The Dirt Field

Dear Caroline,

Happy 6 months! This is not a real birthday, but we are celebrating anyway. I went to the store yesterday and bought you a flower, a new toy, some baby food, and a bunch of outfits, and your father regarded me warily, worried that he was watching the beginning of a lifetime of spoiling you. It’s not; I’m expecting you to get a job next month and start paying your own way, or at least wiping your own butt. But six months is a big deal. We made it this far. We’re half a year into your life and we’ve both survived, you and me.

When you were born, you seemed impossibly small and fragile. Everything was a suffocation hazard and I couldn’t stop checking to make sure you were still breathing. SIDS loomed as a mysterious terror lurking at every turn, and I fretted constantly about accidentally dropping you. I watched your baby monitor at night like it was the latest HBO thriller, despite the fact that you were (a) always still breathing and (b) as animated as a sea cucumber.

Honestly, the first two months were hard. I loved you deeply but couldn’t always connect; that instinctual love and protectiveness were there but it was hard to see you as my daughter. My daughter. Sometimes I’d say those words over and over, trying to make sense of them. It would be the middle of the night and I’d be exhausted beyond reason and you’d be screaming into my boob, your face all slippery and scrunched up and unable to latch onto the nipple to get the milk you so desperately needed to calm down, and I couldn’t figure out how to relate that creature to my daughter. It felt surreal and often I couldn’t conjure up that glowing, warm maternal joy I thought should be all-encompassing. Mostly I just wanted to go back to sleep for a few weeks and wake up when my boobs didn’t weigh 14 pounds each.

The hard part was that your father was so good at that time in your life – he was able to connect and endlessly stare at you, while I could pull it off for about 10 minutes before feeling like, “uhhhh, what now?” I was jealous of his ease in parenting and wracked with guilt over what felt like my own failings as a mother. I finally asked my psychologist and she shared that she too had difficulty connecting with her babies at first, and only started to feel a real bond when the kids could provide some feedback in response to interaction. She made it feel okay to be like I was and helped me see that every parent excels at different points in their child’s life, and that’s okay. She also recommended I restart an antidepressant to combat what seemed to be looming postpartum depression.

And then things started looking up. Bedtime for you started to mean going to bed versus commencing an hour or more of screaming and crying. You started to smile, and not just in your sleep or unconsciously while farting. I started calling you The Pickle one day, and while that raised eyebrows from the other adults in the house, it eventually stuck.

Now you only respond to “Pickle” and seem unaware that your given name is actually Caroline.

I don’t know if it was the antidepressant or time passing or your evolution from blob into tiny person, but I started to feel happier and calmer. There you were, my tiny daughter. I wanted to see you and spend time with you and earn those gummy, joyous smiles. It mattered to be there at bedtime and when you awoke, I thought about you all the time, and your existence brought a thrill of excitement. It was the difference between just loving you inherently and being in love with you. I was still mothering in my own way, but it finally felt good enough.

That was a few months back and since then, life with you has been great. You were definitely, decisively a positive addition to this life I’ve chosen. Sometimes I do wish I could read a book for hours without interruption or plan a trip without worrying about how many diapers to bring, but mostly it’s all wonderful. You add a thousand laughs to each day with your funny faces and noises and I can’t imagine my life now without ending every day with your bedtime routine.

We’ve already had so many adventures in these past six months. You’ve been to a lot of races – Dana Point, Redlands, Winston-Salem, Armed Forces, Nationals – and slept through most of them. You’ve flown all over the country and even explored Paris and London. You did not sleep through many of those flights, but your huge grins and general cheerfulness won over passengers everywhere. I wish you could remember these trips, but at least I can show you photos of all the places you’ve been and tell you about all of the famous places I’ve stripped you down and wiped your butt.

I thought I would be one sort of parent, and in some ways, I wasn’t wrong. Despite having a baby, we still do the things we love to do – travel, go out, ride bikes. We take you along and talk to you like a tiny adult, showing you the world and expecting you to love it like we do.

In other ways, though, I’m different. My tendency to be obsessive compulsive has gone out the window as it relates to you, because it is impossible to keep you in a sanitary bubble. At one point, we forgot your bottle at the hotel in Paris and had to buy a dusty, ancient one from a tiny store and wash it in a streetside fountain to feed you. That same day, you spent happy hour at a bar sucking on the side of your well-used stroller. But don’t worry – you cleaned yourself off really well when you took a swing at my cocktail and sloshed scotch all over us both. Perhaps I’m not parenting as precisely and neurotically as I’d expected, but you’re healthy and happy and well-traveled.

There was one thing that happened when you were just shy of four months old that I will never be able to forget. You had a small spot appear on your upper lip that looked initially like a pimple. When it worsened, the doctor said it was routine impetigo. When it worsened dramatically, I took you to the hospital and was sent home with strong antibiotics. When it worsened even more, we went back to the hospital and shit hit the fan. We were in Virginia, your father had to stay in Arizona for work, and the ER doctors said they were “concerned” about the infection spreading across your face (quite possibly the worst words I’ve ever heard). They wanted to admit you immediately and transfer you to a children’s hospital. I will never forget your tiny, stoic, swollen face as you were strapped to a huge stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. When we got to the children’s hospital, I trailed you and the medics down the hallway, weeping and wanting to grab you to run far away and hide from this horrible thing that had come into our lives so suddenly. I was drowning in terror and could only keep moving forward as things happened to us.

The experience was a turning point in my life. Everything else fell away and all that was left was you, our hospital room, and the infection. The nurses called me “Mom” and it all felt so strange – we were in the hospital? You were sick? You had an IV and multiple rounds of drugs? I’m somebody called Mom? This is my baby and she is sick, sick enough to be in the hospital? I still felt like me, childless child wanting scotch and bike rides and back rubs, except that I didn’t give two shits about me and would have given up my bike and back entirely if it meant making you well again.

I barely left your side for the days that we stayed in the hospital. When I’d wander downstairs for coffee, murky with exhaustion and anxiety, the mere presence of sunshine and people laughing felt offensive. I also felt horribly guilty for being so upset when there were parents there grappling with the worse reality of childhood cancer. But when a doctor awakens you at 3am to tell you the test results are bad and they need to take your baby right now for another blood test, there are no degrees for measuring how much your world implodes. It just does. It is not relative.

We survived. You started to improve and they let me take you home with lots of antibiotics that I administered obsessively. I felt compelled to start watching you sleep again but had to let go enough that we could both breathe and move forward. Now you just have some scarring on your upper lip that will hopefully fade in time. And I’m left with scars on my heart that remind me of how deeply I love you and how my own life has become meaningless without yours. Weeks later when I asked your pediatrician about your scars, she pointed out that we notice them more than anybody else will because it was a bad experience and thus we are more likely to see reminders. As she said those words, I felt my throat close up and tears come, and realized that I am not over what happened and may never fully process the terror of watching my tiny baby be devoured by an infection while I watched helplessly.

But isn’t that parenting, basically? You love your kid and do the best you can, but in the end you have to let life and the uncontrollable happen. I will always do the best I can to protect you but sometimes that is not enough. The world is so much bigger than me and your father and we can’t keep everything at bay. We can only prepare you to face it all and love you immeasurably along the way.

You make it so easy to love you. You smile with your whole face and shoulders. Your laugh is addictive and contagious. You like pears and hate puréed greens. You love mirrors and music (Caspar Babypants!) and your swaddle at bedtime; you do not like startling noises. You adore your father intensely. It’s taken a while, but you finally enjoy bathtime. While you don’t communicate with words (hurry up!), you let us know quickly when you’re tired or hungry or do not want anymore food. On that note, a simple no will suffice – you do not need to gag and then vomit greens to let me know you don’t like them and don’t want any more.

Life with you is a joy everyday, even the more challenging parts. How do I explain how adding a high-maintenance, needy, incontinent, mostly immobile being to my life made it better? It just did. It really, really did. The rewards so far outweigh the work that it’s not even a comparison.

And now we are six months in. This day feels worth celebrating because to me, it marks reaching a point where the good is so obvious and the bad seems minimal and distant. We have settled into our family. My body is mostly healed from pregnancy and birth. I feel almost like myself again. I can let you sleep without needing to ask Josh repeatedly if he thinks you’re okay. You’re a little person now, with moods and preferences and quirks. And teeth! You have teeth! We made it, you and me. You arrived in the world and made your place in it, and I found my place as your mother. Happy six months, my Pickle.

Love,

Mom