BY SUSAN LADD
Copyright (c) 1998, Greensboro News & Record, Inc.
High Point Editor Susan Ladd delivered her first child April 16. She kept a diary for us, starting shortly before her baby’s birth, to record her observations about new motherhood. In celebration of Mother’s Day today, here are her thoughts.
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April 6. Greetings from Planet Ladd. I am now nearly as big around as I am tall, or at least that’s the way it feels. My walk has become a waddle. My feet have turned into stuffed sausages, and my innie has become an outie.
We are finally near the end – ninth month of pregnancy, due date April 9. From the amniocentesis, we know she is a girl, and we have already given her a name – Abigail.
I feel like I know her already. Our communication began with tiny flutters, then taps, then kicks.
I know she likes movies. She rolled with the sinking of the Titanic and returned fire with a kick for every gunshot in “LA Confidential.” She knows her father’s voice, shifting and moving when he is near. As uncomfortable as I’ve become in the last weeks, my heart still leaps when I feel her move. I can’t wait to hold her in my arms, to see her face for the first time. I find myself pressing her little clothes to my face, trying to imagine how it will feel to nuzzle her tummy.
But as impatient as I am to finally see my baby, in some ways I feel as unprepared as I did the first day I walked into the local baby superstore. I was so intimidated that I fled. What the heck was all this stuff?
I lie awake at night, pondering the mystery of baby clothes. Do they wear onesies underneath sleepers and day clothes? How do you tell the difference between sleepers and day clothes anyway, when they all look the same? How will I know if she’s too hot or too cold?
Underneath all these concerns lies a fear much deeper. What in the name of heaven makes me think I’m qualified to be a parent?
And how do I keep from passing along all my neuroses? I had two parents – one I loved and one I loved but feared. My greatest fear about becoming a parent was that I’d become the one I feared. The dread was so powerful, it nearly kept me from ever having a family.
Is love enough to make up for the things I lack?
April 8, 5 a.m. Insomnia is another of the side effects of pregnancy and one of the most difficult for me to get used to.
It has ushered in Susan’s House of Worry, open all night, no waiting! No worry too big or too small. I fret about all the bad things that have happened to children in the news lately. Being mauled by a dog. Kidnapped by a stranger.
Closer to home, I have become obsessed by the fear that she’s going to get trapped in the beautiful toy box my mother gave us. I can see my little daughter climbing inside, maybe thinking of playing a joke on Mommy, and then the lid swings shut and the latch fastens tight.
I consider removing the latch, but that would ruin the look of the chest. Better yet, I think, I could drill air holes in the back of the chest. Only when I picture myself standing over this little chest with the power drill do I realize how ridiculous I’m being.
It’s now 6 a.m., then 6:30, as I spin through an endless series of nightmares, all starring my unborn daughter. Finally, I give in and cuddle up next to the solid warmth of my husband, the only thing that keeps these demons at a respectful distance.
I am not, after all, doing this alone.
April 12. Easter Sunday. My due date has come and gone, and with it most of my patience. Anticipation has turned to frustration. I am asked 20 times a day: “Haven’t had that baby yet?” “When’s that baby coming?” “Are YOU still here?”
I’ve come up with my own Mad magazine-style snappy answers: “No, I’m not still here. I’m just so pregnant I leave an after-image.”
I’m trying to be patient, but I’m beginning to feel like I’ll never have this baby. How can I feel so ready and so unready at the same time?
“Your life is going to change so much,” people keep saying, and I know it’s true. And I know I can’t begin to even imagine what those changes will be like.
I worry that Herb and I will barely see each other. Once he’s keeping her days and I’m keeping her nights, it will be a lot more difficult to meet for lunch and dinner, one of the ways we’ve dealt with different work schedules up to now.
I continue to worry about going back to work and how I’ll cut back on the monstrous hours I’ve worked in the past.
Day care is inevitable when Herb goes back to school in the fall, and that is the most worrisome of all. How am I ever going to trust anybody with my baby? I don’t even trust anybody with my car.
April 15. Tomorrow my child will be born. When we went to the doctor yesterday, I was still showing no signs of labor. The ultrasound showed that Abigail weighed 8 to 9 pounds. NINE POUNDS! I’m 5 feet tall, and my doctor thinks it’s impossible for me to give birth the old-fashioned way.
So, after all the classes, all the breathing exercises, all the reading and preparation, I will have a C-section tomorrow at 8:45 a.m.
I’m not sure how to feel. I’d rather have her naturally. I wanted to have that moment of realizing I was finally in labor, the excitement of knowing that the end of this long process had begun. Making an appointment to have a baby just feels strange.
At the same time, my body is wearing out. My energy is gone. By 3 in the afternoon, I need to sleep again. My appetite is about the only thing that isn’t suffering.
So strange to think that at this time tomorrow I will be a mother. I will have a child. Somehow I can’t get my mind around it. A mother. Me.
Biologically, sure. But how do I become that person who always loves you no matter what? The person to whom you can be completely vulnerable without fear of hurt or rejection? I think of my own mother. That’s what I want to be for Abigail.
Ready or not, it begins tomorrow. A friend who had a C-section told me not to feel cheated out of the birth experience. “Going through labor isn’t what makes you a parent,” she said.
April 16. I woke this morning nervous and excited. There’s fear of the surgery itself, fear that something might go wrong. But ever since I arrived at the hospital an hour ago, I’ve been propelled along by the cheerful hospital staff. Now I’m lying in the operating room with numbness creeping, creeping down my abdomen, legs and toes.
I feel a tugging sensation, but no pain, as the doctors start working.
At my side, my husband peeks over the curtain to watch as our baby’s head comes into view. I hear her lusty cries before I see her, and tears spring to my eyes. Relief floods me as I see the joy in my husband’s face. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” he keeps saying. And then they hold her up for me to see – a thatch of black hair, a squirming little body – all the parts in the right places. I can’t stop weeping.
“Looks like we were a little off on that size estimate,” my doctor says. “I think she’s around 7 pounds.”
As the doctors continue to work on me, she is carried to the room next door. Oblivious to what’s going on with my own body, I turn my head to watch what’s going on with my daughter. I can only see the nurses and attendants, but I can also see my husband’s face, filled with wonder.
An attendant comes back with the official stats – 7 pounds, 19 inches and absolutely perfect.
Soon they bring her back and lay her by my face. All these months of wondering what she’ll look like, and I can’t believe how beautiful she is – and how familiar. Tiny nose, pointy little chin, inky black hair – a face eerily like my own face at birth.
All too soon, she’s whisked away to the nursery with Herb in attendance. I am wheeled to recovery, where I watch the clock and chat with the staff, waiting impatiently for the moment I can wiggle my toes and go back to my room, to her.
It is another hour or so before I am back in my room and they wheel in the bassinet, handing me my daughter for the first time. I cradle her soft little body in my arms, marvel at her tiny nose, her pink little lips, her perfect ears. I put this delicate being to my breast and feel the tug of her mouth. Tears flood my eyes again. I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by joy, by wonder, by emotions so big they have no name.
She is my daughter. She is real. Today, I am a mother.
April 26. All the big questions I pondered while pregnant – how to raise a well-adjusted child, how to mold her character – all those lofty musings have fallen by the wayside, replaced by the only question that matters: How do I make her stop crying and go to sleep?
For two or three precious nights, she slept between feedings. For all the rest – and they seem endless already – she has been awake all night – nursing, then crying, then nursing again.
On the third night, she’d nurse for an hour, we’d put her down, and she’d be crying again 30 minutes later, wanting to nurse again. Another hour of nursing, and she was still wide awake, wanting to nurse again. She couldn’t still be hungry, but how could I not feed her?
Nothing else worked. She spat out pacifiers with a grimace and continued to wail when we changed her, rocked her, sang to her, pleaded with her. When all else failed, I gave in and nursed her yet again.
The only thing that kept me from falling asleep sitting up was pain from the constant nursing.
Finally, at 3 a.m., I lay down and wept in frustration. Why can’t I make her happy? What am I doing wrong? I have never felt so utterly helpless, so completely clueless. Here is a problem I can’t solve analytically, and I never felt so inadequate in my life.
So began my bout with postpartum depression. Postpartum means “after birth,” and it refers to the time when you get your body back and start losing your mind. Knowing that hormonal changes are largely responsible doesn’t make it any easier. I began crying on my third day back at home and can’t seem to stop. I cry when I’m happy, I cry when I’m sad, I cry when I’m frustrated. I cry pretty much all the time.
I can’t put my finger on why I’m so blue. I feel so disjointed, so out of kilter. I haven’t worn a watch in days, because time has no meaning. The closest thing to normal life exists in the two-hour intervals between feedings. The highlight of my day is taking a shower, a luxury that makes me feel like my old self for a few moments. Each day I try to add one element of normalcy. The first day I shaved my legs, I felt like a queen. Another day, I added makeup. Today I wore a bracelet, and it felt great.
It sounds silly, but these little things make me feel like myself again. Maybe that’s the heart of it – I feel like I’ve lost my identity. I seem to exist now only to provide sustenance to this tiny, helpless creature. Woman as milk jug.
I can’t imagine the day when I’ll have time to go shopping for a couple of hours, much less go back to work and concentrate on something besides her. Caring for her absorbs the days, leaving just enough time to eat and sleep. Even something as simple as doing laundry means sacrificing time when we could be resting. Our old lives are truly gone. The foreverness of this is hitting home.
April 29. It’s amazing what a few hours of uninterrupted sleep can do. The past few days have brought more success with Abigail’s sleep patterns. She has wakened only for feedings and averages about one episode per night when she won’t go back to sleep. Slowly, I am learning what works and what doesn’t, and I feel myself relaxing a little more each day.
These are days of frustration and elation. I have spent hours fascinated with her ears and with the graceful way she folds and places her little hands on her chest, her face or my breast as she nurses. To hold your child is to know the greatest joy and the greatest fear, to feel absolutely powerful and completely vulnerable.
We marvel as we watch our daughter take her first looks at the world, as she smiles her first smile, as she gazes into our eyes with total trust.
I have not lost my identity after all – it’s just changing. I am still Susan, but I am also Abigail’s mom, the face that she looks to for comfort even after her diaper is changed and her tummy is full. I can’t help but mourn a bit for the freedom of our old life, but we can see so many possibilities in this new life.
We look forward to the day when we can take her to the beach, watch as she dips her toes in the ocean for the first time. There are so many things I long to show her, places I want to take her, sensations I want to share – the roar of mountain waterfalls, the quiet of a deep forest trail, the vivid, darting fish of the undersea world.
There are so many things she could be. What will make her laugh, and where will her imagination take her? I can’t wait to see her personality unfold.
The turning point, I think, was when my husband and I watched the sun rise on another morning. We dubbed her the Baby Lestat, vampire spawn that feeds by night and sleeps by day. With the sun coming up, I told Herb, she’d either fall asleep or burst into flame.
In that moment, when we found ourselves laughing instead of crying, I knew I could cope with this after all.