New Beginnings

I'm a mommy in search of an identity. Well, maybe the word "identity" is too strong a noun. I sometimes feel like I am the ONLY mother out there like myself. Others are interesting but they just don't have that curious mixture of Live-and-let-live with Damn-no-we-are-not-going-to-try-cry-it-out with 5 minute rule but also shopping for organic lettuce so the kid's brains don't get fried on pesticides.

I started out this path as an infertile TTCer. (That means trying to conceive, for the uninitiated.) I had a heavily medicalized path. From drugs to IUIs to finally some heavy duty fertility drugs and IVF, it was a hard route. Well, I got my son from that path, so I can't complain.

And then there's how I got my son. At 10:22 p.m., when he had only perked for 27 weeks 6 days, a really nice doctor sliced open my abdomen and pulled him out, all to save us (him and me, him being my son and not the doctor, although if he had lost my son my mother would probably have killed the doctor). I'd had a painless Grade 3 placental abruption that we milked for 11 days, changing my oil (i.e., doing transfusions) as I lost blood, eking out more precious days in the womb for the little guy.

And then there was his NICU stay. 115 days. A perfectly normal 28 weeker stay that was complicated by his reflux. It took him projectile vomiting into the bassinett of another NICU resident for the doctor to realize there WAS something wrong with my son, other than just him being a boy. And then a comedy of errors, errors which if Medicaid knew they would demand some of their money back from the NICU.

So, all said, I finally got him home. And welcomed Early Intervention to our lives. My Nathaniel, lovingly called Natty, funnily called Natster, and often termed 'Ster in short, has been home over 16 months now ... and I think I am ready to start speaking to my identity crisis.

For the uninitiated to parenthood, you can SAY you'll do things one way and when the pedal hits the metal, it can be a different story. I am that story.