These days are tough days.
As I said a couple days ago (in Undaunted, we progress), I’ve re-discovered a much healthier way of being in this situation. I’ve found a way to love without worry or fear of losing. Its something I’ve believed in for awhile. Something I figured out how to do (after many years) in relationship with a partner. (A huge deal.) But this has been even more intense. Its been very in-my-face, exhausting work, without a break. Being Present.
We are at the point where Adahlia “loses it” very easily. She gets tired and goes absolutely crazy if she doesn’t get her way… a tricky thing, when she doesn’t actually want anything, she just feels bad. Frustrated, she starts biting things, throwing things, throwing herself… sometimes, its for no discernible reason at all. Other times, its as though she needs to wind down and can’t, or is reluctant to, on some level. She is fighting to be here.
After trying everything I can think of that she might want, I just hold her and sing or hum low tones to her. Eventually she stops howling and throwing herself around. She nurses, and passes out.
She really isn’t like this when she’s not low on blood. When she is, she gets desperate.
Or, she was this afternoon, anyway. This morning, she was fine. I took her on errands with me and carried her on my hip everywhere, and she was entirely fine until about 2 pm. We had a nice time together and I was even wondering if perhaps her blood was recovering, if perhaps she is not going to be much lower than 8.5 when we go back to the hospital this week.
But from 2 pm on, she wanted everything and nothing and alternated between joy and irritation like an on-off switch.
We went to the Sauvie Island beaches and did have some fun. She loves water and it was our first time there. She crawled around in and examined the sand, and played at the river’s edge, and got to pet a dog. (She adores dogs. She points and says something that sounds an awful lot like “dahg.” She seems to like larger, black dogs best. There’s no logical reason why she would prefer them to other dogs, but I used to have and love a big, black dog when I was younger. We got him when I was in 6th grade and he died while I was in college. Perhaps there’s a link there.)
She still refuses to eat pureed baby food. She pretty much started and stopped eating pureed baby food over a period of a month or two, back when she was about 9 or 10 months old. Today, she enjoyed taking teeny tiny bites of my sandwich (she has four teeth and is working on a couple more.) She wants to be a big person. Its clear as can be. Something we’ve known since she was first born. She’s just not psyched about being a small baby. She wants to do all sorts of things herself, and gets very frustrated when she can’t figure something out, or isn’t strong enough.
Sometimes, I feel she is so adamant about things like this because of the anemia, and what happened when she was so little. How she lost all that weight when she was 4-6 weeks old because she was too tired to breastfeed and wasn’t getting enough nutrition. How she howled and howled and howled for us to help her, but no one seemed to think anything was wrong. And then how I wasn’t allowed to feed her for 9 hours at the hospital after she admitted that first time (its because her hemoglobin was so low that they feared any digestion would divert blood to her stomach, and cause instant heart failure), and she screamed and beat her fists upon me and bobbed her head hard against my breasts, looking for the nipple I wasn’t allowed to give. All those hours when she was so hungry, and I didn’t feed her. How they poked her like a pincushion, and drugged her and biopsed her, and scanned her, and put tape on her skin and pulled it back off, and have done all these things to her over and over and I haven’t intervened. I haven’t stopped it. I’ve held her, and kissed her, and been with her when people hurt her, but I’ve allowed it. In her mind, most likely, I haven’t protected and cared for her. Perhaps, in her mind, she must fend for herself.
Its no wonder she is so independent already. She screamed, tonight, when I tried to help her brush her teeth; she yanked the toothbrush away and threw it to the floor. Twice. Now, she loves brushing her teeth. She loves the apple-cinnamon-flavored baby toothpaste and she loves to chew on the bristles. In days past, she’s let me help guide the brush. But not tonight.
Of course, I’m just feeling particularly tired right now. And so is she.
It helps for me to remember what I know: Her challenges she chose for herself or were prepared for her because they are what she needs in order to grow into her highest, truest, self. With our hearts in the right place, and our decisions made consciously, never dismissing her or ignoring her, our words and actions done in respect and compassion, we are doing all we can. And such are the challenges prepared for me.
A week ago, after my revelation about how I suffered last month and about motherhood (my thoughts put down in the aforementioned post), I told Joe that if we can be happy in this situation, with everything falling apart that we had ever wanted for ourselves (including, at times, our relationship with each other), then we have made the leap. We are free from conditional happiness – even from the really big conditions of health, and love, and career, and home, and money.
To be simply joyful in life for absolutely no reason. Isn’t that wonderful?
It’s time to send love and healing light to Adahlia in my belly, and as a newborn, and when she was at the hospital, and to the present. And time to rest.