In which I say, Stop it!

So this morning, as I was perusing the Facebook, I came across this link 100-ways-to-be-pro-life (This is not going to be an abortion discussion). I read down the list to #20 and I stopped. And I am going to tell you right now, and please listen - DO NOT, EVER tell someone that their autistic child is a blessing. DO NOT propagate the nonsense that people who have autistic children are somehow lucky because they get to be blessed with some kind of eye opening, world changing, other-human.

The child may be a blessing, but autism is not. I am telling you this fresh from an evening during which I discovered that my 14 year old son not only smeared feces all over the hall and the bathroom, but he used the handle of one of my soup spoons to get it out. My spoon. People eat with it. In his butt. Are you listening to me? Do you understand what I am saying to you? This is every day. There is poo all over my house on any given day. I walk around sniffing like the Child Catcher, looking for it every time I walk into a room. It's in his finger nails, it's on his clothes, it's everywhere. It's gross. It's gross and he has no recollection of doing it, so how do you make that stop?

The child may be a blessing, but autism is not. I know this because he steals food and then he hides the evidence in cracks and behind furniture and under beds and I find it when I vacuum or when we have an ant infestation. Again. Entire bag's worth of candy wrappers or piles of Freeze Pop tubes. They can accumulate in one night. But of course he had nothing to do with it. So now there are no treats in our house, but there are other children, who have been let down again because of autism.

The child may be a blessing, but autism is not. Come look at my furniture. Look at the holes cut in my couches. Look at the stack of mattresses in the garage that he has destroyed.

The child may be a blessing, but autism is not. He has a brilliant mind, but he can't learn the simplest of tasks. He can't sweep a floor. He can't rinse a dish. He can't be left alone, but he dislikes most people enough that there are very few babysitter options. He has been in therapy for YEARS and he doesn't change, because we are all wrong. There is nothing wrong with him, his father and grandparents and therapists and doctors and I are all involved in a grand scheme to "change" him.

The child may be a blessing, but autism is not. We are broke. I can't work. Our entire lives revolve around him. Around making sure there is someone to take him to therapy, to answer the phone when the school calls, to make sure he doesn't have to come home to an empty house, to deal with his bad days, to try to judge the exact moment before a good day becomes a horrible day, and as far as we can see into the future, he's still there, doing the same things, forever.

It's exhausting. It doesn't mean I don't reveal in his triumphs. It's doesn't mean I don't love him. But calling what this thing has done to our lives a blessing is a bit much.

When you spew this nonsense, when you speak in platitudes to the parents of special needs children, this is what they are hearing:

You: Oh, my cousin's son has asperger's! He got married.
Parent thinks: I'm failing.

You: Autistic kids are SO smart!
Parent thinks: He is, and he can't function, and it's such a waste of a beautiful mind, and it makes me cry, and I'm failing.

You: Autistic children are such neat kids!
Parent thinks: Are you out of your mind? Have you spent time with any? I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. I'm failing.

You: Educate me about autism.
Parent thinks: I am suddenly exhausted.

You: What a blessing!
Parent thinks: This is a blessing? What did I do in a past life to deserve this blessing? Whatever it was, I am profoundly sorry! Please, just... help, because I'm failing.

You: My friend's autistic kid is amazing at ___________. You should get your son involved in that.
Parent thinks: Oh yeah, because all autistic kids like the same thing and I have infinite resources and I really need one more place to drive and sit and wait every week. Oh my god, my kid isn't "in" to anything, I'm failing.

You: Bless your heart/you are so strong/I don't know how you do it/you really have your hands full...
Parent thinks: I'm a fraud. For some insane reason, this person thinks I'm not internally collapsing and that I have a clue what I'm doing. I am not strong, I am terrified and defeated and failing.

You: You should enjoy every minute with your kids.
Parent thinks: There are very few minutes that I actually enjoy with him. Between the mess and the crying and the arguing and the sensory stuff and the blame and the literal thinking - I'm just surviving, and I'm failing.

You: He doesn't look autistic.
Parent thinks: You think I'm lying? Fine then, you take him.

You: You should try ____________ therapy/group/clinic/home/doctor...
Parent thinks: Again with the infinite resources/do you seriously think I haven't?/I'm probably failing.

You: Oh, he'll grow out of it/you should just love him more/more discipline!
Parent thinks: do you even hear what you're saying to me right now? Are you actually going to stand there and attack my parenting and my love? Oh, why, yes you are. I feel like shit and we can no longer be friends.

Those are the bad examples. Don't do those. And not just to the parents of autistic people, don't do them to parents of kids with Down's, or CP, or MD, or spina bifida, or Cornelia de Lang Syndrome, or any other special need. Do not do it. NO.

Here's what you should do, and don't do this unless you really mean it.
You: Would you like to have a cup of coffee and talk? I can meet you where ever is easiest for you.

And then, be prepared to listen. Not to offer advice or opinions, but just listen. Understand that this person may be mourning a child they thought they were going to have, or an amazing 2 year old, who suddenly disappeared, along with a lot of hopes and dreams. Understand that this person probably loves their special needs child harder than they love anyone else in the world, and they may very rarely feel loved back. Understand that being the parent of a special needs child is a very lonely place, and a lot of parents slip into a self imposed exile when their kids are little, because they take so much energy, and that is a very difficult place to get back from.

If you aren't prepared for this, then when you discover some one's child is autistic (or anything else) simply say, "Oh, I see," as if they just said, "Suzy is allergic to pineapple," and then try to carry on a normal conversation. That's it. Simple. Perfect.

In which I say I'm sorry

Yesterday I was chatting with a mom at CMS, about mono of all things. She seemed really nice. Our children came up to the office at the same time, and we all left the building together. This mother, in the way of mothers, advised my son that he should tie his shoes before he tripped. He didn’t answer her, and I realized that my response must have seemed a bit strange, and probably rude. I don’t know who she is, and I don’t even know if she is a member of this group, but I’d like to offer an explanation, just in case.

Most simply put, I don’t care that my son’s shoes are untied. I’m happy that he got shoes on at all on any given day, and the added bonus of socks makes me ecstatic. He is not trying to make a statement. He doesn’t think he’s too cool to tie his shoes. He simply lacks the manual dexterity to tie them well enough to stay tied longer than about a minute. We have, in fact, tried the bungee ties that you mentioned. He says they are too tight. It’s a sensory thing. It does not matter that you can loosen them; he has decided that they are too tight. We like velcro, but his feet are huge, and he has to wear orthotics, so we deal with what we can find.

You didn’t mention it, but I am also aware that he looks like he got dressed out of a rag bag. That’s not a statement either. In moments of high anxiety he picks at his clothes and he picks them full of holes. We’re working on it, but we live with holes because we’re just happy that he stopped eating, literally, his shirts, and that he no longer picks at his skin until blood runs down his legs. And no, he probably hasn’t combed his hair in week. We’re just happy that he lets us touch him.

You are not the first well meaning person to point out his shoe laces. There are even more, less well meaning people, who say downright nasty things about him when we walk by. Luckily, most people are just part of the scenery to him, so he usually doesn’t hear them. I do though. I do, and every time it comes up the little voice in the center of my chest says, “here we go again,” and I suddenly feel physically exhausted. I have to decide, one more time, how to respond. What is going to make this go away? Sometimes I try the smile and nod, but there are people who are not content with that. Sometimes, I try the off handed remark about teenage boys.

But what I don’t want to do, is stand in a parking lot, and explain one more time that what you’re looking at may be all I can ever expect. I don’t want to have to tell you that my life is just about worrying about different things than you do. That as handsome, and kind, and smart as my son, my first born, is he will probably never leave home. I don’t feel like explaining that I know he just ignored you, but to him you might as well be a tree. I don’t want to tell you that he talked about killing himself for the first time when he was seven, or that kids throw trash in his lunch on purpose because his OCD won’t let him eat anything that someone else has touched. I don’t want to tell you that he doesn’t sleep at night and he walks endless circles around the coffee table. I don’t want to tell you that more than one doctor thinks that eventually we will have to institutionalize him, because there are more things, things that we don’t even tell the people who love him the most. I don’t want to have to explain one more time, that yes, he does speak very normally, and he looks like a normal kid, but not all autism looks the same. I don’t want to have to say, “I don’t give a shit that his shoes aren’t tied, you have no fucking idea about the real problems we are dealing with here!” and so lots of times, I just say nothing, and I walk away.

But you didn’t know that, and I was rude to you, and there is no excuse for rudeness. I feel badly, and I wish I knew who you were so that I could tell you that I know, and I’m sorry. I am sorry if I made you feel small, or put down, no one should be made to feel that way, and I saw on your face as you walked away that I did that to you.

In which a Green Anole might as well be Godzilla, and nobody sleeps

People on the autism spectrum tend to have sleep issues. We were told once that something like 70% of kids on the spectrum have difficulty maintaining a normal sleep cycle. Aidan fits solidly into that 70% and he's been there since he was born.

Most of the problem is that he can't settle. He can't turn his thoughts down and let his mind rest. His body is overly rigid and he can't relax. When he was smaller we never knew where we're going to find him in the morning - he could be on the couch downstairs, on one of the girls' floors, or in the middle of the hall. These days he still wanders but usually makes it back to his own room and we find him wedged in the space between pull out bed and couch back (he won't sleep on a real bed). It can't be comfortable. He wanders because he "thinks" about things. He'll tell you he's bored, or not tired, or uncomfortable, or hot, or whatever, but those are all cover ups for what's going on in his mind.

Once, when he was in kinder or first grade, we watched a documentary on Spain, which he thoroughly enjoyed, until the bull fighting scene... He didn't mention it at all at the time. It was ten days of yellow and red sad faces in his Take Home Folder, and ten nights of him waking up Emma countless times to play with him before we discovered that he couldn't stop thinking about the bull dying. Once the idea goes in, it doesn't easily come out.

So a few nights ago Leroy and I were trying to watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (that is such a good movie) in our room, when we saw Aidan's shadow move past our door. Leroy told him to go back to bed. Three minutes later, shadow. Go back to bed. Interlude. Shadow. Go back to bed. Interlude. Shadow. GO BACK TO BED! Crying. "There's a lizard!"

Me: "Where?"
A: "In my room."
Me: "Where?"
A: "I don't know. It's IN there."
Me: "What kind of lizard?"
A: "One of those green ones."
Leroy, bewildered, "A Green Anole?" If you've never met one, you should know that anoles are pretty cute. They eat bad bugs, they are smaller than your hand, and kids occasionally use them as clip-on earrings. Harmless.

Leroy checked his room. No lizard. Still crying. We moved piles of World of Warcraft cards and socks. No lizard. Still crying. Leroy moved the furniture. No lizard. Still crying.

L: "Why do you think there's a lizard?"
A: "Because I put it in a box and it's gone."
Me: "You brought it into your room? And now you're crying about it?"
       Nod.
L: "If you didn't want it in your room, why did you bring it in here?"
A: "Because I put it in a box."
Me: "So... it got out of the box, and you can't sleep because..."
A: "IT'S GOING TO GET ON MY FACE!"

You can't do anything with that. It doesn't matter how many times you explain that it won't hurt him, or that people eat spiders in their sleep all the time, or that it's clearly gone because we've moved everything and there is no lizard. At that point we're verging on full blown anxiety. He didn't sleep, because a lizard was going to get on his face, and so neither did we, at least not very well.

That was five days ago. I've found him in a different room every morning since. "Don't worry about it," you say, "he'll get over it." And of course, you're right, he will eventually forget. I know that. I also know that he once refused to use the kids' bathroom for six months after we had kept a litter of kittens there. I bleached it from top to bottom multiple times, but he couldn't go in... there were survivor germs. Vicious little bastards.

Every book you read tells you to anticipate the sources of potential melt downs. I call bullshit. I cannot possibly anticipate that a Green Anole, that my 13 year old son invited into his room would have him sobbing and hyperventilating, and my husband rearranging furniture in his boxers.

In which an Oilman’s daughter laments

My first pet of my own as a child was a black tomcat my father named Claymore; not in tribute to the two handed sword wielded by the Highlanders in whose country we were living, but for the offshore drilling rig that pulled oil from the North Sea.

Oil permeated every aspect of my life from birth until I got married. When I was small my father worked out of Aberdeen on the SEDCO Thorax. Two weeks off, two weeks on, creating two distinct lives. The one in which my brother and I crawled into my mother’s bed in the early morning hours and we ate noodles mixed with butter and canned tomatoes and watched cartoons, and the one when my father was home and the rules were more strict and every meal consisted of meat, potatoes, and veg, but there was every chance of an adventure.

Reminders of the thing that put food on the table were everywhere. Piles of coveralls liberally smeared with pipe dope next to the back door were the indicator that my father was home. My baby dolls lived in a SEDCO duffle bag. We played Crazy 8’s with cards whose backs featured polar bears on icebergs alongside the 706 off the coast of Newfoundland. Slides of drilling platforms were interspersed with the family pictures that were shown on our annual trips back to the States – my father lingering on these as if they were equal to any architectural masterpiece, excitedly pointing out spider decks, mud pumps and meaningless formations with familiar names, even as he breezed past pictures of people until my mother reminded him to slow down. I spent untold amounts of time, when I should have been doing homework, playing with a paperweight that sat on the desk next to the tape dispenser – a two inch cube of glass encapsulating a teardrop bubble which contained, according to the etched message on the outside, “2 cc of North Sea Oil.” The first camping trip I remember was a sand pit in West Texas near a pump jack. My dresser was topped with souvenirs that my father brought home from countless trips to South Africa, Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore… trips that once prompted my mother to count the amount of time he had actually spent at home during their married life. Every move, and there were many, was for oil. Vacations were cancelled because of oil. There were picnics of fish and chips or take away Chinese in harbors looking at rigs. There were hours spent sitting in stuffy cars waiting while my father did one quick thing before a family outing. Everything was labeled by some oil company, from the pencils I used to practice cursive, to the countless hats in my parent’s closet - even the fingernail clippers I use today slip into a leather case from an oilfield supply company.

And I was proud. My father was my hero. He worked hard, and his work was important and exciting and dangerous. He had broken his back and cut off two fingers and people counted on him. In my young world those things mattered. There are songs about drilling rigs. There weren’t songs for people whose fathers were lawyers or CPA’s.

It was because of oil that I learned that my mother was brave. When I was four and my brother was 7 months old she made a transatlantic flight alone with two small children to join my father in a place where we didn’t have anything but our clothes. She was unflappable in the face of the blizzard that snowed us in without electricity for a week while my father was in Africa – cooking meals of toast and tinned soup next to the grate of a propane space heater. She made meals out of nothing when my father left SEDCO to help start up a new company and there were months when they didn’t even know if they would get paid. She had married a farmer from Williamsfield, OH, thinking she would spend her life in the bosom of her family, and instead she lived for 30 some odd years waiting for the phone call that announced it was time to pack up again.

Oil paid for me to go to school. It paid for the clothes on my back and the piano lessons I took and my first car. But beyond those things it meant that I don’t have a “home” like other people do. There will never be a place that I will know like the back of my hand, or people I will have known all my life. Instead I have my family –my parents, my brothers, my sister – the people who, because of our shared experience, are my home and my strength, and my people.

My own children have spent the entirety of their tender young lives in a single town. They are surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. They have never been the new kid in school. They have friends they have known from birth. When we go to the grocery store or the park or out to eat we see people we know. We attend the community events every year. Their lives are foreign to me. They have what I have never had. They belong to this place. And in some ways, it makes me sad.

They have no curiosity about their father’s work because it doesn’t affect their lives. They’ve never been transferred, they’ve never had to combine his environment with a picnic, there are no songs about high voltage power supply creators. To them the rest of the world is a far off place. The only sea they have ever put their toes in is the grey, greasy, Gulf of Mexico. They don’t need each other because they have their own people. To them siblings aren’t comrades in arms, but roommates – the kind who eat the food off of your shelf in the refrigerator.

They will grow up, and even if they leave this burg, they will come back and still know 20 back-ways to everywhere. If anything breaks they will have gone to school with someone who can fix it at cost. They might marry a high school sweetheart. In short they will have the same life that my husband and his friends had. They will have a life without oil. I wonder which bits of me they will take with them, and if, as I longed for a “hometown,” they will yearn for travel, or if they will become institutions in the place where they belong.

In which I've had enough.

Dear Universal Dispenser of Karmic Justice,

I am sorry. I get it. I am publicly apologizing for being superior, inflexible, intolerant, and narrow minded as an adoloscent. In my hubris I assumed that people were almost always responsible for their own situations, that behavior issues were always due the lack of discipline and good parents, that people who weren't advancing simply weren't trying. I understand now. I spoke in absolutes. I was wrong. Lesson learned. I am a much nicer person now.

That said, I'd like to dicuss the possibility of parole, because honestly, I need some Normal STAT. I really feel that 11.5 years of lesson learning is ample. If you take into account my toddlerhood (during which, by all accounts, I was a very sweet child), consider the standards of particular father I was given, and time spent in waiting rooms (and we all know that's just an Earthly extension of Purgatory), I think you will find that the time in which I was unaware of the error of my ways easily equals time spent learning humility.

I am really and truly sorry. Please, please, please can I have things in my life that work now? Or at least don't work any worse.

Megan

In which I wish you a happy New Year and make a resolution

My plan (call it a resolution if you must) is to be better at this. You may just end up hearing about what I ate for dinner, but it will be something, and something is better than nothing.

I've always thought it would be kind of neat to keep track of everything I read in a given year, so I thought I might do that here. Be forewarned that my previous attempts never got past February.

So far, in 2011 I have read:
Tara Road by Maeve Binchy I like Maeve Binchy. Particularly Circle of Friends and The Glass Lake. I know she's formulaic, but it doesn't bother me with her. I most enjoy her characters as children (although the twins in Scarlet Feather were irritating), they have a believability that is missing with other authors. That said, I avoided this book for a long time because there was an American in it. 1. I didn't want to leave Ireland. 2. I was a bit afraid that the Americans would be like Americans in 1980s British television - crass, nasal, and pushy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the first half of the book was entirely about Ria and her family. I sometimes wonder about Maeve's own experience in love. She's always writing about incredibly good looking men attaching themselves to women who are socially/physically/fictitiously inferior and then everyone talks about how she'll have to watch him all the time until he does something stupid that proves everyone right, or turns out to be Stevie Sullivan.

The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig Total guilty pleasure! I it was very silly, I missed Eloise, and noted some historical anachronism, but Turnip Fitzhugh says "Didn't think there was such a thing... As too much kindness, that is." And it was so lovely and earnest, and unexpected that I think I actually gasped.

In other news Lucy says, tickle tickle, grum (some), and walks around with the mouth piece of her toy phone to her ear saying " 'ello, 'ello." She can also brush her hair. Clearly, she is a genius.

In which Lucy Jaine is born

Part One (January 6 – 40 weeks 4 days):
Wednesday night (Jan. 6) I was feeling very crampy and just sort of blah. I had been having random contractions for the past two weeks, but nothing regular or promising. We put the kids to bed a little early and Leroy and I went upstairs to watch a movie but I just couldn't get comfortable. Every position I got into hurt. Finally we just gave up on the movie and I found a semi comfy position and started to read.

After awhile I start noticing a pattern. I was having contractions every 6-10 minutes. After awhile longer they evened out to every 9 minutes and they were getting stronger. This went on for almost two hours no matter what position I was in. Well I started thinking – it was after 10 already and we were supposed to have a major cold snap with sleet and ice. I didn't want to have to get the kids up in the middle of the night and I didn't want to be in a position where my mother in law might have to drive them anywhere in sleet and ice. Leroy and I talked about it, and decided to send them to grandma then, even though we knew we were in the early stages. So he got everyone up and packed for school the next day and took them to his mom's. Of course they were all excited and kept asking, “is she coming? Is it time for Lucy?”

Around 11:30 I was still having contractions, but I knew it was going to be a long time so I decided to go to sleep for awhile. 1:00 I woke up with horrible menstrual type cramps, still contracting with a ton of pelvic pressure and loose stool and nausea. “Ok,” I thought. “We're getting somewhere.” I got in the shower for awhile and just let the hot water run until it ran out. The sound of the water was really relaxing, so I just focused on the the sound and let things happen. Sometime after 2:00 I managed to get back to sleep but kept waking up from cramping and contractions every 30 minutes or so. Cool. Progress.

Then suddenly I woke up and it was 8:25. No cramps. No contractions. No baby. Leroy wanting to know if he should even go to work or not – I had no idea what to tell him. Had to call the mother in law and tell her no baby. Upset kids. Upset me.

Part Two (January 7):
I had a midwife appointment at 11:00, so Leroy decided to just call in to work and tell them he’d come in after lunch. I spent the morning puttering around on the computer and feeling just completely depressed. I was so ready to have a baby. I was also exhausted since I hadn’t slept very well. Hubby went and ran some errands and then came back to take me to the midwife. When we got there I told her about the contractions from the night before, but that absolutely nothing was happening anymore and she (Amber) asked me if I wanted an internal. I said yes because I wanted to know if anything was happening in there. I went to go pee in a cup and I overheard the other midwife (Joanie) saying something about my face being puffy. “Oh great,” I thought. “I must really look like crap.”

Amber did the internal and said that I was at 5 cm and 85% effaced but that the baby was still high. She and Joanie started telling me that my labor would probably pick up again that night. She asked if we were ready and Leroy said we needed groceries. They told us to go grocery shopping so I could walk around and get gravity on our side, eat a high protein lunch and then take a nap. At this point Joanie was taking my blood pressure. It was 140/90 for the second week in a row (even after me spending most of the previous week lying around). They told me I could get dressed and stepped out of the room.

When they came back there was a whole new set of instructions. I was NOT to go to the store, I was to go home and go to bed where I needed to stay. They gave us instructions on how to make a warm castor oil compress that I was supposed to put on my abdomen while I napped. When I woke up, Leroy was supposed to make parsley broth which I was supposed to drink every half hour and I was also supposed to take Calcium Magnesium to try to get my BP to start falling. Amber said, “you need to have this baby now.”

So once we got home I called my mom and then went to sleep for about an hour and a half with the castor oil compress (so glad I didn’t have to drink it) and then the parsley broth started – which wasn’t too bad. Around 6:00, Amber called and asked if I was having any contractions. I wasn’t. She told me to take a hot bath before I went to bed and to use my breast pump for about 15 minutes. If she didn’t hear from me during the night she would be there first thing in the morning and we would “get aggressive.”

My mom called around 7:30ish and while I was talking to her I started getting contractions that I actually had to breathe through. See ya, Mom! I ran my hot bath and called downstairs to tell Leroy he needed to call Amber and tell her the contractions were 7 minutes apart, intense, and I lost my plug – just as a heads up that yes, we would probably need her tonight. She didn’t answer her phone, but at that point I thought I had plenty of time. I was in the tub and having a lot of back labor, when she called back and asked if we needed her to come now or wait. I didn’t want to make any decisions at that point. It seemed soon to be telling her to come, but I realized that I was moaning through contractions and since I’d been 5cm that morning… I said, “Tell her I transition REALLY fast.” Then I had a contraction. Leroy said, “judging from her face – you might want to come now.”

The water started to get cold so we moved onto the bed and I started having contractions more or less on top of each other and it was getting tough to breathe through them. I started to think about blowing down a straw. I tried to make my breath as narrow as I could and then blew it in a spiral down an imaginary straw (white with blue stripes)

Joanie and Amber got there. I didn’t really notice when they came in. They took my BP and made me lay on my left side. (I guess my BP was pretty high) After that I wasn’t really aware of them. Someone was rubbing my back with warm oil and someone was rubbing my legs but all I really knew was that it felt good – like disembodied hands, kind of a strange sensation. All of a sudden I felt tremendous pressure. I tried to push a few times on my side but I couldn’t really do anything productive and I thought I would try to sit up a bit, but somehow I got flipped flat onto my back. This was horrible, but I couldn’t physically move myself and I couldn’t seem to articulate that I needed to move. It seemed beyond hard to push and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until she started to crown and my water broke – then everything got much easier! I wasn’t just trying to push out a baby, but a bulging bag as well. She gave her first cry before she was even born. They put her up on my chest and covered her with a towel, and there she was all pink and perfect and vernixy. 10:14 pm – only about two and a half hours since the first contraction.

Then things got confusing. They cut her cord immediately and I couldn’t figure out why because we had discussed waiting until the placenta delivered. Then they gave me a shot of pitocin in my leg (which immediately began shaking like crazy) and told me we needed to get the placenta out. I was just laying there thinking why? What’s your rush? I wasn’t having any contractions and I felt no urge to push. Amber was telling me that the cord (which was over 3ft long) was too thin at the placenta end and she couldn’t help me so I needed to push it out. I tried but nothing happened and mostly I just wanted to look at my baby so I wasn’t being particularly co-operative. It took me a minute or two but I realized that something was going on that wasn’t quite in the plan because Joanie and Amber both kept pushing me to push. After about 5 minutes the pit took effect and I was able to deliver the placenta. Apparently, it was much larger than average and part of it had ruptured at some point during the delivery. Also my BP had risen alarmingly high to the point that if I hadn’t been basically having a baby when they got there, they would have taken me to the hospital (they didn’t tell me that until the next day though – probably a good idea).

From this point on everything was wonderful. They made the two of us a nice herbal bath to soak in while they cleaned everything up (they even folded two loads of my laundry) and then when we were ready they weighed and measured her. Everyone was surprised that she only weighed 8lbs because she just looked so fat – we were all guessing closer to 9.

They left around midnight with strict instructions that I was on bed rest until further notice and they would be back the next morning.

By the next afternoon my BP had started to head back to normal and I was shedding vast amounts of water weight. On Sunday night I finally got the all clear to get up, but still take it easy. I bruised or cracked my tail bone when she was born so that was a little uncomfortable, but other than that I was very happy.

I’m fairly sure that if I had been going the OB route, they would have induced me the week before and I’m really glad I was able to avoid that this go around. My BP had been well in the normal range until the last two weeks and I wasn’t experiencing headaches or upper abdominal pain or any other Pre-E symptoms (which I had never had with any other pregnancy) – so it was nice not to be pressured into induction.

I was amazed afterwards, by the realization that, when drugs weren’t even an option, I didn’t even think about them. I’d never had an epidural before, but in the hospital they’d always given me something “to take the edge off” – not that it did a whole lot.

Amazing.