Bonding

I was one of those annoying pregnant women.

No coffee. No soda. No sugar substitutes. No non-organic food. No beef or chicken: the hormones they inject into those poor beasts!

I did prenatal yoga and continued exercising.

I was planning on birthing this babe sans drugs, in a Jacuzzi, with scores of scented candles flickering and woeful acoustic guitar music swelling in the background. My baby would room-in with me, breastfeed seconds after birth. I’d only spend a night in the hospital before whisking him home to my Brooklyn abode where no non-organic soap or cloth would touch his pristine skin.

So naive.

Of course that’s not what ended up happening. Instead, I had a c-section under general anesthesia after five days of bedrest at 28 weeks. I didn’t see MAS until over 24 hours after he was born, didn’t hold him until day 8. Didn’t take him home for another 66.

And now? Five months later he and I are as bonded as a Mama and Baby can be.

All those days of kangaroo care in the NICU, all those hours of struggling with breastfeeding. Each second I spent adding a little dab of glue, bonding us just a little bit tighter.

In the end, bonding isn’t something that happens in a day or so. It’s a process.

Things I Wish I'd Known About Having A Preemie

MAS @ 29 weeks

If you learn your baby’s nurses’ names and use them your infant will get better treatment.

You’ll alternately resent and revere your baby’s nurses.

No one really knows what to say to you. Not even your own parents.

Kangaroo care works.

The more you visit, the more your baby thrives. Even if he doesn’t seem to react at all, he knows you’re there: he recognizes your voice.

You’ll always wonder if there’s something you could have done to prevent giving birth prematurely.

Sometimes it will help to live day by day, other times week by week.

You’ll come to crave the visitor who fawns over how beautiful your baby is no matter how tiny or how many wires and tubes he’s hooked up to because they see what you see: a spectacularly precious life.

You’ll come to love changing your baby’s diaper because its one of the few times you’re permitted to interact with him.

For the first few months—maybe even year—of your preemie’s life you’ll feel sadness and regret and envy and even a little guilt when you see someone in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Your feelings will embarrass and shame you, but denying them will only make them more powerful.

In your mind, your preemie will always have two birthdays: the day he was born and the day he should have been born.

Wanna Know More About Us?

Our story begins with an ending.

I was in the process of recovering from a particularly traumatic miscarriage--11.5 weeks! lots of blood! everywhere!--when my husband Ebronis and I planned trip to the Left Coast. Our best friend and my sister both live in the Bay Area and so to keep our minds off our grief we scheduled a two week getaway around the Memorial Day holiday.

We spent a relaxing four days with said best friend & his now fiancé at Mar Vista Cottages in a little town called Anchor Bay, smack dab between Gualala and Mendocino along the Northern California coast, followed by a couple of days in Davis with my sister and her girlfriend. Much to our surprise, a few days after returning to Brooklyn in the beginning of June we discovered we were pregnant with MAS. A blessing? Yes. A surprise? You betcha. (After all, it took us over a year to conceive the first time and here it had only been two wrenching months since the miscarriage.)

We were grateful. And scared. So we spent the remainder of the summer waiting anxiously for the first trimester to pass without a hitch. Which it did. The second trimester passed without a hitch as well.

But the third trimester?

Ah, that’s another story entirely. At 27 weeks I went into preterm labor without warning and after 5 days of hospital bedrest delivered MAS via emergency c-section. He weighed 2 lbs 5 oz.

The miscarriage and premature birth, our doctors told us, were not related. We had bad luck is all.

After 66 frightening days in the NICU we finally brought MAS home to our Brooklyn Heights apartment. Our three cats, who all outweighed him by about 9 lbs, begrudgingly let him stay. For now.