The Early Bird

Born @ 27 weeks 5 days gestation
1 lb 15 oz, 12.9 inches long

Wow. Over 3 months have passed since we brought Wesley home from the hospital, and almost 6 months have passed since he was born. Most importantly, he is healthy and doing very well. Honestly, on most days, I feel like a shell-shocked zombie.

I don't mean to sound negative (and if you read all the way through, you'll see I'm talking about gratitude) but I am not going to sugar-coat parenthood as constant bliss, the way so many people do. I am going to be real and honest and up front. I knew going into this it was going to be hard. Turns out, I was in no way prepared for how hard it has been (premature rupture of the membranes at 27 weeks 5 days, emergency helicopter ride and c-section, baby in the NICU for 10 weeks, and all this even before we brought our baby home and began our sleepless nights...)

I feel like I am catapaulting through my days and nights at record speed, a whirlwind of working, expressing breast milk, caring for Wesley, going to doctor appointments, and stealing 1-2 hours of sleep when I can. As fast as this pace feels, parts of my heart and mind are still caught in the days just after Memorial Day, hanging in slow motion, in small spaces where I'm still trying to figure out exactly what hit us.


Going Home from the Hospital,
38 Weeks,
6 lb 1 oz

 After ten weeks in the hospital, Wesley came home two weeks before his due date. He weighed just over 6 pounds and he was so tiny in his car seat that we rolled up blankets and placed them around his head. I sat in the backseat with him and I have never been so nervous. It seemed like every little bump jarred him. I know he was nervous because he sucked vigorously on his pacifier the whole way home. When we got home he was wide-eyed for several hours. Our little baby had never known any world except the hospital, and all its alarms, and constant poking and prodding.

I recently saw a Facebook conversation in which some friends were discussing their kids, and one person said, “the nights are long but the years go by fast.” I know exactly what he meant. Fatigue and sleep deprivation have been the hallmark of our lives for six months now, with probably another two months to go before Wesley is even capable of sleeping a 4-6 hour stretch.

Every night when we’re up every few hours, I wonder, how long we can do this? People always say, “sleep when baby sleeps.” I just smile, but I want to say, will you come over and load my dishwasher and do my laundry, so I can sleep when baby sleeps?! Our lives seem chaotic. Some of our loved ones simply can't survive the shock. Our plants are dying. We've lost a starfish. Our cat died (she was 16 years old and in declining health for a while). We're constantly losing ground against the dirty dishes and laundry. I can tell that it will be years before my house is dusted or deep-cleaned in any fashion! Anything beyond the basics is simply unattainable right now. (And boy, did I yearn to make and can some apple butter this year...)



5 1/2 Months Actual,
13 Weeks Adjusted,
11 lb 15 oz

 Just when we start to make some progress with sleeping, or just when I start to feel like I am "getting it," everything changes. I felt like we were just out of the colic phase and starting to develop some longer sleep cycles, when suddenly baby Wesley is a drooling, fist-sucking mess. We feel a tooth coming in! I don’t think I’ve slept more than 2 hours in several weeks…and my bizarre dreams have returned. I dreamed that a cat named “The Struggle for Profound Thought” was perching on my neck at night, and that a co-worker was placing life-size, color cardboard figures of us around the building.

But every day Wesley does something new. It has been amazing to watch him transform from a tiny, sleepy, tube-fed noodle in an isolette to an active little baby who wants to interact with his environment. It’s like receiving a gift every day. He smiles responsively, laughs, holds his head up, kicks his legs in the air, grabs objects, and has started trying to roll on his side. He is strong and healthy. His vision exams have been normal (preemies are at risk for an eye condition called retinopathy of prematurity). He is strong-willed. And loud, opinioned, and fiesty at times! I guess this is the strength that got him so far. He weighed 1 pound 15 ounces at birth and almost 6 months later (adjusted age: 13 weeks) he weighs 11 pounds 15 ounces.

I meant to write during the 11 weeks I was home with Wesley, and yet, I didn’t often have a free hand, and when I did, I was too tired.

Born @ 27 weeks 5 days gestation,
7 weeks in the NICU,
3 weeks in a Special Care Nursery

I did manage to write a 1500-word essay called “Liquid Gold,” which I adapted from a previous blog entry called Pumping, Pumping, Pumping) and submitted it to Real Simple magazine’s “when did you first understand the meaning of love” essay contest. This essay is about milk! Breast milk, specifically. About my experience expressing breast milk around-the-clock for almost three months, for my tiny baby who was too weak to eat on his own.

(Protecting my milk supply, by the way, is the most important thing I have ever done. If today was my last day, this is the one thing that I would be the most proud of, the one thing I would never change, and I would do it all over again if I had to.)

I think I wrote most of the milk essay in my head, during many hours in the rocking chair nursing Wesley. Then I managed to type most of it one-handed. When Wesley was that little he needed to either be held or fed (or both) virtually all the time. After the essay deadline, fatigue from sleep deprivation set in, and Wesley's colic intensified and didn’t begin to subside until he was about 7 weeks adjusted age. During that time, everything in my life disappeared except for my daily walks with Wesley, and feeding, holding, soothing, and rocking.

I Just Love His Facial Expressions!


During this week of Thanksgiving, I am filled with gratitude. For me, being a parent is at once the best and the most difficult thing ever. Just when I think I don’t have the strength to continue, Wesley smiles or giggles and everything that I’m worried about just recedes into the background. Perspective. I have gained instant, clear perspective, even during complete chaos.

I always think of the phrase, "this too shall pass." Almost as quickly as a really bad day develops, a new, amazing day takes its place. I try to enjoy the present moment, whatever it may be. Just the other day, we were talking about how quickly 6 months have passed, and Chuck said, "To tell you the truth, I don't even remember how it was before we had Wesley." He couldn't have said it any better.

Collisions

http://www.flickr.com/photos/waferboard/

I have been putting off some of my writing because I haven't wanted to deal with some very extreme emotions that I’ve been experiencing over the past month.

The other day I was standing on the campus mall, waiting for a friend to pick me up for lunch, when BANG!!! I heard a loud crash behind me.

I turned around to see a pedestrian fall face forward, landing with a loud thud as his bare hands and knees kissed the concrete sidewalk. At the same time, a man on a bicycle plummeted head first into the grass and the bike went crashing on its side down the sidewalk.

It all happened so quickly. Two people going in the same direction collided. The pedestrian couldn’t see what was coming behind him. Perhaps he shifted into the path of the bike. What a shocking feeling, to be walking along, and then SLAM! Someone just nails you from behind.

As they exchanged cordial apologies, the biker put his hat and headphones back on. Sometimes we are so oblivious to what is going on around us. And we introduce so many distractions to our lives, on top of our already distracted minds that are constantly flowing with wants, needs, and to-do lists.

Recently I tried to help a friend who is going through a divorce. I was so shocked I didn’t see this divorce coming. Like the pedestrian-bicycle collision, it just hit me from behind with no warning. Why couldn’t I have seen how unhappy she was? Why didn’t I understand that her distance and isolation meant she needed help? It broke me to think of how long she had struggled and suffered alone, without help.

She was without clothes or basic possessions, so I went to her house to get a few things for her. It was a strange and sad and desperate feeling, trying to fill up one bag of items in the few minutes her husband would allow. What do you take? Surrounded by her pictures, clothes, jewelry, shoes, books, and various items, I quickly threw clothes and toiletries into the bag, as much as I could fit. Then I spied “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle on her dresser. Should I take it, I wondered. I grabbed it and shoved it into the bag. She will need this, I thought to myself.

I never fully realized how important that book was to me until this moment. Yes, I can see now, that in an extreme situation, I will choose to take Eckhart Tolle along with basic life necessities. When I was broken, this book opened me back up, just by helping me to change the way I think about things.

A few weeks later, I was talking to her on the phone, and she mentioned she was continuing the book, a little at a time. Yes, it’s that kind of book, I told her. You have to read little bits at a time and then give it all time to digest. She was dealing with her sadness, starting to make future plans and think about starting a new life of her own. The kind of life she had always wanted.

In the meantime, I worry about her safety, finances, legal issues, and more. I feel limited in what I can do for her because of my pregnancy…I’m not used to this. It frustrates me. I want to do more.

Sometimes, when I’m walking on the campus mall, I remember the collision. And I think of all the collisions that could happen. But my goal is not to fear all the collisions that could happen. Just focus on the moment. That’s what Eckhart taught me.

I blogged about two of my favorite Eckhart stories in a previous post, Ducks Crossing. Check it out.

Walking Through Illusion...Five Lessons Of Spirituality

Betsy Otter Thompson asked me to review her book, Walking Through Illusion. I have to preface this by saying I’m really not one to read religious books.


However, I have read books on spirituality, such as The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, and I find Walking Through Illusion to be similar. For example, it is not an easy read. It is full of so much information that often you have to go back and re-read the sentences several times over. Having said that, if you are up to the challenge, it’s worth it. These books are full of nourishing, enlightening, soul-healing lessons that will leave you feeling enriched. Walking Through Illusion reminds me of the healing power of faith and spirituality, which often starts with things as simple as changing your attitude and paying attention to your inner thoughts.

The book’s title is explained in this passage: “See success differently, I told Bartholomew, and instead of insisting it’s something you see with your eyes, see it as something you feel in your heart. I called this process walking through illusion.”

Getting in touch with your heart, your inner self. This is one of the lessons in this book…lessons of spirituality that are useful no matter what your religion. I’m going to summarize five of these lessons here.

*Live in the present moment.

Ch 1, Reform, discusses Bartholomew and how he was always unhappy, especially in his profession. He blamed his unhappiness on his job and other people when in fact his attitude was the problem. By complaining and blaming others, he missed the point of life: “The good life was one in which the heart found love. Love was found in the moment. When the moment was denigrated, he missed the love it had.”

*Take responsibility for your life and focus on internal (not external) change.

In the author’s reflections at the end of Ch 1, Reform, she takes responsibility for her life by focusing on herself: “Not until I realized that no amount of reform on the outside would solve my problems did I take responsibility for all that I had created. That was my turning point. I knew that if I’d created the mess I was in, I could create something else.”

*Accepting what is creates happiness; resisting what is creates needless suffering.

Ch 2, Gifts, is summarized in the following quote: “Disappointment comes from thinking that life should be different. Enjoyment comes from thinking that life is wonderful the way it is.”

This chapter reminds us to accept what we have, and whatever challenges life brings. If you’ve had a family crisis, perhaps it will take you years to come to terms with the changes it brings and also to realize all you’ve learned from these challenges.

You also have to find acceptance in your daily life. My husband and I went to our local parade of homes the day I read this chapter. Walking into new, enormous, immaculately decorated homes with features like enormous workout rooms reminded us just how modest our home is. When we got home, my husband said he felt very inadequate, and I couldn’t agree more. But then I thought about acceptance, and I realized that we have everything we could ever need. A bigger home and a bigger mortgage payment will not bring us more happiness. I want to break free of the thought pattern that having the biggest, latest, best of everything can buy happiness. There is so much fulfillment in complete acceptance of what you have.

*The world mirrors what you put out into the world; you have to live what you want the Universe to mirror back to you…

In Ch 3, Obstacles, Peter the Fisherman has trouble with the success of his business until he learns there is more to success than catching fish. “When he believed that being the best meant having the biggest catch, the buyers didn’t bite. They knew their reward didn’t come from the size of the catch, but from the size of the heart offering it. Therefore, they zeroed in on warmer hearts regardless.”

This reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s discussion of attitude and the importance of remaining in the present moment so that you can bring peace and gratitude to whatever job you are doing. Put out what you want to get back.

*It’s all about your inner state; inner, not outer transformation is the way to create change

Attribution: David F. Fry
http://www.ideas.wisconsin.edu/

Ch 4, Morality, again discusses Peter the Fisherman who “began finding the highest form of nourishment in the heart,” rather than in the number of fish he could catch or in attaining the approval of others.

Jesus says, “I was gathering people together to encourage belief in self. Self was the only place I knew that God could always be found. Peter was thrilled to be included and, just as he’d been finding the highest form of nourishment in the sea, he began finding the highest form of nourishment in the heart. But wisdom from the former held him in good stead with the latter.”

News flash!! Your perceived challenges are not everyone else’s fault!! You are the only thing that you have control over, the only thing that you can change. So work on yourself, your own heart. I used to agonize over my perceived problems—work conflicts, family challenges, etc. This just creates suffering. Now I just pray to the Universe to help me let it all go, move on, and do better next time. You’d be surprised how much baggage you’re holding on to if you start paying attention.

Often you can start just by tweaking your attitude a little. From the author’s personal insights in Ch 4: “I went from wishing people were different to welcoming their uniqueness.”

Overall Lesson: Knowing God—or your higher power—is about knowing yourself…The higher power that created us is inside of us and everything on Earth is connected. So act accordingly!

Try Something New

Find the thing(s) that calm you, replenish you, allow you to focus completely, and do them. Find the thing that quiets that relentless voice in your head, also known as your thinking mind. Think about things you’ve always wanted to try and things that you look forward to doing. Things that make you feel peaceful and inspired and whatever adjectives you have to describe yourself feeling good (if you don’t know what makes you feel good, then you should practice being aware of how you’re feeling throughout each day and write it down!).

In the years following my mom’s stroke, I developed different ways of coping with my feelings (some good, some not so good). I began watching the Food Network cooking shows with my mom, and I began to try different recipes. I realized that I got a lot of satisfaction out of preparing different foods. I could come home from work and from being at the hospital during my mom’s rehabilitation, and be overwhelmed with the polarity of emotions I was feeling at the time—hope and despair, gratitude and grief, faith and fear—and ten minutes into chopping up peppers or sautéing zucchini all was quiet and peaceful inside.

I found the same healing power with plants. Somehow while rutting up the earth and sticking my fingers in the dirt to nurture life in perennial and vegetable gardens, I felt peaceful and alive.

And so it was that I recently rummaged through my parent’s basement to find my mom’s old canner and pressure cooker, stuck back in a corner of the cellar, covered in cob webs and dust. And I raided her collection of mason jars lining the shelves of the basement, darkened by dust, standing untouched for at least four years—back to the date my mom suffered a stroke—a day that we will never forget, the dividing line between our “old life” and our “new life.”

So as I canned (for the first time) tomato sauce and tomatillo salsa I realized that so many of mom’s things from her “old life” stand untouched now…her canning supplies, her sewing machine. For a long time we mourned our loss of our “old life.” But many things that were nonexistent in her “old life” are now a staple of her “new life”—reading more than 50 books a year, wintering on the Florida beaches...

At some point we have to quit hanging on to the old, and make room for the new. Life happens and things change. Adapt and move on. Find your thing and do it. And if the time comes when you can’t do it anymore, I hope that you can be as courageous as my mother has been. The universe may be stretching you to find something new.

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

The June 2009 issue of Oprah has an inspiring interview with Elizabeth Edwards.

I found Elizabeth’s strength and positive attitude particularly inspiring, especially given the death of her 16-year-old son in 1992, her ongoing struggle with terminal cancer, and the public infidelity of her husband John Edwards.

Here are some parts of the interview I really liked:

Painted above a doorway leading into the home’s master suite is a verse from the 1992 song “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen. Befitting this moment in Elizabeth’s life, the lyrics are an ode to human frailty and transcendence:

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

AND this excerpt from Elizabeth’s new book, Resilience:

This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these land mines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality.

I haven’t read her book, but I believe she is talking about accepting the present moment, instead of struggling against what is…dwelling on what could have been or what should have been. Resisting what is will drain you of all your strength. I began my practice of trying to remain in the present moment after reading Eckhart Tolle, especially in the years right after my mom had a stroke, and I was overcome by grief.

Elizabeth is a wonderful example of how your grief and your struggles can make you stronger, if you’re willing to learn and to forgive.

Ducks Crossing

I’m sitting in my living room when my cat alerts me that something more interesting than usual is going on outside. She’s perched in her lookout on the living room chair, overlooking the big window above our front yard, but her body language is more pronounced than usual, her tail flipping in agitated jerkiness, her mouth opening and closing rapidly, and her voice an unusually loud and persistent combination mewing-whine.

I look down and see a brown mother duck crossing my yard, with eight baby ducklings following close behind her in a line.

A feeling of terror quickly replaces the wonder and awe that I momentarily felt. It has been raining for two days. We live on a highway. The speed limit outside my house is 35 MPH but people never slow down. Trucks and buses and cars whiz by at all hours of the day, almost relentlessly.

Is this mother duck actually going to lead her ducklings across this highway?

I saw this duck family the other day, in the lake, over at the park that’s just through my back yard and a little beyond. Right now the park is full of RVs and carnival rides, setting up for this weekend’s festival. I can only imagine there’s a little too much activity over there right now for this young duck family, and that the mother must be leading them to the river that’s just beyond my front door highway. They are obviously too little to fly.

For a moment, as I watch her lead them through the yard and then into my neighbor’s yard just to the east, I begin to panic, wondering if I should run out there and try to save them. But suddenly I feel calm, and I realize that I might make things worse. You have to let nature take its course, I say to myself, as I watch the mother duck and all the ducklings disappear down the steep embankment of my neighbor’s yard, which leads right to the highway. You can’t try to save everything. You can’t take that on, I tell myself.

They are out of my view now, and I hold my breath for a moment, wondering if I should wait until I can see them again, and risk seeing the inevitable, or if I should just preemptively protect myself by walking away and assuming that they made it safely to the other side.

I remain at the window. I don’t know why. I need to know.

Suddenly then the mother and ducklings are in view again, the mother just crossing the yellow center line and the last of the ducklings following behind her. Just then a large SUV sounds its horn, and without slowing down, passes dangerously close to the last duckling in the line. Close enough to send the tiny duckling flying head over heels into the other lane, landing upside down, so that I can only see the white of his breast. There is no movement.

But now a car is coming in the opposite direction, directly into the path of the overturned duckling, but the car slows down and for a moment I think the car is going to stop and let him and the rest of the ducklings clear the lane. But the car lingers for only a moment and then keeps going, over the top, but without touching, the overturned duckling.

I hold my breath again for a moment, thinking, little guy, you already got two big breaks and you’re almost to the other side, when finally the overturned duckling gets up, runs to the side of the road to join his siblings, and now traffic has resumed its steady pace as the ducklings waddle up the hill on the other side of the road, all eight safely joining their mother.

Whew.

What a miracle, many times over.

Why am I writing about this?
1) Please SLOW DOWN, and be conscious and present when you’re driving. Nothing in your schedule is important enough to jeopardize or destroy animal or human life.

2) I’m reminded of the story, the duck with a human mind, from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. Tolle observes that after two ducks get into a fight they separate and float off in opposite directions. Then they each flap their wings a few times to get rid of the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After flapping their wings they float on peacefully, as if nothing had happened.

However, if the duck had a human mind, it would probably tell itself a story such as the following:

“I can’t believe he just did that. Who does he think he is? The nerve . . . he has absolutely no consideration of others. He thinks he owns this pond. I’m sure he’s already plotting some new way to annoy me. He’s not getting away with it; I’ll show him.”

The lesson we can learn from the ducks is this: flap your wings. That is, let go of the stories you’re telling yourself and return to the only place of power: the present moment.

How does this relate to my duck story? In the past, I would have agonized over this duck crossing situation, perhaps even reacted much differently, carried it with me for days as to what I should have or could have done. Eckhart’s story reminds me that those ducks didn’t sit there telling stories about what they could do or what might happen, or how they might die; they just did what they had to do, and got back up when they got knocked down. They live in the present moment. We all have much to learn from ducks and Eckhart Tolle!

The duck with a human mind, my favorite story from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth:



Another story from A New Earth, monks on a pilgrimage, which shows how we love to hang on to the past: