in the outpatient wing waiting on a heel stick to determine her rising jaundice levels. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. This time it was jaundice reaching numbers that require intervention instead of just sticking a baby in the sunlight for a few hours.
As Lindsey began her soft, feminine cry, my 5-year-old son gave me a knowing look, far too wise for his years. His eyes grew wide as quarters when I fidgeted and squirmed nervously and finally, discretely, produced nutrition for my daughter’s newly perfected latching. Poor baby had just had her little heel stuck with a needle and needed comforting.
“Oh, my gosh!” my son screamed, and the packed crowd in the waiting room turned toward his voice. “Don’t anybody look at my mother. She’s breast-feeding and her privates are showing!”
Everyone stared and I laughed like the truly insane, the laughter of a woman reeling with hormones.
On day five, my mother appeared at my door, and so did the cable guy. Some nitwit in muddy shoes saying something about wall fishes and hookups, and 700 feet of cable for the price of 250 and instant service with free movie channels. I had a baby to feed, a diaper to change, and stared at him through sleep-starved eyes.
“Run it where you need to,” I said.
Two days later another cable guy came over, yanking up what the first had put down, saying my neighbors didn’t like exposed wires in their dahlia beds. Well, who could blame them?
“Look,” I said. “I’m a new mother. My baby has jaundice. See? Yellow as a yolk. Plus, I have a 5-year-old and a husband, and we need some instant service. I need Nickelodeon!”
Days six and seven of Lindsey’s life yielded more chaos, more heel sticks and then home health visits, bilirubin lights and the anxiety that leaves new parents drained and feeling helpless and wondering how in the world a person could survive so much love and its sidekick: worry.
It is the kind of love that some claim as a reason for never having children. They are afraid. Afraid of the intensity of such feelings. Afraid of loving and not measuring up. Of loving and losing. Of just loving.
During those early days, I find myself at my baby girl’s bed or with her in my arms, staring at her dark slate eyes, crying because she’s beautiful, crying because she’s yellow, crying because the hormones need bleeding.
Crying because she’s mine.
I give her a full bath for the first time and set out three baby-care books. Why can’t I just relax, trust my instincts?
“How,” I asked a friend, “do teenagers do it?”
“Ignorance is bliss,” she said. “The less you know, the less you worry.”
Well, how, I wanted to know, do they figure out all the gadgets, such as the car seat’s proper positioning and fastening?
I’ll never forget the first time I had my daughter out on the road, looking over and seeing her suspended, almost hanging, from the straps of her Joy Ride. I pulled over and tried to adjust things but only made matters worse. So I did what I figured all mothers do: I drove straight to police headquarters and waited for an officer to appear. I’d done the same thing with my son. It didn’t take long.
After a few confusing moments and adjustments, they reworked my Joy Ride and I thanked them and said, “I guess you have parents driving through here all the time with the same problem.”
One officer smiled and the tips of his ears grew red. “No, ma’am. You’re the only one.”
Later that week, I met my biggest foe, known as the Diaper Genie. Four adults couldn’t figure out how to work mine, thus I was considering buying an antiquing kit and turning it into a decorative butter churn, until one day I’d had enough and decided the plastic grocery bags at Bi-Lo worked equally as well.
All of these minidisasters, and my baby wasn’t even a month old. I was certainly needing a lift the morning I once again found myself at the pediatrician’s checking bilirubin levels. I hobbled in red-eyed and the receptionist ushered me into a waiting area and said a few comforting words. She thought I was tearful because I had a yellow baby.
“No,” I sniveled. “It’s the car seat. The Diaper Genie. The stroller that weighs 200 pounds. The high chair that serves as a swing, a bed and a playpen. These infant must-haves are trying to ruin everything.”
She nodded knowingly and as the baby began fussing, I felt at ease offering an aesthetically challenged breast to my newborn, who gratefully accepted. The receptionist paused at the doorway, smiled sweetly and slipped quietly from the room, the way someone will when shocked beyond further conversation.
I’m sure there is now a red sticker on my daughter’s chart that says: “Proceed with caution. Child’s mother mentally unstable.”
I felt much better when they announced Lindsey’s bilirubin levels were down and she could stop the light therapy and our lives would return to normal. Normal, meaning my hovering over the crib and watching her covers rise and fall. Normal, meaning the incessant checking of her blankets and diapers and clothing and reading way into the night on how to care for a newborn when my instincts are begging to be trusted and my eyes pleading for a few hours’ sleep.
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