What a Week

This new year is starting with a terrible emotional bang, it's clamor conflicting with my usual, rhythmic conviction about January's post-holiday calm. We continue to work on getting appointments to learn what's going on with the baby. While we do that, we forge back and forth between knowing nothing's wrong, convinced our doctor is conservative and working on a just-in-case scenario (she herself said it wasn't urgent, right); that, and certainty that something is very wrong. Update: we found a way to get to the scheduling nurse at the Children's Hospital. That in itself shaved a few months waiting time. The nurse sent out the intake forms immediately and they arrived Saturday.

I had the strangest reaction filling them out. The reality of the baby's hard first year hit me. I thought I had taken it in, but the heaviness of it became more real. I filled line after line: Doctors who have seen your child; specialists who have seen your child; hospitalizations; medications taken regularly; medications your child has taken. diagnoses.

With Samira, these lines would have stayed blank. Instead, my hand hurt when I was done. My baby has her own pediatric urologist; how many of us ever have a urologist? She's on daily antibiotic. She took iron supplements. Thank goodness that through all of us she smiles, but I really started to worry. And to remember: the loss of muscle tone when she was sick. The few days I've forgotten to take my prenatal vitamins. I'm trying to stay away from guilt in the abstract, mother-guilt sense of things. At the same time, I can't help ask what specific things I can do to make her life better. We've cleaned out the living room to give the baby lots more room to move around. I'm making sure that she spends lots of time on that cleaned-out floor, that's instead of putting her in the backpack or sling and toting her around. If there's a chance that her development is slow due to lack of floor-opportunity, I'd love the chance to solve it this way.

So many filled line. And yet, I remind myself it could be worse. much worse, and that's not to sound pollyanish, nor to downplay the way lowgrade fear fills our days. It is to find a context, to appreciate our friends, our family, the big picture, that these are things that can be treated, fixed.

For now, it's Sunday morning. Samira is at a playdate, Rob is helping an old friend in distress. The baby is sleeping, a long morning nap because we kept her up late last night. I'm cooking food for the week: french toast and soft carrots for the baby, poached chicken to shred. Making a grocery list, putting washed clothing into the dryer, and listening to REM on the radio, which is strangely healing, reminding me of a time, several decades ago, when problems were abstract, and listening to a great album or spending a patch of late night hours at a club listening to a favorite band could make anything all better.

If there's anything that can claim the same emotional range as a few hours with a late-80's North Carolina or Athens band, it's the ups and downs of family life, the insane love and care I feel for these people, who, small and large, are mine, all mine.

And now, when I most want to wallow in jangly guitars and piano pedals, a little baby sends out a cry that she's awake.