Guilt

My first mommy guilt trip is here. This is the reason my MIL says I will hate all future Mother's Days. This is one of those days I will look back on when having a pity party and thinking of reason after reason I'm not good enough. And the thing is, I'm generally really good at giving myself a break. I just can't seem to let this one go.

There's a Farnsworth family reunion in town this week. I love me some Farnsworths. And I knew we'd have to go easy on the activities because of our bitty baby (now like ten pounds). So I had some reservations about going to tonight's dinner activity. But when tempted with free pizza, I gave in. And . . .

*cringe*

. . . took my baby to a bowling alley. With loud music. And people. And germs. And now I'm blaming myself for his not-unheard-of pre-bedtime fussies. His totally normal feeling temperature. His typical schedule of sneezes.

Just when I was starting to get into the rhythm of this mom thing, the self-hate is here. Sigh.

Absentminded

I wore my new jeans today, and it wasn't until I was at the doctor's office strippin' down that I heard the telltale clatter of tags still hanging from the inside of my pants. It wouldn't have been such a stupid mistake except that this was the second time I've worn the things. Oops.

But apparently I'm not the only one suffering from a brain fog—this morning I found a bottle of Finley's milk in the cabinet where we keep his bottles, just sitting there going bad. I swear it wasn't me. Then again, I suppose it's entirely possible that it was, but I think I'll let Tim take the fall.

And speaking of brain degeneration, I bought a trashy celeb-stalking mag today. I was just so disappointed that the most interesting thing in my doc's waiting room was Ladies' Home Journal—whose readers are apparently very interested in failing/rekindled marriages—that I picked up a Star at the King Sooper's when I went to grab more kid supplies.

So I may not remember to take all of the tags off of my new clothes, or properly put things away, but I can sure as heck remember what Miley Cyrus wore in Paris on the first! I'm so glad I don't have any little girls ready to be lead into slutdom by another post-Disney musical whore in the making. Have we learned nothing from Lindsay Lohan?

Seriously?

Sometimes so many bad things happen in a row it starts being kind of funny. And then you get rear ended just days before you finally get to bring your first baby home. Let's just think about the latter part.

I mean, I suppose I've been a mom since I got pregnant. And then more officially at special moments like childbirth, the first diaper change, the first time I got to hold Finley . . . blah blah blah. But I've always felt like I'm not quite a mom until I actually bring my baby home and lose weeks of sleep feeding him in the middle of the night. At the very least I feel like I don't know if I'm going to be even a halfway decent mom until I know I can do this impossibly hard part.

So I'm flipping out a little bit since I have no idea what car I'm bringing Finley home in, and the doctor says that'll be probably Saturday, which I'm hearing as sometime between Saturday and Tuesday. We'll sleep over with him at the hospital tomorrow night, and then pray like mad we all make it through this thing.

Suburbia

I need a book.

It was around 10:00 a.m. when I got the urge to do the dishes. Instead of giving in, I decided to walk to the mailbox. I wasn't shocked by the very suburban rows of trash cans lined up in front of houses (each painted one of four painstakingly bland color combinations). We pay monthly HOA dues to make absolutely sure that (a) the trash is picked up each Tuesday, and (b) nobody paints their house an interesting color.

I was surprised that on my block there were two men at home in the middle of the day and two motorcycles (not lawnmowers) with rumbling motors pulling into separate garages. That the men and the motorcycles should go together is no odd thing—what unemployed man wouldn't have a death wish best fulfilled by a long and bloody skid down the asphalt? Irresponsible vehicle choices aside, I'll hope for the best and assume these people are making mortgage payments by clicking ads online, which I have heard through my television friends to be quite lucrative. And which, I'd imagine, could give someone the same kind of death wish.

And that's the sum of the entertainment happening outside. My stay-at-home motherhood clearly will not be like Rear Window or Desperate Housewives. I've only seen three spiders, so no Arachnophobia here, either. The lawns aren't nice enough for this to be Stepford, and I'm not sure anyone here steps out in their robe and slippers to pick up the paper.

It's after noon and now the trash cans have all been blown onto their backs by the breeze. I tried washing dishes with the window open, but the neighbor's dog wanted a loud cross-fence chat, and I didn't. If I weren't going to leave for the hospital in another hour, I'd bake someone cookies and go introduce myself.

And I know better than to expect some drama from the NICU—it isn't the coma ward after all—unless a set of twins has been separated at birth, or there's a case of mistaken paternity. Or mistaken maternity, which, thanks to IVF, is a thing now, and has provided us with several movie and TV plot twists over the past few years.

You can plainly see that having no book has forced me spend hours honing my mental acuity with BrainAge, which in turn has given me way too much brain power to spend looking out my window for fun.

As a result, I need a book.

The Mom Club

So when I was dealing with infertility (and really, to some extent you never stop dealing with infertility), I always felt like there was an exclusive Mom Club just for women with kids, most of whom did the whole pregnancy thing as well. These people went through the whole L&D process, got their stretchmarks, did the whole no-sleep newborn thing, and are somewhere in the middle of raising their little ones.

I hated not being a part of the club.

You know how in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" the main chick as a kid feels all bad about not sitting with the cute blonde girls at lunch? That was me. Relief Society meetings, social gatherings, work gatherings—all of these things were a nightmare at some point because I was not welcome in the Mom Club, and therefore knew nothing about the whole momming process, and could not complain about fat'n'happies at all. And while realizing that "feeling left out" is the stupidest part of infertility, it stung.

But now I have officially inducted myself into the Mom Club, and by authority of doubling my pants size and finding angry stripes all over my expanded and somewhat jellyish body, I'm going to say the following:

Sure, we all look at old pictures of ourselves and think life might be better if we were still that skinny. If we still fit into our jeans from high school. If sexy in our bedrooms meant the same thing it means on TV. Heck, I've done it since my metabolism started slowing down (which is how I describe the year I learned how to bake).

But I was right about making the trade. It was a great trade. I say we give ourselves a collective break, and call stretch marks and baby weight a thing of beauty because they are proof we did something awesome, and made the necessary sacrifices. We can realistically say that the physical sacrifices are the easy ones. We can love our bodies because they gave life and bodies to our children. The price was cheap, and we no longer need to complain about paying it.

Here's to C-section scars, jelly bellies, stretch marks in various states of lumpiness, and letting go of things that aren't coming back. And to allowing husbands to redefine what is "hot" to equal what is "you." And when people excluded from the Mom Club tell us to shut it about how sad it is to have a mom bod because we look awesome anyway, let's finally start listening.

Things to Say Again

I'm starting to have things to say again. Things besides all of the day-to-day of being a NICU mom, which I put on Finley's blog at finley.crazycutekids.com. In fact, that's not about me at all. It's all about him. Pictures, video, weight updates, and gushing about kangaroo time. Which is awesome.

I've decided to keep this blog about me. That sounds super selfish, doesn't it? I just figured I need to occasionally think about other things (yes, all things not my children are now "other") for the sake of my long term mental health. And the other day, while looking at a bread bag, I had a thought I wanted to blog about that wasn't about my time in the NICU with the munchkin.

I have no idea what it was, but I do know that for a moment, my brain had exited the hospital and gone somewhere entertaining. Somewhere that wasn't Desperate Housewives' Wisteria Lane. And lately I've even stopped having dreams that take place in real or imagined lands within the World of Warcraft (yeah, I dream in low-quality graphics about killing dragonkin every now and then). Suddenly this entry has turned into a rehashing of my most shameful recreational activities. Where was I?

I'm not saying this blog won't mention Finley or Oliver. But it'll probably be more about how I feel about life with and without them than about them specifically. And Finley's journaling will stay on his blog, and Oliver's will stay in my heart.

For instance, where I talked about how much like Tim Finley looks on Finley's blog, here I might mention how happy I am that we avoided one of my irrational IVF nightmares—that the clinic would take an "any sperm will do" (sing that along with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) attitude toward gamete combining and I'd end up having a kid with, like, George Costanza or something.

Anyway, for a moment I had something to say that escaped even the realm of "gosh I miss my B-cups," and "when will these lumps around my C-section scar go away?" but it left as fast as it came. Oh well, it can't be much to feel sorry about. How interesting could a blog inspired by a bread bag be?

Oliver

I'm a mess. It's been a month and I'm a huge sobbing mess. And if I don't write this I may never blog again, because this post simply has to come first.

On February 10, 2010, at around 2:15 in the afternoon, my firstborn son came into the world. He lived a few moments, and then his special spirit left his tiny body—just under a pound and just over ten inches. And because he lived, Tim gave him a name and a blessing. We named him Oliver Michael Gordon. Oliver is after the Green Arrow, and Michael is after his uncle and his grandfather on my side.

But before he entered the world, he was in the world in my womb with his brother. I know he was there in both spirit and body because in his tiny life's end he became our family's little hero, and he saved his brother's life.

Weeks after my water broke, after I'd met Dr. P, the high-risk obstetrician, I started bleeding. It was the third or fourth time doctors looked at me hopelessly and sent me home to wait for whatever happened next. My babies were still alive and well, but my body would not contain them much longer. I had kept them longer than anyone expected past a membrane rupture (water breaking), but at any moment I could go into labor and lose my sons, whom I had loved and waited for my whole life so far.

As the barrier between my babies and the world they couldn't yet survive grew shorter and shorter, my doctor told me our only chance at survival for even one of our sons would be to deliver our poor waterless baby and try to keep the remaining baby in for as much longer as possible (called a Delayed Interval Delivery, or DID). But Baby B, our little PPROM boy with no water left around him, was way at the top of my uterus, and Baby A, with his full bag of water, had his head blocking the exit. He had been protecting his brother with the support of his own water bag and his larger body sitting over my diminishing cervix.

I was torn between the horrible hope that Baby B would move down so his brother would have a shot at life if I went into labor, and the thread of possibility that I could somehow hold them both in. Part of me understood that even if I could, Baby B moving down would give A a better shot at life if he could stay in even a little longer than his brother if they were both born after viability. But there were weeks left to cross.

I cried and cried over the horrible thought of losing one son to save the other, comforted only by the thought that it wasn't my choice. It was out of my hands and in God's. And in Baby B's. And over the next week, where I had felt only tiny movements before from my struggling son, I had the sensation of him wiggling in his tiny smooshed spot, and over the next days he moved more than ever. And at some point I remember knowing that Baby B would leave us, but Baby A would stay. Facing that thought hurt like Hell, but not as badly as saying goodbye when the time came.

February 8 was a Monday, and I went to see Dr. P for another ultrasound. My sweet little Baby B had somehow fought his way down, and with his little feet he had pushed past his brother's head and taken his place as the first to go. And though I knew it was God's will that this baby should come first, I also knew it was Baby B's choice.

I was scared to death when I left that the baby might just fall out, but Dr. P convinced me I'd have time to get to the hospital. That night I started contracting, and Tuesday morning I was in labor and headed to the hospital.

The doctors did an amniocentesis to make sure A was not infected, since he couldn't stay in if he was. The markers were borderline, but Dr. P was willing to try the procedure. I asked him if he would push Baby A back in if he started coming out too, and Dr. P said yes. And after that, a labor that hadn't been progressing much for about a day took less than an hour to go from "Let's see what happens after my meeting," to "Time to deliver!"

It hurt. There must have been six pairs of hands between my legs, but there had also been a skilled anesthesiologist at my side since the wee hours of the morning. Once little Baby B was born, they sedated me until the procedure was complete. Dr. P worked a complete miracle. He managed to get Baby B out and keep Baby A in while stitching me closed from being almost fully dilated. At one point, under the influence of all those drugs, I apparently told Dr. P he was like God. In truth, I'm sure God was guiding his hands to save my baby and keep me pregnant.

But there was Oliver, as we had finally agreed to call him. By the time everything was over, I knew he was gone. I had felt his precious body leave me, and Tim had seen him wiggle in those small moments of freedom he had before he died. When I got into recovery, they brought us his miniature body to see and hold. It is one of the two most perfect and beautiful things I have ever seen.

His feet were swollen from the brave steps he took to save his brother. His hand sat over his heart with five perfect little fingers. He had Tim's nose and my mouth. His hair was bleach white and too young for color. In many ways, he took after his father. And in my eyes, he was the most wonderful thing to ever enter the world. And he was gone before I ever met him face to face.

I will always mourn that he isn't with us. That I don't get to raise him right now. The life he won't live. That his brother will not meet him until we are reunited in Heaven. But I rejoice that he waits for us there. And he has family with him. And I am honored and blessed beyond imagination that he came to us. That I am his mother, and Tim is his father. That my baby boy has a little savior who will one day smile and laugh when they meet, remembering a distant past where they shared a too-small room and did their darnedest to keep each other alive.

I will always cry over that last moment I held him and the pictures a charitable organization took of our little family when it was finally the three of us. I will always miss him. I will love him forever and ever. And maybe someday, I won't be in so much pain every time I think of my firstborn son. But today it has been only a month.

And I am a mess.