A Second Time First Time Mom

Being a new mom is really hard.  You have no idea what you’re doing, there’s this tiny screaming alien you’re in charge of keeping alive, and, initially at least, you feel pretty awful. Either you can’t sit because of tearing, or you can’t move because of stitches-and you are still responsible for breast feeding and washing bottles and doing laundry and pacifying your incompetent husband, not to mention hosting the zillions of people who want to meet the new baby.  Add in sleep deprivation and lack of bathing and you’ve got a recipe for a potential new torture method for terrorists.

Being a new NICU mom is even harder.  You have to manage the newborn, plus all the machines the newborn is hooked up to and the wires that come with them, portable heart rate monitors and oxygenation monitors and an oxygen tank. Every feed, challenging on its own, also comes with multiple medicines.  Then there’s the risk factor-preemies have very low immunity, so even minor colds can prove majorly damaging. So when it came to getting out of the house, we chose not to.  It was just too difficult to schlep Lily AND all her stuff and worry about someone breathing on her.  It wasn’t like I could install a permanent sneeze guard, like at a salad bar.  We didn’t take her out, we didn’t allow people in (except for select family members), and I hated my life.

But as a second time mom, without all the preemie accoutrement, it’s a whole different ball game.  Holy crap I can do this.  It’s just a baby: a baby in her car seat, a baby in her stroller, a baby playing on her activity mat smiling up at a rattling frog. Why didn’t I know about all this? And this is where our parenting story changed.  We aren’t first time parents, but we ARE, in so many ways that it’s crazy. Such as…

Belly buttons are gross.  We never had to deal with Lily’s cord falling off because she was already 3 months old when she came home, with an umbilical hernia, so it looked like a little tail was protruding from her abdomen.  But a bloody stump that crusted over and repeatedly fell off only to scab over again? I didn’t sign up for that.  It fell off in a blanket and I thought it was a raisin, until I picked it up and started to gag.   Even Lily told me, “There’s poop in Margot’s belly.”  Yes, dear observant child, it does look like poop.

How much does she eat? We don’t have to do forced feeds? We don’t have to feed her overnight? What do you mean she eats until she finishes on her own and I don’t have to shove an entire feed down her throat?  There can still be formula left in the bottle? She doesn’t need thickened feeds or specialized bottles? None of this was familiar.  We were used to timed, forced feeds, waking up a sleeping baby to keep her on schedule, to keep her gaining weight, to make sure they didn’t want to revert back to an NG tube.  Lily’s weight gain was slow and painful.  Margot eats. And eats and eats and eats. She put herself on a feeding schedule when she was 1-day-old. She finishes bottles, burps, and goes back to sleep. The hubby and I keep saying how strange it is, the way she eats, the way she’s growing and gaining weight, and our friends and family keep reminding us that it’s actually normal. This is the way it’s supposed to be. We’re still not sure that we believe them.  She’s gained over 3 pounds since being born! One pound in Lily land was a cause for celebration. But 3 pounds! That’s gotta be a Guinness record or something (it’s not-Margot is strictly 50^th percentile).

Margot purrs and coos. She makes this funny little noise that sounds like “hi” and then she smiles, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Her hands found each other weeks ago, she batts at her toys, she tracked while still in the hospital, she realized that she has feet the other day (although, I think it was a fluke), and she rolls up onto her side in a cute little rocking motion. Completely normal baby behavior, apparently, because I had no idea!  We had physical therapy for Lily to bring her hands together, and it took her months to batt at toys.  Lily never vocalized, never made little baby cooing sounds, and language was her biggest area of delay (even though she said “mama” at 8 months, the rest of her language took much longer). There was no echolalia with Lily.

The baby can leave the house!  She’s portable-we take her anywhere and everywhere. She’s a lady who lunches. Whether it’s to the playground with her sister, to the mall with my mom, or simply to the supermarket, Margot comes with me.  And, as it turns out, I have freedom. I’m not tethered to my house, afraid that a single cough will result in a lengthy hospital stay. I don’t resent my husband for being able to leave, because I can leave, too. I can see my friends and get errands done and take day trips and be with Lily-I can be a mom like all the other moms who got to bring their babies home.

Spitting up is not a cause for alarm!  This one was a shocker for me. Our pediatrician uses the term “happy spitter” to describe a baby who spits up and it isn’t bothered by it.  Whenever Lily was spitting up, and then screaming, and then spitting up more, it meant that she needed a higher dosage of previcid-she was not a happy spitter. The acid reflux controlled her, and, therefore, us.  But Margot is a happy spitter. She is unfazed when she spits up. Hell, she barely even notices it (she also doesn’t notice when I shove my nose in her mouth to smell for potential acid).

But because we aren’t, technically, new parents, we have been able to handle baby issues a lot quicker and with less emotional meltdown than if Margot was our first.  Like when…

Margot needed to be under bilirubin lights while she was still in the hospital. The nurses were worried about me, that I would react negatively, that I wouldn’t understand.  And I explained to ever shift change, this was nothing! I was a NICU mom; I’d handled much worse than bilirubin lights.

About a week after being born, Margot developed a large, egg shape bruise on the back of her head.  Our pediatrician was mystified, so she sent us to the E.R.  It was 4 pm on a Friday and there was nowhere else to have tests done so expediently.  A first time mom would’ve panicked, but I’d been to the Valley Pediatric E.R. before, and I knew that Margot was fine.  And Margot was fine and I was calm and my husband was calm and we made it home before Lily’s bedtime.

A few days after Margot came home I noticed that she was having problems with her formula.  So I changed it. No hesitation.

With Lily I pumped for 3 months. I was scared to stop.  I belabored the decision, crying about my insufficiencies, berating myself for my lack of supply.  This time-3 weeks.  Supply never increased, I had a toddler to chase around, and I wasn’t going to beat myself up again. My body isn’t milky.  Even my gung-ho breast is best pediatrician thought I should stop.

So I’m a second time first time mom. We’re getting to experience all those great new baby moments and memories without all the new parent anxiety and I have to admit, it’s pretty damn nice.

Margot on her activity mat-6 weeks old.

Welcome Margot (Being a NICU Mom is Something That Never Goes Away)

On June 11, 2015, we welcomed our second little princess, Margot.  Margot was born full term, weighing a healthy 7 pounds and measuring a whopping 20 inches. It was a “normal” pregnancy with no complications, full of the usual pregnancy side-effects, resulting in a newborn girl who smiled within hours of being delivered, revealing enormous dimples in both cheeks, and shining blue eyes. And the only thought running through my head was, “Do I get to keep you? Can I take you home?” Every shift change required the same explanation: no, she’s not my first, but we were in the NICU for 11 weeks with the first one so this is new to us, I don’t know what to do with a newborn, yes I know I do an excellent swaddle-the NICU nurses taught me well.

But before she arrived, I had to make it through the pregnancy.

Being a NICU mom is something that never goes away.  The horrifying emergency c-section, the memory of wires and medications and potential surgeries, seeing your child intubated, unable to move, trapped in a plastic cage where your touch is irritating to her paper-thin skin; both you and she are helpless.  You’re not really a mom and she’s not really your child. Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. The trauma does not disappear and it only resurges once you are presented with similar circumstances: pregnancy and the potential for going through it all again. Even making the decision to get pregnant brought tearful conversations and gut-wrenching self-doubt. Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. And only other NICU moms can understand. If you’re not a fellow NICU mom you can try to empathize and relate and comfort, but you will never truly understand, and that’s okay. We don’t want you to go through what we went through (we don’t wish that on anyone), but you can’t walk a mile in my shoes because you weren’t sitting there for 11 weeks, unable to bring your baby home from the hospital.  Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away.

Because of all the (no medical explanation available) complications with Lily, we were being followed very closely, by my OBGYN, by my endocrinologist, and by my new perinatologist, the amazing Dr. Z. Slight flashback is necessary.  Because we knew by week 20 that something wasn’t quite right with Lily, we were frequent fliers at MFM (our hospital affiliated sonography center), and our perinatologist left much to be desired-unkempt, wearing a too tight top and a too short skirt, she never received my vote of confidence. She would postulate and suggest and hum and haw in circles, completely uninformative blather, and I never felt like I was getting adequate care. So this time around, I complained, and not in that passive aggressive way that women are famous for. I made it very clear that I would not see Dr. Awful again, and that if they sent her in my room, I would simply leave.  I out-rightly refused to see her.  Why does making yourself seem like the most difficult patient in the world often result in getting the best care?  Enter Dr. Z, a brilliant, neurotic angel sent from heaven to resolve all my insecurities. She ran every test, twice, explained all possible outcomes, what the numbers meant, what the growth scan estimates really estimated. She actually understood that we were simply waiting for the other shoe to drop and she agreed that our anxieties were completely valid-she even once called me, on my cell, 5 minutes after we left the center, just so she could go over another blood test with us.  When routine bloodwork showed something off by 1 one hundredth of a gram, she re-ran a whole battery of tests to allay both my and her fears.  She was Woody Allen and Jonas Salk combined, but with Gene Simmons’ hair and a complete lack of affect-imagine Lorne Michaels’ voice, slightly more feminine, and there you have it. 

Do you like the word normal?  I’m not a big fan, but when it comes to your doctor telling you that your baby’s growth is normal and that your pregnancy is normal and that all your test results are normal, you learn to love it.  We’d never heard the word normal before in relation to a pregnancy or a baby.  Dr. Z used it every time we saw her.  And we cried tears of relief. She was my spirit animal.

Dr. Z’s confidence was amazing, and it certainly helped to curtail my NICU mom brain, but it couldn’t stop the fears and worries in their entirety (I needed to stop having NICU nightmares were I gave birth and the doctors wouldn’t give her back to me-I was having those on a nightly basis). And it certainly didn’t help misguided friends and relatives who could not understand why my husband and I were still anxious.  “But the doctor said it’s normal, so stop worrying.” I can’t say it enough: because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. You are so unbelievably misguided in your attempts at relating to me if you think that repeatedly hearing the word “normal” suddenly makes the horror and pain of everything we went through, and the fear that it could happen again, dissolve like early morning fog.

39 weeks later, there she was, perfect (minus some slight jaundice), no wires, no medications, no barriers…just mine-I got to keep her.

Margot-10 days old!