House dogs and mother’s work

Our dogs are gradually rejoining the new household.  The harvestparents had a double burden of care, not only with the unexpected arrival of the harvestbaby, necessitating a rapid transfer of the dogs to them, but also by all the bitches coming into season within a few days of each other (as is the way with cohabiting mammals of the same species).  The return of Arthur and Eddie took the nearby household arrangements off crated rotation, and now Fern has rejoined us for good.  She has filled out greatly following the weaning of the puppies and now has that cobby look for which Norwich Terrier breeders strive in the just-shy-of-eugenics manner that is the anxious mode of the dog fancy.

A week ago, Tom the puppy made his way north to join his new family, where he is now enjoying happy days.  The bittersweetness of saying goodbye was eased by the responsibility to hand of the harvestbaby, who at just two weeks old was smaller than Tom.  It was a shame not to have the last two weeks of the little fellow’s tenure together, but reassuring to think of the splendid rural life to which he has now succeeded.  The puppies are quite mature now and the departure of the largest of them will make dog wrangling easier, not to mention the soothing decrease in the gross testosterone, reducing the need for Arthur and Eddie to puff out their barrel chests and strut around like they own the place.

The harvestbaby reached her due date this week and has begun a transformation from the largely quiet, sleepy baby of her premature weeks to a more inquisitive, expressive kind of character.  The things that fascinate me most about the daily routine are the things that precede the setting of memory in my own experience: feeding and the oral eruptions that follow it, in particular (as the earlier post may have suggested).  I have thus far through chance escaped the highest-volume of the milk-spits, but the señor, his mother and the harvestdad have been sprayed with lacto-regurgitate more than once.  The scary sleepiness of her first days, when we needed to wake her for everything including feeding, means that the señor and I still regard all of what will likely one day be encumbrances (that cycling trio of feeding, winding and changing) with a mixture of relief and awe.  It is perhaps a good thing that memory takes a long time to tether its human subjects, since what kind of a monster would be a person who could recall in their earliest days being praised for spitting and toileting?

In the weeks since the harvestbaby’s birth I have re-read the labour narratives of those who have recently gone before me.  Retrospective comparison is a wonderful thing, since having had my own experience means that others’ stories no longer read as terrifying.  I was, I think, well prepared by the honesty and cheerful open-mindedness of both my care team here and my many friends and associates, online and off-, who shared their stories with me. There was sufficient diversity in everyone’s stories for me to figure my own experience would be unique to me but part of the obstetric pattern.

Labour was as the parent educator at the antenatal classes described it to us: largely inexpressible except through similes and metaphors.  In the most difficult parts I was thrown back in my mind to a state of being not dissimilar to what I had struggled with during my antenatal depression.  I would describe it as “frightened fifteen year old”, which for me was the time of my life when I felt like I had the most stress and the least control.  I feared through the contractions some intangible loss of control in addition to the necessary physical stress of labour, some flipping out, as we use to say, from which I might not come back mentally intact.  But this too seems a metaphor in itself, the psyche throwing out emotional equivalents of the physical pain.  This was expressed in a different way by my midwife, who said at one point, “you’re such a teacher; just go with it.  Don’t try to control it.”

I had said I would compare the pain to the pain of gallstones.  I am sorry to say it hurt more, not necessarily because of the strength of the pain but of the way in which it built in intensity through the contractions.  However, I surprised myself by coping, by getting through it, and by being roundly praised by both the midwife and the obstetrician with words like “brave”.  I don’t know about that, but it was flattering to hear.  The señor tells me that at one point I sat up and said, “while I’m still lucid, I’d like to thank everyone”, in a manner that was anything but lucid.  I do recall, post-epidural, giving my midwife quite an extensive lecture on how to prepare tofu for stirfry, based not on my experience but on the señor’s method.

At the end of a protracted second stage our daughter was assisted through the final centimetres by a ventouse, this resulting from a combination of the epidural disrupting my perception of the start of contractions and therefore when to push, and by my using most of my pushing energy at the start, two hours previously, of that second stage.  “You could,” said the señor, “have held back a little then and saved some energy.”  I didn’t, I told him truthfully, want anyone to think I was being lazy.  More dispatches from age fifteen, it seems.

Epidural anasthesia and assisted delivery are for some mothers the antithesis of what they want but I was happy with both these outcomes.  I realised once it was all over how every step of the way I had my midwife and the señor there, not only supporting me through that moment but also well prepared for what was to come next.  It made me feel retrospectively tremendously safe, as did the fetal heart monitors and the perpetual printout they gave.  I watched that information print in a near-mesmerised state in the early stages of labour, that line that showed the heartbeats the last metonym of the baby we wanted so badly to see.  The thought that I had to go through this to have her here with us was a great motivator, and overrode consistently the anxiety and the pain aversion that were at times the more immediate concerns.

In the end I did a day’s work along the hours of an ordinary working day, with induction at nine o’clock sharp (my waters had broken some thirty hours previously) an hour-long rest over lunch following the epidural, and our daughter born at four thirty-one that afternoon.  By around seven we were wheeled up to the ward, staff in the birthing suite looking out of their rooms to greet us as if I were the queen (I was severely tempted, holding the harvestbaby with the señor following behind us, to wave at passers-by), and the pile of white blankets over my legs belying the reality below.  Part of my elation was specific to the experience: I was not, in the end, too afraid to go through with it (even though I had of course no choice), I didn’t go mad (varying degrees of immobilisation helped with this) and all complications had been reparable.  It is, too, as plenty of people had said, do-able for the fact that you likely get your baby at the end, and now I had time, once we had her, really to feel the wonderful enormity of what this meant.

Tagged as: baby