Tag: personal

Posted in family life

doctors and medicines (in which everyone is sick in various ways)

Posted on by kristinabean

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks here. To be honest, it’s been harder since Aubade’s birth than I expected it would be, considering that this is our third baby (so we should have more confidence and experience by now) and that she is a significantly easier baby than the first two. It seems like life just keeps throwing curveballs at us…

To begin with, my physical and emotional recovery from the birth has been a bit more complicated this time around, what with the severe tear on the physical side and the postpartum depression and anxiety on the emotional side. Those baby blues I wrote about last month escalated into depression and anxiety so bad that they were making it hard for me to get out of bed and be present with the kids every day; I would get up and shower because I wanted to keep the tear clean, and force myself to get dressed in presentable clothes, because if I didn’t I would just curl up under the covers and feel horrible. My husband would get home from school and I would take Aubade up to bed with me and hide from the world, so overwhelmed from the few hours of parenting on my own. I wasn’t interested in anything at all, really, but I was devouring books just to keep my mind off of real life and to drown out the thoughts of fear and guilt that kept pouring in. And the anxiety – of being left alone with the kids, of driving, of leaving the house, of talking to people outside my family, of letting everyone down, of being “crazy”, and so on – was so strong (despite its obvious irrationality) that I would have waves of pain course through my chest.

My OB treated me with a series of progesterone shots, operating on the principle that the sudden decrease in progesterone at the end of pregnancy can throw the whole hormonal system out of sync and cause PPD/PPA. Fortunately my husband was able to take care of some of them at home so I didn’t have to set up an appointment every other day for the whole series! And they definitely took the edge off of the negative emotions. The first day it felt like I was on a high – much better than normal – and I thought maybe that’s how things would settle in… but no such luck. I’m still in a hole, but it’s not as deep as it was, and some days I feel like I might be climbing out of it.

In the middle of all of this, we started getting sick. Apparently it had been a mild winter here in the illness department, but February brought all the germs with it and everyone across the valley is catching and spreading disease. Naively I thought that Aubade would be safe from anything going around because her immune system would be bolstered by mine since she’s exclusively breastfeeding, but it didn’t work out that way. Last Thursday I took all three kids to their pediatrician and after prescribing albuterol, antibiotics, and steroids for the boys she told me to take Aubade straight to the ER at the children’s hospital by our house. I was in shock. The boys had never been sick as newborns, so I didn’t realize how differently a serious illness could present in a newborn as opposed to an older baby or toddler. But because they have fewer energy reserves to draw on, and because they don’t know how to breathe through their mouths, an upper respiratory infection that might just cause a cough and a runny nose in a toddler can accelerate a baby’s breathing rate to the point of exhaustion.

The ER took Aubade’s symptoms as seriously as our pediatrician had; we were in a room within 30 minutes, which is quite impressive for a busy urban emergency department, and within another 30 minutes a respiratory therapist had evaluated her and hooked her up to a high-flow oxygen machine. (The high-flow machine pushes air gently down the baby’s airways, so that they don’t have to work so hard to pull air in past all the congestion in their nose and lungs; the oxygen concentration was originally set twice as high as normal air but they told me it was really the pressure more than the oxygen that she needed.) May I note in passing how much I appreciated the ER nurses? Fast, competent, and caring without a hint of saccharine, they inspired confidence and relieved my anxieties without minimizing Aubade’s condition. Even before the respiratory therapist arrived, they had suctioned out her nose and lungs, and did so again a few hours later when her breathing began to worsen. The pediatric nurses we had after transferring out of the ER that evening were not so wonderful by comparison, though they weren’t bad by any means.

img_1544
Aubade in the ER

So… she ended up being in the hospital for the next two nights. The boys slept over at my mom’s house for one of those nights and the first night we had her back home; my husband fought off a stomach bug and tried to keep up with school and job applications and laundry; I sat in the hospital with Aubade and held her and watched movies and tried to sleep. It was rough, even though I could tell she was slowly improving the whole time we were there. RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) usually peaks around the fifth or sixth day, which is when we were in the hospital, so we were able to adequately support her breathing through the worst of it.

Rondel and Limerick caught the same virus, and both presented with coughs and ear infections, but since they are older it wasn’t as dangerous. Rondel is now on a preventative steroid inhalant, though, as every cold he gets turns into a cough – he’s been on Albuterol at least four times just this winter. I’m hoping it will help, and I’m also hoping it isn’t a sign that he’ll be officially diagnosed with asthma at some point in the future. I suppose the silver lining of all this is that my prayer life and relationship with the saints are both growing… that daily shower is a good time to maintain spiritual health as well as physical and emotional health, with a morning prayer thrown in with the shampooing and all. Better that than nothing, anyway, and I know the kids won’t distract me then.

But hopefully the rest of my maternity leave goes a bit better! We’ve still got a spring break trip up north, summer internship applications, physical therapy, and maybe a visit to a psychiatrist to fit in to these next five weeks, on top of the regular demands of school, parenting, and running a home… so if we can stay healthy (physically and mentally) it would be great 🙂

Posted in musings

growing beets

Posted on by kristinabean

Our garden is starting to look lush and green again, now that harvest is at hand for the winter vegetables.

img_6471

It’s mostly beets… the cilantro didn’t grow this year, the carrots only made half-hearted attempts at it, and the one stand of dill that made it is off in the other corner of the raised bed. I do miss the cilantro, but beets are better than nothing I suppose! The effusion of green helps lift my spirits, though, even if half of what I planted never grew, and beets are lovely plants.

These particular beets ought to be ready to pull and eat by now, but the few that we’ve tried have been all leaves and no beets. It’s rather disappointing, even though beet greens are also good to eat, to find no dark red bulb waiting beneath the soil like hidden treasure. The soil was finally loose and rich (and not clay!) this year, which was our problem in past years; I think perhaps it was too rich as I recall reading somewhere that excess nitrogen can cause root vegetables to overproduce leaves instead. But who knows.

It makes me wonder if my life has (or can have) the same sort of imbalance – an overproduction of the things that look good from a distance, or in a casual acquaintance, and an absence of the things that are hidden and deep. Do I put all my energy and resources into looking like a good mom when I’m out in public, or do I give significantly of myself in loving and guiding my children at home when no one is watching? Is my goal to be known by my church community as someone who knows the Bible and has all the answers ready, or is my goal to know and love God and His words and His people? Do I work hard at home and at my job for the praise and appreciation of my family and coworkers, or for the inner satisfaction of excellence? To be honest with you, it’s often a struggle. I want both things, of course – both the leafy greens and the red beets are good! But when I have finite time and limited resources, I’m tempted to devote myself to the cultivation of greens at the expense of the beets: to make sure everything looks okay instead of making sure everything is good and right under the surface and behind the scenes. And in so doing, I end up with the same unfortunate imbalance from which my garden suffers, as beautiful as it is above ground.

Posted in musings

learning to know the saints (slowly and rather awkwardly)

Posted on by kristinabean

Just a month or so ago I noticed that while I believe in the community of saints (that is, I believe that the church is the body of Christ, so the part of the body here on earth – us – is still one with the part of the body in heaven – the saints – and we are thus able to have some type of connection or relationship with them), I didn’t really know much about the any of the saints, and I didn’t have a particular relationship with or devotion to any of them except the Virgin Mary. It felt too contrived to try to pick a saint on my own, so I just registered my thought and moved on. I figured it would be best to let such relationships develop naturally, as my relationship with Mary has.

Well, earlier this year, as you know, kind of for the fun of it and to satisfy my curiosity, I used the random saint generator to find a saint of the year for myself, and was given St. Jude, the patron of hopeless and desperate causes. Interesting, I thought. I didn’t feel a connection, so I again registered it and moved on. I read the book of Jude but that was it.

Then I was hit by postpartum depression and anxiety at full force. It was obviously and drastically worse than the transitional sadness and fatigue I’d had the first couple weeks after Aubade was born; it was a massive effort just to get out of bed, and I felt like all my time and emotional energy was expended just in rolling away the negative thoughts that kept intruding into my mind. I would hear a sound (like a car in the bank parking lot behind our house, or a door opening downstairs) and feel stabbing anxiety pain course through my body in the half second before realizing what it was. And I was starting to build escapist fantasies in the back of my mind, because I just wanted to be at peace and peace felt so unattainable.

Hmm… a situation in which I was left feeling completely hopeless and desperate for help… and a patron saint whose speciality is in interceding for hopeless and desperate causes… maybe, I thought, that random saint generator wasn’t completely random. So, feeling very awkward and not really knowing what to say, I asked St. Jude if he would pray for me in this situation. After all, what is the worst that could happen? Nothing? And at best, he would hear my request and pray for my healing and peace; a saint living in eternity, championing the hopeless and lost, probably is better about consistently praying for his supplicants than the average busy and distracted friend (of course, I might just be extrapolating from my own inconsistent prayer life).

There is of course no way to verify that St. Jude did anything, but I know that I was able to fight my social anxiety enough to go to the new moms’ community after church two weeks ago, and that the only other woman there that week was an experienced mom who encouraged me spiritually and suggested I call my doctor; I know that instead of spinning into a hole of endless research and indecision I actually did call my doctor; I know that my husband and I started praying together every night, which we’ve never done before and which has really comforted and supported me; and I know that the progesterone shots my doctor prescribed, while not completely knocking out the PPD/PPA, have made me much more functional and given back a lot of the joy in my life. In other words, things don’t feel so hopeless anymore. If nothing else, I feel like someone outside of God and my family (namely, St. Jude) cares about me and how I’m doing emotionally and as a mother – that they are standing beside me before God, praying on my behalf.

I still think I’d like to let my relationships with the saints develop slowly and naturally, at their own pace, but I’m very glad that I’ve made the acquaintance of one of them this year so far, and I think I owe him some thanks.

Posted in book lists

what I’ve been reading lately

Posted on by kristinabean

After a rather long stretch of time in which I mostly reread my favorite fiction (Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter on repeat!) and kept up with the news and our church’s Bible-in-a-year plan, I have been diving back into the world of books. I realized that I have a lot of time in which I can read but not do much else (while Aubade is nursing, especially at night), but of course holding a book is complicated by said nursing… so I had been reading the news, surfing the web, and spending altogether too much time on Facebook, which was not helping my postpartum mood in the least. Then I remembered that all the libraries in my county have come together to create the Greater Phoenix Digital Library – meaning that more books than I have time to read are available on my phone, for free, with a simple app and the PIN from my library card. Honestly I’m not sure how I managed the boys’ newborn phases without this…

So, despite finding that a lot of the books on my wish list are checked out by other users of the library system, here are four books I’ve read this week that were completely new to me, in a variety of genres:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

cagedbirdangelou

This is of course a classic, and most people who haven’t read it are still familiar with some of Angelou’s poetry, at least (I knew of her mostly through her poetry, to be honest – Phenomenal Woman makes the social media rounds fairly frequently, and I love it every time I read it). But for me, who grew up in an educated, well-off, white family, it was eye-opening to see the deep personal and emotional impact of both intimate individual hurts (like parental divorce and sexual abuse) and systemic oppression (like the racism and poverty Angelou faced herself and saw affect her community). Someone’s story can be far more impactful than all the statistics and social study lessons in the world, especially when told with the simple power and unpretentious elegance of Angelou’s writing. It’s not an easy read, because of the painful topics it deals with, but it is definitely worth reading.

The Family Nobody Wanted, by Helen Doss

familynobodywanted

This is a memoir of quite a different type, although it touches on some of the same themes. Doss and her husband discovered as a young couple that they were infertile and that the demand for Caucasian infants to adopt was far greater than the number of babies available. So, in the 1940s and 50s, they built their family by adopting the unwanted children – children of mixed heritage who didn’t look “white” enough for mainstream American families to consider – and ended up with 12 children all together! The book is an honest look at their family life, addressing the racism directed at their children and family but mostly just full of hope and humor (I laughed out loud many times at the anecdotes Doss related – she is quite adept at capturing the funny side of disastrous moments as well as the dialogue of her young children).

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

stationeleven

After reading two memoirs, I decided to switch things up and chose this post-apocalyptic novel after seeing it on one of Modern Mrs. Darcy’s booklists (in general, that is a helpful site if you aren’t sure what book to read next!). I don’t normally read this type of fiction because it is dark and suspenseful and keeps me up all night, and this was no exception… The basic premise is that a strain of the flu wiped out the vast majority of the world’s population, disrupting civilization to the extent that people are living without electricity, without medicine, scavenging and hunting to survive, holding on to what scraps of art and culture they can salvage, and falling prey to cults and prophets who offer some explanation for why so few survived. Mandel’s characters are diverse in personality and background, and the different ways they experience the pandemic (as well as the years before and after it) feel very authentic. I particularly liked how the threads of theatre, music, and literature wound through the characters’ stories without devolving into preachy passages about the meaning and value of those things in a broken world; the novel is far more about what it means to be human, and how humanity survives and even perhaps recovers from an event so utterly devastating.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

halfthesky

Kristof and WuDunn examine the inequality of women in the developing world in a number of different arenas, including forced prostitution, rape (as a tool of shame or a weapon of war), maternal mortality and injury, and education. Each issue tackled is presented in light of the story of one or two individual women, spotlighting the problems involved as well as the complexities faced in addressing those problems; for instance, we see how difficult it is to truly free an underage girl from forced prostitution in the story of one young woman who returns multiple times to feed her drug addiction – which was in itself instigated by her captors and abusers. Some stories are inspiring; some are less so; and the statistics that they illustrate are often bleak. As a new mother myself, having experienced a labor (with my first) that would have resulted in death or serious injury without access to a surgeon, it is horrifying and saddening to read about women who have had similar experiences without the medical care available to me and others in the West. There is so much pain and death that could have been avoided. On the other hand, however, the book also shows us the stories of whole communities that have been improved by simple investments in education, or by deciding to take justice for women seriously. In addition to the stories and the statistics, a unique and valuable aspect of this book is the appendix listing specific organizations that are working in effective ways to address the issues faced by women in the developing world, to give the reader ideas of whom to support. I would encourage anyone – especially anyone who believes that things like rape and maternal care are only “women’s issues” – to read this book and see just how much communities can grow and heal when they come to realize that women, as in the eponymous proverb, “hold up half the sky.”

What have you all been reading lately? I’d love to hear your recommendations, since I have a short window of reading opportunity open right now!

Posted in musings

a prayer for hope

Posted on by kristinabean

Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name.

Father, your name goes unspoken, or mocked, or used for profit and manipulation. The names of all the people in the world – the movers, the powerful, the close at hand – constantly echo around us, while your name lies forgotten and unspoken on the side. And you feel so far away from us, enthroned in heaven in glory and peace while this world falls apart beneath you.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.

It seems as though your kingdom is so far from coming, Father. This world seems more broken every day: my Facebook feed is filled with laments, with arrogance, with anger, with half-truths; the news constantly reminds me of pain and division, oppression and war, hatred and selfishness. What principles are right and good and worthy? What means of applying those principles are most effective? People who love you and long for your kingdom don’t even agree with each other on the answers. And I feel lost, and confused, and I wonder how your kingdom will ever come, how your will may ever be done, when even your people are divided among themselves. Our brokenness seems complete, our hope extinguished.

Give us this day our daily bread

And yet, each day comes, and we are still here, and even the food we eat is a gift from you, a gift of hope, a promise of life. Every day we need it. And some, because of war and poverty and famine and corruption, do not have it. Where is their hope? Are you present for them like you are for us who have never known hunger? Is your power too weak or your love too small to provide for them also, when they cry out for food and their children die around them? Why do you not intervene when people tear the world apart and condemn others to starvation for their own gain? And it goes beyond the physical bread we need to live: we need emotional bread – love, hope, friendship, purpose; we need spiritual bread – the body of your Son given for us. Why do you allow so many to be cut off from those things, bereft of those great blessings, caught in misery and despair, for whom each morning is not a cause for joy at your faithfulness but simply the start of another journey through darkness and fear?

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Is that why you wait so long to intervene in the evils of this world, Father? Are you offering even the oppressor a chance at forgiveness, a chance to work for the redemption and setting right of the brokenness they have caused? It is a hard and painful wait for the oppressed. For us, a thousand years are not as a day, but as an eternity, and we fail, eventually, to extend again forgiveness when it has been met time and time again by continued oppression and trespass. We forget our own sin in the burning awareness of the sins committed against us; we seethe with anger, hold onto our hurt, and drive your kingdom still further away in a cry for justice that does not extend beyond ourselves.

And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

Everywhere I look, there temptation and evil lie in wait. The temptation to put myself first, to let anger take root in my heart, to attack and demonize the people who disagree with me or inconvenience me, to close my ears to the hurts and needs and stories of others. The evil of corrupt institutions, of dysfunctional families, of systemic poverty, of generational sin – broken homes, communities, and nations, catching people in nets of pain and pride and wickedness. Deliver us, Father; restore us to your righteousness. It is such a faint hope, sometimes, a light believed in though still unseen, but it is the only hope we have.

Amen.

Posted in family life

finding myself again

Posted on by kristinabean

One of the less pleasant aspects of Aubade’s birth was that it resulted in a 4th degree tear (baby girl was coming fast and needed to come fast as each push caused her to have pretty significant decels, indicating potential hypoxia – they actually had me on oxygen and made sure we waited in between pushes to get Aubade fully oxygenated before each new push, and she was quite big!). While it’s been healing as well as can be expected, it’s put some limitations on what I can do, which is really frustrating for me.

But! Today I pushed the boys in the stroller, while wearing Aubade, all the way to the Museum of Natural History two blocks down from our house! I’d been building up to it: I’ve walked with them to the children’s museum one block from the house with no stroller, just carrying Aubade and the diaper bag, since the boys can walk that distance fairly easily; and I’d taken all three of them to the grocery store and pushed them in the shopping cart (which in retrospect was rather stupid because I lifted Rondel in and out of the cart and he’s quite a bit above my lifting weight limit right now). But this was my first solo outing with the stroller. And it went really well! With the weather so frigid, gloomy, and drizzly these days, it is especially nice to have broadened the scope of where I can take the boys when my husband is at school – and it makes me feel much more like my normal self: confident, independent, and quite capable of planning and executing fun outings with my children!

I guess my whole point is that even when you know rationally that recovery takes time but will eventually happen, it’s easy to get discouraged and feel like you’re never going to be yourself again, until you have those little moments of normalcy that help you see that you are coming back. It’s true physically with the recovery from a tear (or C-section, as I learned with Rondel), and it’s true emotionally with the hormonal transition from pregnancy to postpartum; in either case, you might need some extra help getting there, but recovery is totally possible, and you will find yourself again.

Posted in Uncategorized

{just enough info} – 2017

Posted on by kristinabean

{JEI} is a link-up with a different topic, and a few different leading questions, every week; I haven’t participated before, but the questions for this week made me stop and think in a New Year’s-y sort of way that I’d been avoiding otherwise, so I thought I’d share with you all.

1. What is one small thing, if you accomplish it in 2017, that will make you feel successful?

Forming an exercise routine and continuing it long enough for it to become a habit or discipline would make me feel insanely successful! I’d be happy with 15 minutes of intentional activity every day, to be honest. My body is going to need some extended rest to recover from Aubade’s birth, but because of that, and because of the anemia I had during the pregnancy, it’s going to be fairly weak and need some attention. I’d like to build back the strength and stamina I had before the kids, ideally – but just starting out with some core rebuilding exercises would make me feel like a success.

2. Have you picked a “word of the year” or patron saint of the year?

No patron saint here (how would I narrow it down? and it feels somewhat audacious to think a saint would be interested in being my patron, like asking someone to be a mentor…), but I did settle on the word: presence. I want to be more present this year, less lost in my own head; I want to engage with the real family I have, in the reality we share, instead of forming an idea or abstraction of them and interacting with that; I want to actively listen instead of chasing daydreams while my husband or children try to talk to me; I want to turn my phone on less frequently and run and play and laugh more often. It is easy for me to live in a world of theories and ideals, to the exclusion and detriment of the actual – and I don’t want to squander the actual blessings I’ve been given by not being as fully present with them as I can be.

And ok, I did go to http://saintsnamegenerator.com and have it randomly select a saint just to see who it would be, and it was St. Jude (author of the book of Jude in the New Testament). Apparently he’s the patron saint of hopeless and desperate causes… Honestly, I don’t know much about him, nor am I even that familiar with the book of Jude. Maybe I should rectify that – I need a book of the Bible to dig into deeply right now anyway!

3. What are you looking forward to in 2017?

I’m looking forward to my husband graduating and (hopefully) finding a job! We’ve been waiting for this next chapter of our lives for a long time now and it’s exciting to see just how close it is! The specifics of it will also help us make other decisions like where we’ll want to live (we’re outgrowing our current house because it doesn’t have the best bedroom layout, mostly) and what schooling choices we’ll make for the kids (since Rondel will be turning 4 this summer! Where does the time go?), so I’m looking forward to hammering out the details.

Head on over to Sweeping Up Joy for the rest of the link-up!

Posted in musings

postpartum depression

Posted on by kristinabean

I had PPD with my first baby.

I’d hoped for a natural delivery and done all my prenatal care with a wonderful midwife at a birth center near our home, but I was still pregnant two weeks past my due date and state law required her to transfer my care to an OB and, after a failed induction, Rondel came into the world via a C-section.

The week of his due date I’d had a major fight (for lack of a better word, and without going into the details) with my husband and was feeling extremely emotional and stressed about that episode through the early postpartum weeks (despite how supportive and amazing my husband was through the rest of the pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum period – I have trouble letting go of negative emotions).

So I felt like my body had let me down, and like my marriage was letting me down, and then Rondel turned out to be one of the most sensitive babies I’ve ever met, struggling with the basics of babyhood and responding to his struggles with tears and screams and demands for instant comfort. The sleepless nights wore me down. The constant crying wore me down. Nursing helped hold me together – until his prolonged comfort nursing led to an oversupply and an overactive letdown that led to more frustration and discomfort for us both. Nothing was outside the realm of “normal,” but the sum total of things, plus my own hormonal instability, meant that it wasn’t a good situation.

I didn’t trust anyone else to care for Rondel as well as I could, or to love him as much, even my husband. If someone else was holding him I couldn’t let them out of my sight. But at the same time that I loved him so fiercely and completely, I worried with a deep, uncontrollable fear that I was a horrible mother, that he would be so much better off with someone else, that if I just left the picture somehow both he and my husband would be happier and better in the long run. Neither fear was rational; between the two of them, I felt hopeless and stuck.

I managed to hold life together until I unexpectedly fell pregnant again, around 7 months postpartum, and the changing hormones broke the hold of PPD on my mind and body. There are still things that bring back flashes of it: a rough night with the boys, maybe; the casual off-hand comment of a friend about how women’s bodies are designed to give birth so it shouldn’t be that difficult; a post about how well someone’s infant sleeps through the night thanks to some method or other. The insinuation that because labor was difficult for me, that because I needed an induction and a C-section I somehow was weak or a failure, triggers the old lie that I’m not a good enough mother; the assertion that some parenting technique can make your baby happy, relaxed, independent, and a good sleeper does the same thing. Because my body gave childbirth everything it had, and I gave motherhood everything I had, and we didn’t have the “expected” or “ideal” outcomes.

Now, 3.5 years later, with two more babies’ worth of experience, I know those things don’t define me or the “success” of my motherhood. But it’s a powerful lie.

Will I have PPD again, in this postpartum period or in some future one? I can’t say for certain. I didn’t with Limerick, and I’m still in the baby blues/transitional period with Aubade so it’s too early to know. It was one of my biggest fears through this pregnancy, though – because in the midst of it, asking for help seems almost more difficult than just enduring it, and the overwhelming sense of failure and shame is a pain so great I don’t even want to imagine having to go through it again. But this is the resolution I have made, for myself, for my family, for baby Aubade: that I will make rest and self-care a priority from the beginning to try to prevent it, and that if I feel things are not right within me, even if I can’t say I “know” I have PPD, I will ask for help.

Posted in family life, musings, Uncategorized

beauty in the little things

Posted on by kristinabean

newborn baby giggles as little girl slips, milk-drunk, into sleep in my arms…

the smell of fresh bread, sweet and citrusy, to celebrate Epiphany…

img_1422
it got a bit lopsided but tasted delicious!

warm sun and a cool breeze and a couple hours at the park with my family…

little boys all crazy smiles running through the splash pad in the cold…
img_6443

img_6415

img_6434
warming up before heading back into the spray

sunlight on baby girl’s face, streaming through the window to the changing table, holding her spellbound for a good twenty minutes…

little boy hugs, head laid down on baby’s tummy, arms ever-so-gently tucked around her…

big boy love, wild and exuberant, caring and protective, running joyfully in each morning to say hi to the baby, showing her his toys, getting up at dinner to check on her…

tiny fingers capturing us all with their utter perfection…

img_6409
not forgetting that tiny perfect nose and mouth and chin of course! or the perfect chubby curve of that tiny cheek…

Postpartum is hard. But in with the hard times, there is so much beauty – beauty in the new life, beauty in the old familiar everyday that keeps on going on – and the beauty is what keeps me going on as the old and the new become one.

Posted in musings

seven things I learned from my third childbirth

Posted on by kristinabean

Because I thought I knew how it would go after having two babies, and discovered I still had a lot to learn!

  1. Every delivery is different – and by that I mean different enough to leave even a third-time mom completely confused and unable to read the situation! Baby #1 I had no false labor but dilated to 3.5cm, was induced two weeks late, and had a c-section for failure to progress. Baby #2 I had some preliminary Braxton-Hicks but nothing painful or regular until the real thing, a slow and steady labor. With this one, I had several weeks of regular uncomfortable contractions with no dilation, then an incredibly rapid and intense labor that took me from 1cm to delivery in less than 24 hours. My mom and MIL both describe their deliveries as all being cut from rather similar cloth but that has not been my experience at all!
  2. Oxytocin is pretty powerful. I’ve not been very excited about this pregnancy, or about meeting the baby, and I hadn’t felt any sort of emotional attachment with her – but lying their in labor, I suddenly felt this wave of anticipatory love, thinking ahead to the moment when she would finally be snuggled up against my chest. So I’m grateful to the hormones for that one!
  3. Transition is miserable without drugs! I was comfortably attached to an epidural for my first VBAC by the time I hit transition, but this time (because of the labor’s fast progression) I got to experience a bit of it before the anesthesiologist could put the line in. Normal contractions are bad… transition contractions are worse. I would describe them by saying that the pain suddenly was all the way around all at once instead of focused in either my back or abdomen, and it was significantly harder to breathe through them because of that lack of focus. I am in awe of you ladies who can make it through labor drug-free.
  4. Epidurals can come out during labor. Not the most pleasant thing to happen at 9.5cm, but…
  5. Pain that isn’t relieved by your epidural can signify uterine rupture. Before the doctors realized that the epidural line had come out, they were starting to become seriously concerned about that possibility. So I suppose the bad news of hearing there was a technical difficulty was really good news compared to the alternative! I was lying there thinking, well, the worst that can happen is that I’ll have a hysterectomy and this will be our last baby. The epidural makes me rather blasé about disasters and fatalistic about outcomes, I think… if something had gone drastically wrong, I wouldn’t have felt the emotions for a day or so.
  6. That crazy feeling of a baby slipping out of your body is simply amazing. Not quite as good as the feeling of the sticky warm baby herself pressed up against you a moment later, but pretty close 🙂 I don’t think either of those feelings could ever lessen in their primal beauty and profundity.
  7. Finally, labor is more than just a physical process; it involves the whole emotional and spiritual aspect of a person as well. The contraction pain drove me to prayer, and prayer – while not necessarily relieving the pain – brought comfort and hope in the midst of it. It’s very much like squeezing my husband’s hand through a contraction: the knowledge of his presence in response to my need gives me strength to persevere through the pain. Labor prayers are not particularly eloquent but they are fully and authentically meant! There isn’t much room left for pretense or appearance at that point, after all. And one of the strongest feelings I can recall from my labor was that of being held, enveloped, by the love and strength of Mary and Jesus. She was another mother, my spiritual mother, holding me through the pain, giving me her comfort; He was love itself surrounding me, the One without whom nothing can be made or created, with me bringing this new life into the world. And when we thought that we’d have to have a c-section anyways, because Aubade wasn’t aligned right to make it past that last half centimeter, it was prayer that gave me peace regardless of the outcome and prayer that, I think, made the difference in straightening her out and letting the dilation finish during the 45 minutes of prep time for the section (after 5 hours of unsuccessful contractions).

What did you all discover after the birth of a subsequent child, that you didn’t know or fully realize after the first (or second, or third…)? It makes sense that every delivery would bring some new revelation, since the experience is bound to be different in some way or another 🙂 I just didn’t realize how different it could be the third time around!