“Whatever happened to my 2-pound baby?”
(I wrote this in 2011. She turns 20 this week. She remains awesome.)
When you are pregnant with your first baby, you have all these ideas of how pregnancy and motherhood will be: you will be one of those women who carry the pregnancy beautifully; you will be one of those women to whom motherhood comes naturally; your child will never have a snot-encrusted nose.
Of course, none of that turns out to be true.
For me, my first pregnancy started out rocky, with morning sickness that left me in a state of perpetual nausea. It progressed from there to lousy, as the baby perched itself on my sciatic nerve for three weeks, causing me excruciating back pain that was not alleviated by anything medicinal or homeopathic. And from lousy it went to terrifying, when, at 26 weeks I was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a condition in which the mother’s blood pressure abruptly begins to rise. They don’t know why it happens, although it is most common in first pregnancies.
With that diagnosis, I was told to lie on my left side, put up my feet and take it easy. The doctor would monitor me closely. Two weeks later, my blood pressure shot up, and I delivered the baby in an emergency C-section. It was close.
So there she was, at 28 weeks, 2 pounds, 2 ounces, 12 inches long. She literally almost killed me. In my morphine-induced haze, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this kid.
Life, as I have said before, is a series of lessons. If you pay attention, you will learn and grow from them. This particular instance taught me my first parenting lesson: You are never too old to scare the crap out of your parents. Mine, when told about the birth, jumped in their car and drove the 2½ hours to make sure everything was all right.
So my first lesson came from my newborn daughter, and my second lesson came from my mother: Even if you don’t know everything is all right, pretend that it will be. On their way to the hospital, my mother stopped at the Filene’s in the Crystal Mall and bought a boatload of pink baby clothes. “For when she comes home,” she told me.
That was 13 years ago. That tiny baby — “feisty,” the nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit dubbed her — spent 2 months in the hospital, and came home on May 22, 1998, again ahead of schedule. She has not stopped surprising us.
When she was born, we weren’t ready. I guess that’s the best lesson you can ever learn. From that experience I decided that the universe would never throw something at me that cosmically it knew I could not handle. So I have learned to better deal with the twists and turns of life, I think, because of that baby.
I learned from that baby to never lower expectations, no matter what they tell you, and to never bother to compare yourself to anyone else. I learned that it is helpful to have friends who will drop everything and come to you when you put up an SOS, and that I have those friends.
I learned that you truly never stop needing your mom.
When she was a toddler, I used to pick her up and say, “Whatever happened to my 2-pound baby?” And she would grab her belly with both hands and shout, “I right here!” and we would laugh together.
Happy birthday, Summer.
