In the middle of the night

In the middle of the night, Alice wakes me ever so gently. She has a habit of doing these little coughs when she's stirring, closely followed by the sounds of her stretching and flexing her little limbs about, and then, after a few more minutes, I hear the suggestive smacking of her lips that signal she is hungry. She is such a helpful little baby. She tries very hard to communicate with us and she is very good at letting us know what it is she wants. Or perhaps we are very good at interpreting her signals. A bit of both, no doubt. We are very patient with each other, all of us. We take our time because we know how precious, how irreplaceable time spent with Alice is. I gaze at her so long sometimes that I think I can see her growing. I've become a bit obsessive about trying to commit every inch of her, every minute spent in her company, to my mind. In case she disappears, of course. I still half-expect her to be gone when I wake up in the mornings. I don't know how I'll ever sleep without her in my room.

She is a good sleeper, my baby. She has been from the day she was born. Admittedly, she slept so well those early weeks because she was jaundiced and lethargic (I didn't know that at the time, though), but even though she is thriving now and drinking herself silly with milk she is still a pretty settled sleeper. She's beginning to stretch out her feeds to the four-hour mark, although this seems to happen more frequently during the day than during the night time. I don't dare complain about how hard it is to get up at 1am or 4am on these cold. wintry Melbourne nights, however. I can't think of a better reason to find myself cold and weary than my dear baby's comfort and satisfaction. It's much easier to be on the couch in the middle of the night feeding my snuggly, warm Alice than it is to be sitting there aching, longing, grieving for her brother, as I have for so many nights since he died.

Though Alice is here safely with me in the post-midnight hours, that feeling that the darkness is time for mourning must still be etched in my mind. I find the night time makes me feel very sad, still, though I'm holding my heart's greatest wish in my arms. It's too quiet. Or it's too lonely. Or it's too something I can't quite put my finger on. Sometimes I just want to wake Les up and have him sit with me just to share the moment. I contemplate turning on the TV but that kind of noise feels like an assault at that time of the morning. I'm thinking of setting up the radio in the living room so I can just listen to some soft, comforting voices - a podcast from the BBC or something like that.

I sit with Alice at 1am and try to stay present with her, sharing those special moments of quiet time with her. But my mind does wander. It wanders to Max - of course it does. The place where I usually sit to feed her directly faces the shelf where his photo sits, where I display the little book I wrote about him, where his name is spelled out in wooden letters. I like that he is there with us but it hurts so much every night, all over again, that he is not there with us, really. The middle of the night is not the time to be contemplating the meaning of life and death but there I go anyway. If Max had lived Alice would not be here. But I can't imagine Alice not existing, so does that mean I'm glad Max died? It always comes back to 'why' - why did it happen this way? Why can't they both be here with me? Why was I given this insurmountable cross to bear?

The love I have for my children is overwhelming but it is stretched across a divide - the divide between the living and the dead. I feel like I am back at the beginning of this journey again, finding a way to navigate through the most complex mix of emotions. I'm trying to let Alice be my guide. She is a healer, of that I am sure. I wonder if she knows what a balm to my heart she is. She does not fix the part of it that broke when Max died. That is not her job. That break cannot be mended. But she warms and expands all of its other chambers of feeling in a way I could not previously have imagined, and in those moments, alongside the sadness, I just overflow with love for her. She is sweetness. She is warmth. She is love. She's the best reason I've had to be up past midnight in a very long time.

Six weeks old

Alice, my Alice, you are six weeks old, but just barely past your due date. Already I am saddened that the early days spent with you seem like a blur. The thing is, having a baby (especially a premmie one like you) is such a shock to the system that you're really not conscious for the first week or so to really enjoy the little creature you have created. No one really tells you that. It's not until weeks later when you've rested and healed and been able to look back on your experience so far that you realise you don't remember that much of it, and you suddenly desperately wish you did. As I had to spend so many days without you while you were in the hospital this feeling is magnified. I feel cheated of those days, though I know you needed them to get strong. I didn't expect to feel so disconnected from those early days. Remembering is like watching someone else play the part of your mother because six weeks ago feels so very different to now - so different that I must have been another person or in another world.

Today is the first day that you and I have spent entirely alone together. Your daddy has been working from home and your Nana has been visiting, but today it's just the two of us. Though I was scared the sky would fall in when I didn't have all of this lovely support at home, I was also looking forward to getting started on being your mum. Not that I haven't been caring for you so far, but the last few weeks have felt like a practice run and I wanted to get to the part where we are doing the real thing. It's 4.30pm as I write this and I can happily say we've made a success of this first day. We left the house (tick) and bought a new pram for us to go walking and exploring and socialising with. We took you to your check up appointment with the maternal and child health nurse (tick), where we discovered that you have put on 260g in a week! (You now weigh 3.8kg!) We sat on the couch and spent some 'awake' time together just gazing around the room (tick). You have this way of pursing your lips when you're alert that is just so cute. I love it when you do that. So, we pretty much achieved everything that was expected us and we both did it without any major meltdowns!

You were a very lucky girl over the past week to enjoy special time getting to know your Nana from Tasmania (I'll write another post about her visit soon). She fell in love with you as easily and quickly as we did, and she spoiled you rotten as well. She gave you the world's most hi-tech and amazing baby swing, which you have been thoroughly enjoying. Daddy calls it the 'sleep machine' as if you are grizzly and unsettled we put you in it and swing you about and you instantly calm down. You just love looking at the little lambs that circle around your head while it's swinging. Here are some pictures of you in awe of your new contraption - I think you thought it was the best day of your life!

We can't figure out if you are saluting the lambs here!

Keeping a close eye on those flying sheep

Your 'sleep machine' in all its glory

You are finally growing into some of your many, many, pretty outfits. Until recently even size 0000 clothes have been so big on you that they look like clown outfits! I am very happy that you have grown just a little bit, if only because I have so many things I want to dress you up in! Daddy says you don't need any more clothes. Soon you'll realise that's a very 'daddy' thing to say. He just doesn't understand that a girl needs an outfit for every occasion because he wears the same thing all the time and doesn't buy anything new until the old thing has fallen apart! He's such a funny daddy, though sometimes he's infuriating too! He's always happy to see you looking so pretty and cute in your little clothes, though, so I don't think he really minds that new things keep appearing in your drawers...

You were supposed to have a doctor's check up and get your vaccinations today but the clinic made a mistake with the appointment and now it has been postponed for a week. It might have been a bit much for our first day together, anyway, as the nurse said that you might not be feeling the best afterwards. But don't worry, I'm going to buy you some baby Panadol in advance of next week in case you get a fever or any aches and pains. I wish I didn't have to watch the doctors stick needles in you but I know it is for a very good reason so I'll just have to toughen up, won't I?

One exciting thing we did this week was get your little baby hands and feet cast in plaster so that we will have a keepsake of how teeny tiny you were. The company will frame them and make them look beautiful and we will hang them on our wall as a reminder of this time in all of our lives. You were such a good sport during the casting. You didn't really like the coldness of the plaster and squirmed around a bit but you didn't really cry. I was very proud of you!

Really, though, I am proud of you every single day, just for getting to me safely. Already you've achieved the thing I cared about most in the world so anything you do from here on in is an absolute bonus. Keep being your gorgeous little self, and maybe think about giving me a smile sometime soon? I would really, really love to see your little face light up in a grin!

I love you my little pea, with all of my heart. Happy six week birthday!

A belated Mother's Day post

This Mothers Day I counted myself as an extremely fortunate woman. I was able to share it with my own mother, who was visiting from Hobart.

I was able to share it with my living, breathing daughter (I still can't believe I get to say those words).

On this day last year I was a mother too, but one without a child - hardly a mother at all in some people's eyes. I felt keenly Max's absence that day and I think it was one of the first times I really realised that I had not just lost Max, my little boy, but that I had lost the entire life I had planned to lead with him. I felt invisible. I didn't look like a mother. I didn't feel like a mother. I felt robbed of my baby and of the recognition that I'd ever birthed him, tended to him, loved him, just like any of the other mothers waking up to breakfast in bed that morning. It was a hard day. One in a long line of hard days.

It is true that Alice's birth has helped the hard days seem easier to bear. At the moment she is a tiny, squirming vessel into which I pour an abundance of love and affection, and when you love someone so deeply it is actually quite hard to feel sad in their presence. Alice brings me such light. She brings me such hope. She brings me so much happiness. I spent this Mother's Day in Alice's joyful company, but it was still a profoundly uncomfortable day for me - rejoicing in the presence of one child and mourning  yet again the foreverness of another's absence.

We had had high tea at the Abbotsford Convent to mark the occasion but it did not feel like a celebration despite my efforts to dress up and to look on the bright side of life with a beautiful baby in my arms. In fact it felt lonely. It was perhaps one of the loneliest days I've had in a very long time. Here I was pushing this tiny, delightful baby around, who was the subject of so many smiles and comments and so much attention, but following by my side was my ghost child - the one who feels ever-present to me but can't be seen by those well-wishers who assumed that Alice was my first and only baby. It stung my heart to know, as if I had just realised it for the first time, that Max would never be seen or acknowledged by the outside world and because of this I felt this really acute disconnect from everyone else there. I couldn't help but wonder if that is what motherhood is like after you've lost a child. Is there always a sense of not-really-belonging? Or even of not wanting to belong? I sometimes think that I get confused between the two - wanting to be a part of 'normal' life and then wanting to set myself apart from it in protest that life will never be 'normal' for me again.

This disconnect became even more apparent as the afternoon wore on. I'd been gifted tickets to the event by a foundation supporting families of premature infants after I responded to an article in their latest newsletter. As the mother of two premature babies I felt that maybe I would find some of my 'tribe' through this organisation. I guess, like I am all the time at the moment, I was looking for somewhere to belong.

Three other families sat at our table, each of whom was also affiliated with the foundation. At first I think they all wondered what the hell we were doing there with our full-term-looking, healthy newborn baby. It felt silly telling them that Alice was a 35-weeker, as a 35-weeker is not really a premmie at all in the eyes of those whose babies had been born much earlier. I was well aware of that. I could not be part of their conversations on corrected ages, chronic lung disease, or stories of months spent in hospital or of carting oxygen tanks around for the first few years of a child's life. But I wasn't there in recognition of Alice's struggle. I was there in honour of Max. But he was not there. And because of that I felt so alone, so separate from the 'normal' mums in attendance, and now, feeling like I did not even belong in a group of mums who had also known the heartache of prematurity.

God knows I tried my best to feel a part of things. Trying to make conversation with the woman sitting beside us with two small children, I asked what her connection to the group was. She told me her three-year-old son, who was sitting on her lap, had been born at 23 weeks. Here he was, a robust, normal little boy, scoffing scones and tartlets, running about and getting his face painted.

23 weeks. 23 weeks. The words took my breathe away, especially as she said it so nonchalantly, as if having a surviving, thriving ex-23-weeker was one of the most normal things in the world. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I had a 23-weeker too. She was probably already all too aware that her son had beaten a death that was almost a certainty for most babies of his gestation. It seemed too cruel to tell her. But hell, it was cruel for me to have to sit there after that, fighting tears, unable to look at that little boy without wanting to scream and wail 'why not my little boy? Why not mine?'

Could that be Max sitting there, if only we'd demanded the doctors resuscitate him? Could he have been the baby who not only survived, but survived with no debilitating long-term consequences? That spiral of thoughts, long since put to rest (or so I thought) started up again almost immediately. I had to stop myself from falling into a panic of 'WHAT HAVE I DONE?' as if I had just realised that Max was dead all over again. Had I killed my baby? Had I taken the chance of becoming like this little boy away from my own son? Why didn't I fight for my baby as this woman had clearly fought for hers? In that moment I wanted another chance. I wanted to walk for a while in her shoes to know what it would feel like if you only had a close call with tragedy. I wanted to know what that kind of relief felt like. I wanted to know what it felt like to dodge that bullet.

And so, for another day, I made polite conversation and swallowed my terrible sadness. I took that sadness home and I shaped it into whispers of love for my newborn daughter's ears, wondering how on earth I would ever learn to manage the complicated spectrum of feeling that having one child alive and another dead would continue to bring.

One month old!

We've had a big week. Alice reached the very momentous one-month-old mark. She also, finally, reached her expected due date today, the 10th of May. Two milestones in one week! Her one-month birthday was a cause for celebration in our little house. In fact, every day we've had her in our lives has been a celebration, as cliched as that sounds. We still really can't believe we got to the other side of the pregnancy. We still can't believe she's here. We still can't believe she is ours. We especially can't believe that we get to keep her - that she's growing stronger and more resilient every day.

We had a visit to the maternal and child health nurse this week where we discovered that she has grown 4cm since she was born, and that she is also putting on a pleasing amount of weight. She currently weighs 3.45kg, and is finally beginning to fill out her little grow suits that until now have been a bit on the roomy side. She is a perfect size 0000 at the moment and we are trying to get a good amount of wear out of the lovely little outfits we've recently bought her before she grows out of them!

I just love dressing her up. I love any chance I get to look at her gorgeous little limbs and to feel her warm, soft skin upon mine. She's not a great fan of getting in and out of her clothes but she doesn't complain too much, she just squirms around a bit and screws up her face when we pull things over her head. We are still quite slow in dressing her, afraid that we will be too rough and accidentally pull off an arm or a leg, or a little finger or toe. We're slowly learning that she's a much more robust little creature than we give her credit for, though. She's actually getting really strong - I've noticed it in her little legs, especially, and two different medical professionals have also commented on how good her head/neck control is for her age. We've been encouraged to start giving her some 'tummy' time and her grandfather bought her the world's most gigantic play mat where she can practice (seriously, it takes up our entire living room). So far the cats seem to be enjoying the play mat a lot more than she has, though!

I can't get enough of Alice's milestones. I'll make a milestone out of pretty much anything. They were the things I desperately missed out on when Max died, and that I spent months and months longing for. It's why I'm going nuts gathering mementos of all of Alice's milestones, from ordering commemorative birth certificates, to having sculptures made of her little hands and feet, to buying a trolley load of albums and decorations from a scrap booking website to make her a very special baby memory/story book, to collecting all of the little tidbits from her hospital stay (ID tags, the name signs from her little cot). I even took photos of the first pieces of mail she received addressed to her (a package of presents from my mum!). I'm sure I'm going to end up with thousands of mundane photos. Maybe I'll forget what those random images meant at the time, but for now they seem important. I want to gather all the 'evidence' of her existence I can find as if those things might finally convince me that my baby is here, that she is safe, that she is mine.

Here's something else I did. I bought these little month-by-month stickers ages ago and daydreamed about being able to take photos of her wearing them as the calendar turned throughout the year. I bought them from this cute Etsy shop and there are tonnes of designs to choose from. I was beside myself with excitement about being able to whack one of the stickers on her this week. It gave me such a thrill that I didn't even get stressed that she was crying at the time - I was having too much fun! Here she is modelling her '1 Month' sticker. The photos crack me up. She's so expressive with her little arms and they are so long and skinny!

Speaking of photos, we were also excited to have a professional photo shoot of our little family this week. My friend Bek from Little Red Photography is an amazing photographer who is really able to capture the essence of the subject and the occasions she photographs. Bek took some photos of Leslie and I after Max died, incorporating some of his special keepsakes, and she also found some ways to include Max in our current batch of photos, which meant a lot to us. Alice was a good sport for the whole afternoon, only getting unsettled towards the end of our visit to Bek's lovely home. She was very accommodating of us posing her and passing her around. I haven't seen any of the images yet but I know they will be very special and that we will treasure them forever.

Les has been working from home the last two weeks. It's been nice having him at home - just knowing he is there in case all hell breaks loose is reassuring, though nothing of the sort has happened so far. I know that I will manage perfectly fine when he goes back to work, I'm just nervous about it. I'm nervous about not having any back up. I'm worried I'll never get out of the house. What if Alice starts crying and I can't make her stop and I'm the only one here? Nothing seems as scary or dire when there's someone by your side, even if there's nothing additional they can do to help. I have the phone numbers of a bunch of helplines that the hospital gave me on the fridge, so I suppose if all else fails I could swallow my pride and dial them up!

The week ended on a high note. Alice and I made our way, sans Les, to see Melanie this morning, then we took yet another trip to the hospital where she was born for an appointment with a lactation consultant. Feeding has been a very serious challenge for me (I'll write more on this later) and I've seen a bunch of consultants for help so far. The one I saw today was the only one who has really helped, though. It wasn't that she told me anything especially different to what I'd already been told, but she seemed to be able to communicate in a way that just made sense to me, and in the space of a few minutes she fixed a couple of simple mistakes in technique I'd been making and things pretty much improved instantly! I came home with a new feeding plan. It is going to take a lot of work, but I'm committed to giving it a red hot try over the coming weeks in a final attempt to make breastfeeding work for us both. Alice was an angel throughout, even sleeping peacefully while I had some lunch and a cup of tea in the now-familiar food court. Thankfully she also seems to enjoy being in the car as we had a long day getting in and out of it. There's not usually a peep out of her when I'm driving, which is a relief!

So that's a rundown of Alice's fourth week of life, although a mundane one (my update, that is, not her achievements!). I'm basically just typing what ever comes into my head, with very little forethought, which is about all I am capable of at the moment!

More from all of us soon!

An invitation to contribute to Alice's time capsule!

Dear friends and family,

To mark the occasion of our daughter's birth, and to give her some insight into the world as it was when she was born, we are creating a time capsule to give her when she is grown. We would love your help! We had planned to do this in the early days after Alice was born, but then things became complicated and very stressful after we ended up having to stay in the hospital for so long, and the task fell to the bottom of our 'to do' list when the priority was just to help her get strong enough to come home.

Thanks to the diligence of Alice's grandparents we managed to collect the major newspapers from the day she was born, but now that she is one month old we would like to scour further afield for interesting artifacts that represent the first month of her life. So far we have thought of gathering
weather forecasts, photos of and notes about our every day life, music charts, and bestseller lists, but in our sleep-deprived state are struggling to come up with more creative ideas.

We would love it if you could share with us any clever memory-making ideas you have, and we'd love it even more if you'd like to participate in our project by providing something unique for the capsule. Perhaps you could take a photo of something from your every day life (trees, streets, cars, anything!) and send it to us with a caption or story. Maybe you'd like to jot a note about where you were when you heard the news of Alice's birth and how you felt. Or, you could write her a letter introducing yourself as one of her 'special people'.

We'd love to include you in this project for our little girl so please put your thinking caps on!

Janelle, Les and Alice.

First bath

Les gave Alice her very first bath when she was three days old. He was ably assisted by a lovely midwife who was looking after me that evening, and Alice surprised everyone by enjoying every minute of her soak, despite Les being as anxious as hell about having to hold her in a very deep tub!

For the first few days after she was born we thought our baby had dark hair, but a good wash revealed that we actually had quite a platinum blondie! She looked like a completely different baby after her bath!

Here she is enjoying every facet of her bath that evening:

 

While Daddy was having a nervous breakdown, Mummy captured it all on film... 

I was initially bemused by Les's nervousness. I'd never seen him so shaky and unsure of himself! But then, when it came time for me to bath Alice for the first time, I finally understood just how stressful it is to handle a squirming newborn in a tub of deep water, especially as by this time Alice had a feeding tube inserted, which added an extra layer of complexity to the situation. Also, the nurse who was in charge of the Special Care unit that day was particularly bossy and opinionated and made me very nervous and unsure of myself. She really undermined my confidence, in every way, that day. 

Alice is also enjoying her baths here at home. We're becoming adept at organising all the bathing accoutrements in advance of the actual bath (I'm very proud of us) and the only time she kicks up a fuss is the time between her getting dried and getting dressed. Once she's snug and dressed again all is well with her world. We are bathing her 2-3 times per week, which is what the the hosptial recommended, although I can easily see how we might do it more often if she gets unsettled as she seems to find it so soothing and relaxing.