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Aug. 12th, 2007 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lollardfishI haven't written anything emotional about Nicholas in a long time, other than to express joy at the myriad little things he does. It mostly is joyful. He's eating solid food very consistently, he's laughing and playing, he's strong and curious, and really we haven't encountered any of things that we feared. Not one. He hits every milestone right on schedule and is a joy to everyone who knows him.
But I've been dealing with some complex emotions surrounding the birth of a baby boy to a friend of ours. The community, properly, is rejoicing and celebrating. The parents are so happy. Everyone is home and snuggly. And I've been feeling some jealousy. It's not a pretty emotion and is immediately followed by feelings of guilt for being such a lousy human being - but it's not being jealous in quite the way that you might think. It's not that Nicholas has Down's Syndrome and the other baby doesn't, but that the parents and friends get to experience a kind of joy that we entirely missed. There's a kind of intense joy, tinged by exhaustion, that just flows out of the pictures and postings about this new life. If you go back to the postings around last January 11th, you won't find that joy - and that's because we didn't really feel it. Our emotions were much more complex and, sadly but honestly, negative.
When Nicholas was born, days of troubled exhaustion followed. We had a sweet moment with the new baby on mama's chest, and if you ignore the medical tubes, the oxygen they were blowing on his face, and the impending sense of woe, they are sweet pictures. But within an hour or so, they had taken our son up to the special nursery, left us alone, and Shannon and I wept on each other, crying that it wasn't fair. This is not how new life should be welcomed into the world. Over the next week, it was a long battle in which sorrow and mourning gradually were defeated by our son's resolute health, incredible cuteness, and key concrete events.
First, the next day, our friends who called (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
minnehaha and mizzlaurajean and davidschroth) changed the dynamic by being so damn congratulatory, regardless of how un-congratulatable (not a word!) we felt. Enough people start telling you to celebrate and you start to believe it.
It also turns out that the newborn Nico was, in fact, our delightful child Nico - healthy, loving, strong, and cuter than a baby panda. When I look back on those first few days - wierdly lit through the haze of exhaustion that they were - I realize how his personality was already beginning to shine through.
And we had some clear victories. His heart, digestion, and respiration were fine. He began to breast feed within 24 hours of birth (I can't remember when, exactly, but Laura was there, and I can picture the expression of pleased shock and pain on Shannon's face when our little boy latched for the first few times). Since we had been advised that breast feeding would be a difficult, and quite possible impossible, goal - this was helpful.
Then there came some catharsis. That morning when I listened to Kurt's song for Nico, I wept on Shannon as deeply as I have ever cried. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, thinking about that moment, and I haven't been able to listen to the song since. But the acknowledgment of the sadness, perhaps, helped move me towards the joy that I should have been feeling all along.
"Should"
Knowing what I now know about my son, I should have been feeling joy. Knowing nothing, it's harder. And I think that if he had needed heart surgery, a feeding tube, had extreme hypotonia, and so forth - the joy I'd feel now, as I adjusted to the new normal, would be just as great as it is (sorry if that sentence is confusing). But still, when the new boy was born a few days ago, I felt no emotion more keenly than envy followed by guilt. And so I thought I'd write about it a bit.
In other news, in the last two nights, Nico has fallen asleep in the 8:00 hour for my mother and for a babysitter, then slept until about 6:00. This is excellent.
But I've been dealing with some complex emotions surrounding the birth of a baby boy to a friend of ours. The community, properly, is rejoicing and celebrating. The parents are so happy. Everyone is home and snuggly. And I've been feeling some jealousy. It's not a pretty emotion and is immediately followed by feelings of guilt for being such a lousy human being - but it's not being jealous in quite the way that you might think. It's not that Nicholas has Down's Syndrome and the other baby doesn't, but that the parents and friends get to experience a kind of joy that we entirely missed. There's a kind of intense joy, tinged by exhaustion, that just flows out of the pictures and postings about this new life. If you go back to the postings around last January 11th, you won't find that joy - and that's because we didn't really feel it. Our emotions were much more complex and, sadly but honestly, negative.
When Nicholas was born, days of troubled exhaustion followed. We had a sweet moment with the new baby on mama's chest, and if you ignore the medical tubes, the oxygen they were blowing on his face, and the impending sense of woe, they are sweet pictures. But within an hour or so, they had taken our son up to the special nursery, left us alone, and Shannon and I wept on each other, crying that it wasn't fair. This is not how new life should be welcomed into the world. Over the next week, it was a long battle in which sorrow and mourning gradually were defeated by our son's resolute health, incredible cuteness, and key concrete events.
First, the next day, our friends who called (
minnehaha and mizzlaurajean and davidschroth) changed the dynamic by being so damn congratulatory, regardless of how un-congratulatable (not a word!) we felt. Enough people start telling you to celebrate and you start to believe it.It also turns out that the newborn Nico was, in fact, our delightful child Nico - healthy, loving, strong, and cuter than a baby panda. When I look back on those first few days - wierdly lit through the haze of exhaustion that they were - I realize how his personality was already beginning to shine through.
And we had some clear victories. His heart, digestion, and respiration were fine. He began to breast feed within 24 hours of birth (I can't remember when, exactly, but Laura was there, and I can picture the expression of pleased shock and pain on Shannon's face when our little boy latched for the first few times). Since we had been advised that breast feeding would be a difficult, and quite possible impossible, goal - this was helpful.
Then there came some catharsis. That morning when I listened to Kurt's song for Nico, I wept on Shannon as deeply as I have ever cried. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, thinking about that moment, and I haven't been able to listen to the song since. But the acknowledgment of the sadness, perhaps, helped move me towards the joy that I should have been feeling all along.
"Should"
Knowing what I now know about my son, I should have been feeling joy. Knowing nothing, it's harder. And I think that if he had needed heart surgery, a feeding tube, had extreme hypotonia, and so forth - the joy I'd feel now, as I adjusted to the new normal, would be just as great as it is (sorry if that sentence is confusing). But still, when the new boy was born a few days ago, I felt no emotion more keenly than envy followed by guilt. And so I thought I'd write about it a bit.
In other news, in the last two nights, Nico has fallen asleep in the 8:00 hour for my mother and for a babysitter, then slept until about 6:00. This is excellent.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 03:59 pm (UTC)I tried to find a post I thought I'd written years ago, about broken dolls and my daughter and my own feelings on a similar (though not identical) topic, but I can't seem to pinpoint it at the moment.
I guess the jist was that my own wrestling was that I spent a lot of time as a kid feeling like whatever I got was "less" -- my Barbie which was the same-in-box as my friend's Barbie came out of the box with a piece missing, the horse model that I got had a chipped ear, how come I had to wear glasses and so and so didn't, etc. etc., such that I internalized it very badly. Yet there I was, with the only baby out of all of my friends' with time in the NICU and developmental delays and having operations -- and here I was with another "broken doll", yet somehow this time, it iddn't matter. In my eyes and heart she was perfect. I didn't want to share this along the lines of "you should feel this too" but just to try to share a window into wrestling with similar issues. Though I know some of the above is what you guys are feeling now.
Perhaps more helpful:
One of Gwen's classmates, A, has a mom named, K. When A was born she had an annurism and almost died; her head swelled up. She spents weeks in the NICU, has had significant lifelong delays, and has a head now, as a five year old, that is bigger than most adults'. It's been a struggle. Then A's little brother, E, was born. K told me that when he went for his first post-birth physical and they told her everything was perfect and he was a healthy boy, she burst into pitiful tears. Her husband said, "What's wrong?" She answered, "It was supposed to be like this the first time."
no subject
Date: 2007-08-12 07:30 pm (UTC)