The crucible of transformation
With the arrival of my son, a whole new phase of my life was ushered in – The Warrior Years. I will talk about those in upcoming pieces. But first, there was the “minor thing” of giving birth, and “finding my footing” as a new mother.
However easy the pregnancy was, that next year or two was the “Baptism of Fire,” the crucible that would initiate me into motherhood. It would transform me from a young woman managing my own life, needs, and work to heal, to the nurturer and guardian of a whole other life. And even as I would need to keep working on myself, my son and his care would, rightly so, take precedence over my needs for a good many years.
Birth
The birth was difficult – I had to be induced. Hours and hours of transition-level labor. The biggest concern came late in the process, when the baby seemed to be trying to exit out of my hip and was starting to show drops in oxygen levels. The doctor decided we’d give it one last try, and if it didn’t work, then it was a C-section.
My son’s foot was stuck up in my stomach, so while the doctor literally grabbed my abdomen and turned the baby’s direction from the hip, I grabbed the foot and pushed mightily. Finally, he headed on out! We joke to this day about trusting our son’s sense of direction. Anyway, given his stressful journey, they put him right on oxygen, which seemed to help after a few minutes.
The time in the hospital was equally turbulent, especially the first couple of days. Between the exhausting delivery and a snoring roommate, I got no sleep that first night. The next day, I started feeling terrible – shivering, pain, hot then cold, which turned out to be my milk coming in. I had no idea that would happen, or that it was going to mean aching breasts, constant leaking, and the utter sense that my body was not my own. No one explained any of that to me, so it added to the stress and my sense of feeling inept.
Since our son needed to stay an extra day or two for his bloodwork, I was relieved to have some time to try to rest. Frankly, I was glad to have the nurses’ help in his care and was actually afraid to go home. I felt so unprepared. This is one of the places where a lack of mothering really shows up. And for part of that time, I was alone. Ed took a day to rest after the whole delivery. He had been a tremendous birth coach, but I think he was a bit shell-shocked, too. And he had no “paternity leave.” For that matter, he had no time off at all. So we were both struggling to adapt to having a baby to care for.
One of the nurses that I knew from working with her came by and was very kind and calming. She talked about her difficulties at first as a new mom and reassured me that she was sure I would get the hang of things. I will be forever grateful to her.
I did manage to calm down after some rest. And the visits with the baby helped me feel like maybe I could do this after all. While I was in the hospital, my mother came to visit. She did not bring Dad. I had made it clear I didn’t want to see him.
That was a mixed emotional moment for me. I was feeling tired and vulnerable. And so, no matter how old you are, when you feel vulnerable, you want “Mommy” there to help. Even as I knew that was not going to be the case for me.
I did appreciate that she came by, especially since the last time I saw her was that night in the therapist’s office. But at the same time, it was bittersweet. There was no way I was going to have her, and especially not Dad, be around my newborn. She had not been there for me all those years through childhood. What could she give me now? I both needed and wanted her help — what new mother doesn’t? But at the same time, I didn’t want her there.
And it was awkward. I had blown open her shell of denial, made it starkly clear what her husband was. If she lived in silent denial all her life, there was no denying it now. Which left her in the spot of having to choose: Stay with a husband like that or leave, given what he was?
Of course, no matter how upset she was, she would never leave him. He was her security. And on some level, I knew that. She stayed with him all those years, through his abuse of her. Through all the blatant signs that he was abusing me. It pained me to see her be that “stuck.” So yes, it was an awkward, painful, bittersweet visit, filled with longing and need, but resignation that the past would continue unchanged. Unless, of course, he actually got help?
What does the book say???!!!
Going home with a new baby was both an exciting and a terribly scary time. With the birth stuff over with, I was finally looking forward to getting home. But I remember that when we arrived with our “sound-asleep progeny,” and placed him carefully in the downstairs cradle, we stepped back, looked at each other, and said, “Now what do we do?” And we meant it. But if there was any uncertainty of what new life with an infant would require, we were going to find out very soon.
One unsettling thing was introducing the dogs to our new addition. While Jess, the younger female poodle, was more “bouncy curiosity” as she sniffed at the cradle, Charlie, the territorial and jealousy-prone male, seemed unhappy. Yet another harbinger of things to come. I shrugged it off as his hip giving him trouble. And it was. But I never felt he would have adjusted to the baby, no matter what.
But the afternoon went quietly, as did the evening. I began to feel like this would be okay. Until about 11:00 p.m. That’s when he started wailing with a pitch that rattled our spinal cords. This went on for several hours. We tried everything. Rocked him. Fed him. Changed him. Sang to him. Rocked him again. All to no avail.
The nurses at the hospital had told me that he had been calm and slept well for them, so I called them, worried maybe something was wrong. They just laughed and said he probably slept well for them because he was tired from the birth, and now he was starting to be himself. So there was no help there.
Ed and I were not used to being around babies. And I hadn’t done much babysitting either. We knew books. So that was my next resort – Dr. Spock. Literally. As I rapidly paged through it, Ed rocked our son and frantically asked me, “What does the book say??!!”
That was our introduction to life with a colicky baby who resisted any kind of schedule for sleeping and eating, and who screamed constantly.
Certainly, a situation can feed on itself. And no doubt, as the screaming infant made us scared, inept, and frantic, he too must have felt our fear and screamed more.
Somewhere around 3 or 4 in the morning that first night, I think he stopped screaming for a couple of hours, at which point Ed and I grabbed some nervous sleep.
Always running
After that, it was more of the same. Not only did our son have no particular schedule, neither did I. I could barely find time to go to the bathroom, much less take a shower. The baby slept fitfully, then would wake up screaming. And I would drop everything and run to comfort him.
Meanwhile, Jess, our younger female poodle, dug herself behind the backboard of our bed, where she would remain in hiding off and on for the next few months. And as to Charlie, the older, more jealous male? In fact, he would not be with us much longer. Just about the same time I was trying to bond with a newborn, his leg became a real problem. It started separating from the hip joint, requiring me to drop everything to reinsert it. So when I wasn’t running for the baby, I was running for the dog. It was hell.
Add to these problems the fact that any attempts at nursing were a disaster. He wouldn’t nurse well. So he would cry. I couldn’t relax. My breasts ached. Leaked. I tried going to a nursing support group, but let’s just say when I saw one woman’s 4-year-old son walk up to her while she was talking, lift her shirt, take a tug, then walk away, I was like, “Nope! This isn’t for me.”
I finally said to my husband that I just wanted my body back. I was leaking, aching, still bleeding from the delivery, and my nipples were chewed up. I had had enough. So the pediatrician we had chosen told me to start our son on formula and told me what kind to get. But within a few days, our son was refusing to take the bottle, was spitting up formula, and was having diarrhea.
And an aside here – two things. First, to people who tell new mothers to sleep when the baby sleeps, I have a suggestion for what you can do with that advice. Our son barely slept longer than thirty minutes at a time. Then screamed. About the time I finished cleaning and prepping bottles and lay down on the couch, he was awake again. And second, thank GOD someone finally made baby swings battery-operated or electric. They were hand-crank ones when my son was a baby. About the time he just started to fall asleep, the crank cycle would run out. So I’d have to crank it again, he would wake up, and start screaming. Who EVER seriously thought a hand-crank was a good idea???
The dog
Meanwhile, Charlie’s leg was absolutely not staying in the hip joint at all. So I had to send him for surgery. The vet told me that I would need to be nursing him around the clock, which meant that I had to pick him up, carry him everywhere…and keep putting his leg back into the hip joint if it came out.
The surgery recovery went badly right from the start. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him comfortable, and his leg separated from the joint more and more. I called the vet and said I needed to have the dog cared for at the vet’s office because I had a newborn who wasn’t eating, we weren’t sleeping, and I couldn’t give the dog the care he needed. The vet grudgingly agreed to take him back, but he was not happy.
Within a few days, things went from bad to worse…at which point, we finally had to put the dog down. I feel sorrow and guilt to this day. But I had nothing left to give. I was stressed out, not sleeping, and frantic about my son’s refusal to eat. And, I still feel that Charlie might not have been safe around the baby. So perhaps fate stepped in there.
The nervous mother
This is what having little to no support system is like. And why I think there should be insurance provisions for doulas. Someone to help a new mother adjust, rest, and get up to speed would have been a blessing. I had no support, and one friend who, on the couple of occasions she babysat so Ed and I could get out, let me know that SHE had no problem with him, the implication being, it was my fault and ineptness.
It didn’t help that the pediatrician was no help with our son’s feeding problems. He just laughed and said I was a nervous mother. After several rounds of this, I made my husband take the day off from work to come with me to the next doctor’s appointment. I told my husband that if the doctor called me a nervous mother one more time, Ed would have to come bail me out from jail because I would deck the doctor. Ed was stressed as his job was terrible, and he was nervous about taking the time off, but he came with me. Frankly, by the time we walked out of the office, Ed was ready to deck the doctor.
A friend’s mother suggested the baby’s upset might be gas, and to boil onions and give him the liquid. Another person told me about a bottle of baby simethicone drops. I did both, even though the 0.5 ml bottle of drops cost $21. I would have paid anything for relief. Neither worked.
I quit
In the middle of all of these weeks of chaos, I was starting to get depressed and have anxiety attacks. So I tried to set up a home daycare situation for a day or two a week to give me a break. I tried out a woman who had been recommended to me.
She quit at the end of the first day. She said to me, “I can’t do this! He’s too much work. I don’t know how you do it…you must be exhausted.”
I just started crying when I got home and told my husband what she said. And even when I tried a few other daycares, no one would take him because he wasn’t “on a schedule.”
Meanwhile, the baby wasn’t eating well. And still screaming a lot. The female dog was living behind the bed’s backboard. I wasn’t sleeping. And my husband was trying to keep up with a job that demanded he be on call 24/7 and didn’t care about his family’s needs.
I dreaded when the phone rang at 5 p.m. because it meant the computer systems he was in charge of had a problem, and he would be late leaving. And even when he did leave, his commute would take an hour because of how far away we lived from his job.
One day, he got home, and I was upstairs bathing our son, who was screaming as usual. I was sort of getting used to it. Ed said he opened the basement door and heard the cries, and for a moment, thought about quietly backing out and going for a ride for a few minutes. We both laughed, and I told him that I knew the sound of his car engine coming down the road. So I knew when he was home. If he had done that, I would have known and hunted him down.
Moments of sanity
I will be eternally grateful to Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and Dean Martin for saving my sanity during these days. They provided me with the tools to keep going in the form of three movies that I watched again and again and again and again: Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom,” Goldie Hawn in “Overboard,” and Cher and Olympia Dukakis in “Moonstruck.” To this day, I can recite most of the dialogue from Moonstruck. Ed would come in from work and note that one of the three was playing on the VCR that day, but never complained.
Dean Martin sang the theme song for Moonstruck — “That’s Amore.” And when he would sing, I would pick up my son, sing along, and we would swing around the room and dance. However grumpy my son was, he would always laugh when we did that. So we did that A LOT! We now joke that if our son gets married, the mother-son dance has to be “That’s Amore” by Dean Martin. That is the only TRUE version for both of us!
And over time, I even found comfort in Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, though Barney was a stretch. Also, Ed and I would have an occasional night out when a friend babysat our son. While we were totally unaware of anything in life at that point regarding culture, music, or the latest fads, we saw the movie “Naked Gun” in the theater and laughed our hearts out. We so needed that. Silly movie, yes. But just what we needed.
Ed and I did manage to get away for an overnight on our anniversary weekend. Forget mad passion. We had a nice meal at the restaurant where we were married. Then we sat by the indoor pool at the hotel, shell-shocked, and counting down the minutes of quiet time before we had to go back. We were just doing the best we could to hang on.
We need to live somewhere else
Aside from anxiety, post-partum depression that I didn’t know about yet, stress, no sleep, and struggles to feed my son, it was February. That meant snow, sub-zero temperatures, and constantly dark skies.
One particular day, Ed came home from work to find I had the sliding glass doors open to the outside air, even though it was -10 degrees F. out there. When he asked why, I said, “Because I need to hear people!”
Then I looked at him and said, “We need to move. We need to live somewhere else.”
My husband looked surprised but thought this was a good idea. “We can move closer to my job.”
Well, no, we couldn’t because we couldn’t afford a house on the southern coast of Connecticut. But also, I said, “No. We need to move somewhere else entirely. Someplace warmer and sunnier!”
I had lived in Torrington my whole life, and until that moment, I had not intended to move anywhere else. But in that moment, I was done living in Torrington. Or the Northeast. That was the beginning of our efforts to get Ed a new job and to move to a warmer and sunnier place. But more on that later.
“Pick a nipple”
About this time, I was at my wits’ end. This situation was not working right, and it was up to me to fix it somehow. So I did the only thing I could think of — go back to what I knew best – science.
If I were going to help my son, I needed to figure out why he wouldn’t eat. The doctor was useless. But I was a scientist. I knew that to find answers to problems, you try things, make observations, analyze what you find, then try something else until you get a solution.
So I did the “great-bottle-and-nipple experiments.” I got a small notebook, and as I started testing out different things, I would record the results. Then, after a few days, I would look to see if anything changed for the better. If not, I would try the next thing.
The first thing I tested was the baby bottles I was using. I tried different kinds, glass, plastic, regular ones, and ones with liners. The bottles didn’t seem to make a difference.
So then I tried changing the nipples. I tried regular latex ones with one hole, two holes, and three holes. Cross-cuts. I tried orthodontically shaped ones, silicone ones. I would record the nipple used, how much he ate, what his stools were like, everything I could notice.
But the nipples made no difference. One morning, with our son screaming, I stood “frozen” before the counter full of nipples that I’d already tried. None of them worked. My husband, in his infinite wisdom, came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Dear, you’ve got $40 worth of nipples on the counter. Our son is screaming and needs to eat. Pick one, and use it.”
To this day, whenever any of us is overwhelmed by choices and isn’t sure what to do next, we go back to the family maxim: Pick a nipple.
The lab manual and help from the experts
While the nipple and bottle tests failed, the information in my “lab manual” saved us. In looking over my notes, I began to see a pattern of diarrhea related to his eating schedule. From my lab background, which included doing stool analyses, I knew something was wrong in his gut. If something was wrong in his gut, he would be unhappy, cry, and not eat.
I needed help. But the pediatrician was useless. Also, my anxiety and depression were not getting better, and now even if our son slept at night, I couldn’t relax enough to sleep. My regular doctor, a father of three himself, spotted what was going on and prescribed just a muscle relaxer for me. Just enough to relax me to fall asleep, but nothing strong or addictive. He explained about post-partum hormonal changes and that my husband needed to start switching off nights with me, even if we were both exhausted.
At the same time, Ed’s job was just hell for him. Finally, one morning, I said to him, We need help. I need help. We need to go back to the therapist.” His silence for a moment may have just been exhaustion or uncertainty. He was equally fried.
But noting his hesitancy, I just put it all on the line. I told him that whatever he chose, I was going. Because I needed support and help to find answers. And he could come or not. In fact, I remember telling him that if he couldn’t cope with this, he was free to leave. I was no rock around his neck and would raise our son myself if he couldn’t stay.
It sounds terribly harsh now. But I also know now that it was my defense mechanism against rejection. As I said it, I was praying to God that he wouldn’t leave. But I also recall feeling that I wanted someone who wanted to be there with me. If he didn’t want to be there, I couldn’t put up with that.
To his credit, of course, he wanted to stay. He was just equally wiped out. He joined me in therapy even as he had to drive halfway across Connecticut from his job on the coast to West Hartford, where the doctor was. But it was the best thing we ever did.
Finally, some answers
For one, the therapist listened to Ed about the job issues. He suggested that we look at this place — North Carolina – Research Triangle Park — as a possible good new location. RTP was an area with a large technology presence, which meant lots of computer jobs. The therapist had gone to school there and thought the pace of life and climate would help us. Though it would take another year, that advice would eventually land us in that very area. And I think in the long run, that saved all of us.
The other thing the therapist did was arrange for us to meet with his wife, also a doctor, who specialized in CHILD DEVELOPMENT. She examined our son, tested him, and told us that, while he was a difficult baby, he was healthy and doing just fine. She assured us that we weren’t doing anything wrong, but that we needed a better pediatrician. She referred us to a doctor who, while not in Torrington, was a godsend. He looked at my feeding notes and immediately said that the formula was wrong and causing intestinal distress — something I’d been trying to tell the other pediatrician, who was ignoring me. He also assured me that yes, our son was not an easy baby, but he was healthy, it was just his temperament, and we were doing fine.
He even told me that when the baby was crying, after I did everything to give him care — change him, feed him, rock him — to put him in his crib and shut off the monitor for just ten minutes. That would be ten minutes for me to calm myself, and for that ten minutes, the baby would be fine.
It made all the difference in the world. And with the change of formula, our son suddenly settled down, started eating well, and crying less. The dog came out from behind the bed. And I started learning to trust my own gut as a mother. My confidence started to grow. And I even managed to fit in showers on a regular basis.
Last, I had originally planned on being a stay-at-home mother. But that wasn’t working. I needed adult company and support. Lacking it anywhere else in my life, I decided that if I could go back to work even a day or two a week, that would give me adult company and my son, the company of children. That might be good for both of us.
My old boss at the lab was indeed needing people to fill in for people out sick. She was happy to have me back a couple of days a week, and being a new mother herself, she understood the need for adult company. Also, since my son was settling in more, perhaps I could find a daycare that would take him. My boss told me that the hospital had just set up a connection with one, so I went to see the woman.
Again, drawing from my newfound confidence, I met with the woman, and the first thing I said to her was, “*My son is not on a set schedule. He’s had a lot of upset, and so I feed him as he needs it. If that is a problem, this conversation is over, and I am leaving.”*
She laughed and immediately put me at ease when she told me how her son had been the same way. She ran her daycare like it was someone’s home, and they would give him whatever schedule he needed.
Becoming “Mom”
That became the beginning of finding my way into motherhood. It didn’t change everything overnight, and some things never.
Our son was still a difficult baby at times, I mean, he actually cried when I fed him applesauce! Who hates baby applesauce?! Another time, when I worked on a Sunday, I came home to find my son was hoarse from yelling, my husband was wearing ear protectors as he rocked him, and the dog was throwing up in the kitchen. Never a dull moment!
But overall, those moments were diminishing, and I was also growing to understand him and what he needed. He was very sensitive to change, and things being “too” anything – loud, quiet, hot, cold, different. That was just who he was, and I was learning how to deal with it.
For example, we both started sleeping better when I discovered that wave machines were a gift. His machine was set to constant white noise, and he started sleeping regularly. Mine was set to waves, so I could hear if he was crying, in between the waves. And we adapted to the fact that the only time our son truly napped was if he was getting sick. So forget trying for naps.
The point is, I was finally developing the bond with my son that I’d wanted, and to find joy in him, even as I still feared being inadequate at times. But it was a start, and a good one. And no matter the challenges of parenthood, our son has been a total joy for over 30 years now, and worth every bit of the early struggle. And my husband jokes that being a parent helped in his role at work later as a supervisor. Managing people can sometimes be no different than colicky babies!
And all of that progress was just in time…because, as usual, just as things settled now, new big changes were coming. As were battles that would need to be fought.
Soul Mosaic 
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