How We Got Gus

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.