a pink onesie????

Of all the new baby clothes I have for little Esme, only one item is pink. It also happens to be the very first article of clothing I acquired after finding out I was pregnant. It happened on an icy February day. I had done a home pregnancy test that showed a positive, and immediately called to inquire about getting free prenatal care from the good state of Indiana (i.e. prenatal care for poor folks). I was told I needed a more official proof of pregnancy and that the Women's Care Center, a not-for-profit organization, offered a free test that was considered official. One of their locations happened to be right around the corner from our apartment, so I put on my coat and scarf and walked the two blocks to get the test.

I provided a urine sample, and while waiting for the results a very nice middle-aged man and young woman sat down with me in a small private room and went through a lot of questions. Then they left me alone in the room for some time. When they came back, they had lots of stuff in their hands to give me. I was pregnant, they said, and congratulated me and handed me brochures on nutrition and fetal development, coupons for baby stuff, and samples. They also handed me a sealed plastic bag with a tiny onesie, a pair of newborn socks, and a note from the nuns of a Catholic convent. I suppose these nuns donate onesies to all the pregnant women who pass through the Women's Care Center, perhaps to remind them that it is a real human being growing in them, thus discouraging them from abortion. The middle-aged man picked a pink one for me, though at that point it was anyone's guess whether I'd have a girl. He guessed it would be a girl.

As my pregnancy progressed I desperately wanted an ultrasound to find out the gender of our baby. I never got one. My doctor said the state program didn't cover one unless there was a medical reason. As my pregnancy was consistently healthy and normal, there was never a reason. People kept asking Jeff and me whether we knew it was a boy or girl and we kept answering that we didn't know...but that we wished we did.

Not knowing either way allowed my imagination to take over. I got it into my head that I was carrying a boy. I can't answer how or why this is so. I probably told dozens of people that I "had a feeling" it was a boy, "not because I want a boy more than a girl," I always tacked on. In any case, the boy of my imagination grew into an almost real boy, with a name and disposition. It seemed to be happening without my permission: the imaginary boy. As our newborn layette started filling out, I kept the onesie but left it in its plastic bag, fully expecting that I would have to give it away to someone else who was having a girl.

It wasn't just gender that I was imagining. I was projecting all kinds of thoughts, fears, and expectations onto our unborn child. I knew it was useless, delusional, and just plain impossible, but my mind just kept doing it. I was eager to jump the gun, to know who this person was going to be, what he or she was going to be like. What would he or she look like? What would he or she be good at? Would he or she be left or right-handed? Have straight or curly hair? Green eyes or brown? In some ways I think choosing a phantom gender was just one way that my brain could narrow down and get a handle on assigning some kind of personhood to the fetus inside me. Did I really hope for a boy? I'm not so sure. In some ways I think that I was secretly hoping for a girl, and to protect myself from disappointment, just decided to accept that it would probably be a boy. Or maybe it was some freudian desire to propogate myself in male form. I honestly don't know what lurks beneath the surface of my convoluted ego.

Nevertheless, in conclusion, hearing my doctor say calmly and firmly, "It's a girl," when Esme came out, thrilled me to the bones. It confirmed that all of this is beyond me, no matter how convincing the phantoms my mind creates. I can't make one hair on my head black or white. My child is already throwing me curve balls and I hope she keeps doing so. I dressed Esme in the pink onesie yesterday, and now it lies in the bottom of her dirty laundry basket. It's a symbol of everything that is beyond me. I thought of all of this when I read Amber's (Lucy's) recent blog entry that says, "I am reminded...that all my thoughts and mental maneuvers are of little worth. It is a reminder that my responsibility is to do the next best thing. And a reminder that more often than not the next best thing is prayer."

a smile in the operating room

We're home from the hospital with our new girl, Esme Alexandra Wickes. I wanted to post the above pictures to show that the resurrection really does follow the cross. There I am, strapped down to a surgical table, paralyzed from the waist down, and having my organs rinsed and suctioned, then sewn back up. But, as my doula pointed out to me, you would never know that from the smile on my face at seeing the baby for the first time. Even I cannot believe this smile. Once she was out and breathing, all of my discomfort and fear receded. And the pain of recovery, the toll on my body, is nothing to me now that we have her with us.

Esme Alexandra weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces, and measured 21 inches. She was born at 8:14 a.m. on Tuesday morning, September 19, 2006. We are so grateful to have her as our very own. My doula took photos of the birth from beginning to end and I've posted them as a set on my flickr page.

extreme reality

Last night I stayed up late reading The Essential C-Section Guide. This book is telling me everything I need to know, but one fact that hit me hard was this: the rate of c-section births in the U.S. is over 25% of all births. I've seen another statistic that said it got up to as high as 29% last year. That's more than one out of every four women. If you went around asking first-time pregnant women in their first or second trimester whether or not they expect to get a c-section, I doubt that one out of every four would say they expected it or were preparing for the possibility. I certainly was not. This makes for a huge chasm between expectation and reality, and women fall through this chasm emotionally and suffer from depression and anger after having the unexpected happen to them. I'm starting to suspect that a person's expectations may be the most telling thing about what they really believe-- the worldview they hold. I'm suspecting that to be a holy person is to continually try to align your expectations with the reality that we live in a wretchedly fallen, crappy world.

Another quote from the book which supports my suspicions: "Can having a c-section make you more prone to postpartum depression? Research from one study conducted at Alliant International University-California School of Professional Psychology in San Diego involving 107 women showed that those who had unexpected c-section [italics mine] were most likely to experience symptoms of depression when compared with women who had the planned c-sections or vaginal deliveries. Interestingly, among the three groups, the planned c-sections reported the fewest symptoms of depression."

It sounds like women who know what to expect are better off, even if they're going to have a more negative experience. This made me think: now that I know I'm having a c-section and have a chance to adjust to the idea, it will be hard, but it will be o.k.. The adjustment for me has been huge, but I'm working hard at making it nonetheless, and making it quickly before tomorrow. Before I knew about the breech problem, I was looking forward to labor as if it was going to be like a surprise slumber party. I wasn't concerned about the pain or potential complications, because I was naively assuming that my labor would go off like clockwork. This was, in my little head, I'm ashamed to say, a foregone conclusion. I even skipped the childbirth class that was devoted to c-section births. My doctor kept calling me the ideal patient throughout my prenatal visits. I was confident and trusting in the strength of my body. Now I see that I was overly confident, and setting myself up for potential disaster. I was forgetting that my body is in fact a fallen body, and forgetting the inescapable clause of human fragility. For all I know, if I had gone into labor without anything intervening in these expectations, things could have gone badly for me and made postpartum recovery even more difficult emotionally than it will be now that I can know pretty well what to expect.

I've sobered up. I'm expecting to feel drugged and shakey the first day. I'm expecting to have no abdominal muscles for several more days; for it to be difficult to laugh, cough, change positions in bed, and go to the bathroom. I'm expecting to be weak and sore and to have a really hard time nursing. All of these are facts. I can only hope that the baby will have no complications, which is still an unknown variable.

The book says to take something from home to personalize your hospital room. I'm taking the Icon of Extreme Humility with me to prop by the bed. I'm looking at this icon as a picture of reality in this world, which mercifully, I haven't managed to escape unscathed with my stupid expectations intact. I'm starting to believe that salvation for me involves God saving me from my own childishness and forcing me to grow up and join the human race. Tomorrow, I will become the one out of four. I won't be able to maintain my prior illusion that strength and health and all things "natural" and "normal" are in the bag for me. But I don't think I will fall into depression either.

the big stops here

For all my friends who read my blog, just wanted to post a shot of me in my final days of being preggers (as the Brits say). While babies are said to come "when they want," mine is coming according to the best laid plans of a team of doctors at St Joesph's Regional Hospital. I go in on September 19th for a c-section. Baby is breech; her (his??) head has been lovingly smooshed against the top of my uterus now for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, my doctor assured me that this was the bottom, so I didn't worry until a week ago, when she realized that the baby was indeed head-up, not head-down. By this time, the baby is pretty much too big to do a flip downwards, even though I've tried things. I saw a chiropractor who did the Webster Technique, which involves trying to loosen up the ligaments around the uterus and align the pelvis bones so that baby has more room to stretch its arms and move. I propped an ironing board onto the sofa, laid down with my feet elevated, and then put an ice pack on the babies head and a light directly on the bottom of my abdomen (no, I did not make this one up myself). I also went swimming. Baby still didn't move. A few times the little champion has tried to scramble around; I could feel it. It just never made it! My motherly instincts tell me that this baby is budged tightly.

I've gotten some pressure (from a source that will remain un-named, but NOT my doula, as one might expect) to fight the medical establishment and have the c-section postponed to give the baby more time to move. I considered it, and even though it would look good on paper, I just don't feel right about it. In these final days, I'd rather be preparing for the life of my child rather than launching a crusade for vaginal birth. Yes, that's the birth I wanted, but life comes at you unpredictably, and I've made the decision to let the chips fall where they've now fallen. It's paradoxically out of my control, and yet very much my choice. I don't feel like I've been had by the doctors, or pulled along in ignorance, like many women (I'm realizing) feel coming out of their childbirth experience. I was somewhat ignorant going into my prenatal care, and if I'd been more educated at an earlier stage in the pregnancy, the baby might not have been breech by week thirty-eight. But I've learned a lot now, and I won't hold it against myself, or look back and obsess over how things could have gone differently.

I could write so much more about the past week-- finding all of this out and working through the surprise of a c-section ending to such an uneventful, "normal" pregnancy. Who knew that women seem to have a primal, biological desire to give bith naturally? I did not know this about myself until it was suddenly taken away from me. Then, I cried.

Now I'm just prepared to do this and have the baby out. My doula has been a life saving investment; she's already met with us three times, joined me for three doctor's appointments and a day at the hospital, and kindly read and promptly responded to a plethora of wordy e-mails authored by my disturbed brain. I think I'm going to paint an icon of her. She has had four c-sections herself and has made all of this a lot less scary for both Jeff and me. Like I said, there's a lot more detail I could go into, but for now, I'm tired, and have a baby on the way. I'll have to write more some other day.

i'm in the track home now

I made a $200 purchase today. As the broke wife of a broke student, this is a huge sum, so it required hours of online research-- reading up on discussion forums and product reviews. Like all major purchases, it was very confusing to compare brands and types. It wasn't something you get at Best Buy, and it wasn't accompanied by a list of technical features or specs. No, it was $200 worth of diapers. Oh, and the day before I spent $40 (including shipping) on a diaper pail-- one that is toddler proof and includes a special carbon filter for freshness. And oddly, I'm just as excited for these shipments to arrive as I would be over a new winter coat, or $200 worth of books.

When I step back, I'm not sure which is more odd-- that I spent $200 on diapers, that I'm excited about it, or that prior to the purchase I also spent hours completely riveted and sincerely interested in cloth diaper discussion forums. The participants in these forums have their own code language. "Cloth diapers" are CDs; a diaper is usually just a "dipe." Well known brand names, like Motherease, are abbreviated to ME. There are other diapering-related code words that I haven't cracked yet. I think I've stumbled into one of the many mansions that the Lord warned his disciples about. The inside deserves the name mansion, but from the outside, it looks like a disgustingly boring track home located in an utterly generic subdivision.

I remember looking at the motherhood track home from the outside. I remember being in the seminary community and foregoing the women's group that met once a week. I, along with other non-mothers, would point out the fact that all conversations in this group eventually came back to children's sleep schedules. Terms like "latching on," "engorgement," and "letdown" kept me elsewhere on Wednesday nights. I didn't despise these conversations or these women. My mind was simply not drawn in and I had no desire spend my evening sitting in that circle, eating cheez-its. I'm still in touch with a lot of the mothers I knew at the seminary; one of them just moved to this area. When my doula asked me if I knew any breastfeeding women who I could talk to for support, I just said yes. Little did she know that in my mind it was a yes, yes, and a very engorged yes.

I just got an e-mail from my friend Rachael, who had a baby this past spring. She used to be a solid member of the non-mom club, so I remember standing side by side with her, looking at the track home from the outside curiously, mildly interested, but only interested because we figured we'd likely be going in soon-- not because it looked interesting in and of itself. I hope she doesn't mind me quoting her. She said "you'll find that motherhood is a society in which you automatically can relate to so many women on so many levels - even women you never thought you'd have anything in common with. It's the great equalizer."

This is so far true of what I'm experiencing. I first realized it a few weeks ago. I was in the break room at work when another woman, Angela, walked in. She's in her mid-twenties, and just had a baby in December. We've never really talked before except to say hi. I casually told her that I'd love to talk to her sometime about what it was like to breastfeed and work full time. She immediately insisted that I pull up a chair next to her and sat me down to cover the subject with zest. She apologized later for taking up so much of my time, but there was no need. I was hanging on her every word. It was from her I learned that you need at least four nursing bras-- don't even try to get away with less, because you're constantly washing them.

I could go on, but in short, I'm making up for all of those lost Wednesday night meetings and embracing life inside the track home. Let me go ahead and make my apologies to the world outside, and to my former, non-mom self. The "great equalizer" has taken hold of me, and I'm grateful. I want to be equal with other women-- as many as possible, in fact. I won't try to explain to you how interesting it really is inside the track home, because you probably wouldn't believe me.