Owen's imperfections: A short love story

It's morning and I'm lying on the couch with Owen, my back propped up against the end of the couch holding him up by his hands, his feet on my belly. As I pull him toward me repeatedly to kiss his chest, his belly, his forehead and the tip of his nose — all of the places that make him smile, giggle and drool — I survey his bare body, covered only by his diaper.

Owen has a freckle next to his belly button. I love this freckle. It's small but stands out against the vast whiteness of his belly. There's something about it that looks so tender and vulnerable. I cup his feet in my hands and run my fingers over his toes. In between each one I find the fluffy residue of sock fuzz. When I'm really having an OCD moment, I clean between his toes with a Q-tip after his bath. With babies, it's the crevices that get overlooked unless you're really paying attention.

I study his face and note that his right ear does stick out more than the other. I'd never noticed this until Dave's Aunt Betty pointed it out a few weeks ago at Dave's grandmother's 100th birthday party. It's the ear he tugs at when he's tired. I joked with Betty that I would be sure to have it tacked back before his 5th birthday.

As I continue to gaze at Owen's face, I notice that the pigment on his left eyelid is still a darker pink than the other one. It was more prominent when he was born, almost red. When I looked it up in a baby book they said it would fade with time. They called it a stork bite.   

On his hands he has those baby dimples above each of his fingers. Sometimes I find little scabs there. I think it's from chewing on his fists. But he doesn't have teeth yet so I'm not sure what in his soft, moist, gummy mouth could cause tiny abrasions. 

As I run my hands down his chubby legs, I see that he's got bruises and rug burns on one of his knees. I'm guessing they are the result of him flipping over on his stomach in his crib, on his play mat and on the carpet. There's just no stopping him.

The most striking thing about Owen is his hair. It's the first thing strangers remark on when they see him ("Wow, he has so much hair!") But the other day I noticed that he has bald patches on the sides of his head, right above his ears. At first I thought he was starting to lose his hair like everyone has warned me would happen. But when I flip back through his baby pictures on my iPhone photo library, it looks like he's always had those lighter patches. I guess I just never noticed.

I flip him around and study him from the back. His neck looks like a block stuck on top of his shoulders. I've often thought that the back of the neck is one of the more vulnerable parts of the body, like the underbelly of a dragon. Maybe it's because it holds up our big brains. And when you're looking at the back of someone's neck, they may not even know that you're watching them.

I run my fingers through the dark hair at the nape of Owen's neck and uncover a patch of red skin on his scalp that may be a birth mark. He has another pinkish spot higher up on his head that is smaller, about the size of a raspberry. You can only see it if you look closely.

As I take this visual inventory, these are the things I want to remember about my son. These are the things I want to think about when he is a teenager, gives me monosyllabic answers when I try to make conversation and won't let me touch him. I want to remember all the bumps and bruises, the blemishes and cowlicks — all the things that make him unique and yet like the rest of us, so very human.

Flipping over and sucking on Sophie

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Owen was sucking on his hands. Feverishly and hard. Like they were coated in honey. He wasn't singling out his thumb or just a few fingers. He'd stick his entire hand in his little mouth. Most of the time he would have both hands in his mouth. A few times he actually choked himself.

"What are you bulimic?" I asked, picking him up to soothe him as he coughed and grasped my fingers with his moist, milk-soaked fists.

When he was a newborn any kind of sucking or rooting around meant that he was hungry. But now he was doing this even after a big meal. So I did what any contemporary mom would do: I consulted Google. "Three months old sucking hands," I typed into the search field. Up came an article from a parenting site that was right on point.

"Three months is about the age when babies discover their hands -- and find that they're wonderfully useful!" the all-knowing pediatrician author said. "They most love using them to get anything they can into their mouths, including their fingers. Sucking can be a sign of hunger, but if your child is eating and growing well, I don't think she's hungry. Most likely, she's doing it to soothe herself, which is a very normal behavior."

 At 15-plus pounds, Owen is definitely eating and growing well. Okay good, he's normal.

It seems we have reached the oral stage around here and everything is starting to go in his mouth: the edges of blankets, wash cloths, Baby Einstein toys and of course Sophie -- the plastic teething giraffe from France that is now the No. 1 selling baby item on Amazon. He loves to suck on Sophie's face and occasionally a leg.

With the oral phase comes drool. The drool is just an added bonus to the spit up we've been dealing with for months. At least a third of every bottle seems to come back up to drench the hardwood floor, the living room carpet, his playmat, Dave's favorite T-shirt, my work pants and the front of every onesie that Owen owns. I am forever wiping down his cheeks, chest and the back of his neck with a wash cloth and shimmying it back and forth under the folds of his neck to keep cottage cheese from growing there. Don't get me started on the loads and loads of laundry.

The spit up is apparently the result of the fact that the sphincter in a baby's esophagus doesn't fully develop until they are six months old, according to my research. So whenever they burp, liquid comes right up with it. Dave hates it when I give our uneducated friends and family members that explanation. I don't think he likes me using the word "sphincter" so freely.

The other development is that Owen can now flip over from his back to his stomach. It started with him hanging out on his side whenever we put him on his playmat but then one day Dave went into our bedroom to find him sideways in his sleeper with his legs dangling precariously over the edge. We knew then that his days in the plush little Fisher Price rocking bed he had slept in since birth were numbered.

At first, we tried strapping him into the sleeper because everything made for babies seems to come with straps and snaps that make them look like they're in a miniature straight jacket. But that seemed inhumane so we knew it was time...time to transition to the crib.

For the past two nights Owen has slept in his crib, where he looks so small and lonely on the sprawling flat sheet with no pillow, blanket or stuffed animals to accompany him. The fear of SIDS has every parent deathly afraid of putting so much as a tissue in the crib with a sleeping baby. As soon as we put him down, he rolled over to his side, snoozed for awhile and rolled right over into a face plant.

"Do you think we're supposed to flip him back over?" Dave whispered.

I looked at Owen. It looked uncomfortable, but I could see he was breathing.

"I don't know," I said. "Let's check the Baby 411 book."

The answer: let him sleep. I was still surprised, however, that after 3 1/2 months of sleeping on his back he'd roll right over to his stomach again and again. Clearly his preference. Now when he wakes up from his naps his right cheek and the right side of his forehead are pink from the pressure of his little face against the mattress.

The other day I came home to find Dave putting together the activity jumper. When he put Owen's chubby thighs through the leg holes and settled him into the seat, Owen lurched forward. His head wobbled as he tried to regain control of his neck and back muscles. He can't really sit up yet and his feet dangled at least a foot above the ground.

"What are you doing?" I asked Dave. "I don't think we're supposed to use that until he's six months old."

"He's fine," Dave said. "Look, he likes it!"

Owen did look pretty happy to find himself surrounded by bright colors and things that swiveled.

So as you can see, all kinds of excitement is going on at our house. Before we know it Owen will be walking, driving the car and hopefully, doing his own laundry. 

The secret to a good marriage: Don't have kids?

With taking care of the little guy and recently returning to work, I haven't posted in awhile. But I couldn't resist writing a guest post for my friend, Meredith's blog Role / Reboot, on the topic of how marriage changes after you have your first kid. Studies on the issue are depressing at best. Most find that marital satisfaction falls off a cliff after the transition to parenthood. But despite the added stress in my own marriage these days, I still have hope.


Click here for my post.

Nipple confusion

Owen suffers from nipple confusion and it's all my fault. I have a feeling this won't be the last time in my motherhood career that I utter those words "it's all my fault." As I'm quickly learning, motherhood comes with built-in guilt. If you don't do it to yourself, someone else will do it for you—family members, other mothers, teachers and even the American Academy of Pediatrics. All well meaning, of course.

But back to boobs. Throughout my pregnancy, I didn't have strong opinions on circumcision, co-sleeping, vaccinations or taking pain medication during labor. We were attending natural childbirth classes but I knew that if I ended up pleading for an epidural, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I figured we'd never done this parenting thing before so we'd see how we felt when we got there. And if it's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that the second I start to make plans, something changes.

One thing I did feel strongly about was breastfeeding. That was definitely part of the plan. So of course, that was the one thing that got screwed up.

My mom had always spoken fondly of breastfeeding me and my brother—the closeness she felt holding us and being our sole source of nourishment in the wee hours of the night. In college, I wrote a paper about the superior qualities of breast milk to formula (antibodies, perfect balance of nutrients, tailor-made for your baby). And because I grew up in California, I've been indoctrinated with the virtues of healthy eating habits and the edict that "natural is better."

Not only that, studies say that infants who are breastfed have lower rates of cavities, are less likely to become obese and may even be smarter than their formula-fed counterparts. Breast milk, according to some researchers, can actually raise your IQ.

None of these studies mattered much to me because I was already a convert. I likened feeding your baby formula rather than breast milk to giving them Velveeta cheese instead of Tillamook. It was just like those evil food companies to come up with a way to get mothers to feed their children processed food right from the start. No child of mine was going to eat McDonald's style his first six months of life.

Bottle boy

That's how I used to feel, anyway, because like I said, whenever I make plans, life happens. First, I was in labor for 2 1/2 days. Yes, 52 hours. So I didn't sleep for two nights before Owen was born because the contractions kept waking me up. Then during labor, the fetal monitor picked up an arrhythmia in little Owen's heart. Soon after he was born he was whisked away for an EKG and had to stay in the nursery rather than room with me so they could monitor his heart 24-7. (Turns out the arrhythmia is nothing serious, although it's something we continue to monitor.)

Then, after going through one of the most physically demanding experiences of my life — drug free I might add (yay me!) — the nurses kept waking me every two hours to breastfeed. They'd wheel me down the hall to the nursery where I fumbled with my new baby, smooshing his swollen face into my chest, navigating the wires hanging from his, trying to get him to latch. It was an awkward dance and most of the time I couldn't get Owen to wake up. He too, was exhausted from his birth.

By the time they discharged me from the hospital two days later, I hadn't slept in five days. Even worse, Owen had to stay in the hospital another night because they were still waiting for the results of his heart tests. I had 24-hour access to the nursery but no where to sleep. Exhausted and near tears, I broke down and told the nursery nurses to go ahead a feed him formula for the night so I could go home and recuperate.

Next came the news that I may not be able to breastfeed because of a medication I was taking. I had been cleared to breastfeed on the medication before he was born, but given his heart condition, his pediatrician wanted to check with the cardiologist. So for the next week we fed Owen formula while I pumped, trying to get my milk to come in and storing it in the freezer while we waited for word from the cardiologist.

Finally we heard back from the cardiologist that breastfeeding was fine. But by that time I had developed some postpartum anxiety and I knew that if I didn't get long stretches of sleep each night, I'd end up a basket case. Breastfeeding requires getting up every two hours to feed the baby. Not the best recipe for sanity, even for mothers without anxiety issues.

So my mom and Dave took the night shift, formula feeding him so I could sleep. My plan was to breastfeed him during the day. But by then he had gotten used to the bottle and it was difficult to get him to latch correctly. He'd get frustrated, I'd get frustrated and I'd finally give up and give him a bottle of the breast milk I had pumped.

Cousin Johanna helps with dinner

What they don't tell you until you're pregnant and sitting in childbirth classes is that babies don't breastfeed by sucking on the end of your nipple like you would think. Nope, they're supposed to open wide and fit your entire nipple and areola into their sweet little mouths. The nipple should be toward the back of their mouth, that area right behind the bump in the roof of your mouth. By compressing the nipple against that area, they get milk.

But that requires a different kind of sucking than how you suck from a bottle. It's a totally different experience to suck on soft fleshy breast tissue than hard plastic. Hence, Owen's nipple confusion and the reason lactation consultants warn you not to introduce pacifiers or bottles until breastfeeding is well established.

Breastfeeding, as natural as it seems, is learned behavior. Sucking is a reflex babies are born with, but both mom and baby have to learn how to position the breast in the baby's mouth to make that sucking comfortable and effective for both parties.

Whenever I tried to get Owen to latch on he'd suck superficially for a few minutes, then pull himself off, shake his head back and forth panting in frustration and start to cry. I couldn't seem to position him like our lactation consultant had taught me and frankly, I didn't have the patience to work through both of our frustrations. In other words, I'd failed as a mother.

At least, that's how I felt. I'd sob to Dave that Owen wasn't getting the antibodies he needed and would never go to Harvard. Dave rubbed my back and reminded me that my health and peace of mind was more important no matter what La Leche League said. Being calm and stable was what Owen really needed from me. As much as I hate the cliché, I had to put my oxygen mask on first.

So I did. But over the past few weeks I've also been pumping three to four times a day to give him breast milk with a bottle. It made me feel like I was doing something right to give him at least a few ounces a day of the real thing.

Everywhere you look women are pressured to breastfeed. The American Academy of Pediatrics, pediatricians, parenting websites, baby books and every childbirth pamphlet you will ever read advocates breastfeeding. Even the formula companies push breastfeeding as some kind of politically correct marketing campaign.

The other day I was standing in the baby food aisle at Target trying to find the right brand of formula, and on the front of the Enfamil canister was a warning label that said, "Experts agree that breastfeeding is best."  Great, I'm even getting shamed in the aisle of Target.

Over the last week, pumping numerous times a day has gotten harder and harder and my milk supply has continued to dwindle. Owen is six weeks old now and as much as I hate to admit it, I'm seriously considering quitting altogether. As he continues to suck down bottle after bottle of formula making eager, noshing noises, I may have to swallow my pride and realize that being a good mother is more than providing just the right balance of nutrients.

As the cardiologist told us at our last appointment, I don't have to be the perfect mother, just good enough. As a perfectionist, it kills me to settle for good enough. But given the way I feel about Owen, I have a feeling that good enough is going to be more than enough.

The miracle of life?

They say that the moment you hold your precious baby in your arms, you forget everything. You forget the four months of puking, the mind-numbing fatigue, the sneezing and peeing, the heartburn, insomnia, constant belching and general discomfort of carrying around more weight than you ever have in your life. They even say you forget the pain of labor.

For months, as I trudged (and waddled) through my pregnancy, I didn't believe them. Every time a mother would tell me you forget it all, my rebellious streak would rear up and I would think, Not me, I won't forget. 

Now two weeks after giving birth, I'll admit, in some ways they were right. I'm still not a big fan of pregnancy. As my friend Alina says, pregnancy is the "most unnatural natural state." As I struggled through it myself, I often thought there had to be a better way to duplicate the human race than have women blow up like balloons, cry during baby food commercials and develop cankles. I marveled as I walked around downtown Chicago that every person on the sidewalk had gotten here because some woman had given up her body for nine months.

Me and Owen

Pregnancy is particularly hard in this day and age, when most women are working and just because you're sick as a dog and huge as a house, your employer doesn't give you a break. You're still expected to meet your deadlines, sound intelligent on conference calls and show up to the office wearing some semblance of business casual. In my case, my employer refused my request to work from home the last two weeks of my pregnancy, even though they could see I had to leave my cubicle every 15 minutes to waddle to the bathroom to pee.

That said, pregnancy is something I am glad I experienced. It's just one of those things that until you've done it yourself, you have no idea what it's like. You can read all the pregnancy literature you want, listen to 100 of your friends' birth stories, but until you've vomited into your trash can at work and felt the baby kick and get the hiccups in utero, you really have no idea what it means to create life. You have no true understanding of the beautiful sacrifice it takes.

During the last month of my pregnancy, Dave and I were sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the midwife to come in when somehow we got on the topic of whether birth is a miracle. Dave, a philosophy major in college, started to pontificate as he sometimes does, that really it wasn't.

"Miracles are something unexpected, something scientifically impossible," he said. "Birth is what our bodies are designed to do. It's entirely natural. How can that be a miracle?"

Sitting on the examining table, the tissue paper crinkling beneath me as I struggled to find a comfortable position for my heaving belly, I just stared at him.

"Dave," I said sternly. "Just let me have my miracle."

That shut him up.

So is part of the miracle postpartum amnesia about all you've been through?

In some ways, yes. I can remember curling up into a ball and crying because I had yet another migraine. I can remember eating only fruit smoothies for days. I can remember how often I had to change my wet pants. But none of it feels visceral. With all of those symptoms gone now, thinking about them feels like I'm talking about someone else. It all kind of blurs together into some kind of folklore from a distant past.

I think the miracle of life is that we do things even when they're hard, even when we doubt our ability to make it through. And when I gaze down at my little boy's face, I'm so so glad I did. 

Dear Baby,

For a long time your daddy and I have called you "the bean." But that doesn't seem appropriate anymore given that you are as big as a watermelon now, or whatever fruit "What to Expect When You're Expecting" would compare you to at 38 weeks. I think it's a little strange to compare babies to fruit, given that babies are much sweeter than any fruit could ever be. But I digress.

I've waited a long time for you. I've always wanted to have children, but I've always wanted to do it with the right person. And for some people, the right person doesn't come along in high school, in college, in graduate school or even in the workplace. As a single person, someone actively dating in their 30s, everyone will tell you, "You'll know it when you find it." And for a long time, I didn't believe them. As you'll discover from having me as your mother, I can overthink things. Make them too complicated. Doubt that good things will come to me or that even if they do, somehow it will fall apart. The other shoe will drop and I will be alone again.

But when I met your daddy, it wasn't complicated. I liked him from the first moment I saw him. I liked talking to him. I liked that he listened to me with an intensity I'd never really felt before, something we now jokingly refer to as his "ministry of presence." He called when he said he would. He picked interesting things for us to do together. And best of all, he never used emoticons or LOL in his emails.

Sure, I had the early dating jitters during our first few months together, but I didn't pick him apart like I had with previous boyfriends. I didn't think, "Well, he's successful but bald" or "he's funny but he competes with me." You see, you get a lot of bad advice about dating and one of them is "relationships are work." Another is "nobody's perfect." So often I stayed in relationships when I had conflicted feelings because I thought I was doing "the work." I thought I had to settle because "nobody's perfect." And neither am I, so who did I think I was being so picky?

The good news is I never married any of these people. Or had a baby with them. Something inside me held back. That was hard to do, given that one friend after another got married, even my younger brother (your Uncle Eric), who seemed much more resistant to adulthood and "settling down" than I ever was. Then they all started having babies. Even Uncle Eric and Aunt Sonnet.

I'll never forget when they called to tell me they were pregnant with your cousin, Helix, six years ago. It was St. Patrick's Day. I was at a bar in Chicago with my then-boyfriend and his friends. It was cold outside and I had gone into the vestibule — the space between the outer and inner doors of the bar — to take the call so that I could hear them above the din of the green beer drinking and celebrating. When they told me I felt sick to my stomach. I pressed my face against the cool glass of the outer door. Things weren't going well with the then-boyfriend. We would have to break up soon and I would have to start over. Meanwhile, your Uncle Eric and Aunt Sonnet were getting something that I badly wanted. And it wasn't fair.

As I got closer and closer to my late 30s, I often thought about what I would do if I never found the right person by the time I was 40. I felt angry at the biological clock. I didn't think it was fair to put that kind of pressure on finding love within a certain time frame. I didn't want to adopt, or get a sperm donor. I had no interest in being a single mom. Being a parent is something I wanted to share with someone — the right someone. So I began to resign myself to thinking I'd just be the world's greatest aunt to Helix, and your newest cousin, Arya.

Another thing you'll discover about having me for your mother is that I'm not the most patient person. It's hard for me to not know what's going to happen, how things will turn out. I often want to control the circumstances, dictate the outcome. I want to prepare myself for heartache or disappointment before it even happens so that I won't be blindsided. But that's silly. Understandable, but silly. Life doesn't work that way. And having those kind of defenses doesn't really protect you anyway. You still get hurt, only longer, because you've spent so much time dreading it, then thinking "I knew this would happen."

But here's some more good news: somehow I was brave enough to just keep going. To stay open to the possibilities, despite attacks of doubt, loneliness and jealousy. And now you're here — just under the deadline. I mean, you're not here, here, but you will be within the next few weeks and I cannot tell you how excited I am to meet you, to hold you, to feed you and to play with you. I probably won't even mind changing your diaper.

I'll do everything I can to be your perfectly imperfect mother. Just like I'm a perfectly imperfect wife to your daddy. We'll all walk through this together (okay, crawl first, but you know what I mean). Because you, dear baby, are someone I will never take for granted.

Love,
Mommy

Good ol' Braxton Hicks

I always thought that the third trimester of pregnancy would be a lot like being an inflatable airbed. Your soft baby belly would just keep getting bigger and bigger until you were about to pop. Then just in time, you'd wake up one night with contractions or your water broken and you'd know, "This is it." You'd roll over, gently wake your husband and off you'd go into labor.

Not so much with me. This pregnancy has been so full of fun surprises (leg cramps, shortness of breath, peeing while sneezing) that I guess I shouldn't expect these last few weeks to be any different. Before we embarked on this journey, neither Dave nor I had ever heard of such things as the mucus plug or perineal massage (yet another reason to keep your kitchen well-stocked with olive oil). And before our childbirth classes I thought the "Ring of Fire" was a Johnny Cash song, not the burning sensation you feel down there when your baby is crowning.

I'm still trying to get my head around effacement. Dilation sounds simple enough: your cervix opens centimeter by centimeter during labor until the opening is large enough for the baby's head to fit through and you can start pushing. Effacement is the shortening of the cervix. It starts happening before dilation (I think) whereby the contractions start pulling up the tissues at the base of your cervix, making the cervix thinner and thinner so it can start opening (dilating). This, appropriately enough, is called "ripening."

At my check-up last week, the midwife said I was already 75% effaced and 1 centimeter dilated. The baby's head was "engaged" and she could feel it right there, at the base of my cervix. It didn't mean I was going into labor tomorrow, she said, because apparently some women walk around being 4 centimeters dilated for weeks before giving birth (nature can be cruel). But it meant my body was definitely getting ready.

John Braxton Hicks

That made sense to me, given that I've been having contractions for weeks. This too, can be "normal" in the third trimester, as the uterus "practices" for the main event. They're called Braxton Hicks contractions, named after a man of course, an English doctor who noticed in 1872 that many women felt contractions in the later stages of pregnancy without going into actual labor.

The thing about Braxton Hicks contractions, however, is that they are supposed to cause only "mild discomfort." They aren't painful like actual labor, according to everything I've read on my iPhone at 2 a.m. when one of them has woken me out of a dead sleep, freaking me out with the sensation of my belly seizing up from the bottom of my rib cage to the base of my pelvis.

Some women don't even notice them. But not me. Oh no, I'm one of the lucky ones who gets the sensation multiple times a day that my mid-region has turned into a snare drum, my abdominal muscles torqued over my already compromised major organs with an intensity that feels a whole lot stronger than "mild discomfort."

A few weeks ago they got so intense that I was convinced I was going into preterm labor. I agonized that I wouldn't get the chance to wear the gorgeous blue maternity dress I'd bought for my baby showers and Dave's graduation (because in the end, it's all about fashion). A frantic call to my midwife confirmed that until the contractions grow continuously stronger and fall into a rhythmic pattern, it's nothing more than an unnerving dress rehearsal.

With less than three weeks to go now and the baby showers and Dave's graduation safely behind us, my job is to stay as hydrated as possible. Hydration is supposed to ease "false labor," so I've been drinking glass after glass of refreshing water. The byproduct, of course, is multiple trips to the bathroom per hour. This slow (and annoying) build up to actual labor, I might add, is nothing I've ever seen featured in movies. Guess it's not as dramatic as gushing water and a mad dash to the hospital. 

One day soon, one of these contractions is going to mean we're actually going to meet our baby. When that happens, a thousand mothers have told me, all of this "mild discomfort" will become a distant memory. I'm not so sure. But I am willing to concede that it will probably be worth it.