“We read the world wrong and then say that it deceives us” - Rabindranath Tagore
Quinn never slept more than two to three hours at a time for the first three years of life, and because the threat of seizures dictated we co-sleep, he never learned how to “self-soothe” through the wee hours of the night. Instead, Quinn learned he could wake me up, hour after hour, with a Viking’s attack on my breast and I would happily serve as his human binky, IF, in return, he'd do me the biggest favor of my life and JUST … GO BACK…TO SLEEP….
I know, I know … we’d read all the books, we had early interventionists visiting weekly who “tisked tisked” and warned that we were headed for trouble with such a system, but no other system seemed to work, and we were hamstrung by the very real fear of upsetting Quinn’s neurological apple cart.
However, after the first year and a half of no REM, it was my neurological apple cart that fell over. I began having mild panic attacks at night. The doctor put me on Zoloft. Afterwards, I slept better when I slept, but a few months later, migraines set in. Blinding, incapacitating headaches that maybe a nap would cure, but how do you sleep when your baby sleeps if your baby never sleeps? The doctor added Topomax to my regimen. Not exactly how I wanted to experience the first few years of motherhood– all drugged up with nowhere to go.
Another year of no deep sleep and my body staged a full-out revolt. My immune system decided to go on strike and a little cough turned into a three-month battle with bronchitis. I was told that if I didn’t consciously take a deep breath every ten minutes, I was at risk of losing part of my lung. I dropped a few dress sizes, probably the result of the Topomax and the stress, which some might say, so what, who cares how you get there, ain’t it grand to be a waif? Maybe, but the drug also made me as alert as a bag of rocks, so I couldn’t enjoy my new litheness because I was far too busy trying to piece together a full sentence or trying to remember why I had pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store on any given day.
When I began to boycott all of my black clothes and started dressing in nothing but pink, I knew I’d stepped off the cliff of sanity and was soon to land in the not so distant land of nut-so. Not that I have anything against pink, but I wasn’t choosing to wear it because it flattered my skin tone, but rather because it turns out, black dye contains tannins (who knew?) and every time I wore black my skin broke out in horrible rashes in reaction to the chemicals. And it wasn’t just tannins, I could be grounded for hours by the smell of bleach, or new rugs or scented lotion or even dirty diapers.
Clearly I was cracking under the pressure of trying to care for my sleepless, epileptic son. Surprisingly, the doctor didn’t have a drug for that. She just said, “you have to change your lifestyle, otherwise you’re going to launch yourself into a full-blown autoimmune disorder that won’t allow for you to care for your son at all … is that what you want?”
As if.
Of course I didn’t want to be incapacitated by an autoimmune disease! Of course I wanted to be a fully functioning human being who could care for my son! Didn’t she know my biggest fear was that I would die in a fiery car crash and then who on earth would pick up the slack and tend to this colicky, hungry little insomniac? I didn’t know how, in a few short years, I had gone from the hardy soul my dear friend says she would choose to “man” her wagon train out west, to the leper in the ditch, too preoccupied with scabs to get it together to set out for gold … but I can tell you this, it had nothing to do with what I wanted or didn’t want!
Or did it?
Though the doctor probably hadn’t meant it literally, looking back, I see that the question was not all that far-fetched. Maybe I didn’t want to care for my son, because maybe I didn’t really want “this” child. Maybe I wanted the child who slept and occasionally took a bottle, the one who could coo and crawl and laugh on cue - at least at all of my jokes. This rather bizarre, but oh so human need to cling to my own pre-scripted story - the one with the perfect beginning, middle and end, complete with bouncing baby boy - had left me bereft and bewildered at my co-writer’s new plot twist. Not that I would have ever said any of this aloud to another human being, because I also have a fear of being dragged through the public square and stoned to death, but clearly the cosmic waiter had made a mistake and brought me the wrong dish, and while I was too polite to complain, I was resenting having to swallow bite after bite of somebody else’s idea of a meal. And if the resentment wasn’t making me sick, the guilt most certainly was.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Quinn dearly and desperately then. My heart ached with so much tenderness for his little being that I felt like I’d been turned inside out and unfurled to the limits of my loving. And while I was exhausted in those wee hours, I had also never experienced more joy than in the softly lit, quiet moments just before Quinn would drift off, his index finger gently “plugging in” to my belly button as we fell together, back into the shadowless land of sleep. He was my boy and I was his Mama … and somewhere in that equation lingered something larger than the both of us. I knew it, deep down, but I just couldn’t seem to catch hold of a truth like that; I was too busy reeling at the idea that not only did God have a bunch of short straws in his big fist, but that I’d had the misfortune to draw one.
My friends rallied around me and hooked me up with a nutritionist, an acupuncturist and the most gifted massage therapist who has ever lived. It was time to get back on track. Gradually, my body began to heal, but my spirit couldn’t fathom gradual. It was still operating on some ancient system, the one that melts glaciers and realigns tectonic plates, so in the interim, before I could synchronize corporal and spiritual time clocks, I attached a whole new meaning to my regained health: I would have another child!
And this time, I would do it right. I would eat nothing but organically grown kale and mercury-free fish. I would do yoga every day. I would visualize a perfectly healthy baby and voilà, manifest one out of thin air. I would beat God at his own game. There’d be nothing but long straws for me from here on out!
Soon after I hit 39 and felt my eggs gasping for air in the shriveling caves of my ovaries, I knew the time was now or never. Quinn hadn’t had a seizure in nearly a year and a half, which was a strong indication that he’d outgrown them, and now that he was weaned, I had passed night duty off to my husband and had caught a few restorative z’s. I’d also successfully weaned myself off all my medication, which meant it was time to unearth my stretchy pants and get down to business.
But the maternity clothes remained tucked away in their plastic tub, along with all of the toys Quinn never played with as a baby. I longed for another child, but something in me was resisting moving forward with the plan. I couldn’t figure it out, I thought maybe I was still holding on to the fear that we’d have another special needs kid and that I’d fall down the rabbit hole again, this time never to return. Or maybe I was still so focused on helping Quinn through his delays in development, that I didn’t know how I’d have anything left to give to a healthy newborn, who, I was pretty sure, despite robustness, would still have needs.
Neither really felt right or true, so it seemed, whatever this stoppage was, it must not belong to me. And then, like a ripe piece of fruit, the mysterious hair-clump was plucked from the cosmic drainpipe with a single twist of fate.
While we were visiting my parents in Virginia, Quinn had his worst grand-mal seizure since he was a newborn. The unconscious, violent-jerking, lips-turning- blue-kind. But it wasn’t the horrible vision of my three and a half year-old’s seizure that put a halt to my desire to further procreate, but instead, the intense feeling of peace I felt holding him afterwards. Actually, it was more than a feeling, it was an experience… well, actually, it was more than an experience, and if you promise not to call in the little men in white coats, I can tell you what it really was …. It was an entity. I didn’t see bright lights or hear voices, but I felt a presence as surely as I felt my son’s sweet body resting against my own. As if Grace itself had entered through the back door of my parents’ house and stood there before me in full regalia, tipping its hat in salutation ... and then wrapping itself around my son and me, transfiguring our desolation into crystalline knowing.
All this time I had been holding myself hostage from the absolute joy of loving what is. Tossing my script into the shredder marked, "Meaningless Tripe" I now had two hands free to fully embrace my imperfect, perfect life; to finally catch hold of the truth beyond truth: I did want this child. I had always wanted this child. I wanted nothing else but to love this child. Quinn was my boy and I was his Mama and that was that.
