Mommy Confidential

Not my parents. They aren’t Wittle Toesies people. They’ll crack wise when you get a shoulder full of spit up. But if they’re looking at anatomy, it’s usually under a lamp. This is not good.

I confronted them. “What are you doing? Are you palming his socks?”

“Oh, we’re just looking at his feet. They seem… cold. A little purple.”

“Your mother’s concerned about his circulation.” If my step dad puts anything gently—or even worse—quietly, he’s worried about something. A pathologist looking serious about my baby is not what I needed.

“Well, give it up. Should I be worried?” I demanded.

They glanced at one another. “Not yet.”

My mother and stepfather were visiting a few days after Wyatt was born. Second son, first natural delivery. First time undramatic birth. Wyatt was born in the early hours of August 1, 2000, just after my folks celebrated my brother’s birthday. They called us in Labor and Delivery from a restaurant in Chicago.

“Hurry up and have the kid so I don’t have to share a birthday!” My brother. Booming voice.

“If I could have this baby on demand, don’t you think I’d have done so already?”

“Yeah, well, here. Talk to Mom.”

My mother was over the moon. I think they were all a little drunk. And excited. “Let me remind you that August first is an auspicious day in our family. It was Grandpa Bernie Leonidas’ birthday as well as Chris’. But still… hurry up if you can.”

I started pushing thirty minutes later and was holding my son twelve minutes after that. It was that easy. Too easy. I pushed for just ten minutes and my hair still looked good. O Drama, where art thou?

Mom flew in the next day. She said he looked like a c-section baby, so pretty and perfect. He didn’t have that squishy Bataan Womb March look most babies get after spending hours in the birth canal. He had auburn hair, just like I did as a newborn. Since then my hair’s been every shade from auburn to white-blond to honey to dirty dishwater. What’s up with that? As a child I had gorgeous cornsilk hair, and with each pregnancy more and more of my mother’s genes asserted themselves. Now, it’s dark blond—if you squint—and curly. I did not order curly. And curly only in the back of your head? Is not chic.

For the first day or so, Wyatt nursed and pooped and slept and did everything by the book. It was almost boring after the mayhem of his older brother’s birth—the one that was everything a first-time mom doesn’t want to happen to her.

Oh, you want to know what happened? Okay.

I was trying to climb into a borrowed dress to go to a friend’s wedding when I went into full, bucking labor. By the time my husband was out of the shower, I was chanting, “We have to go now. We have to go now.”

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’d been up since three a.m. timing contractions and phoning the nurses at the hospital, who were monumentally unimpressed. They said that I sounded way too calm to be in real labor.

Something in the back of my mind told me that maybe I hadn’t been peeing myself the last couple of days, that I was in fact leaking amniotic fluid. The on-call doctor agreed, so we went to the hospital. So much for my friend’s wedding.

I was admitted and prepped for c-section forty minutes later. My doctor was worried. There were a few unexpected complications. You don’t want to know.

My doctor was a tall, quiet man—handsome in the cruel-irony sense that dictates OBGYNs NOT be attractive—and had a laugh that made him look much younger than his forty-odd years. During one of my office visits he told me a story about his wife peeing her chair all through a dinner party only to discover the next morning that her water had broken.

“Ha!” I exclaimed, “How do you not notice that?”

Ha, indeed. When he finally arrived at Labor and Delivery I had to tell him.

“You do realize that I was in the stirrups just the other day and mentioned that story because I thought I may be doing the same thing. Remember how we laughed?”

And we went on laughing all through Will’s c-section. I lay on the gurney in the operating room, stark naked with a hospital gown carelessly slung over one shoulder for a more casual look. I started to giggle. “I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and gay…” Six people bustling around the OR stopped to stare at the woman belting out show tunes in the while being catheterized and in middle of an epidural.

It continued through the surgery. My doctor told one joke, and then his partner told another joke, and then it was my turn.

“Oh, god. Um, a piece of string walks into a bar. The bartender stops him before he takes a seat and informs him that they do NOT serve string. The string went outside, thought a while, grabbed the top of his head, shredded the strands and tied them into an elaborate turban before walking back into the bar.

The bartender eyed him suspiciously. ‘Hey, you’re that piece of string, aren’t you?’

“No, I’m a frayed knot.’”

My Doctor looked up from stitching my insides. “That’s it?” He sighed. “We’re putting him back in.”

In a departure from the three-day Baby Naming Summit held after Will’s arrival, we found we could pin a name on Wyatt in under twenty-four hours. The other kids were at least three days old before DH and I could agree on a name, which drove the candy stripers up a wall. In retrospect, this repetitive naming struggle was a foreshadowing of sadder times to come in our relationship.

Mom jetted back from Chicago to help take us home one night early. Everything was fine, and although Will missed me he was a disruptive presence at the hospital. When he came to visit, he spent the entire time pushing the buttons on my bed and looking for the big blue “vacuum neener” that roamed the halls.

I had a temperature, but we downplayed it and I went home where my step dad did his usual surreptitious examination. Mom kept warming Wyatt’s feet. Neither of them was happy about the color, but they chose not to make an issue of it at the time. They trusted me to watch for signs of trouble.

After a couple of days, Mom went back to her job in Indiana. She was a university dean and her absence was noted. For five more days, all was well. Will and Molly, our ninety-pound Lab, got to know the baby and we all awaited the arrival of DH’s mom.

Did I mention that we were to have houseguests for the next two weeks? First DH’s mother, the DH’s father arrived next, followed by DH’s two brothers, nephew, and a golden retriever.

Let’s review: our little family of four, five in-laws, two large dogs, and a fourteen-hundred-square-foot house. Not only did no one do the math, no one smelled the sharp tang of ozone that signaled the onset of post-partum depression. I’d had it twice before—once after a 22-week lost pregnancy and once with Will—and this third one was a doozy. Mom and my step dad had vacated the fully charged premises just in time.

On the eighth night after Wyatt’s birth, just as DH was leaving to pick up his mother at the airport, I called to him from the living room. “Wyatt doesn’t feel right. Something’s wrong.”

“Wrong, how? What do you mean?”

“He sleeps too long and wakes up ravenous. He just manages to latch on and then he’s out again. And for some reason he’s panting like a puppy. I’m taking him to the emergency room.”

“The emergency room? It’s nine o’clock. I’m just about to go get Mom. Are you sure it can’t wait till morning?”

I looked at him sheepishly. “I knew you would ask, so I checked with the advice nurse after I took his temperature. It was 100.1.” Anything over 100 degrees merits a visit to the doctor. After I described Wyatt’s eating, sleeping, and breathing behavior to the nurse, she had quietly suggested I go to the ER right away. I was dismayed. “I really don’t want to go to the one down the street. Is it okay if I drive up to the hospital where he was born?”

“You could take him to Stanford.” She meant Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, renowned the world over for top-notch care.

“Stanford? But that’s even further away. He was born in Mountain View, why couldn’t we just go there?”

“You could… or you could go to Stanford. But go now.”

I told DH that he’d have to wake our two-year-old and take him along to the airport. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll either meet you back here, or you can leave Will with your mom and meet me up there.” I whipped off my nursing gown and threw on a white t-shirt, Gap overalls, and clogs and bolted out the door with my too-sleepy son.

In the waiting room I was in agony. My milk was full and insistent and he was hungry, but he just couldn’t stay awake to nurse. He kept nodding off as I jammed my breast into his face, and the by-then fierce letdown was spraying milk all over the both of us. Gah. I buttoned up again, trying not to think about the huge wet spots spreading across my bib.

After a few minutes a nurse motioned for me to come in the side door. “When I saw your baby’s age on the check-in sheet, I didn’t want you to have to sit in the waiting room. Since he’s only a week old I’ll try to have him seen first.” She glanced at my clothes and promised to find me a breast pump once we knew what was what.

As the doctor examined the still-sleeping Wyatt, he calmly explained that a fever above 100 degrees in an infant under two weeks of age automatically calls for blood tests, X-rays, and lumbar puncture. I was floored. “You’re giving him a spinal? Without knowing any more?”

“It’s protocol. We have to eliminate a few things before going further.” The X-rays showed an enlarged heart, indicating possible congestive heart failure. It was some kind of failure, and the hospital did not have the level of care my baby needed. Just as they decided against admitting him, DH arrived, his mother and Will waiting in the car.

I filled him in on the treatment Wyatt had already received and explained, “They’re sending a critical care unit down from the children’s hospital. They can’t take care of him here.” We were both stunned. We held each other tight, then negotiated the details: he would take the others home and meet me at the neonatal intensive care unit at Stanford. Little did I know that I would be spending very little time outside the NICU that month.

All that time, while my parents were looking at Wyatt’s cold little feet, while he was sleeping like an angel for long stretches, while he was sweet and calm and quiet and perfect, he had been failing fast. He was in heart failure, for God’s sake. And we just thought he was a very, very good baby.

He stopped breathing a few hours later.