AI've put off writing this post for quite some time, mainly because I wasn't really sure what to say.
People ask you a lot of questions when you are pregnant/a mother. Lots of the time I just make stuff up to say - half of the time saying something off the wall to be a smart alec and to point out the inappropriateness of asking such personal/random questions of people. (spoiler alert), yes, that means that no, I really am not waiting for Addie to clean my entire house, nor do I expect her to actually speak her mind to tell me what she wants -it's just way easier to say than the obvious - yes, I am aware my house is a wreck and the floor needs to be dusted/vacuumed/mopped - and if I knew why my daughter was crying don't you think I would be doing what she needed to stop it?
Seriously, people ask the most random of questions. But I really didn't have much of an answer to these so I just dodged them - how did it feel for you to have your daughter in the NICU for a week? What was it like for you to go home without your baby? Aren't you worried about her having more seizures or having lasting damage from them? and the most recent - Have you been thinking a lot about where you were at this time last year now that Addie is about to be 1 years old? To be blunt, I try not to talk too much about that week for a plethora of reasons. 1) I feel badly talking about it because so many others parent's stories are way worse than mine and ended up badly... I got my baby and she seems fine - so I feel guilty about talking about it. 2) Speaking of guilt, I feel a lot of that - whether or not I really could have done anything about it, the fact remains that I feel guilty - for being stubborn about a C-section, for not switching doctors at the beginning, for not saying something to the nurses sooner or not demanding they watch her more... for a lot of reasons really. It was so weird today - one of our friends had a baby at the same hospital that we had Addie. Addie and I went up to see them and it was surreal. They had Andrea, the same baby nurse that Addie had. The whole time there felt so odd - the drive there was familiar - we drove it more than 20 times in a week. Everything seemed the same, like time had stood still - yet things were drastically different. I wanted to take her to the NICU to see Ms. Donna - to remind her how much her work means to people.
11 months and 2 weeks ago was one of the best days of my life - regardless of how it happened, we go to meet our little girl and I thought that the "hard part" was over. Not that that I thought parenting would be easy, but that since her birth was so difficult, the "drama" was over and we could go home and just be happy together. Flash forward to day 2 of my life when within the period of 30 min we went from putting our new baby into her car seat to go home, to watching her be whisked away by a team of physicians going to perform a myriad of tests on her and we could just " go grab lunch or take a walk..." Right. It felt like a never-ending sucker punch to the gut. Honestly I didn't talk a lot about it because I didn't have the words to say - everything I could think of seemed undeserving of the situation. It was surreal and odd and unnatural to go home and sleep at home for longer than I did when I was at work. I came home the first night and closed her door and didn't' reopen it until we came home later that week, baby in tow.
I've been thinking about exactly "how I feel" about Addie turning one. I was telling Lee the other day that I think the appropriate word is oddly "relieved." Most blogs of moms that I read say "scared" or "sad I'm losing my baby" or something to that aspect. I say relieved because I think that this next year will be the start of something new. Because of the seizures and because of the drama of her birth, Addie was left with 2 spots on her brain that are dead - and no one knew what ramifications (if any) they would carry. I feel like I haven't really breathed in the past year - every twitch, every odd cry, every milestone, I feel like I've watched every move she's made and checked off an imaginary checklist. Sit - check. Crawl - check. Words - check. Steps - check. And finally walk - check. I finally feel like we can be normal and not be hypersensitive about her development. I heard the doctors last summer when they said that we didn't have to worry- but at that point I was over pretty much anything the doctors had to say looking at their track record.
So relieved that this past year is almost over. It's been a great one. I really never knew that I could be so happy and that I'd actually be ok with and almost enjoy having to get up early on a Saturday. There is nothing like rolling out of bed and walking into her room to see her smiling face pop up over the crib railing. These next few years will probably be my favorite until she is in high school - and I couldn't be more excited to live life with my little girl, hubby, and pups.
Some women say they are born to be mothers, others say you learn as you go. Me, I was thrown into the deep end - but I've learned that I can swim.
