Category Archives: baby

Let Me Take You There

doorA hundred lifetimes ago, in undergraduate and graduate writing workshops, I studied the ways that tense and perspective change the tone of a story. When it comes to my emotions and my words, I find that tense and perspective are the best tools I have for bringing readers into the story quickly. For example: What happens when I tell this in the past tense — “My daughter could barely breathe” — versus when I tell it in present tense: “My daughter can barely breathe”? What happens when I tell a story in first person (“I was frightened“) versus when I tell them the story in second person (“You will be far colder than one would expect“)?

For me, past tense offers distance. As I write in past tense, I feel separated from the events. I can write without getting too caught up in the moment as I experienced it in real time. I am calm, almost clinical in my descriptions. It reminds me of the unwavering steadiness I’ve been able to construct in moments of real trauma by simply breathing deeply, disassociating from my emotions, and behaving like a soldier on a mission. In past tense, I am a reporter, and even when I report on the raw and furious emotions in our family’s history, it is with a detached, analytical eye.

Present tense is where I get you invested. I am here, in the sun-filled living room, with the baby in my lap who is struggling to breathe. Or, I am lying on the floor of my basement in the cold dark, and I think, for a moment, that I can hear my screaming daughter two floors above me as I sink into the drugged sleep of a woman past the edge of exhaustion. You are watching me in real time. Neither of us knows what comes next. We are both — writer and reader — in my mystery. Continue Reading…

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Somehow They Grow

grownI took my younger daughter, Sammi, to the pediatrician’s office today for some routine vaccines. While we waited for her turn, I noticed a woman across from me with a preschool aged daughter, sitting in front of an infant carseat. The baby in the carseat began fussing, and the woman said — tenderly — “Oh sweetie, you’re fussing already? You haven’t even had your shots yet.” Then she reached down and lifted a bundle of pink into her lap.

Remembering those early days, I smiled at her and said, “If you need a hand, I’m happy to hold her for you. It’s been a long time since I had to bounce a fussing baby. I’m not tired of it anymore.”

She smiled back and said, “Really? If you don’t mind…”

“Not at all!,” I interrupted, making my way across the room to her.

She continued, “…you could take him. He’s starting to squeak too.”

That was the first I had noticed the second infant car seat. A delicious baby boy smiled at me from within it. I unfastened the distantly-familiar shoulder straps, pressed the button to release the buckle, and slid one hand each under his round head and his diapered bottom. He gurgled at me, and I sat him in my lap facing his mother, my arm across his bared stomach.

When the mother was called by the nurse, I carried my new little baby-friend back to the exam room, nestling him in his car seat and waving goodbye. Then I returned to my nearly-eleven-year old, who just this morning had looked like a little girl next to her teenaged sister, and now suddenly looked like what she was: a preteen, just a hint of changing skin and growing limbs and, indeed, puberty easing its way across her path.

“Mommy?” she said, watching me watch her, “What?”

Continue Reading…

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Oversharing, Awareness, and the Muddled Middle

http://mamalode.com/story/detail/how-blood-dancesWhen my medically complicated daughter was only a few years old, a close family member said something that I’ve never been able to forget. I’ve thought about it often, especially as I’ve been writing about my daughter so publicly.

This family member was a new parent with a fussy, unhappy baby. He was complaining that nothing he and his wife were doing to soothe their baby was helping, and I asked if they’d asked any of the parents in their new baby group for ideas.

“No,” he said, “we’re just more private.”

“But maybe someone knows of something — a product or a position or something — that might help,” I countered.

“Look, that’s not how we are,” he answered. “That’s more you. You’d tell any random stranger in your kid’s kindermusic class all about her medical problems no matter what they’d think about you.”

At the time, I felt slapped. I felt hurt, and I felt judged. The tone with which this was delivered was so derisive, as though I was indiscriminately blurting out the story of Sammi’s first cardiac surgery to anyone who didn’t run away when I opened my mouth. It made me feel like an embarrassment.  Continue Reading…

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Feeding Therapy in a Vacuum

cerealHere’s the crazy thing about taking my 8 year old daughter to feeding therapy: no one important really knew we were there.

There was a complex set of circumstances that brought Sammi to the cheerful basement office suite forty minutes from our house. Unaware of this were a host pediatric medical specialists: an office of gastroenterologists, a cardiothoracic surgeon, an otolaryngologist, an endocrinologist, and her general pediatrician. Though all of them examined her, declared her capable of eating, and recognized that she did not, in fact, eat well, not one of them had recommended feeding therapy.

They didn’t recommend it when, despite the compression on her esophagus having been surgically relieved possibly for the first time in her life, she failed to eat any meal in under an hour — including a simple bowl of cereal at breakfast. Continue Reading…

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The Second Time Is Different

Sending a baby into cardiac surgery is hard.

I brought Sammi to the hospital that morning in 2006, and she was wearing fleece pajamas covered in frogs. She was 13 months old and had a light layer of soft duck-fluff hair that stuck to my face when I cried, but she had perhaps a word or two in her vocabulary, neither appropriate for anything approaching real communication. She was beautiful and soft, and she smelled wonderful, and I could trace the shape her body made on my torso as she laid there, but had I lost her that day, far more of what I would lose of her was in the future and amorphous. Our experiences together until then were primal still — nursing and holding, touch and smell, fear and love.

It was all uncertain then: who would she be? what was she like when she was not sick? how would her voice sound when she learned to sing? 

She was a mystery, yet, and grieving a mystery is still grieving, but it’s fuzzy and intangible. I would never know quite what to miss. Continue Reading…

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