Author: Stephanie Rodgers

Stephanie Rodgers is a campaigner, communicator, and commentator on New Zealand politics. She provides advice on messaging and communications strategy, media and social media, organisational culture and crisis management for progressive and community organisations.
My daughter’s surgery, Part Two

My daughter’s surgery, Part Two

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 2 Comments

[Content note: this post discusses childhood illness, medical treatment, and surgery.]

Read Part One here.

When my daughter was born, I started keeping a diary for her. This came to feel particularly important when she was diagnosed with a heart condition, and I knew that I’d never be able to remember every detail I wanted to of the things we went through – things I knew I’d want to talk to her about when she got older.

When your child is a heart baby, you become part of the Heart Kids family, which has meetups, support resources and a Facebook group. A while ago, a parent made a post in the group asking about people’s experiences of surgery for the particular condition our child has. I made a few comments, but I thought at the time that I had all this written down somewhere – maybe it would help another parent to share it.

It’s the third anniversary of that surgery now, so here is a pair of posts, drawn from the diary I keep for my daughter, documenting how that all went. The dates relate to the diary entries, not when things actually happened.

Tuesday, 8 June 2021

You made it through surgery.

We were all so tired, and got so little sleep, and had such an early start on top of the stress of once again putting you in a shower and wiping you down with those bloody antiseptic cloths – you screamed your lungs out for that – and we got to hospital and were told we were on hold, again, due to a lack of sufficient PICU staff, again.

We were not in a great headspace. But the staff were legends. They got it. I think some major efforts were made to get us in. And we did, although the other child who had been told to come in that morning was sent home. Their family wished us luck.

There were more conversations with the anaesthetist, and checking the consent forms, and wiping you down again (you didn’t hate it as much this time). We were allowed to feed you some pink bubblegum-flavoured liquid to settle your stomach because you couldn’t have milk so close to the operation.

And finally – a week after our first surgery date – we went down to pre-op, with our lovely nurse and an assistant wheeling your empty hospital crib while your papa and I followed behind with you wrapped in hospital blankets in my arms. I was already crying a lot.

Another nurse, and more forms, answering a lot of the same questions all over again (pretty important questions, in fairness). And then a lovely anaethetist with big warm hands and a reassuring Northern English accent took you away. You woke up for just a moment as they left. Your papa and I had a bit of a breakdown. They let us sit there for a bit.

[Before all this, Parent to Parent had arranged a phone call from a mum who had been through the same surgery with her daughter, and her strongest piece of advice was: get out of the hospital. Don’t sit there worrying. They will call you. We listened.]

We went and got a proper breakfast in Ponsonby, did some shopping, and circled back to the museum, which is very handy to the hospital.

Then, sooner than I’d expected, we got the call that you were off bypass. That didn’t mean surgery was over, but at least your little heart and lungs were back up and running. An hour later, the surgeon called to say it was all done; “straightforward”, even. There’s still a 1mm gap, but it should close on its own and wasn’t worth putting you back on bypass for. We’ll have to keep an eye on it.

It wasn’t actually necessary to head back right away, but all of us – Granny was there too – were thoroughly out of spoons. We sat on the ward, and finally got called to PICU.

A few people, including the nurse who called, really strongly emphasised that it would be a shock to see you: pale, groggy, hooked up to machines with drains and sensors, tubes everywhere. It was somehow better and worse than I expected at the same time. My imagination was probably worse, but the reality had weight to it.

[Every feeling was mixed at that time. We were so happy everything had gone well and so sad to see her in that state, and so guilty for “doing” this to her even though there was no real choice in it. Sometimes it still sucks to think about it even though it was 100% the best thing, the only thing to do.]

Wednesday, 9 June 2021

You’re doing so well. This morning they took out your breathing tube. Your little heart is beating on its own, with a little pharmaceutical help. You were still drowsy, but more in control of yourself.

By the afternoon they were ready to move you back to the ward.

The nurses’ union were taking strike action today, so your special nurse in the PICU was wearing a sticker reading “Life Preserving Services”. I’ve always been a unionist, but I’ve never felt more strongly that they deserve every penny they’re asking for and more.

[I’ll leave it there for now. I might share some more about the rest of her recovery, but the worst part for us was definitely the lead up to surgery. As of now, it is three years ago, and a lot of it is a complete blur: in typing this up I remembered a lot of things I hadn’t thought about for ages. She is happy, and strong, and everyone who meets her is shocked to hear that she’s a heart baby. We won’t have another hospital check-up until she’s five.]

Photo by Pin Adventure Map on Unsplash

My daughter’s surgery, Part One

My daughter’s surgery, Part One

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 1 Comment
Heart shaped balloons floating up into a blue sky

[Content note: this post discusses childhood illness, medical treatment, and surgery.]

When my daughter was born, I started keeping a diary for her. This came to feel particularly important when she was diagnosed with a heart condition, and I knew that I’d never be able to remember every detail I wanted to of the things we went through – things I knew I’d want to talk to her about when she got older.

When your child is a heart baby, you become part of the Heart Kids family, which has meetups, support resources and a Facebook group. A while ago, a parent made a post in the group asking about people’s experiences of surgery for the particular condition our child has. I made a few comments, but I thought at the time that I had all this written down somewhere – maybe it would help another parent to share it.

It’s the third anniversary of that surgery now, so here is a pair of posts, drawn from the diary I keep for my daughter, documenting how that all went. The dates relate to the diary entries, not when things actually happened.

Wednesday, 2 June 2021

The past few days have been a bit of a blur, but you won’t remember them at all, thankfully – so I will do my best to sum up.

On Friday we got the call from Starship – they wanted us to fly up to Auckland on Sunday to do your surgery Tuesday. It was simultaneously scary and a huge relief. Finally we had a timeline, even if it was one that meant rescheduling things, cancelling an MC gig and threatening your Granny’s holiday to Hanmer Springs.

Then the first hiccup: we didn’t hear what flights we’d been booked on – that was to be handled by CCDHB, not ADHB, and when you’re older we’ll explain what DHBs were and why it’s ridiculous to decentralize your health system in a country of 5 million.

[Ed – this aged well]

So Saturday was spent planning, and packing, and ringing people at Wellington Hospital whose job it definitely wasn’t, trying to sort that out. Which we did at about 7pm Saturday.

Sunday morning was a write-off. When the time came we drove to Granny’s to pick her up, get to the airport and her take the car back to her place. She had such a great time pushing you around in circles in your stroller while mama and papa figured out boarding passes (the flight was so full we had to go right down the back to be seated together) and luggage tags (there’s a lot of stuff to take when you’re flying with a baby!)

And then she carried you all the way through the terminal and rocked you back and forth while your parents had a drink and one last quiet sit down.

Then your papa got to be the star, a tall beardy bloke carrying his tiny wee daughter through the security screening, to the smiles and admiration of every woman over 40 we encountered.

Your first flight was a dream. We’d planned ahead and made sure to pop a pacifier in your mouth before take-off, and you sucked on it the whole way, with just a few little scowls during ascent and descent. There definitely wasn’t elbow room to feed you and I have no idea how we would have changed your nappy – so it was a good thing neither of those things came up!

We arrived at our accommodation at Ronald McDonald House. The room was small (we could barely get the stroller inside, much less turn it around) and the facilities bland (first impression), but we figured we’d only have you there for a night or two.

We had dinner with friends who lived in Ponsonby and then settled in for our first night in Auckland.

Monday was a very long day.

Friday, 4 June 2021

[And then I didn’t write again until the end of the week.]

As of Monday we were still expecting your surgery to happen on Tuesday, so went into the ward for pre-admission checks. Starship Hospital is a nightmare to navigate for newcomers, much worse than Wellington Hospital [this is pre-the construction of Wellington Children’s Hospital]. We were back and forth all afternoon getting blood tests (twice because of muddled paperwork), a chest X-ray (your papa had to hold you in an uncomfortable position, and you cried), an EKG and an echocardiogram (you were very good even though it seemed to take forever.)

Your bed was made up – a little nest of towels wrapped in a sheet in the middle of a giant cot, and we waited for hours to get the informed consent briefing from the surgeon and anaesthetist.

We were in a big shared room, so we heard the consent talk being given to another family whose child was older – enough that the anaesthetist had to explain everything twice, once for the parents (the technical version) and once for the patient (“a magical sleep”). We honestly felt a little relieved that you’re so little, because you don’t understand and you can’t worry, even though you’re probably picking up some of our anxiety.

The surgeon came and was very straightforward in describing the procedure and the risks, though reassuring us they are small – especially for a baby as big and healthy as you – and that baby’s brains, especially, are pretty elastic. But these conversations are always a bit awkward – if you’re already at this point, you’re not realistically going to refuse consent.

The day ended in disappointment, first being told your surgery would be on Wednesday; then, about twenty minutes later, it became Thursday, but requiring you to stay in the ward Wednesday night.

At this point we determined we absolutely could not stay at Ronald McDonald House for the duration – or even one more night with you in that bassinet squeezed next to the bed, and changing late-night nappies on the floor. We were incredibly lucky – your godfather and his flatmate offered us accommodation, and even though I felt really really (pointlessly!) awkward about it, we accepted.

We thought we’d planned for everything, but we had expected to be staying in properly equipped facilities, so our friends whipped around their relatives and furnished us with bassinet, sheets, and everything else we needed.

We played tourist on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we returned to the hospital. You were checked in again and bathed and wiped down with anti-bacterial cloths, which you hated (I think they might feel very cold, but we didn’t try them ourselves.) This time the child in the next bed over was extremely upset, and we felt so sorry for them and their family, and it added to our own stress.

Your papa stayed the night with you, sleeping on a narrow, uncomfortable (especially for someone of his height) pull-down bed. I don’t think either of you slept much, if at all. And when I arrived at 6:30am the next morning, things were already looking bad. As of the nurse check in around 5am, they didn’t know if surgery would go ahead.

It didn’t.

The reason we were given was insufficient nursing staff in PICU (the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit) – which messes up the entire treatment pipeline.

[If you ever see Starship fundraising for “more beds”, often what this means is not the physical bed, but being able to pay the staff to put a patient into one of those beds.]

So we went away again – though it wasn’t quite that simple. First they said, come back in at 4pm tomorrow – and potentially any number of days after that – to ensure you were “still checked in”. We declared this was ridiculous. Then it became, you don’t have to come in, but do the bath-and-wipes routine again and be ready to come in at 6:30am if we call you – and keep you at nil by mouth – no breast milk – from 6am. [This meant waking up at 5am to try to get you to have something; and of course, you refused to be hungry.]

They didn’t call until later the next morning, to confirm the first surgery of the day was taking longer, so you were postponed again, with a possible glimmer of hope that extra staff might be found to come on over the weekend.

We made the best of it again. Touristing, a big dinner with the Auckland whānau who hadn’t had the chance to meet you yet. Everyone agreed you are very cute.

On the way home from dinner, a predictable phone call from the surgeon: no surgery over the long weeked, “unless your condition deteroriated”, a phrase I really didn’t need to hear. I still wonder if this was a bit of a hint to the white, middle-class parents that if enough of a fuss were made, by white, middle-class parents, resources could be found. I don’t like to think that that’s true.

I had a big cry, but at least I also had some certainty for a few days, instead of sitting by the phone every morning hoping for a terrible call.

[Here ends part one. Read part two here.]

Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash

COVID, with a baby, with COVID

COVID, with a baby, with COVID

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This has definitely been a year where two months can just disappear on you.

At the end of October the pandemic finally came to our wee household, probably due to all three of us spending various amounts of time at Wellycon, the board game convention. Whatever the source, it felt inevitable, and unnecessary, but I’ll do my best not to make this a political rant.

It’s all a bit of a blur now, but it wasn’t too bad for us. Two or three days of feeling incredibly miserable for the adults, and a runny nose and some fatigue for baby (she can’t give us any more details about her symptoms). I remember lying awake for long hours, desperately trying not to cough, listening to my two loves breathing, and sometimes holding my own breath until baby’s little snuffles came through in between her papa’s rather more resonant huffs and puffs. I remember being suddenly gripped with anxiety that baby was overheating – she ended up in our bed, refusing to sleep in her cot – and stripping layers off her in the middle of the night.

We did feel very alone. It was different to the old lockdowns (I hate that I can use the phrase “the old lockdowns”). We could hear the annual Tawa spring festival going off just up the road from our house (despite the drizzle). It underscored how the rest of the world was just getting on with life (because we’ve given up on actual collective community action, don’t get political). As always, I was very thankful for having online friends to talk to and commiserate with me; I guess all that screen time pays off!

Parenting tips for getting through COVID: switch to disposables, if you’re using cloth nappies. We did not get any laundry done for a week, and we did not need to be worrying about laundry on top of rest, hydration, RATs and keeping down food. Make a supermarket order as soon as you know you’ll be in self-isolation. Easy treats, quick meals, a lot of hot drinks, because water gets very boring very quickly.

And – good advice I think for any kind of serious illness – try to let go of the usual anxieties (like the laundry piling up). Life will pick up again. It doesn’t matter if lunch is just a plain bread roll (or supermarket-quality croissant if you’re feeling fancy). It’s food, and you need food, and hand-baked artisanally crafted brisket sliders can wait until after you deal with the important thing: getting well.

Now, one thing I do want to say is this: the official health advice for self-isolating with COVID right now is that after day 7, you can leave. And some Healthline operators are apparently telling people that they can’t infect anyone after this time. There’s absolutely no requirement or even suggestion that you do a RAT to check. On day 8, I did one anyway. And it was still positive. And I got some … disconcerting advice from Healthline myself. So I asked Twitter what to do.

And this is the reply I got from Dr Siouxsie Wiles (for some reason WordPress won’t embed her tweet directly).

https://twitter.com/bootstheory/status/1587651238325145601

The text of her tweet: “If you are RAT+ (in the 15 min test time) then you are infectious, so best for you to remain in isolation despite the official (bad) advice. If still + by day 12-14, by then you’ll be making antibodies which should neutralise infectious virus & so you’re safe to leave isolation“

So … you do you, but personally, we stayed in self-iso. For a lot of people, thanks to having bad employers and existing in late stage capitalism (don’t get political) that’s not going to be an option. But if it is practicable for you, please consider it, so maybe next Christmas we won’t “have COVID hanging over us” (STEPHANIE! NO!).

Since our COVID experience we’ve also had the very bad cold which is doing the rounds of Wellington (assuming, based on negative RATs) and tomorrow (the day I post this) we’ll be off to the GP to check baby’s eyes, which have been getting very red and swollen – another plug for Plunketline here, who advised it’s likely nothing, but always good to get an in-person opinion. I am very tired of coughing all the time, and would like to be able to get through a day without losing my voice.

Roll on Christmas!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The first trimester

The first trimester

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I have all these notes from pregnancy, I really have no excuse when it comes to finding things to write about. Time and energy are the rare commodities when you’re working (in a paid job) and working (to parent an 18-month-old) and working (to be a good partner and vaguely competent adult). But this evening I seem to be able to give myself the mental kick in the pants to put fingers to keyboard and talk about pregnancy. At least two friends and two colleagues/colleagues’ partners are expecting right now; maybe it’s all the extra baby talk in the air.

I think my first trimester felt longer because of the IVF. You don’t get the experience of a missed period, calculating your cycle length, wondering whether it’s late-late or just had-a-rough-week-at-work-late, not when you’ve had a medical professional literally inject a viable blastocyst directly into your uterus. It’s the awful thing about all those misogynist American laws which cut off abortion access at six or seven weeks: because your pregnancy is timed from your last missed period, which is likely, probably, or just maybe two weeks before you conceive, “for patients with a predictable 28-day cycle, there is only about one week before the “six-week” threshold to confirm pregnancy.” And not many people have a predictable 28-day cycle.

Anyway. My point is, IVF takes all the guesswork out of it. You know when Li’l Blasty arrived. You get told exactly when to go for a blood test to confirm pregnancy. You get a seven-week scan to formally discharge you from the care of your fertility doctor. You get lots of fun early pregnancy anxiety, which I may have had to remind myself I already wrote about. And then you’re rolling happily into the first trimester.

Mine was pretty cruisey (spoiler alert, things take a TURN at about 27 weeks). We met with two midwives: one younger, softer, more homebirth focused and highly recommended by a friend; and the other, bluntly spoken, hugely experienced, fabulous nails. It was a real “the hero we needed” choice, and one we were very lucky to be able to make. I managed to make a lot of very sensible adult decisions in my pregnancy, and picking the midwife who was going to look me dead in the eyes and tell me when I was being silly was definitely one of them.

Aotearoa being Aotearoa, it turned out she was my hairdresser’s midwife too.

I didn’t have much in the way of morning sickness, but it felt very touch-and-go at times, like if I coughed too hard everything was going to explode. No cravings either, just a sudden, very definitive sense of yes or no to eating any given food that was offered to me, which I knew was definitely real and not “just” in my head the first time the smell of pizza made me genuinely want to throw up.

See, babies do ruin everything.

The first trimester can be lonely. We didn’t tell many people, though when your nearest and dearest all know you’ve been struggling for a while and are trying IVF it just gets awkward at some point because they know you know but don’t want to pry because it might not be good news but on the other hand you’ve told them previously when it’s bad news so there’s really only one conclusion to draw especially when she starts ordering ginger beer instead of a craft sour …

But it was also nice to have this thing that was just ours. A little flicker of hope barely making itself known in the world. A moment of quiet before all the drama (seriously, week 27) unfolded.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

Sometimes the baby cries

Sometimes the baby cries

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Sometimes, the baby cries.

And it’s okay.

The way most people react even to the idea of a baby crying, you’d think it’s the worst sound in the world, nails on a chalkboard multiplied by chewing tinfoil to the power of someone slurping their soup. “There was a crying baby” is shorthand for “the experience was completely ruined and I derived nothing of value from it”. And I used to think like that.

I have to emphasise that it wasn’t having a baby which changed my mind, it wasn’t the magical (mythical) “you’ll understand when you have one of your own”. It was years before baby came along, when I simply came to appreciate that babies have no other way of communicating. And when you need something, as a baby, it’s pretty bloody urgent. And god, who wouldn’t love to just sit down and have a big wail about things sometimes?

That cry, on the bus or at the park or on a plane, wasn’t and isn’t about me (or you). It was about a baby who has a need (and they’re a baby! They need it now!) and a parent or carer who’s doing their best to diagnose and correct the issue as quickly as they can – and how could you feel anything but sympathy (especially when you’re on a plane)??

Now that I do have a baby on my own, I’m glad I went through that bit of personal growth. It’s easy to see why parents get to the end of their tether, once you add that full-bore open-mouth bellow of infant anger on top of the sleep deprivation and constant underlying terror of childrearing. It can feel like the baby is just making more noise specifically to make you explode or join them in crying. And it really helps to remember: this is the only way she can tell you things are wrong. She wishes she could make it stop herself. She simply can’t. She’s a baby.

And sometimes I’m not the person who can help, because I am at the end of my tether, but that’s only going to be made worse if I’m also telling myself that the baby crying is a personal moral failure on my part, and that being unable to pick her up because I’m so damn tired, or nurse her because my boobs were too damn sore, means I’ve failed. It’s definitely going to be made worse if I’m fielding unsubtle, contemptuous glares from supposed grown adults in my vicinity who want to pretend that children don’t exist in public areas.

Now sometimes, if a baby’s having a tangi in public, the answer is to take them out of the situation they’re in. But that’s still about what the baby needs, not placating antisocial melon-ballers.* We all have to recognise that some caregivers don’t have the choice to not be on that train, or not do the shopping a that time, or have no space or facilities to feed or change or nap the baby right now.

(I was just out at a nice Wellington bar the other night which had no changing table in any of its bathrooms. I changed the baby on the floor, and she was well grumpy about it, and I did not try to stop her crying because you’d complain too, lying on a cold floor with your bare butt in the air).

Sometimes the baby cries and there’s no fixing it. She’s fed and clean and warm and just really, really tired which only makes her less likely to go to sleep. Or she’s a tiny creature full of big feelings and can’t say “I’m experiencing some existential angst, mama” yet. And what matters, in that moment, is that she needs me, and she needs to let her feelings out, and I want her to know that’s okay, and she will always have someone to snuggle her while she gets it out of her system.

She’s a baby. Sometimes, the baby cries.

~

*Melon-ballers: the most useless kitchen utensil and yet one we’re all supposed to put up with

A pin-prick of prevention

A pin-prick of prevention

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment
Image: Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash

Whoops! You blink and two months have gone past, and the only real evidence of it is that the baby now seems impossibly long. Where did these legs come from?

I feel like a broken record on the topic which has prompted me to post today, but a golden rule of communications (my day job) is that by the time you’re sick of saying something, someone else is only hearing it for the first time.

So: please, please vaccinate your babies.

In our wonderful antenatal classes the message was very simple: we vaccinate our children against the things we don’t want them to get. I don’t want my baby to get measles, or whooping cough, or polio or HPV. I don’t want anyone else’s baby to get them either. And vaccination is how we make our babies, and everyone else’s babies, safer.

A month ago we did baby’s 15-month jabs, and due to her heart condition, she had to get a full four – one in each delicious little arm and leg. And she was very not happy about this situation, and there were tears and crying and declaring one parent (her father) to be the cruellest villain in all human recollection and the other (moi) to be the second-cruellest for not stopping him.

But it was 100% worth it to know she has protection against diseases that could kill her.

There is so much disinformation out there about vaccinations – and I say “disinformation” not “misinformation” because it’s absolutely, deliberately misleading. A lot of it is focused around the COVID vaccines, but it’s clearly bled into other areas, as this story on Newsroom illustrates. The impact of the anti-vaccine movement is literally counted in lives, and this was particularly underscored for me by learning this week that goddamn polio is back in New York.

Never one to miss a chance to quote Hannah Gadsby (and lament that there isn’t a handily embeddable video of this quote, come on, internet!):

“As difficult as this life is, it’s nice to have a life. And it’s particularly nice to have this life in a world without…

POLIO.

Polio is bad, and that is a fact, not a feeling.”

I know a lot of people who are declining or delaying vaccinations aren’t vicious, or gullible, or too deep in the rabbithole of far-right conspiracy theories. They’re worried, because of course you’re worried when your child is so young and fragile and seemingly beset by danger on all sides. But it’s also true that when it’s too late, it’s too late – not just for you and your baby. When immunisation gets so low that we get outbreaks of measles, and they spread like wildfire because we’ve lost herd immunity (which is a thing you get through high vaccination rates, NOT letting a contagious disease kill thousands of people and crossing your fingers), a lot more children get sick. It’s like putting on your seatbelt before the car starts moving, only the seatbelt goes around your whole community. You just won’t be able to get it on in time when a crash happens.

But we can get immunisation rates up now. Please. Not just for our babies – pregnant people can get vaccinated against flu, COVID and whooping cough, and the antibodies pass to your baby in the womb, giving them protection too.

~

For those with nearly two hours to spare, I really do recommend this video about Andrew Wakefield and his deceptive linking of MMR vaccines with autism, which drives the anti-vaccine movement to this day. Even he didn’t intend to demonize all immunisations, just the combined MMR jab, for reasons that will make you absolutely furious. Slight spoilers, but there is good news: once the disinformation gets taken away, vaccination rates go up again.

Heart day

Heart day

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 2 Comments
A square piece of paper with a heart drawn on it, attached by a peg to string hung across a plain wall

Content note: discussion of hospital, medical issues, baby illness

Today is the first anniversary of baby’s heart surgery.

It’s a very weird sentence to type. It’s probably a revelation to a lot of people reading this – even the ones who know me offline. I ran into someone just over the weekend, where I was MCing a pole competition, who had no idea that the reason I’d missed the same show a year ago was that we were all flown, with about 48 hours’ notice, to Auckland for our eight-week-old baby to have open heart surgery.

The technical term is ventricular septal defect. A hole in the heart. Big, but not so big they had to fix it immediately; we were sent home, under close observation by the absolutely goddamn phenomenal people at the Wellington Hospital NICU, with instructions to get some weight on that baby. If we could get her to five kilos, before any of the side effects of a heart pumping blood in the wrong direction became too serious, it would make things much, much easier for everyone involved. But outside those two metrics – one simple vital statistic and one terrifyingly vague, “her breathing will get steadily worse, get in the car and call us if she turns blue” fail condition – there was no timeline. No certainty.

It was the longest eight weeks of our life. And then one day we finally got the tick to take her down to the operating theatre, and hand her over to the anaethetists, and I sobbed my heart out for a good half hour. You can have all the reassurance in the world that it’s a very common defect, a regular procedure, an incredibly safe operation, but your child is in a room far away being put on bypass. For a few hours, her little heart isn’t going to beat, while someone tries to fix it.

And now, it’s a year later.

If that felt like a swerve … it’s a swerve.

I’ll have a lot more to write later – especially once I find where I kept my darn notes, because unsurprisingly, those two or three weeks are a bit of a blur – but for today I’m holding on to the happy ever after we got. She’s so happy and bouncy and independent and strong that no one who doesn’t know can even believe what she went through, when she was so small. And so many other things happened that year – her birth! My gall bladder surgery! Multiple job changes! Buying a new house! – that I frequently forget to even include it on the list. You get some funny looks when you’re talking about this beautiful healthy almost irritatingly energetic child and the phrase “after the surgery” just casually drops out of your mouth.

It’s not that I feel nothing – I’ve had a good long cry this evening (the day before), snuggling her to sleep, vividly remembering so many terrifying, anxious moments, how difficult it was to hold everything together, how much we can never repay the many friends and whānau who were so completely generous with their time and resources and homes.

But it’s nice to start with the happy ever after sometimes.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

A farewell to breastfeeding

A farewell to breastfeeding

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

There’s been a lot of discussion online around the US formula shortage, and the petty, kneejerk, unthinking, callous response from many to “just” breastfeed. “What did we do before you pampered ingrates had (expensive, complicated, emotionally fraught) formula???” some sneered.

“Well, a lot of babies just died” was the understandably angry response.

Breastfeeding just isn’t that simple. Many parents don’t produce enough milk, or any milk, or their babies can’t take milk, or – especially in the US which has no mandated parental leave – breastfeeding simply isn’t feasible when you have to go straight back to work. And pumps are expensive and noisy and frankly become a hazard once baby is walking and grabbing and fascinated by anything that makes a noise.

But I’m not here to talk about formula today, as baffling and angry-making as it is that a country like the USA can even experience such a thing as a formula shortage (many have already made the “joke” that it’s weird how, once again, capitalism delivers all the bad things it warns us socialism would do).

I think I’m done with breastfeeding. And that word “think” is the first hard part of it. Some babies just wean themselves – one mama in our antenatal class had her baby flat-out stop at around eight months. Not mine; she would still be on the boob if she could, it’s just that when she does, there’s too much biting. I talked to a lactation consultant we know, who’s been really helpful in the past; she had advice for fixing baby’s latch. It might have worked, if going back to the office didn’t mean going down to barely two feeds a day – little opportunity and no patience for detaching her, letting her scream, getting her to open her mouth wide, tensing to see if I get bitten, lather rinse repeat.

I had some equanimity about it at first, because obviously, the key thing is that baby is fed – and she’s taken marvellously to solids – and of course, I could just keep pumping, and make sure that she got at least one bottle of my milk at the end of the day to send her off to sleep. Unfortunately, pumping has lost its effectiveness. One bottle a day became one every two days, stretching the “keep milk in the fridge for 48 hours” to its absolute limit (and if I’m honest, beyond) as I tried to scrap together enough 15 and 20 and 30mL sessions to make up a proper feed.

But as of today (when I’m writing this), it feels like the battle is lost. There’s no satisfaction in sitting and grinding out a meagre splash (other people who’ve pumped will know that “grinding” is exactly the right word), trying and forgetting and then regretting all the tactics that might work if you really kept them up for a few days, but just seem like too much work on top of everything else you’re doing. Add to that the aforementioned baby walking and grabbing and fascination with the loud machine that mama spends so much time with – it’s too much. It’s too difficult to go on.

There’s a bottle of milk in the fridge. And it will probably be baby’s last. And from then on it’s solids and formula – so we come full circle. She’s had formula on top of breast milk practically since day one, and I hated it, even though it was necessary, even though it’s perfectly good food for a baby. The message that breast is best is important – but on some level it also tells you that formula is failure. Not just “less good”, but “actively bad”. Even when you don’t have another choice. And it’s not. The problems with formula aren’t formula. They’re capitalism. But that’s a discussion for another day.

The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding until age 2. And I won’t make it. And it’s so difficult not to feel like I’ve failed, even though we’ve gone well past her first year, even though she’s completely happy and healthy and bouncy and bright. Once again, I’ve done parenting Wrong, and as much as I can tell myself that these feelings are inaccurate and disingenuous and irrational, it doesn’t stop me feeling them. Not for a little while anyway. As with all the anxieties and pressures we’ve already been through, I know it will pass. It “just” sucks right now.

Photo by an_vision on Unsplash

Lessons from the first year

Lessons from the first year

by Stephanie Rodgers ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It is a very “newspaper columnist who’s running out of proper ideas” understatement, but: you learn a hell of a lot in the first year of a baby’s life. At least, I did. Some of it was stuff I already thought I knew!

Obviously, I can only speak to my own experience, but it’s difficult not to use the standard parenting-blog “YOU will think this”, “YOU find that” language – which is something I’ve tried to avoid in my posts so far. But today I’m giving in, especially because this one goes out to all the new parents, or expectant parents, who haven’t been through and come out the other side yet.

Hearing these things would have been comforting to me at the time. I hope they’re comforting for you. I know I’m not the only person saying them; but quantity also helps, because if we’re all saying this is how things are, we must be on to something. The fears and worries that come with being a new parent are completely normal. It still sucks to experience them. It helps to know that other people feel the exact same way.

1. A lot of the anxiety is unfamiliarity, and it will pass.

When it’s your first baby and you’re living in a typical “nuclear family” household – i.e. you’re not already sharing child-raising duties with other parents in a big communal multi-generational home, which is a huge failure of modern capitalist society – so much is completely new. You might have changed a nappy or two – in my case, probably twenty years ago because I’m an only child and all of my cousins are grown up – but there’s a difference when it’s changing every nappy. And doing the associated laundry.

You might have seen a baby napping in their capsule, or been at a friend’s house while their bub was asleep in another room, but it’s completely terrifying when it’s your baby, it’s the middle of the night, and you genuinely don’t know how quietly they breathe because you’ve never shared a bedroom with a newborn. I was checking baby’s breathing so often in those first weeks. When she and I were sleeping in the lounge (it was part of the system J and I figured out so we both got at least one decent chunk of sleep) and settling after her 3am or 4am feed, I would lie on the sofa, holding my own breath, eyes straining open, counting the seconds until I heard a little snuffle from the bassinet.

I still get up to check she’s breathing, some times – but the terror is gone and the anxiety has faded significantly, because we’ve been through so many nights together now.

I don’t demonise anxiety – it’s our brains’ way of trying to manage difficult and unfamiliar situations. On the other hand, it’s also good to be aware of when that anxiety is getting too strong, and having ways of reining it in. One thing I did a few times was allow myself ONE check – not five or ten or fifteen. Counting those seconds when we were going to sleep in the lounge was another – it meant I wasn’t getting up every five seconds to check her, and I knew how long it had been since I’d last heard her little puffs of breath.

2. Men can parent. Duh.

This one is obviously coming from my perspective as the woman in a hetero relationship. Even before baby arrived we had a lot of conversations, some funny, some very aggravated, about the way people talking about fatherhood. The classic is asking a dad, looking after his own children, “are you babysitting today?” because obviously it’s not really his job.

Since we’ve swapped roles – I went back to office work in November and J is now the anchor parent at home – it’s even clearer that the only fundamental difference between us is that I make my own milk. And if I weren’t still breastfeeding, or hadn’t been able to continue breastfeeding, even that difference wouldn’t exist. J changes more of the nappies. He takes care of the laundry. He has a much clearer grasp of baby’s daily routine, even when I’m working from home under different levels of COVID restrictions.

He’s not heroic for doing any of this. He’s a dad.

One thing I remember from our antenatal classes was a bit of advice: “Just because the other parent is doing things differently, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” And I’ll admit that took a lot of work – especially because I’m an anxious person, and because as feminist as I am it’s really, really difficult to push past the constant messages we receive that men are useless, especially with small babies. Obviously they get to be cool and fun and engaged when the kids are older and don’t need food spooned into their mouths or their butts wiped, but young babies? The province of mothers. (Even my favourite author, Terry Pratchett, has a bit of that going on in the later Vimes books.)

But you can work through it. And you both need to be on board for those early weeks, because they are bloody tough – but it’s much, much easier to say that from the other side of it.

3. The baby will eat stuff off the floor.

Yes, babies need things to be pretty clean, especially in the early days. Sterilising bottles and other equipment is really important.

But they will eventually eat something off the floor and you won’t be sure what it is and they have definitely swallowed it by the time you get a finger into their mouth to check. And hang on, did you wash that finger?

If it’s poisonous or genuinely hazardous, don’t read this blog – get medical advice asap! But if it’s a scrap of paper, or a dried-up bit of grated cheese dropped during last night’s dinner, or a plastic straw they want to chew on for a minute … it’s fine. It’s probably good for the immune system. I’m not a doctor. I’m just a very tired mama who thinks raising an entire small human is a very big job and doesn’t need to be made even more difficult by trying to meet Home & Garden magazine levels of tidiness and vaccuuming.

The baby will also bump her head, a lot, and I promise you, you will figure out when it’s actually serious enough to warrant a rush to the hospital and when it’s only a whoopsie. See point 1. And also point 4.

4. Babies are pretty resilient.

You won’t do everything perfectly and there will be screw-ups and you will feel like the worst person in the world every time you wait too long to change a nappy, or the baby bumps her head because you stopped paying attention for a second, or she’s gotten overtired and won’t settle and literally nothing you can do will stop her crying, and oh my god, colic. Baby might scream and scream for hours, every evening, for no diagnosable or fixable reason, and you’ll already be completely exhausted, and it is impossible not to think that she’s going to be traumatized for life and it’s your fault.

Babies get through.

When we were in hospital, preparing for her heart surgery, the surgeon and anaesthetist came and talked us through the risks – risks we had no choice about taking because, let’s be real, her heart wasn’t working properly and needed to be fixed. But they reassured us that babies are pretty elastic and can recover from a lot.

And that was heart surgery. Colic has nothing on heart surgery: it’s mostly an endurance test. Again, I know: it’s so very easy to say that with hindsight. That’s where point 5 comes in.

5. You are pretty resilient.

There were plenty of times J and I both thought we wouldn’t survive parenting. Or that our relationship wouldn’t survive parenting. We’ve both said some pretty dark, hopeless things to each other and we desperately needed – and thankfully, were able to access – outside support to get through.

We got through.

And yes, that is much simpler to say with a good night’s sleep and a happy, squawking baby scrambling around your feet. When the colic is a fading nightmare and even the surgery feels like a blip quickly disappearing off the radar instead of the longest eight weeks of our lives. But it’s important to know it, and hear it, precisely because it can really, really feel like you’re alone. You’re not. Millions of people have done this, just like you.

Give yourself time and patience and a bit of leeway. You’re doing the best you can and it is more than good enough.

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash