The Angst I Felt at the Prospect of Having an Average Child ... and Will She Ever Forgive Me for (Even for the Short-Term) Believing That About Her?

There was no question leading up to the days before her birth last June that my fourth daughter, Clara Hope, had some large shoes to fill. I think most babies coming into the world with older siblings do to a degree, but poor Clara has the gift (or curse) of truly incredible sisters.

Although her next oldest sister, Gabrielle, had by far the worst birth story, Clara's pregnancy was the most difficult (when they tell you that childbirth gets more difficult when you approach forty, they're not lying). I was uncomfortable all the time, my feet swelled, my blood pressure fluctuated, I had unspeakable migraines, I had weird bouts of confusion and pain that were ultimately tied to potassium and other vitamin deficiencies, and so on. Because of the drama of Gabrielle's birth, there was no question that Clara was going to be a C-section delivery, then we found out she was breech, so this opened up a whole new can of worms.

Anyway, her C-section was scheduled for a Friday morning, but my water broke Wednesday afternoon and she was born that evening.

The day after she was born, we were informed that Clara had failed her newborn hearing screening. They'd need to repeat it the day we were discharged. When they repeated the hearing test, she still failed. They set up an appointment for several months in advance and let us bring her home.

Once home, Clara decided that she did not like to nurse. Ironically, I've never been one of those vehement "breast feed or die" women, but at the same time, I've had incredibly good luck with my first three daughters and they breast fed almost to a year old. I didn't know how upsetting it would be for me that Clara wouldn't nurse, but it was terrible!

And then I got to feel like a selfish jerk for the first of many times, because here I was having a pity party about my baby not wanting to nurse and she was literally wasting away. She was at the doctor's every day for a week while we tried to figure out how to handle it (in case you're wondering, I became slave to the breast pump and we supplemented it with formula ... it was a very long summer).

We worked very hard to get her weight up, and things seemed to be going well, and then out of the blue, Clara stopped breathing one night. I was out with my oldest daughter celebrating her 21st birthday, and when I got home the baby was coughing and coughing, which she'd evidently been doing all night, then suddenly she stopped and couldn't breathe. It was a nightmare I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. They kept her in the hospital under observation for two days, and it was unspeakable. She was such a trooper, but the rest of us were collective messes.

The big stuff settled down after that; well, as much as possible with four children, a dog, a cat, and all adults working full-time jobs. I took Clara to her three-hour hearing screening, and she passed it with flying colors. Life is good.

And yet, I have this problem ...

Clara's sister Gabrielle is sixteen months older than she is. What that means, of course, is that it's impossible not to do a bit of comparing, no matter how hard you try to avoid it (and Gabby's so young still that it's hard to avoid).

Gabrielle walked early. She talked early. She is, at the age of two, the most naturally funny human being I've ever met. Her speech was slightly delayed by a year's worth of ear infections, but once she got tubes put in her vocabulary has taken off like a rocket. As a very young baby, her receptive language was unbelievable, and that has continued.

When she was a year old, Gabby said Mama, Dada, Ari (her sister), Mimi (grandmother), Howard (the dog), kitty, cheese, cracker, more, all done, and so on.

Clara says Dada. Possibly Mama. There are rumors that she said water once, but no witnesses.

When Gabby was Clara's age, she was building block towers that meet milestones set for three-year-olds. Clara bangs two blocks together on a good day.

I see what I'm typing, and I hate it. Gabby's my favorite child and is going to be an engineer, and Clara is going to be a bank teller, right? No, that's not it at all.

I have two other daughters, one an exceptional musician and linguist (I could brag for hours but I won't) and one a competitive gymnast (same). These two girls are superstars.

If our beliefs about Clara are tied to her crawling well over a full month after Gabrielle did, what is going to happen when you add in phrases like "Fulbright Scholar" and "elite gymnast"?

And so for awhile, we believed that Clara was just going to be an average child. In a family of academics, this is something that I think Jeff and I struggled with silently and separately ... what if Clara wasn't as smart as the others?

We've gotten to know Miss Clara Hope pretty well by now, though, as I'm sure you can imagine. I look into her eyes, see the sparkle, and wonder how I could ever have doubted that her mind is just as brilliant (and likely just as diabolical, at times) as every one of her sisters'.

My mother kept saying to me that, even if she wasn't smart, she wouldn't be loved any less, and this was always, always the truth.

Now we know that she is smart--too smart, not to beat a dead horse ... she sits at her day care and steals pacifiers from the other babies, laughs, then gives them back; she locates every possible piece of detritus on the floor (it doesn't matter if the floor was just vacuumed) and gets it into her mouth; she waves bye-bye and claps her hands when you say, "Yay, Clara!" and loves playing in her toy kitchen with her sisters.

It took us awhile to realize that Clara is a child that will never do something until she decides that she wants to do it. Not walk, not talk, not crawl (although she started doing that this week), nothing. It occurs to me that we do at times treat Gabby like a trick pony--"You have to see Gabby count to ten ... her Hulk impression ... her rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' ... how she hits the high note in 'Let it Go' ... her block towers."

Nope, Clara saw that writing on the wall and decided to pull this average thing. Too bad we're on to her ... although I think it's been a tremendous learning experience for all of us.

I loved Clara Hope when she was inside me, I loved her the second she was born, and I've loved her every minute since then. I would not love her any less if she was not exceptional like her sisters because I love her for her, which is of course how I got to see that she was never "average" at all, even after I'd resigned myself to it.

I don't know why the idea of an average child was hard for me, but Clara helped me come to terms with it, just before she looked at me again with that sparkle in her eye so much like Gabby's and said, "Mama."

Stillbirths: What Nobody Wants to Talk About

When I read John Irving's The Cider House Rules, one of the lines that always stuck with me was when Wilbur Larch says, when arguing with his protege Homer Wells over the sanctity of life, "I give them what they want, an orphan or an abortion."

And really, it seems like there are three options when a child is conceived:
a) The child is born and raised by a loving family
b) The child is given up for adoption
c) The child is aborted (and I choose to add that this is almost always because the mother feels this is in the        best interest of the child)
d) The child is miscarried in early pregnancy

There is a silent e), though, that no one wants to think about, talk about, or otherwise mention. Those are the babies that are stillborn, that are either born just a little too early to survive or who have some sort of problem (I don't want to use the word deformity) that keeps the pregnancy from being viable.

With scenario a), which is obviously the best option, there is a child born, and children make most people happy.  The child is healthy and wanted and read to and tucked in at night, and it's a win/win for everybody involved.

Scenario b) is a bit stickier, as giving up a baby after carrying it for nine months would, I imagine, be tough.  I also know a couple of people very closely who were adopted as babies or young children, and it definitely plays a role in defining who you are.  With that being said, though, in most cases the child is healthy and wanted and read to and tucked in at night, and it's a win/win for everybody involved.

I will say that, when I had an accidental and unplanned pregnancy when I was seventeen, I considered giving my daughter up for adoption.  Once she started moving, though, I started to know her.  Now, I could never imagine life without having been bettered through being Emily's mother.  She is a treasure (she's the one playing the piano for her sisters here).

Scenario c) is stickier yet.  I think the idea of people running amok having abortions is frightening and disturbing.  That being said, there are times (rape and incest come to mind, or situations where a pregnant woman knows that she will be unable to care for the baby from the start) when I can see where abortions under, say, 8 weeks might be the best thing for both mother and baby.  I pontificate on this issue more here, but let me just say that it is sometimes best for both a fetus and its mother to not be born.  That sounds harsh, but I've seen enough abused kids whose parents blame their existence for all of their problems (and the damaging cloud those kids have been raised under, destroying every shred of self-esteem), enough women destroyed by family estrangement due to pregnancy, and so on.  I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-what's-best-for-everybody.

Scenario d) is quite sad, in large part because some women are prone to miscarriage, so they experience this over and over again.  I have a friend who tried for years to have a child, and she had miscarriage after miscarriage before finally carrying a baby long enough for her to survive.  I have had a miscarriage, and it is distressing, but it usually happens early enough that you haven't made big plans or bought clothes or had a baby shower or even told anybody.

Stillbirth, though, is the worst of all scenarios, in my opinion.

One day, I got a text from "Joanie", someone I am very close to.  It was very clearly an ultrasound picture, and I started jumping up and down with surprised joy.  Joanie already had a precious (and precocious) son, and while I'd speculated that she'd one day have another, this was a treat.

Joanie texted and called regularly as her pregnancy progressed, joyful tales of heartbeats on Doppler and plans for the baby, which Joanie and her husband learned was a girl.

And then one day, I got the news that the latest ultrasound showed a deformation in the baby girl's nuchal cord.  Poor Joanie, who is in the medical field, knew what that meant.  We all hoped and prayed that the next ultrasound would show better news, but instead, it was worse.  The pregnancy was not viable, and the baby would not live to term.

Joanie asked me to come be with her while she figured out if she should induce the birth or let it happen spontaneously.  I knew how serious this was because I do not fly.  My parents decided that it was easier to schlep three kids to Disney World in a station wagon than try to get me on a plane (the one time we did fly to Disney World, I evidently caused such a scene that we drove every time after).

Needless to say, I got on a plane.

When Joanie picked me up at the airport, I noticed that her hand was on her stomach.  It was caressing her stomach.  And as the weekend went on, her hand rarely left the gentle bump of her stomach.  She loved that baby, loved her dearly, and the fact that she knew the baby would  never reach viability was just terrible.  As I write this, I'm thinking about the gentle touch of a mother's hand on her baby, the being living within her, and I am crying like you cannot imagine.

Anyway, Joanie's baby was stillborn, and it was just as traumatic as you would expect.  She texted me a picture, and the baby was tiny and gray (she had died in utero before Joanie ever reached the hospital), but she was beautiful, absolutely beautiful.  In typical Joanie fashion, she noted that she had the same nose as her son.

The thing is, though, if you are visibly pregnant, you generally have a baby to show for it.  If you have an abortion, it's rare that you would show as anything more than a little fatter around the waistline, so no one would have to know.

A stillbirth, though ...

Everyone knows you are pregnant ... but then suddenly you aren't.  A lot of people, including Joanie and her husband, had bought stuff for their baby girl.  The baby's grandmothers had already gone nuts with shopping sprees.  I myself had bought at least two items (which, and this could be seen as either morbid or an honor, Gabrielle has worn.

I don't know how Joanie managed to survive the questions as her baby bump dissipated.  I know she cried a lot, that she was very sad and angry, but I do not know how she handled the issue with her colleagues (she was far enough along to have told her co-workers and superiors). I don't know what the neighbors thought, or her friends that lived close by.

I do know that I am closer to Joanie than almost anyone, and I had no idea how to handle it.  I mean, do you say, "I am so sorry!", or "What can I do to make this better?", or even "Wow, you look great, you've obviously lost some weight"?

There is no etiquette for stillbirths.  Instead the women who arguably need the most support are left with the greatest void.  I mean, sure, there's counseling, but the idea of paying someone to listen (and what are you going  to say, anyway ... "My baby died inside my womb and I'm freaking sad?") is kind of...I don't know, sterile, I guess.

I know that I talked to Joanie a lot, but I did not talk about the baby, who they named H.J., unless she broached the subject.  For a long time, this did not happen.

Then one day, Joanie had another baby.  Her son was born a couple of months before Gabrielle, and I spent some time in the hospital with her before her husband got there, and she was talking about the difference between her pregnancies with her older son and with H.J.  It hit me hard, that she had gotten to the point where she could talk about it as just any other event. I was very proud of her.

By some strange fluke that involves chlamydia (not either of us having it, but we sort of have an inside joke about it now), Joanie happened to be there when I was in labor with Gabrielle.  She was talking, again very comfortably, about the difference in the births of both of her sons and with H.J.  I should also note, in case you haven't read Gabrielle's birth story, that Joanie was the rock I leaned on when things got bad. Her strength is amazing.

The thing is, why do we avoid talking about stillbirths?  I think Joanie is an exception in that she is able to talk about H.J. in casual conversation without going to pieces.  People talk about abortions they've had, children they've given up for adoption, even early miscarriages without batting an eye; they just take this as a matter of course.

I guess I am curious about one thing.  How many people have had stillbirths that I am not aware of?  I mean, I'm sort of in Joanie's inner circle, so I know the whole story, but I wonder sometimes how many stillbirths I've been woefully unaware of?

What do you think?  Why is it that it's easier to talk about early miscarriages, children given up for adoption, children that have died young, and even abortions than stillbirths?

I would love to get your thoughts on this as I can't seem to wrap my head around it.

**This post is dedicated to H.J., a baby I love dearly and deeply and will never forget** 

That Blessed Title "Aunt"

On April 8, I became an aunt for the first time when Pete, the son of my brother Adam and his fiancee Colleen, was born.

Being an aunt is a feeling like none I've ever before encountered. I knew on the surface, of course, that both Adam and Mary had a very special relationship with Addie from the very beginning, and both Mary (and, of course, Jon, who once passed out in a closet while playing hide and seek with Addie) and Adam (and, of course, Colleen, who truly gets little girls) have been amazing positive influences with Belle as well.

My mother once told me that being a grandmother is the perfect reward for raising children. Basically, you get to do all the good stuff, always offer kids a fun alternative to their parents ... and then give them back at the end of the day. It's kind of a win/win situation, as she described it, and I think I'm starting to realize that Mary, Adam, Jon, and Colleen have probably felt something like that with my girls as well (well, I hope they have ... I know both Belle and Addie think their collective aunts and uncles pretty much hung the moon).

There has been some bad blood in the past few months between Adam and Colleen and me and Pythagorus. The long story has more stupid immature drama than anything that comes up with my ninth graders, so I'll just say that it's based out of a misunderstanding and lack of communication, that we are as guilty of perpetuating it as they are, that hurt feelings were never intended on either side, and that it's hard for some people (and I put myself firmly in this category) to let go when they are upset.

I think that's why, to me, Pete is even more of a miracle. We went to visit them at the hospital yesterday, and the beautiful and amazing Pete was almost like an ice breaker to the awkward silence that has characterized my relationship with my brother lately. There were tears in my eyes the whole time we were there, in large part because I was just so overwhelmed with love for Pete, but also because I was just so overwhelmed with love for Adam and Colleen, too. Adam has had a really rough several years, and I have never in my life seen him as happy as when he was holding his son. And Colleen? She was a trooper, getting stuff herself instead of asking someone else to do so (she had a c-section) ... and she also had tears in her eyes when she looked at Adam holding Pete. I loved her anyway, but that made her truly my sister-in-law, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I'm an aunt now, and I cannot wait to spoil Pete rotten and take him to fun places and hopefully be as wonderful to my nephew as my Mary, Adam, Jon, and Colleen have always been to Belle and Addie.

Speaking of Addie, here's a pic of her holding her new cousin (and I'm putting it here only because you can't really see her face ... otherwise, she'd probably kill me):


And here's me and Belle with the precious Pete:


Whoever makes the calls in this crazy world, thank you for this amazing treasure. And while I'm at it, thank you for Adam and Mary (who will be making me an aunt again in just a matter of weeks--quite a spring for my family :-) ) as well. I would never have survived my childhood without either of them.