I’ve been doing a lot of talking…yapping, lately, about having a three-year old. I’ve been lamenting to people about how challenging it is and how I just “don’t know what to do with him”. Well today I discovered exactly what I need to do. I need to just BE with him. Today, inspired by a friend who spoke the other day of making this a practice with her daughter, I decided to be fully present with my child. It was a fleeting thought and took little too no effort, but produced the most amazing result. At the same time that I experienced this moment of clear resolve, I told him I’d put on his favorite music. The music came on and, I believe, diffused me somehow. It distracted me, maybe, from my perpetual restlessness. The restlessness that pulls at me all the time to go put on the tea kettle, to look at my cellphone for the 100,000th time, to go wash a dish or two. All little things but adding up to a lot of time only being partially present with my son. He must have really felt that I was there, because he became giddy and happy - REALLY happy, laughing and dancing and smiling so BIG and beautiful. We were hugging, laughing dancing, smiling, singing all with him in my lap. Not really “doing” anything but just being together. It was so simple. A few days ago, in my moms discussion group, our group leader, who is as supportive as she is wise, encouraged me to make a conscious effort to spend quality time really engaging with him. “Whatever you have, give…” she told me. “Usually the child that is challenging us the most is the one that really needs us.” It is easy to lavish my one year old with positive attention and affection from noon until night because she is not willful and seemingly uncontrollable like my three year old. She is in the honeymoon period between 12 and 18 months, which I think of as the “mini-toddler” period. Adorable and babylike, but mobile and just curious enough for it to be cute and not taxing. She does need me, and admittedly I am very attached to her as well in a way that I wasn’t in the same way with my first, I assume because he is a boy. But she doesn’t need me the way he does right now. He is three, and three is such a big one. He is trying to make sense of the world around him as well as inside him. He’s trying to understand relationships - his own, and other people’s. He is learning more and faster than he will at any other time in his life. It is a lot. And although he looks “so big”, he is still a baby. He needs me to be here now with him. I accept the challenge. Yes, it is a challenge for all of us! A challenge not to hover in “partial presence” with one eye on the cellphone. But perhaps nothing is more important than this. This is it, after all. THIS IS IT! Nothing compares to forgetting what happened and not caring about what will happen and just being right in the middle of the moment with my child.
A year ago today, my husband I were picking at our Valentine’s dinner and talking about how we both felt off. About an hour later the off feeling turned into contractions, and a few hours after that, we were at the hospital, getting ready to meet our daughter. I can’t believe it has been a whole year. Although I feel like Gia has been with me forever, it also feels like just yesterday that she was sleeping on my chest in the creaky hospital bed curled in a tiny ball. Breastfeeding her has been wonderful from the first minute we started. My whole experience of parenting her, in fact, has felt so effortless and joyful. Certainly for me, but probably for every parent, having a second child is an entirely different and much more relaxed and enjoyable process than your first. Of course. The first time around you learn - the hard way. With your second child, the shock of parenthood has worn off and you are accustomed to being exhausted and selfless. For me, that took several months of adjustment, and after a relatively harrowing last few months of pregnancy and a long and intense childbirth it is understandable. They say the first three months are the “fourth trimester”, but I believe the whole first year is an extended postpartum period in which mother and child are still very much intertwined, especially when they are breastfeeding. Because I still nurse my daughter during the night, I still feel very physically connected to her and I cherish that bond. It feels like something we both need that feeds us both. Happy happy birthday to you, my beautiful sweet daughter. My mom says having a girl is different, and she is right. I love you with all my heart.
PART ONE
I was about seven months pregnant with my first child when I found out I had gestational diabetes. I took the first of two glucose tests (which are routinely given by OB/GYNs) and my blood sugar was 199. My OB called and told me that she wasn’t going to bother with the second test and was sending me to an endocronologist immediately. I didn’t take the news well. In addition to having the normal array of pregnancy fears and a bit of anticipatory anxiety about childbirth, I am an anxious person to begin with and a hypocondriac to boot. The perfect storm of misery in this situation. Diabetes sounded terrifying and I immediately went to a very bad place in my mind, worrying about the baby and how everything was going to turn out. My doctor was well-known in the area and rumored to be “type A” but I was reassured, “that’s how you want an endocronologist to be”. My husband joined me at my first appointment, and we sat across from the doctor as she asked me some questions about my history. She then explained what the initial plan was going to be, which I was relieved did not sound too bad. I was to meet with a diabetic nutritionist and begin following a diet designed to keep my blood sugar within a tight range (under 90 fasting, under 120 one hour after a meal). She mentioned that gestational diabetes sometimes required insulin therapy, but she said she did not anticipate me needing it. Within a short number of days, I was on both short and long acting insulin several times a day. In addition I was regularly checking my blood sugar with a glucose meter as well as testing my urine for ketones. Suddenly, my pregnancy became extremely medical. Diabetes took over and I split my time between doctors appointments and excessive worrying. Only a few weeks ago, all I knew was that Gestational Diabetes was a serious complication of pregnancy. I didn’t really understand how it happened or what it meant. Needless to say, I quickly studied up. Gestational diabetes is one of the most common pregnancy complications. It occurs when the pancreas is unable to meet the increased demand for insulin caused by pregnancy. Most commonly, women are placed on a diet and exercise regime and asked to monitor their blood sugar. More severe cases require insulin therapy and often intravenous insulin during delivery, which I had with both of my kids. There are two kinds of insulin - long acting and short acting. The long acting is designed to be slowly released into your system steadily over time and is usually given at night and in the morning. The short acting insulin is designed to give your body the insulin boost while your body is digesting a meal. Gestational diabetes typically worsens progressively as the pregnancy goes on and and then levels out as labor draws close. As the illness takes a stronger hold in the later weeks, the insulin is incrementally increased. I have been told by specialists that even at my highest dosages I did not have too bad of a case of diabetes, but it sure didn’t feel that way with all the extra attention I was getting from my doctors. The hardest part of the daily experience of it all was testing my blood. Pricking my finger and then waiting three seconds for the blood meter to spit out its reading was so nerve-wracking. Diabetes is a shape-shifter. Just when you think you see a pattern emerging, it changes. You get a scarily high number out of nowhere after eating a salad. Or, anticipating a high reading you eat perfectly sized portions and then get way too low of a number. You just never know. That uncertainty coupled with the stakes if your blood sugar is an unsafe number make you feel…well, unsafe. The anxiety unfortunately kept building on itself. I had a bunch of books and would pick through them fixating on the worst possible outcomes. I couldn’t cope with the idea that somehow I could have gotten this illness out of nowhere and it was going to hurt my baby. My beautiful, perfect baby that I had been wanting for so long. It felt unbearably unfair. I started checking my blood sugar more often than I needed to and freaking out if the number was out of range. I surprised my doctor when I agreed to set an alarm every night for 3 am to wake up and eat a handful of nuts. Eventhough it had been her suggestion, she thought I was crazy. When I told her that at my baby shower I had left my friends to walk on the treadmill after lunch she got worried and told me I was being too good of a patient and needed to chill out. It was so, so hard to do. As it is, pregnancy is a lesson in relinquishing control (at least, it was for me). Having diabetes felt almost karmic. Like I had been given this to deal with in order to teach me to relax and not worry too much. Through spending so much time together and being like-minded in many ways, I became friends with my doctor. She appreciated the neurotic lawyer in me that wanted to hash out every detail with her every time I saw her. Our appointments always lasted over an hour because we would get to talking feminism and get eachother going. I felt close to her and I did trust her. “The baby is going to be FINE, I promise” she kept telling me. Knowing what kind of a woman she was, I knew she wouldn’t say that if she didn’t really believe it. After what seemed like an absolute eternity, the day finally came. As promised, I was swiftly connected to an insulin drip and my blood sugar was closely monitored. Like a dramatic final act to a nine month opera, Enzo kept me laboring for 26 hours. When it was all over, some hours later when the fog was starting to lift, Dr. Moore arrived to tell me that my blood sugar was back to normal. The placenta was out and had taken the diabetes with it. It was very hard to believe at first! Although it had only been a couple of months that I had been living as a diabetic, I could not imagine eating the way I had before and not checking my blood sugar. Soon enough though, I was immersed in life with a newborn and didn’t notice how much time I had back now that I was no longer living with diabetes. All of my time was consumed with nursing. Luckily, breastfeeding was the best thing for me to have been doing as my body readjusted. Breastfeeding has been shown to help stabilize blood sugar, not to mention the fact that it speeds up postpartum weight loss. It also reduces the child’s chances of developing diabetes or becoming obese later in life. I nursed, and nursed and nursed. At three months postpartum, I returned to the doctor for a glucose tolerance test to make sure the diabetes was completely gone. At the time, I was so sleep deprived from breastfeeding all night that I slept on the examining table in the dark while I waited for my blood to be drawn. My blood sugar worries were gone and had been replaced with the exhaustion and bewilderement of new parenthood. My test confirmed that in fact my blood sugar had returned to normal. My life, however, had just been turned upside down. And so I turned to that, to the joy and the journey of being a mother and my relationship with diabetes enjoyed a reprieve…
