Saved.

It was overcast that morning but still hot.  The air was sticky and heavy and we had not slept well.  Truth be told, we had not slept well for six weeks.  As I brushed my teeth that morning I remember looking in the mirror and thinking about the day ahead.  I would pump, wash my parts, and then repeat this process four or five more times.  I would leave the unit to eat lunch and dinner but then I would return.  I would talk with nurses, a doctor or two, and other moms, but I would mostly sit in tense silence.  Rob and I would talk by the bedside and Rob would ask questions about procedures and equipment.  And over the course of the day, there would be A's and B's; although some of them would be scary, most of them would be minor.

As I thought about what would happen that day and what every day had been like for the past month, it felt like it had finally happened.  As if the string that was flirting with the flame had finally burned through its last thread.  And it snapped.  

The snap had everything to do with being in the same place for weeks on end and doing the same things each and every day but doing most of them against my will.  And wishing we ,and especially, our baby, were somewhere else.  It was emotional exhaustion, it was likely due to postpartum hormones, and it was the inevitable result of experiencing such extreme emotions over the course of one day for many days in a row.  At that moment it felt as if a vital neuron that connected one piece of my brain with another had been completely severed. 

We traveled our familiar route to the hospital that morning and as we turned a corner I told Rob that this was the day that I was going to have my nervous breakdown.  I was only half surprised by my conviction.  Rob may have thought I was joking but I said it with certainty.  The collapse of my sanity loomed ahead of me like an event.  The clock was ticking and there were merely hours to go.

I had been on the brink of collapse from the moment that I saw our 2 1/2 pound baby in his incubator on the day that he was born.  For the first four days of Eddie's life I lived in terror.  We did not know if he, like Henry, would leave us.  After one week he seemed to be stable but he was so tiny and had such incredible obstacles ahead of him; obstacles unlike any that I had ever imagined. At 28 weeks gestation, he had to develop and grow and do all of the things that should have been taking place within me and with my help.  As I sat by his bedside day after day I would wrestle with questions that I never dared ask aloud: how was Eddie going to make it through and do everything that needed to be done?  How was he going to go home?  And most of all, how was he going to safely come out of a place that up until that time had only meant death and devastation to us?  

From the moment I discovered I was pregnant with him, I loved Eddie carefully.  With the kind of love that wants to be uninhibited and naive but knows too much to be easy.  He had my heart completely, but he also had the scars that came with it.  The sleepless nights, the tears, the resentment, the faith, and all of the other emotions of a wounded mother.  

That day, without even being around them, I knew that the alarms on his monitors had sealed my fate.  For the past week or so Eddie had been going through a particularly rough period where his doctors were weaning him off of caffeine.  Up until then, he was given caffeine to help keep his heart rate up so he could breathe more easily.  Once they started cutting back, Eddie's body had to remember to breathe on its own and sometimes he would forget.  These little spells of forgetting (A's and B's) could last for just a second or they could be longer and if that were the case, he would become gray and limp and have to be tickled or touched in order to start breathing again.  Even though we knew his spells were normal and even comparatively mild, it was still difficult to watch.  And although we knew he would come out of them, we still silently prayed during each one.  Hoping that he would become stronger.  That there would come a time and a day when he could breathe freely.

Out of all of the sensory memories I have with Henry's time in the NICU, the monitors were the ones that I associated the most with his stay.  After his passing I hoped that our subsequent experiences with our children would make the monitors' jarring sounds a distant and dreadful memory but instead, it was the opposite.  Although in some ways it felt like an eternity, Henry was only in the NICU for four days.  Eddie was there for 61.

That morning as we walked to Eddie's room I immediately felt my body tense.  The doctors, pharmacists, and nurses had already gathered around him and were going to do their rounds and talk about how he was doing, what he needed, and if anything needed to change in his treatment.  I left Rob with the group so I could pump in the other room.  I do not remember my exact thoughts as I pumped that morning but my ears strained, searching for the sounds of alarms - Eddie's alarms.  I would hear a ding and a beep and then more frantic beeps and I would wonder if it were him.  If it was my baby who was having a bit of trouble at that moment.

I cleaned my pump parts slowly and thoroughly and shuffled into the room.  Wishing that I could be home, on vacation, in the bathroom.  Anywhere but there.  As much as I loved and love Eddie, it was agony to be in his room all day.  Truthfully, nothing triggered my "flight" instincts like having to sit by my two boys in the NICU.  Yes, I wanted to see them and help them and be their advocate but I was virtually powerless when they were at their most vulnerable and I could not bear to see them with tubes, under lights, and with leads on their heads and on their hearts. And on that day I could not stand to be helpless anymore.  I had gone as far as I could and could not and did not want to go any further.

As I made my way to Eddie's side, Rob turned to me with a jubilant grin.  He took my hands in his and told me that Eddie would be able to try nursing for the first time that day.  That Eddie had made enough progress and taken enough strides that his doctors felt like he was ready.  

Without going into too much detail, I will tell you that that news saved me from a mental breakdown.  

That the promise of nursing one of my babies for the very first time and of immediately providing him with something that he needed and that would soothe him, brought me back from the edge of collapse.  And even though there were still difficult days after that morning, that after that, things were not quite so hard to take.  The beeping gradually subsided, and eventually, altogether stopped.  Eddie came home.  And on the 24th he will be turning 18 months old.

If one believed in coincidences, one would think that what happened that morning was the perfect one.  It was a wonderful coincidence that I had the opportunity to do something with Eddie that I had been dreaming of for a long time on what happened to be the day when I was basically finished.  That may in fact be true, and if so, I am grateful.  But there are so many inexplicable coincidences, consequences, phenomena, and hardships in this life.  And as a person who has experienced a few of these things firsthand I do not merely believe in coincidence or happenstance.  

I believe in faith.  I believe in hope.  And I believe in mercy.  I believe in God, His Son, Jesus Christ, and I believe in the Holy Ghost.  I believe in families and in human decency and goodness.  I believe that mistakes and frailties are inevitable but that they are not unforgivable.  And I believe in love.  I believe that love saved me that day and that it has saved me throughout my life when I have been at my weakest moments.  And when I have I wanted to simply stop.  

My heart is full of love for my brave little preemie tonight.  He is currently cutting four teeth, battling through a nasty cold, and is waking up at all hours during the night.  And, oh, how I love him!  He is full of life, curiosity, and passion.  He lives to be outside or to be opening something new.  He hardly sits down during the day unless he is eating or taking his nap and even then, he usually changes position.  He screams, he giggles, and he babbles.  He has a one-sided love affair with our "doggie" (poor Riggins) and thinks that every animal or any other object that moves is a doggie too.  And lately, he will not go to sleep unless he can nuzzle his head into a blanket and snuggle up with a board book.

Happy 18 months, our amazing Eddie.  You have saved us - in so many, many ways.

Therapy.

A good friend of mine recently argued that those who analyze and criticize life, art, food, etc., are not merely subject to the objects and things they write about but are in turn creating on their own by writing.  This thought has struck a chord with me lately and I like to think that those (holla! all of my fellow bloggers and academians) who write about beautiful things are making their own beautiful thing by writing something thoughtful.  

And I especially like to think that even though my thoughts on Rob and Henry are few, that in some small way they have created a type of little moment that I can return to again and again.  For me, my moments and posts usually center around a thought or a feeling that I have been experiencing and thinking about for quite some time.  So let me introduce another little precious "moment" that I experience everyday.

Meet Riggins

I have mentioned him in passing in some of my posts but now I will more fully describe the wonder and joy of this special little pup.  This is Riggins.  He is a chihuahwerrien (chihuahua terrier mix).  And yes, in this picture he is wearing a Snuggie for dogs.  As you can see, Riggins is not only a charmer but he is also quite unique.  Like Riggins, the story of how he came into our lives is equally special and unique and it is worth retelling.  

Rob and I woke up on a dismal Wednesday morning.  We did not wake up to alarm clocks nor did we hustle around to get ready for work.  On the contrary, on that morning our apartment was eerily quiet.  Floral arrangements dotted our counter and our table was covered in cards, cookies and pictures.  The crib in our second bedroom was vacant and the ground was littered with boxes that had been hurriedly opened just a week before on a journey to the delivery room.  In our master bedroom we laid close together in bed, closing and opening our eyes as we woke up.  Our hands were clasped and we were each clutching a tiny baby blanket that still had the unmistakably sterile smell of the hospital.  It had been five days since Henry passed away and we were just beginning to grasp the loneliness that comes after saying goodbye to a child.    

Henry's service was imminent and was going to take place on that upcoming Saturday.  In between our tears of shock and grief, we talked about the service but for the first time, we talked about what would come after.  It was that morning that I realized that life would go on the following week.  That the world would continue to turn and people would live their lives even though ours had stopped.  Out of some crazy twist of fate, I quit my job the day before Henry was born not knowing that he would shortly make his arrival.  Looking back, it was actually necessary for me to not have to go into an office immediately after Henry's death but at the time the future looked horribly bleak since I had nowhere to go and nothing to do to cope with such a tragic loss.

Sensing my despair, Rob looked me in the eye and announced that he was taking me to get a dog.

I will never forget the tenderness in his face as he told me that he knew that my body had been preparing to care for a little person for the past nine months and that I needed to have someone (or something) around to love.  

Within the hour, we were out the door and on our way to the Humane Society.  If you have ever been to an animal shelter you will likely share my sentiments that the environment is jarring and unbelievably sad.  We went into the room where the small dogs were kenneled and we were barked at by desperate dogs at every angle.  The noise of the room and the condition of the dogs in their kennels made me so sad that I did not even focus on a particular dog.  But thankfully, Rob paid attention and he noticed a little brown dog that was lying down in his kennel and looking at the ground.  He was the only dog that was not barking and when we got his attention and he looked at us we noticed he had beautiful amber-colored eyes.  Within another hour we were walking out of the door with our first dog.

I could not possibly describe the love that we have for this mutt.  He is my shadow, Rob's wrestling partner, our walking buddy, a member of our singing group and is our comic relief.  Riggins was not only an invaluable companion during those first difficult months after Henry's passing but he has proved his worth and devotion again and again.  I am certain that we would have loved him if we would have gotten him at any other time but tragedy brought us together and love has cemented him into our family.   

It is no coincidence that out of all of the dogs that we could have brought home that day that we ended up with one that is so perfect for us.  In fact, in many ways, this little dog is our therapy.

PS - For those of you that were wondering, Riggins is named after Tim Riggins, the lovable philanderer and our favorite character, from the TV series "Friday Night Lights."  We had just started watching the first season before Henry's birth and continued watching after his passing.  If you have never watched the show I dare you to watch the first two episodes...you will not be able to stop.  And for those of you Dillon Panthers/Lions fans out there I have to say, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!"