Wet Feet

Sunny Pictures for a Rainy Friday

 It occurred to me that the last two picture posts I did were of Naomi or were Naomi related. So here are some pictures of Miriam. Fairness and all. I wouldn't want anyone to think I love one more than the other.

Differently, sure. But more or less? How can you quantify love that limitless?

At the same time, it's true that Miriam spends much more than her fair share of my patience. She's 2. She's always had that quality of being an adult in a new body, and at 2 that super-awareness leads to more fits of violent tantrum than the wise gazes that characterized her baby days.

And really, what a ferocious game-face. I'd stay out of her way if I were you.

Spurting Developmental: a post in three movements

you don’t even want to know 10/4/07 myspace/10/5/07 right here

the screaming. oh the screaming. make it stop!

i have never been more ready for the weekend than i am RIGHT NOW. and it's only thursday night.

finally both chickies are sleeping and i am tipsy on lambrusco.

i don't know what the hell is going on with miriam this week, but it's like her lack of language is finally starting to get to her. her temper flares and i have to restrain her so she won't hurt herself. i'm so fucking exhausted. but she's picked up several new words, in fact, next week will probably bring a language explosion. thank god. now everyone can stop with the Worrying.

i'm not worried, by the way. naomi did the same thing: held out on language development until the last possible moment. one days she had a vocabulary of like ten unintelliglbe words. the next she was speaking in full, audible sentences.

and miriam chatters so much in her ewok language, which, oddly enough, other more languified babies her same age seem to understand and respond to. there are so many mysteries in development. it's fascinating to watch. from a distance.

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miriam still not right in the head 10/8/07 myspace

and therefore, neither am i. she was up until two last night, walking in tight cricles and repeating the same nonsense syllables over and over, frenetic but clearly still half asleep.

i checked her ears, her nose, her teeth, her belly, nothing seemed to hurt but sometimes she'd put her fists to her forehead and scream. a headache seemed the most likely cause, so i gave her some motrin and she eventually got tired enough to go to sleep. once she did, she slept like a rock.

i slept between them, touching both, the late night and worry's erosion of my mental stability made it necessary because then i would know immediatly if one of them stopped breathing or something.

the sleeplessness and the fretting over possible catastrophic causes of her weird-ass behavior (meningitis? brain tumor?) have combined to make me an exhausted, cranky mommy today.

better go hook up that new tv. my blankie is calling me.

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relief

she's finally stopped screaming and she's cut her nighttime milk consumption in half, so rocklike is her sleep. she's spitting out new words every five minutes.

"neeomeee!" she says it over and over, gleeful, giddy, that she can finally call her sister by her name. "sssster! neeomeeeeeeee!"

a woman with keys walks by. "keys! bye bye..."

she has words for things that i don't understand, that will become clearer the more she uses them.

i knew it was in there.

i totally wasn't worried at all ;)

even smarter than I thought

Miriam hasn't shown much interest in TV yet. I thought this was because she valued the development of her brain, and had read the AAP guildelines that state "no TV for children under 2", and being only 15 months, knew that her time was not yet nigh. She's a good girl, or so I thought.

Turns out, it was just because she hadn't seen The Office yet.

I discovered this by accident one morning when Miriam was awake and bouncy and I was trying to sleep a few more blessed minutes. The portable DVD player was set up from the night before, headphones in jack and menu playing. There were no other DVDs within arms reach and so I just put on The Office for her, hoping for a few minutes amusement.

Oh boy.

One of these days the camera and the DVD player will be in the same place at the same time, and I will capture the gleeful twirly happy dance she does to the theme song, the look of transfixed joy on her face as she watches, and the virbrating giggle of recognition she makes whenever Dwight comes on the scream.

My girl, she LOVES Dwight.

Happy Birthday, Miriam

A year ago you were born. What a gift you are.

You are so joyful, so happy just to be alive, I want to take lessons from you.

You are so determined, whether it's learning to walk to keep up with your sister or learning to navigate a full sized umbrella stroller around the park, you don't give up. You bring your steady attention to everything you try. Behind your placid exterior lives a will of iron.

You love everyone. You've had barely a moment of separation anxiety.

Your eyes could stop traffic. Your expression is arresting. You are an old, beautiful soul.

I wish I could take credit for how you are, but you were born this way, a fully formed individual.

Happy birthday, Quiet Riot.

Like epidurals for endorphins *UPDATED*

Ahh, birth. Read Manela's account of her visit to Dr. Famous, read Casey's reaction.

I've used this analogy before (damn, if I can find the post!), but I'm going to really hammer it in this time. A deader horse there will never be.

You are planning your wedding. You're excited! You've been thinking about this your whole life! You know just what you want!

You order chateau briond and norwegian salmon . You write your own vows. You order a Vera Wang and have your bridesmaids in fuschia.  You can't wait to dance to your special song that you and your beloved heard on your very first date. Everyone's excited. They all say that barring anything unforseen, you should be able to get whatever you want.

Now, the caterer brings hamburgers and fish sticks. The DJ lost your playlist and just came from a bat mitzvah, so can only play boy bands. The ice scuplture melted when the power went out in the thunderstorm the night before, so there goes your giant heart with the initials entwined centerpiece.

Now imagine that everyone, your mother, your friends, and your husband's receptionist, tells you that the wedding isn't the important thing, it's the marriage that really matters. The professionals you hired give you guilt trips for asking so much. People laugh at you for planning like you had any control over this day at all. Way to make a girl feel small.

There is far too much emphasis placed on a woman's wedding day for that scenario to ever happen. But that's what you're doing when you try to console a woman whose had a disspointing birth experience with "well, a healthy baby is the only thing that really matters". Yeah, that's true, but it does great disrespect to the fact that this day was a defining day in a her life. The reverence for birth as one of the major rites of passage in a woman's life is totally absent in tha attitude of birth professionals like Dr. Famous.

Like Casey, I was taught profound lessons about myself during each birth experience. Miriam's birth was the turning point that tipped me from feeling mostly inadequate to feeling ever-so-slightly powerful. There was a fundamental shift in how I felt about myself and my body. Not just because I gave birth without medication to malpresented baby without a single laceration (although I'm damn proud of that. They tell me my trophy is in the mail) but because in order to get the birth experience I wanted I had to stand up for myself at key moments in the process, and standing up for myself is not something I was in the habit of doing. That's what I took from Miriam's birth: the ability to trust myself.

*Edited to respond to some comments*:

I don't know what it is that makes people equate "empowering" with "natural" when discussions of birth arise. Bringing a child into the world is powerful, transformative, soul-shaking, and, yes, dangerous, no matter how the baby comes out. There are empowering c-sections where the rite of passage is treated with the reverence it deserves, there are disempowering natural births where the mother's wishes for pain medication were not respected.

The manner of birth is less important than how a woman feels about it. I see little respect for women in Dr. Famous's attitude.

Afterbirth...

We have some video clips of the birth and just after, and in one of them, Josh asks "So was it worth it to go natural?" My answer: "Ask me again in like an hour". (I'm a Jersey girl. I say "like" a lot).

There's so much to process about it all. Little snippets of thought and action come back to me randomly and trigger a new wave of revelation about everything, and as soon as that they're gone again.

It was one of the most intensely spiritual and personal experiences of my life, but not in the way I expected. I guess I expected the heavens to open up or something. I expected it to be ecstasy. It was more like Dante's Inferno. It was a guided tour of my own weaknesses, which makes the triumph at the end all the more sweet.

On with the story...

After she was born, the midwife checked me and found that there were no lacerations. I was still bleeding profusely, and I continued to bleed "too much" for a few hours. She kept going back in to see if she could find any tears that would explain the bleeding, but she found nothing. I got a shot of pitocin, and then a shot of another drug, and then another IV, a pitocin drip, and a hospital transfer. I had been falling asleep sitting up, and my mom and the nurse were both alarmed: they weren't sure if I was passing out from blood loss or just tired from the birth. Even I'm not sure if I was falling asleep or passing out.

They took Miriam to the nursery and took me to the obstetrical OR, where they put my legs in these enourmous padded stirrups. The midwife wanted to do an "exploration" to rule out a cervical tear or a retained placenta. They put Nubain in my IV. Yes, I love the irony too: I went through that birth with no drugs but I got narcotics for what is essentially a pelvic exam.

After I got the drugs everything was veeerrryyy nniiiiiiiccceee, if a little fuzzy. She couldn't find anything that would have caused the bleeding, and it was finally starting to abate anyway. I spent the night in the hospital. I actually didn't mind as much as I thought I would. It was nice to be alone with Miriam, and Naomi didn't mind sleeping with my mom for a night.

Breastfeeding a newborn again is weird. I'm glad Naomi was my first and not Miriam. Naomi saw the boob and knew exactly what to do with it. Miriam had to be sold on the boob. She would nuzzle and lick and then lose interest. It took her a long time to figure out that she should open her mouth and suck. She was over a day old before she seemed to get good and hungry. Now she nurses All. The. Time. She's already pooping yellow. I'm so proud of her.

I am not immune to milk anxiety. Until today I wasn't ever really sure if she was getting enough. Her output was fine and all, but I still has this nagging fear that I wans't making anything. I kept sniffing her diapers to see if the pee was concentrated enough to stink (does it stink, or does it just smell a little)? Anyway, I woke up from a nap today with a bra that was straining its seams. Milk is in. Anxiety is out.

Hello Again

Don't I have a wonderful brother for making the happy announcement so soon after the event?

So? I guess I'll just dive into the story.

10 ish Tuesday night: I notice the contractions are regular, about ten minutes apart. I'm pretty sure this is it. So I take some castor oil to get things moving. I am happy, dancing, pacing the floor, sitting on the ball and getting very excited.

Around midnight things are definitely happening, so I call my mom. After sitting on the couch tensely for about ten minutes listening to my happiness and excitement, she tells me that this morning, she saw the latest birthing suite schedule. Turns out the midwife was wrong, there was one 12 hour gap in the schedule in two weeks. And I had gone into labor in the middle of it.

At this point my inner bitch came flying free. Why didn't she tell me earlier? Why didn't she tell me before I took the fucking castor oil?

1 am: I talk to the midwife, who listens to me through a contraction, and tells me that I she'll meet me at the hospital. Fuck. Now I notice that the contractions end with an unpleasant bone crunching feeling in my back. Because the baby has been well positioned at every check-up, the possibility of back labor doesn't occur to me.

My sister-in-law Kristen meets us at the hospital. They triage me, and find me to be four centimeters and in active labor with contractions every four minutes. They are very accomodating, they put me on "low risk protocol" and bring me a birth ball from across the street.

I realize that my hatred of the hospital is not helping my labor or my support people, and I need to find a way of getting my head together. After the first bag of antibiotics goes in, I take the birth ball in the shower for about an hour, where I give myself a pep talk. I could let my anger take over, I could continue to be bitchy to Josh, Kristen, the nurse, the midwife and everyone else who crosses my path, or I could pull myself together and make the best of the hand I was dealt. It's not so bad, I can pace the room, I can use the ball, the birth center would open at 7 AM, and I could go through transition in the tub and deliver in a real bed. Even though 7 AM was still five hours away, the thought cheered me. I came out of the shower in a much better mood than I went in. I put on my labor nightie and continued to dance and pace and bounce. I started to feel happy again.

7 AM rolled around, and I had progress to six. I could only walk during contractions now, bouncing on the ball didn't help too much, sitting or lying down was absolutely unbearable. We walked slowly through the underground tunnel to the birth suite, me dragging another IV pole with the antibiotics.

I got right in the tub. It was not the relief I was hoping for. The jets weren't very strong, the water wasn't quite warm enough or deep enough. I stayed in for a long time, squatting, listening to music and occasionally singing. I burst into tears a few times.

I thought I'd have progressed more in the tub. When I got out I was 7. And this is where things get really blurry. I knew it was transition, the contractions where hard and strong with no break. My back felt like it was being crushed, and the feeling lingered between contractions. I was probably crying. I was losing it. I slowly paced the room with a warm tube sock full of rice on my back. I got down on my hands and knees and someone rubbed the right spot.

I could hear little conversations going on around me. They were concerned that I wasn't vocalizing. Every once in a while, one of the students observing the birth would ask a question, and the midwife would explain why I was doing something or choosing a particular position. I heard the word posterior.

I was frustrated, I felt like I wasn't making any progress.

The nurse suggested I get into the shower and make some noise. Because the shower worked so well on my mental state last time, I nodded, and got in. Josh told me later that the nurse and the midwife sat just outside the bathroom, quietly listening to my sounds.

I cried in the shower. What happened to my spiritual, sexy birth? What happened to trusting my body and being strong? At this moment, I HATED Ina May Gaskin.

This baby was never coming out. I wanted that epidural more than I wanted anything. If an anesthesiologist had walked into the bathroom right then, I would have fallen on the floor and kissed his/her feet. I never felt weaker. I am tearing up, two days later, thinking about how I felt in the shower. There was nothing to do but moan.

I don't know why I decided to get out of the shower. The confined quarters were comforting, the water was good, and I knew walking would be worse. It was worse. It was hell. I couldn't stop thinking about the epidural I could be getting across the street.

The midwife checked me, and I was 9. She had me push during an exam and she moved the cervical lip out of the way. I didn't believe I was complete. They started setting up for the birth, and it annoyed me because didn't they know this labor was never going to end?

I began pushing before I realized it. I was crawling around on the linolium floor. I crawled into a corner of sorts, and butted my head between the bed and the bedside table. Someone got me up on the bed where my water broke in the only place they didn't have plastic. There was some giggling, and the mw commented that it's much easier to care for a confined woman. Through the darkness, I had a burst of pride that I wasn't a "confined woman".

Pushing was loud. Pushing was tearful. I couldn't feel anything happening and I felt like I was beating my head against a brick wall. Why is this kid so hard to push out? The others practically shot out of me. She must be bigger, I thought.

I don't know what ancient animal visited me, but the pushing changed. She started to move down. I rolled from my hands and knees onto my butt and my back, where Josh supported me as I half hung off the bed. Half of her head was out, I could see it and feel it. She was facing my thigh. When I pushed the rest of her head out, there was her hand, up against her face. A few more pushes and I felt her slide all the way out.

There are no words...I wouldn't trade that moment for all the epidurals in the world. I had delivered this girl after so many hours of back labor, facing sideways with her arm around her head. I did it all myself, and there are no words for the pride I feel.

Oh, I never did feel the, uh, effects of the castor oil.

Next up: postpartum, or when I finally get some good drugs.