How We Got Gus
It’s 3:32 AM, and I’m being pulled from whatever level of
REM it is that feels the thickest when you’re being roused from it. I had finally been sucked into this glorious
tomb of sleep at 2:28, less than an hour ago.
I groan, roll over to the cold side of the bed, pull the stirring body
of my 6 month-old son close to my own and push an exposed boob toward him. “What side was I on? Didn’t I just feed him an hour ago?”
Everything is a disconnected haze except the numbers on the clock, which are
anchors in the otherwise drifty sea of night.
Hungry or not, he swiftly latches on (he knows the drill), and I wait,
watching his little fingers close and open absent-mindedly, groping around my
chest until his sucking slows and he is milk-drugged and still again. I roll back to my side of the bed and try to
sink back into sleep before the next round.
You cannot complain.
You went into battle for this.
You cannot complain.
Six years ago, we conceived my daughter the way people who
get to take things for granted do. We
had a bunch of sex, got pregnant, delighted in every normal ultrasound, and we
were so confident in the process that at 30 weeks, we ditched the hospital
birth plan for a homebirth we very much believed in. We spent the last month readying our little cabin for her
arrival. My daughter, however, in her
first act as a militant introvert, decided that she would never be coming
out. And by week 43, I made the
defeated pilgrimage to the hospital where I was monitored, timed, poked,
drugged, and eventually cut open, and my little redhead was pulled out,
literally kicking and screaming.
But then there she was.
And I wondered what the hell I had been doing for the past 32 years that
had seemed so important.
He kicks my arm, and I pull out an earplug. I listen to a single, flaccid cry that gives
out at the end. He’s back down. It’s
4:05 AM. I was almost dreaming, and now
I am not.
We had really only talked about having one. Hazel filled us with so much of everything
that there didn’t seem to be room left to be filled with anything more. We dismissed myths about only children being
spoiled or weird, and we enjoyed the relative calm of our life with one little
person who more than flooded our hearts on a daily basis.
A friend had told me that I would know if it was time for
another baby when I had the nagging feeling that someone was missing. Neither of us had anything close to that
feeling.
But suddenly she was two, and then almost three, and we
could see the simplicity of “baby” morphing into the crazy hilarity of
“toddler” and then the complexity of “little person,” complete with opinions
and ideas and fat rolls that were quickly smoothing out into muscled
limbs. We watched as our early 30s
started to drift into our “late 30s.” Our lives since her birth were the most
fulfilled and purposeful they had ever been, and we started to feel that having
another might let us wring out the sponge of joy a little longer.
So we pushed aside all of our hesitations and decided to just
give it a whirl and see what would happen. And as often happens (if one is so
fortunate), within a few months I found out I was pregnant again. My husband was out of town when I took the test. I sat on the toilet, waiting for the rush of
joy, but instead was met with a quite unexpected and overwhelming wave of grief
and panic. I watched my daughter putter
around the house with her funny projects, and I cried. I didn’t want to have to share. I didn’t want to have to make room. I didn’t want to be pregnant. I felt we had made a terrible mistake.
And just over a week later, I wasn’t pregnant anymore. Scar tissue from my C-section had blocked my
left fallopian tube, and the pregnancy got stuck. And then it ruptured. And
while my husband was returning home from his trip overseas, I was in the
hospital having the broken tube, and the pregnancy I didn’t think I wanted,
removed.
He breathes heavily and I stare at the ceiling now, unable
to fall back to sleep. It’s 4:12. I’m thinking about what to pack in my daughter’s
lunch. I don’t have much room on my
side of the mattress because he’s right in the middle of the bed. I curl into fetal position with my back to
him. I try yoga breathing
exercises. I know my window to sleep is
shrinking with each breath he takes.
One of my legs is tingling and I try to shake it without waking him
up. At 4:40 I manage to sink back into
sleep.
I healed and dusted myself off, and we decided that we
really did think we wanted to try again, despite the now higher chance of a
repeat ectopic pregnancy. After a few
cycles, I held another positive test in my hand. This time the idea of a baby took a back seat to the medical
drama of blood tests and ultrasounds.
As early as is possible, we went in and saw a little shadow of a thing that
we were relieved to learn was a pregnancy in the uterus. We watched the teeniest little flicker of a
heartbeat, that magical pulse.
After we had gotten through the proverbial woods, however,
the reality of the situation dropped in my lap. Another baby. This time
it was happening. And even though I was
grateful, I was battling the reservation that settled in again when I thought
of making room for another person.
I was still letting the idea steep when we went in for my 9
week appointment. We were chatting with
the ultrasound tech about kids and the mystery of our daughter’s red hair when
her wand froze, her face fell and the room got silent. The screen was still. I heard, “Honey, I’m so sorry,” as if it
were spoken from the end of a long tunnel.
I stared at the unmoving outline of a head and the beautifully stacked
curve of a spine, and I knew that it had been an alive thing, and that now it
wasn’t. And I suddenly had never wanted
a thing more than I wanted something on that screen to stir.
30 minutes into a dream about sailing on a cruise ship
that I forgot to pack for, he starts thrashing around again. My face contorts, and I am crying, too tired
to produce tears. “I can’t do
this. I can’t DO this anymore.” This is torture. I want to get up and pass him to my husband, but I’m too tired to
move. My face hurts from being so
tired. My skin hurts. I open my shirt to him, and he nestles
in. It is 5:36.
It was just before Christmas when, having turned down a
glass of wine, I announced to my family that I was pregnant with our “third
time’s the charm” baby. I had a healthy
right tube, and we now knew that it worked.
The next day, despite insisting that I was just a little
“backed up” from my prenatal vitamin, I started feeling bad, and by the
following day I was having a hell of a time convincing myself that things were
okay. Still, I was scared and in a
million shades of denial, so I waited too long. By the time we drove to the ER, my entire abdomen was filled with
blood. Another rupture.
In an inexplicable turn of events, the “third time’s a
charm” pregnancy had somehow floated to my tubeless side and had managed to get
itself lodged in the nub of the tube that had been removed a year prior. This was partly why we missed the signs; the
pain I was feeling wasn’t coming from the right place. As I blinked through the anesthesia fog, the
surgeon softly explained that she had to reopen my c-section cut to get to the
source of the bleeding. She had to cut
out the rest of the tube and a wedge of my uterus. She put her hand on my leg (which doctors are not prone to do
often) and said, “Ali, you almost
didn’t make it.” And I knew that
“making it” meant living, and that living was all about my girl, the kid who
still slept with my old nightshirt and took big inhales off it, even if I was
lying right there next to her.
He finishes nursing and his eyes look like little black
marbles in the dark. The gray of
morning is beginning to yawn behind the slats of the blinds. His mouth spreads into a gummy, charming
smile and I know he’s not going back down. “Noooo…!” I plead to him and toss a
toy in his direction, praying that he will somehow entertain himself for ten
more minutes. Just ten more minutes.
For six months we didn’t
discuss babies. I looked at my
daughter’s freckled nose, her eyes wide-set like mine, and knew that nothing
was more important than me being here to draw pictures of cows and boats on her
back before bed. Gratitude for my
breath, my life, for my little family, propelled me through those six
months.
Gratitude though, like all
other emotions, is not a thick, evenly felt gift that you hold with you every
waking moment; it’s too weighty. Instead, it drifts out of the immediate now
and becomes something more like memory.
It takes the form of a stated fact (I am grateful), but fails to
continue to be a feeling in your bones, no matter how you try to cling onto it.
Luckily, like gratitude,
the baggage emotions like fear and grief can also only keep you in their grips for
so long before they, too, begin to soften and keep their distance.
The following summer, as I
drifted back and forth in the hammock, I watched my daughter filling up her
little green watering can and making her way to the strawberry bed, and I was
suddenly hit with the feeling my friend had warned me about. “Oh my God.
Someone is missing!” I could
almost see the outline of a pudgy person, a boy, toddling around on uneasy legs
where my now tall and gangly almost-five year old busied herself in play. It was like realizing halfway to work that
you forgot your belt. Or your
pants. Someone was missing!
The feeling was not a
fleeting one. I pictured this sort of
cosmic window above my head behind which a little person could be seen peering
down, his face pressed to the glass. I
am not religious, and I generally do not believe in things like cosmic windows,
but this image was so vivid that I couldn’t dismiss it. It lived alongside the sadness of knowing
that my brush with “not making it” had likely shaken us up too much to broach
the subject ever again. Then one day my
husband quietly said, “I want to try to have another baby.”
So we called our doctors
and we got second and third opinions.
We made emergency plans and decided that if we could just have one more
chance, just one more, we would be able to live with whatever the outcome
was.
I was thirty-seven, and
while having a bunch of sex had worked for us in the past, this time it seemed
not to be happening. One cycle rotated
into the next, and every negative test dropped me into a dark place. I tried to dig up that feeling of contented
gratitude for having one healthy, fantastic kid, but then hope would flare up
in its place, and I’d become adamant.
It took six more months, and over the course of the six months, I had
given up six painful times. I
apologized over and over to the little boy looking through the window, and I
scolded myself over and over for not being able to let it go, for knocking gratitude
and contentedness out of the way like a bully, for feeling that my daughter
wasn’t enough when I knew she most certainly should be.
And then there was a
positive. And there was blood work and
ultrasounds. There was a pregnancy in
the uterus. There was a normal 9 week
ultrasound with a wiggling, squirming little being. I dreaded every appointment and braced myself for loss, for
stillness, for dramatic gushes of blood.
Instead, 37 weeks later, I was handed a small, warm package that I was
told contained a boy, and I began to believe in things like cosmic windows and
messages from the sky.
Gus and I are awake now, but the rest of the family still
sleeps. He squeals and makes himself
laugh by sucking in air, a new sound he’s trying out. He grabs is toes and rocks back and forth. He clutches a fistful of my hair and shows
me his gums. I have 14 minutes before I
need to get up, make his sister’s lunch, coerce her into wearing her puffy
jacket. I wonder how I’m going to drive
her safely to school when my eyes are seeing double and the weight of
exhaustion forces my eyelids down with every blink. I cannot do this day.
Most days I am a
zombie, and my mind is plagued by the negative thoughts of what I’m doing
wrong. “I’m not loving enough,” “The house should be cleaner.” “I’m enabling
his shitty sleeping,” “I keep forgetting to hug my husband,” and the big one,
“I should be more grateful for Gus.”
Every second I should be grateful for Gus. But when I’m trying to make dinner, and he won’t let me put him
down, so I’m holding him with one arm while trying to kick open the oven to
toss in some semblance of dinner, I forget to feel gratitude. When he blasts through a diaper while I’m in
the middle of grocery shopping, and I discover that I have forgotten to stock the
diaper bag, I forget to feel gratitude.
When I’m in the shower, my hair full of shampoo, and I hear him wail,
already awake from a mere 12 minute nap, I do not feel gratitude.
And I go to bed many
nights feeling guilty and ashamed for all of the negative thoughts I battled throughout
the day. For not staring at my children
in wonder all the time, for snapping at my daughter when she kicks her shoes
off at the bottom of the stairs, and for not clutching them closely enough and
acknowledging the little miracles they are every second of the day.
But that is not how
gratitude works. Like fear and grief
and desire and even love, it is too big and profound and cumbersome to carry
around in our hearts every minute; we wouldn’t get anything else done. Instead, it lives like ocean waves,
sometimes nudging us a little with chilly, delightful splashes, and sometimes
knocking us completely off our feet.
Yet somehow, running on the fumes of only tiny sips of
sleep and looking ahead at a day full of mundane domestic errands, milk spilled
all over the counter, and shoes to pick up from the foot of the stairs, I can
still take a moment in the early morning to stare at this simple creature with
his enchanting eyes and ridiculous
dimple, and I am reminded of his journey and of his patience at the window and
of the weight of what I have been handed.
