The Sick Baby

MAS woke up this morning with a runny nose.

Mid-morning it morphed into a stuffed nose with a possible low grade fever. (First reading was normal; second reading was slightly elevated; third, he was a little chilly!)

Our pediatrician thinks this is a cold and a minor one at best. Nothing to worry about. MAS also seems to think a cold is nothing to worry about: he spent the morning happily banging his green plastic egg on everything he could find. After a mid-morning snack of sweet potatoes and prunes and milk he's contentedly sleeping on my bed while I type this.

But me? I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a frisson of fear when I saw that clear snot snaking down his upper lip. It could be: flu, swine flu, RSV... ?! Anything, really. But it also could be nothing.

Yes: I know that overprotecting him will never be the answer. Kids need to get sick so they can develop immunities. Put MAS in a bubble now and his first year at school will be a disaster.

Still. I thought I'd put the whole NICU roller coaster behind me, you see. At the beginning of the summer I made such a huge effort to not talk about it and to brush it off as nothing nothing, a little blip whenever it came up. He was born early but he's fine now. Quick, let's change the subject. Have you guys started solids yet? I even stopped blogging here because I didn't want to think of him that way. I wanted to pretend that MAS started life like all the other babies.

All it takes is a whiff of a cold, a whiff of allergies even, and all that comes tumbling down. MAS's story isn't like the others'. I can't change that. No matter how much I would like to.

It will always be there in one way or another. No matter how robust MAS is, there will always be some part of me that remembers my first glimpse of him: my 2 lbs 5 oz half-cooked baby hooked up to god knows how many wires, his nose irritated from the CPAP and his soft mewling cries more feline than human.

During our NICU stay my challenge was to step up to the plate and be there for him in as positive and consistent a way as I could. I spent hours by his side and even more hours holding him in kangaroo care, telling everyone--myself, my husband, my in-laws, the nurses and all the other grief-srtiken parents--that MAS would not only survive but thrive. If I could WILL him better, I would.

But now? My challenge is to step back a little and let him be... With all the flus and colds and scrapes that come with any normal childhood.

As one of the neonatalogists told me when she discharged us that last cold day in January: "Well, he's not a preemie now. He's a former preemie. Now he's just like everyone else."

What They All Want To Know

Last week on the way out of the studio after mommy & baby yoga, one of the other mothers stopped to talk to me about MAS. (At the beginning of class I always give the preemie version of an elevator pitch: “He’s five months but he was born 12 weeks prematurely so he looks and acts like a 2 month old.”)

“So what happened—why he did come so early?” she asked after commenting on MAS’s cuteness. (Which is inordinate.)

She herself had had high blood pressure when pregnant with her son. Almost induced at 37 weeks, but through meditation had been able to keep it under control until his due date.

She looked at me expectantly.

Why had this calamity befallen us? Why oh why? Ah, there were so many reasons to choose from. Which to offer first?

I was dehydrated.

I had a urinary tract infection.

I had a yeast infection.

I got pregnant again too quickly after the miscarriage.

That D&C they did afterwards to make sure “everything got expelled”—it fucked me up some how.

I had a progesterone imbalance.

I was too stressed out. In general.

I jinxed things by being afraid I wouldn’t be a very good mother.

Paint fumes! We’d painted his room not two days earlier. Ebronis and his Mom had done the actual work but I was in the living room. I walked in to check on them. I even helped for a minute, to show how I wanted it done. Why had I done that?

Somehow, without even knowing it, I’d plucked an apple from a witch’s garden.

But instead I mumbled, “They don’t know why it happened,” and strangely: felt ashamed.

I was telling her a truth so terrible it should be sugarcoated. That these things happen for no reason at all. The bad things, the good things. Random.

And the moral? That all you can do is be grateful for the baby that makes it, for the life that survives. Do your best to forget the reasons why.