Peter Gwydion

Impossibly, in two weeks Peter Gwydion will be one year old.  Emotions are running high right now.

I still feel acute pangs of jealousy and frustration when encountering pregnant women, or when parents talk about their “next baby” with certainty and without a second thought.  They know that they will have another pregnancy, and feel totally confident that it will be as uneventful as the first, resulting in a healthy term baby.  I am envious of their total confidence that sore backs, swollen feet and vaginal birth - the natural consequences of a healthy pregnancy - will be the biggest trials they face.  I am frustrated by their discussions of these “hardships,” while they remain blissfully unaware of what it feels like to watch your tiny baby struggle for his life and feel it’s your fault for selfishly bringing him into a world that, for him, was full of hardship from the very moment he was born.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article discussing the lasting sorrow that parents of NICU babies experience.  The emotions surrounding having an extremely premature infant have been likened by some experts to losing a child.  We lost the healthy newborn that we expected and the home birth we dreamed of.  We lost ubiquitous rites of passage that were important to us, like taking pregnancy photos, attending childbirth classes and a normal baby shower - one where I was pregnant with a big, gorgeous belly, excited about feathering a soft nest for my beautiful child to land in.

I know that ultimately our experience is much richer than the norm.  There is not a single day where I take Gwyn, or his good health, for granted.  Lately “amazed” doesn’t begin to describe my feelings as I look at him pulling up on the furniture, babbling and getting ready to crawl.  It seems impossible that he’s the same baby who was so tiny that I held his whole body in one hand, carefully placed to avoid all of the wires and IV’s he was hooked up to.  I am grateful in a way that only NICU mothers can understand for every little thing, because the little things represent so many problems we miraculously avoided.  He laughs at a silly face Daddy makes, and I am often grateful that the oxygen he required didn’t make him blind.  He bounces in his jumper, I am grateful that he doesn’t have cerebral palsy and will be able to walk normally.  He wets three diapers in half an hour, I am grateful that vancomycin didn’t destroy his kidneys.  All of this factors into our daily life together, and unless Lacuna Inc. opens a Bradford office, the memory of Gwyn’s babyhood will include ventilators, antibiotics and blood transfusions as well as nursing, naps and diapers.

So, as I consider the anniversary of his very early birth, I am joyous and proud.  I’m so grateful for my now-healthy baby - but I am far from “over it.”

Wearing the CPAP a week after birth