still waiting

The last ten days have been the longest of my life.

Here's the short version: for medical reasons, we tried an induction of labor on the 15th. Nothing happened but a long, frustrating day in the hospital (and some very bad news about a dear friend of ours that arrives via a cell phone message while we're waiting). After a battle with my doctor over my blood pressure that necessitates some extra lab work (he is sure I'm developing pre-eclampsia, I'm certain it's just white-coat fever), they rescheduled us for the following Monday. We called in five times and waited all day by the phone, but there was no room at the hospital for an induction. We rescheduled for Wednesday. After a day full of Cytotec, no contractions, no dilation, so we switch to Pitocin. I spend several hours hooked up in every possible way: IV, blood pressure cuff, fetal monitor, feeling like I'd rather be in jail because I could at least walk my cell (good news is, baby B's heartrate just chugs along at 140-160 bpm, he's doing belly flips and punts and hiccups, he's a little locomotive). No contractions.

They take me off the Pitocin so I can get a few hours sleep (for some reason they moved me to a birthing suite delivery room, where the bed is really not meant for sleeping, so there's not much of that), then start again at 5 a.m. I am just beginning to have contractions at 8 a.m. when the new doctor comes on call. She and my doctor recommend continuing with Pitocin and checking me again several hours later. Mentally exhausted (partly because the next words out of new doctor's mouth--keep in mind I've never met her before--are "You know you're going to have to go on the South Beach diet when this baby arrives," and tells me again about my baby's risk of sharing my chronic health condition) but committed, I agree.

A half hour later she comes in and says, "I just got new information. The special care nurseries at all three local hospitals are full. If we continue this induction and your baby arrives before nursery space becomes available, if he needs to go into the nursery, we'll have to send him to (names two cities, one three hours away, one five hours away)." Now, I've talked with the pediatrician and know that there's a slight risk of baby needing some special intervention, but hearing it like this and imagining my little guy whisked off, is just too much. I burst into tears. Doctor keeps talking (amazing how medical professionals don't even skip a beat when someone is crying in front of them), and I say, I need a few minutes to consider this. They tell us that if we stop the induction today, they'll be sure and get us in on Saturday (when, theoretically, the nursery situation will have improved). Absolutely certain. B and I talk, we decide we need to keep going. We'll deal with the nursery situation when/if it materializes.

They turn up the Pitocin, and I try to prepare myself for another long day (and the new, previously unimagined possibility that, since today's our due date, this baby might actually go overdue!). Half hour later, the nurse and doctor come back. Doctor says, "Your choices have changed." This time they tell us that we no longer have the choice of continuing the induction in their hospital today. We can either go to another hospital two hours away, which appears to have room, or come back on Saturday. I ask, what if the nursery situation hasn't improved on Saturday? Well, they backpedal, then it's the hospital two hours away.

I'm a freakin' wreck by this point, but I'm taking this as a sign from the universe that this baby is not being induced (I'm starting to think of it as "evicted") today. We call our doula and our friend, who meet us at the hospital. Our doula confabs with the nurse, then comes back in and says, I've never seen this before in 30 years of doing this work, but it's true. There is no room at the inns all around us. . .

We have lunch with our doula and friend and go home. B feels like we've been bumped from an airline flight and is pissed. I say, "Yes, but you feel like you've been bumped from an airline flight because it was oversold. I feel like I got bumped because someone thought I looked like a terrorist."

I know I'm all sensitized with pregnancy hormones, but it feels somehow personal to me. Trying to advocate for myself, trying to be allowed to manage my chronic health condition in the hospital without too much intervention (which has meant fielding disbelieving calls from pharmacists who say, are you sure you take this medication in this dose? and nurses having to provide extra monitoring, who are vocal about their frustrations that my baby is active and doesn't like to stay on the monitor, as well as about how difficult it is to locate him through my belly fat), dealing with my doctor who has turned out to be the most conservative monitor-Nazi possible, not allowing me to move around at all even before the Pitocin was started, dealing with shift-changes that change the induction protocol, being moved. . .and all for nothing. We've lost nearly all the five days B was going to be able to take off work after the baby arrived, just waiting around in the hospital. We've now been in the hospital for three days, and I'm terrified of what this is costing us.

So, it's keep my eyes on the prize time: when this is all over, there will be a baby B. We just have to wait it out. I'm not sure now what to do about inducing again, but I suspect my doctor's going to freak when he finds out we got booted--he didn't even like waiting full-term. I suppose it's a good exercise in parenthood--letting go of my own agenda. Still, I'll be glad when he's here and home and all these extra people are out of our lives.

knitting socks and waiting

I love knitting so much. After several months absence, I've returned to the Heike socks, started last February. Where their tiny sz 0 needles and the little pattern of cables seemed interminable a few months ago, it suddenly is just the right thing to knit while waiting to birth this little bellyball. At our first (failed) attempt at induction on Thursday, knitting helped ease my frustration with all things medical and let me forget the growing discomfort in my nether regions (it was failed, but not entirely failed--some unproductive contracting). Tonight it seemed just the right thing to help me forget the. . .yes, growing discomfort in my nether regions.

We go back tomorrow for induction attempt #2, if the discomfort doesn't wake us up in the middle of the night as real labor. Boy, this baby is stubborn--I told him yesterday that, if he wanted to do this on his own, he needed to do it sometime Sunday. He waits of course for the last possible minute, just like he waited for the last possible moment two weeks before my deadline 36th birthday last summer to make his presence known. He is his definitely his father's child.

an old post about mother love

In a week or a little more, I will be a mother. I came across this post, written for another blog, about knitting for my mother (2/2/06). I'm posting it here and now because it seems appropriate, and because I have been blog-AWOL for awhile.

My relationship with my mother has been complicated for a very long time. As I prepare to be a mother, I am now conscious of all the ways I can let my child down without ever meaning to, with all the best intentions. Forgive me, mom, for being hard on you, and thank you for all your good intentions.

I’m knitting a pair of socks for my mother. I don’t like them very much. They weren’t intended for my mother. They began with an experiment in dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid, and because Kool Aid makes its chemical colors garishly bright to appeal to children, the yarn was a mud of uncommitted but distinct stripes of grape, kiwi green, turquoise blue, and 1970s pink. The 1970s pink was familiar precisely because of my mother’s love for it, the shade of most of my public dresses until I finally said no more and rebelled against lace. I chose the yarn for these socks (my third pair ever) because I wanted to learn a new knitting technique, making two socks at one time, and didn't want to spare more valued yarn on something where mistakes were so likely to happen.

But when my mother saw the socks at Thanksgiving, she loved them. Of course she did—they were all the colors I rebelled against, the soft tenuous colors that she clothed herself in my whole life, the colors she always wanted for me to love. She likes faint things: faint living, faint colors, faint powers of persuasion. Glad to have a home for these socks that wouldn’t remain in my drawer, I said, they’re yours. But something happened as I spent the next months finishing them. They were, like all knitted garments intended to become a gift, a reminder of the recipient. As you stitch away, leaving microsopics of flesh on them and wearing away your already sketchy carpal tunnel, you’re giving something more than just the end pair of socks (which, if I were honest, have a pointy heel that would never accommodate my broad back of foot). You're weaving in thoughts, intentions, hopes, wishes, fears, for the one who receives them.

Last night, several inches from completion, I turned my attention back to the first row of these socks—a ridge of stitches before the crinkly rib. I did what I do with all balls of yarn before deciding to purchase: I rubbed the sock against my face. The first row, tight and even, torn out more than once while I tried to make just one thing in my life perfect, for once—not compromising or deciding I wouldn’t mind later—was a masterwork. A small one, nothing like the whole bins of garments the most well-blogged knitters turn out, but my own small one. I am grateful to have a masterwork to give to my mother. I look at the sock and think, it will be warmer than the socks she has. She needs warm socks.

A week or so after I started these socks, but before my mother had claimed them, she did let me take her shopping, a rare occasion--she hardly ever lets me buy her things, and when she does, she rarely wears it (like all Depression-era mothers, she always saves the nice things for later). I resorted to subterfuge to get her there: Mom, I need to buy a bathmat, so you can take a shower for church. Our tub is really slippery. (We’d already had one fall that resulted in Dad wearing a bloody headwrap to Thanksgiving dinner.) Shopping trips are also minefields--reminders of days we shopped together for dance dresses and school clothes, reminders for both of us of how much she needs (why she needs so much and is so poorly cared for is a long and rotten story), and how uncomfortable it is to have your child provide necessities. I bought her jeans, a turtleneck, and a fleece jacket that, it turns out, go with the socks. It was all she would let me do. She was genuinely delighted and grateful in the way that breaks my heart. I wish so much I could change things for her, but I've failed at making any real difference in her life, though I've been trying for years. So I do what I can do: I give her a pair of socks.

I sent the socks off to my mother shortly after writing this. She loves them, and so I learned that the yarn wasn't a mistake--it was for her all along. We can't always give the people we love the exact thing they need, or enough of it, mothers or children alike. Sometimes we just love them imperfectly and fully, do the best we can and hope they know this. That's what I'm thinking as I wait for baby B to be born.