The fluorescent lights in the Emergency Room threw into sharp relief a dull, solid fact: our being there was pointless. Our infant daughter did not, as it turned out, have a fever, but since we were there, the doctor still recommended we take her through a number of diagnostics and blood tests.
“We only brought her in because we thought she had a fever,” I said, watching a father cradling his whimpering toddler just past the door. A wave of shame at my error began its slow crash over my head. “If she doesn’t have a fever, why would we stay?”
“We always tell parents that there’s a reason you brought her in, and you should trust that instinct,” said the doctor, in a tone both placating and supportive.
Except there was no reason. I did not want to be placated or supported. I wanted to smash my head into the wall.
You see, my husband and I were destined to be the chill parents, everyone had told us so. Not like those supposed other parents, the ones who drag their footsie-pajama’d baby into the ER over nothing. As I waddled through pregnancy, I had hoped and assumed my eventual parent-self would mirror how I acted in other arenas of life—the level-headed colleague, the unflappable synagogue board member, the wife who can calmly Google the right people to call when the boiler floods the basement.
In our daughter’s first seven weeks, not once had we overreacted to the myriad strange things infants do that could be misconstrued for illness, from their raspy sleep breathing to the fact that their hands and feet are always popsicle cold.
Until several hours earlier, when we crouched over our daughter on our living room floor covered in soft mats and chewable rattles and the high-contrast picture cards that are touted as ideal cognitive stimuli for newborns. We had determined we weren’t worried about the mild redness around her eyes (see? chill!), but perplexingly, I checked her temperature anyway. I pulled the thermometer from the infant wellness kit that included a nasal aspirator (for all the boogers), soft-bristle brush (for her largely bald head), and tiny nail clipper (for those shockingly sharp baby talons).
Lo and behold, we clocked her temperature at 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the exact number new parents are told is the tipping point for potential danger in a newborn.
We took her temperature twice more and called the on-call nurse at our pediatrician’s office. She reminded us that a feverish infant should always be treated as an emergency. I sighed and strapped our near-asleep daughter into her carseat. We were being responsible, I told myself. Parent-y.
I felt no such conviction hours later as our daughter lay naked on an exam table, her big eyes and curious little ‘O’ of a mouth seeming to say: fooled ya good. I silently peppered myself with questions as I made repeated shush-shush-shush sounds to her.
Why hadn’t I paused to remind myself that rectal temperatures are more accurate than the underarm method I had used? (shush shush shush) Or called our various physician and doula friends to double-check our decision? (shush shush shush) Above all else, why hadn’t I trusted my gut that our daughter was perfectly fine? (shush shush freakin’ shush).
The medical team drew our daughter’s blood and she screamed so loudly that it turned into a breathless croak. The minutes ticked by in the tiny exam room. My husband and I passed her back and forth, our eyes drooping. By the time we took her home, well after midnight, with a diagnosis of precisely nothing, she was a limp noodle, and I was consumed with self-loathing.
I had acted like a typical Anxious Parent, perhaps the most noxious of all labels. And there I was, reeking of it. (Also, I literally smelled, because that is the way of new parenthood.)
The next day, after barely three hours of sleep, I threw myself into every imaginable activity. I wiped the crud off our kitchen walls and took my daughter to her first music class, where she mostly just stared at the ceiling fan. I did my pelvic floor therapeutic exercises, wrote nine baby gift ‘Thank You’ notes, and took a long walk around our local pond. During my daughter’s nap time, I sorted my own clothes into bins according to season, likelihood that I would fit into them again, and whether or not they were breastfeeding-friendly. When she woke up, I filed her tiny little nails with our unnecessarily fancy electric nail grinder.
Even with busy hands, I could only think about the ER visit and my failures of logic. I have never been graceful at handling feeling stupid, that vile word. I hope my daughter will never apply it to herself or others, but I can’t seem to escape it myself. Doing something “wrong” brings back visceral memories of missed layups in smelly gymnasiums, jumbled algebraic equations with angry eraser marks, and haunting verbal stumbles. As soon as I stopped obsessing over the thermometer error (“Yes, sweetie, your mommy is an idiotic cow unworthy of reproducing!”), I moved on to my skewed priorities. What did it say about me to be so sunk into my own feelings that I couldn’t appreciate the bigger picture? That my daughter was perfectly healthy? I was mad at myself for being mad at myself, a meta-cognitive spiral I simply wasn’t getting enough sleep to navigate.
Days later, I hurriedly recounted the incident to a friend with what I hoped was an aren’t-I-an-idiot-let’s-move-on tone of nonchalance. Instead, I started to cry. She gently suggested that while consciously I hadn’t thought anything was wrong that night, perhaps subconsciously I was scared that my daughter was sick and acted accordingly.
Certainly that made sense—of course someone like myself, logical and occasionally overcritical, would be shocked to find that parenting decisions couldn’t always be rationally maneuvered. But I had the nagging feeling that this wasn’t quite it. We were landing somewhere to the left of the actual parasitic obsession eating away at my brain.
The common parenting adage is that the days are long—filled with diaper explosions, oversized feelings, and generalized exhaustion—but the years are short. So it felt like a lightning-quick change when my daughter’s coy hints of smiles turned into big, goopy, transformative grins. With each one, I became mush. I was intoxicated. I made the same inane noises and gestures over and over again when they if they elicited those smiles. I was a kid at a pinball machine with an endless supply of quarters, a cat following a laser beam to every crevice of the room. It was a perfectly predictable milestone, and I reacted perfectly predictably.
I shared the smiley pictures widely—here she is smiling in a hat! In a strawberry onesie! With poop running down her leg! I sent some favorites to the WhatsApp group of 250+ local parents that pinged night and day (we don’t sleep), and found myself increasingly tuning into the group’s stream of chatter, questions, advice, venting, and encouragement. Parents shared freely, both the good and the bad, and I wondered: where had I gotten the idea that other parents were anxious and that I was above all that? Why had I been compelled to distinguish myself from other parents at all?
The more I connected with others in the baby trenches, digitally and otherwise, the more I saw it: I wasn’t the only one who had woken up in the middle of the night convinced that I was about to roll over and crush my daughter in bed, when in reality she was safely snoozing in her bassinet. Nor was I alone in wondering how the heck to dress a baby in winter, or if my breast milk supply was adequate, even as I watched rivulets of it drip down my daughter’s chin. I was just like all the other parents, and happily so—loving, silly, and a little deranged, each of us excellent and flawed in our own unique ways.
Dayenu, we are all enough for our children.
I thought I could have avoided an unnecessary and wildly expensive night in the hospital had I applied enough cool, Hermoine-Granger-esque logic. It wasn’t that deep down I thought something might be wrong with our daughter, as my friend had suggested. In reality, I was driven twisty by what happened because I was unaware that something greater than logic, fear, or anxiety now governed my actions. Love doesn’t always shine brightly, and that particular night, it disguised itself cleverly, shrouding itself in a gray weariness. Still, it was a love that swallowed all the other intangibles whole; regurgitating them into an organic newly-sprung drive to do right by my daughter, occupying a previously nonexistent quadrant of my brain-heart space. My self-concept had not changed since first holding my squirming, squinting baby in my arms, but unknowingly, I had.
My daughter is getting bigger, and in any given hour I’m as likely to dance wildly to the Wicked soundtrack to make her giggle as I am to type some ridiculous parenting query into Google (“how to distinguish normal baby eye goop from infectious baby eye goop”).
Thank goodness I am exactly, as it turns out, like all the other foolish, spectacular parents.
Like all the other foolish, spectacular parents, I can’t wait for her many “firsts,” most imminently her first Pesach Seder, where she will be the youngest in attendance. She will ask the four questions if not with words then with her bright eyes and curious hands, taking in the world anew every night.
As for me, this Seder will be different than all those that came before because I am different. I am a mom.
No responses yet