Just Keep Swimming A wife trying to keep a positive outlook on male-factor infertility

Dear Evan,

There are so many emotions and thoughts swirling through my head tonight.  I thought when my baby was first born I would be a basket case of hormones and tears, but I wasn’t.  It took me some time to fall head over heels in love with you, to reach that point of deep swirling abandonment where my heart swells and explodes every time you curl your toes or smile in your sleep.  But I’m there tonight in full force, and I’ve never been happier to be so overcome.

When I hold you and look at your sleeping face, I see all the hopes and dreams I’ve ever had for the world.  You are so innocent and pure, untouched by stress or pain or greed or any of the other things that make the world a terrible place. You are our greatest blessing, a gift so hoped for, but it’s not until now that you’re here that I truly understand what the desire to have a child means.  To hold a baby in your arms, to care for it day and night, to worry over every little sigh and whimper, means to surrender yourself completely in the hopes that this life that you nurture will grow into something better than yourself.

Yesterday, I konked your head on the cabinet when I bent over to put something away.  For a split second, you were stunned, and then you screamed with a fury that I’ve never heard before.  My heart ripped in half at the sound and my need to soothe you was more intense than I ever knew possible.  I worked quickly to check your head for bleeding, to find a cool cloth to ease the throbbing pain, and to hold you and rock you and talk to you until you calmed down.  It wasn’t until I sat down to nurse you into comfort that I cried myself, heart aching that I had caused you so much pain.  I took a little piece of your innocence away.  Can I ever forgive myself?

I can’t stop looking at the pictures we’ve taken of you each week since you’ve been here.  You change and grow every day, right before my eyes.  Already your clothes are fitting differently, and some things you are growing out of.  I’m holding you in my arms while you sleep, trying to memorize the feeling of your weight against my chest because this time we have together will pass by so quickly and will one day be just a distant memory.  I’ll be like these old women who constantly stop us while we walk to look at you in your stroller and comment on your adorable little face, remembering the days when their own children were so small and longing to hold them again in their arms.  I want to drink you up, to bottle you and never lose this brief moment in our lives.

And yet I also can’t wait for you to grow up.  I saw a little girl today who smiled and waved at a man sitting nearby, and I imagined what you will look like one day when you know how to smile and wave.  I started to cry, sitting right there at our table, thinking about how big you would be then.  I can’t wait to see you laugh and play, to see you learn and smile and talk to people, to hear you tell me that you love me.  I kiss you a million times every day, and I can’t wait for the day when you will kiss me back, when you’ll wrap your little arms around my neck, when you can actually listen when I read you a book, and when you can read it back to me.  I can’t wait to see what kind of person you will be.

But here’s how I know I’ve really, completely been overcome with love for you, little boy – you’re sleeping here in my arms, and I’m filled with all these emotions, and yet I won’t let myself cry because I don’t want my falling tears or shaking chest to wake you.  The words “I love you” don’t carry enough weight to express what I feel.

Thank you, God, for this gift.

For me, being a new parent means constantly finding something to feel guilty about.  A small (very small) part of my decision to have a drug-free delivery was because I would have felt immensely guilty if I had given in and then ended up with a c-section.  The first night home when we had to give him that emergency formula in the middle of the night when he wouldn’t breastfeed, I felt so guilty for not being able to provide nourishment for my son.  Even the first couple of nights in the hospital and at home, I felt guilty every time I went to sleep because I should have been up caring for my child.  Whenever I ask Bobby to change a diaper or hold the baby, I feel guilty for interrupting his relaxation time so that I can have a minute for myself.  I feel guilty every time I put the baby in the bouncy seat or give him the pacifier instead of calming him myself.  As you can see, I’m racked with guilt over everything.

But I’ve now found something new to be guilty about.  My long-term sub that is teaching my classes until the end of school has been keeping me up to date on what’s happening with my students.  Since I left, every single one of those kids that I’ve worked hard with over the school year to get them to just barely pass are all failing – miserably.  My classes are rude and disrespectful to her – they talk over her, ignore her instructions, even talk during tests.  Like, not just one or two kids – the whole class.  They even started making animal noises behind the sub’s back.  Today she emailed me – one of my students told her that she was going to get an F on her report card because she hasn’t done a single journal since I left.  My sub had the principal come in and talk to my students about not giving up and being respectful, and even that did nothing.

On the one hand, it’s interesting and kind of endearing how much of a difference I make when I’m in the classroom.  On the other hand, I feel massively, horribly guilty for leaving my kids.  They’re failing without me. They’re not learning without me.  Teaching is so my passion and I love my students with all my heart, even the ones who drive me crazy, and I can hardly sit still while 10 minutes up the road is a room full of kids who have shut down simply because I’m not there any more.  The end of the school year is always hard on teachers because we literally have to drag most of our kids, kicking and screaming, to the finish line.  I’m not there this year to drag them, and they could care less about this other lady who’s been with them for three weeks.  I’m seriously two seconds away from packing Evan up in the carseat and driving down there to yell at those kids and tell them that their lives are about more than just which teacher is in front of them that day.

I won’t do that, of course.  But I still feel so guilty for leaving them.

Evan is now two weeks old!  Having a new baby is exactly what I thought it would be and yet completely different at the same time.  I knew I would be exhausted and stir crazy, but I never expected that things would be so HARD, especially breast feeding.  Here’s what’s been going on.

The first week was an adventure, to say the least. The first day in the hospital he had trouble latching on – he was fussy and noncommittal – and we eventually figured out that he had goo in his tummy still from delivery.  When he finally barfed that up, he fed for a champ like a little while, but the latch was increasingly painful.  We also had a choking scare that terrified the crap out of me, a mild case of jaundice, his circumcision, and a couple of those midnight “he won’t stop crying and I don’t know why” moments.  The nurses were all so great though – my only complaint was that the lactation consultant was hard to get a hold of.  The prognosis for the latch problem was that he was sucking is bottom lip in, meaning he was pinching my nipple with his gums.  But his face was so tiny and my boobs so large that I really never figured out what the nurse meant when she told me what to look for and how to fix it, and by the time I left the hospital my nipples were in a hell of a lot of pain.

Then the first night home, Evan would NOT latch on, no matter what I tried.  He was screaming and screaming his head off, so hungry and so frustrated, so of course I was also crying, too.  I tried pumping so we could feed him something but nothing would come out.  I was sure that I wasn’t making any milk and devastated, feeling like a failure.  Bobby had to go to the store at 1am to buy a bottle and formula so we could at least feed him something .  This made me feel really emotional, like I had failed somehow, but I know with his jaundice it’s more important for him to eat regularly.  So the first night home was purely awful.

I called the lactation office first thing in the morning and she made time to meet with me right away, and it turns out my milk had come in with a vengeance.  Literally, when I lifted up my shirt in her office, she said “OH honey, no wonder!” It turns out my breasts were so swollen and hard that Evan physically could not latch on – he was basically gumming a bowling ball.  The reason why pumping was ineffective is because my breasts are way too large for the cups that come with the pump.  She set me up with nipple shields to give Evan something to latch on to, bigger flanges for the pump to accomodate my cantalope-sized breasts, some breast shells to help with the soreness, and a few tips about reducing swelling. I left her office feeling like I could conquer the world!!!

So we were doing fine for a while, and then during one feeding my left nipple started bleeding profusely, like the entire nipple shield was filled with blood, causing Evan to simultaneously barf up everything he had eaten AND explode in his diaper.  So then the battle became even harder, because my left breast was too sore and scabbed to even be pumped, and became even more engorged and incredibly painful, and I couldn’t hold him in cradle to nurse off my right breast because he kicked my poor left breast, but I couldn’t get him to latch on to the right breast with a football position because of the way the shield is shaped.  So I tried to pump my right breast for him but could only get 1oz over a period of an hour, which wasn’t enough for him.  So that night was horrible, too.

The next morning, I noticed that my entire left breast was bright red.  The lac consultant became worried that I was on my way to developing mastitis and stressed the importance of getting that left breast drained.  I was frantically trying to figure out how to nurse him on the right side while speeding the healing on my left side.  It took cabbage leaves, ice packs, heat packs, ibuprofen, tea bags, saline baths, hydrocortisone, and polysporin, but I finally got my left breast healed enough to pump and eventually to feed my son.  Things were going great for a couple of days, until it was finally time to wean him off using the nipple shield.  He would scream and fight through every feeding, refusing to latch on to the natural nipple.  I had to bait him with the shield and then switch to my own nipple partway through when he wasn’t looking.  Eventually I discovered that the size and shape of my breasts has changed (yet again!) and the main problem was I was trying to put him on in the same position I used before the shield came into our lives.

Fast forward to today – after three good days of shield-less feeding, I decided that today was the day to master the side-lying position.  Bobby’s going back to work next week and I’m going to be feeding Evan from bed at night.  It was a cinch!  Not to mention incredibly sweet – I think I bonded more with Evan in three feeding sessions this morning than I have in the last two weeks.  There’s something so amazing about the feeling of that tiny body nestled up next to you, looking down on his face as he draws nourishment from your body, and snuggling the both of you under one blanket together.  I now completely understand the draw to co-sleeping and really had to fight myself to remember how potentially dangerous it could be.

I’d say that I’ve officially conquered breastfeeding.  Finally, I am victorious!  At least… for now! 🙂

Agenda for this blog post: L&D horror stories, surviving the first week, and general feelings on motherhood.  Settle in for a long post, folks!  Evan and I are currently outside sunbathing – he’s a little bit jaundiced and the  doctor’s prescription is filtered sunlight! So as my blankets inch across the lawn with the shade from our oak tree and my cats watch us from the back porch, I will tell you the story of how Evan was born.

Last Friday was my last day at school.  I wasn’t planning on stopping early, but all the talk of being 5cm and fully effaced made me worry that my baby would drop out in the middle of class, so I decided to call it quits.  Saturday morning, I woke up at 5am.  My first contraction came at 5:15, the exact time that my alarm clock normally goes off work work.  I don’t think this is a coincidence!!!  It’s almost as if my body just knew that it was time and that I was ready.  Early labor was a breeze – I timed my contractions using a killer iPhone app and pretty much went it alone for the first four hours or so.  Bobby was still asleep in the bed and I knew he would need rest for later, so I cleaned the house and fussed in Evan’s room, stopping to breathe and lean over every 5 minutes or so.

Around 9, I woke up Bobby and called my doulas.  We hung out for most of the afternoon, watching movies and counting contractions.  I took a nap, we had lunch, and eventually the contractions were close enough together and intense enough that we felt it was time to go to the hospital.  We got there around 3:30 or so, and the car ride was relatively painless.  The admissions nurse gave me news that surprised me – I was 5cm and 100% effaced.  But I’ve been that way for two weeks, and I’ve been in labor for 12 hours!! How can I not be further??  She said I don’t know, just keep going!  There was talk of breaking my water, but my ob advised against it – artificially breaking a water increases the pain level a lot, and since I was going for au natural, she said that wasn’t the best idea.  So we kept laboring on.

For several more hours, we just kept going.  Bobby sat on the couch, I sat in front of him on the birthing ball, and my doula stood behind me and rubbed my back.  My husband was amazing – he never left my side, fed my ice chips, kept me drinking, told me I was doing great.  I developed diarrhea and had to be held up in the bathroom over and over again.  The maternity pads that had no adhesive kept falling into the toilet, but couldn’t be flushed, and Bobby fished them out of the bloody, poopy mess to throw them away.  The man deserves an award for what he went through, and this wasn’t even the bad part!

So a couple more hours go by, my water breaks (or so we thought) and I’m checked again – hooray! You’re at 8 cm!  So then I really grind in, prepared for the worst, and experience an hour or so of the worst contractions yet.  I’m sure I’m in transition, that it won’t be long before my son was here.  They check me again – you went back to 7cm. I nearly lost it.  By this point it had been around 15 hours and I wasn’t progressing.  I was exhausted.  The nurse suggested a hot shower, which made me feel wonderful.  It slowed down my contractions and refreshed me.  Then I took a nap for about an hour.

When I woke up, Bobby was holding my hand and my doulas were asleep on the couch.  Apparently I had contracted all through my sleep, and he stayed with me even though I was unconscious.  I’m telling you, the man was amazing.  So the nurse came in to check me again…. I had slipped back again to 6cm!!!  The ob came in and said well, there’s still a bag of waters over the opening of your cervix.  I thought it was just residual since we had some leaking earlier, but let’s go ahead and clear it out of the way, and maybe things will move along.  So she gets the crochet hook and…. GUSH! It was my REAL water, not the apparently lame water from earlier.

Within thirty seconds of her busting that open… holy shit.  I literally thought my body was going to rip in half.  Before I was moaning… now I was screaming.  I was panicking, I wasn’t prepared for that intense pain after resting for a whole hour.  The doulas had to calm me down and get me to keep breathing and stop screaming.  I couldn’t tolerate the birthing ball any more, I had to be in the bed on my side.  For an hour and a half, I begged and pleaded for somebody to make it stop, to just pull him out of me, to kill me, anything to stop the pain.  They checked me once, I was at 9.  20 minutes later, I begged to be checked again because I felt like I needed to push, and finally I was 10.

Pushing relieved the pain, much to my surprise.  But as one push led to another, I became more and more exhausted.  Eventually I began falling asleep in between each contraction, so my memory of this part is nothing more than a hazy dream of pain and exertion.  I remember asking somebody to tell me if I was having contractions, but nobody ever did and that frustrated me.  Maybe they couldn’t understand me… I should ask Bobby.  I kept asking how much farther I had to go, but they wouldn’t tell me. I pushed for an hour and a half.  Eventually the nurse was talking about how much hair he had, and Bobby went down by my feet to check out the action.  I had to be put on oxygen because the baby’s heartrate was having trouble recovering after each contraction.  They brought a mirror in so I could see and maybe get motivated, but without my glasses on I really couldn’t recognize much so that wasn’t helpful.

It really burned when his head started to come through, and when he crowned I thought – for the millionth time – that I was dying.  But then I heard joy in Bobby’s voice and my doulas saying he was beautiful, and then I felt a gush of wet pressure release and he was on my chest.  He looked like an alien and had a ridiculous conehead from being in the canal for so long.  The nurses rubbed him down, but he wasn’t turning pink very fast and he wasn’t crying, just gurgling.  So the respitory guy took him over to the warmer – I had hoped to bond and snuggle right away, and I was disappointed about that, but he was just a few feet away and Bobby went to stand by him.  I can’t even describe the look on Bobby’s face… it was just beautiful.

The afterbirth was quick and relatively painless, but I had the shakes very badly.  I shook uncontrollably for probably 15 minutes.  I received two stitches, one on each side of the opening, so that wasn’t too bad.  But the most amazing thing was how quickly the pain just disappeared, and how much energy I had after he was born, despite being in labor for a grand total of 20 hrs.  As soon as he was out, it was just… relief.  I thought I would cry when my son was born, being that type of person, but I didn’t.  I was too exhausted and sort of in an out-of-body state by that point.  You have to go to a completely different place mentally in order to be able to survive that kind of pain.  And to be honest with you, even though I am sitting here recording the events for you as they happened, I actually have no recollection of what the pain felt like.  Other than the sensation of him crowning and then slipping out, I have no physical memory of how much pain I was in.  Which is a good thing, because I might never want to have another child if I could remember that!

Once Evan was nice and pink, he was handed back to me and we fed for the first time.  Bobby held him for a little while, and then my parents came in to meet their grandson.  And he was so beautiful.

We’re all done in the sun now, so I’m going to postpone the rest of this post till later.  It’s time for some breakfast, a little sponge bath to get rid of all this sweat, some laundry because Bobby’s parents are coming and I want to dress him in something cute, and maybe a little feeding and a nap.  If mama’s lucky – a shower!  I will leave you with one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever taken.

evan thomas… 6lbs 6oz at 2:48am.  tell you more later with pics, if i can find camera cord!