newborn

Well, hi. It has been a long time. A very, very Long Time. And while I could go on about how things have changed, and all the things – both big and small – that have changed and happened since my last post, I won’t. I’ll get to that. You know, [waves hand] later.

What has really been on my mind lately has been a year ago. A year ago, our little family of five all met. Our littlest bub had just been born, and her big sisters came to meet her in the hospital the next day. For one chaotic and delightful and nerve-wracking half hour, we were all together in my little part of the hospital ward.

The photos from that brief visit show the chaos. C was standing by, sucking a yoghurt pouch, obviously quietly delighted and loving her newest sister, but also possibly a bit peeved that no-one was letting her actually hold the new baby. E flung herself backwards on the bed and nearly fell off the bed multiple times and tried to pull out all the cables and push all the buttons that are present in a hospital bed setting. And Glenn, who was trying so hard to be a good husband and good new dad and good established dad and make it out of there with the same children he went in with all in one piece.

But for all the chaos, and the first real need for parental octopus tentacles to prevent all the accidents that almost happened, my memory of this day makes my heart swell with happiness and love.

And it’s mostly because of E.

She was so little, really. Just 18 months. Still in the hardly-any-hair, maybe she’s a boy? stage. Hardly able to say anything much. And because she was so little and such a baby still, I hadn’t been able to talk with her in the months leading up to this time about what was going on. What was about to happen. What this big tummy meant.

Because she was so young, I had also worried about what having a third baby would do to our second baby. She was such a calm baby, such a good sleeper and eater, and I worried that changing things would change her. Middle child and all that.

I worried, because I had no idea what she would be like with another small child, let alone a baby. She’d been going to daycare for months by then but did she even know what a baby was? I had no idea. How would she react? I had no idea. How would I present her sister, very much loved, just as she was herself, just as her big sister was, and convey that they are all from us and all loved, equally and fully, by us? I had no idea.

But what happened in the hospital that day, happened, and could not have been planned or wished or orchestrated. E came around the bed, wide-eyed, pointed to the baby and said, slowly and with wonder, “Bebeh”, with her whole face lighting up. And all my worries vanished.

I mean, they were replaced with a thousand more. Some rather pressing, like, will E fall off this bed or make me cough or pull a cord or remove the catheter bag. Some more what-if, like, will they fall over each other playing, or hit each other in the face before they learn gentle hands, or throw wooden blocks at each other when frustrated. Some more for me as their mum, like, will I be attending to one while the other runs to where they shouldn’t and then a car— or will I sow resentment by unwittingly favouring one child in some way over another, or will I have an accident with a carrier again while trying to keep another child safe… The list goes for an eternity, it seems.

But the joys – they are each treasured, and unexpected, and so delightful.

Like the way S will break into a whole-body smile when she sees one of her sisters. Like the way E will look at me worriedly and say “Oh no, baby S crying” when she hears a nap-time cry. Like the way C will show S how to build a blocks tower. Or S will crawl speedily along the grass to play ball with the big girls. Or E will wrestle and snuggle while I’m feeding S and produce chuckles like I’ve never heard. Or C will read a book to S when I’m making a cup of tea in the morning. Or S will have a bath with either big sister and be so overjoyed all she can do is kick and splash for minutes on end to the point that the older one can’t take any more water in the face. E and S in the pram, facing opposite directions but holding hands. E stroking S’s hair and saying, “I luh you baby S”.

There are more, and more, and more. I will go on and on, but not now. Now is for remembering the day a year ago, when sisters met and made my heart sing.

[Trigger Warning: infant trauma]

I haven’t been able to write for a while. The stuff of our life was just too much for a bit. I’m hoping to get back into it, but I couldn’t let today pass without writing something.

One year ago, I had an accident with E. She was 2 months old, just shy of 9 weeks. I was out walking with her in a carrier, down a street in which I used to live, and tripped. I fell on her, breaking her femur.

When it happened I was sure I must have damaged her grossly and irreparably, that she would have damaged organs and broken ribs and internal bleeding. And because she was so little, it was so hard at the hospital to work out the extent of the damage. No way to know what was sore, where to check first. But the staff – what felt like a huge cohort of staff but was actually probably more than usual but not the dozens my emotional memory remembers – the staff were wonderful. Calm and thorough and reassuring. In our emergency bed area, E was checked over thoroughly and I was asked questions and they narrowed it down to a broken leg. Which still leaves me gobsmacked, that what felt like the whole of me including excess pregnancy weight fell on a tiny baby and all that happened was a broken leg. A very fixable injury. I stayed with her in the hospital from the Monday until the Thursday morning when she underwent non-invasive surgery to have a double leg hip spica cast put on. It stayed on for just under 4 weeks and now we just have checkups every 6 months. That’s it.

And, as we moved through the horror and fog and new reality of those few days, we came to realise that although it was horrible that it had happened to such a tiny and helpless baby, it was much better for it to have happened to her at that stage of development instead of later. She was still in the sleepy newborn stage so I wasn’t battling naps or trying to tire her out so she would sleep. She hadn’t started walking or crawling or even rolling so there was nothing to try to control there. She was still so little that hoiking her around with the cast on wasn’t such an effort.

So, there was much that turned out for the best. The best, considering the initial moment that began the whole thing and was an accident and unavoidable but still something we would rather not have had to go through.

But, my goodness. So much in my head of the memories of that time and the horror and the panic and the pain and the relief.

The relief that I had delayed her 6 week checkup due to a lockdown and she’d had it at 8 weeks instead, so she was still up-to-date with her vaccinations but we also had a recent weight for her.

The relief and gratitude we felt that, unlike C as a baby, E took a dummy and she took formula in a bottle and she didn’t need to be held or fed or rocked to sleep and she was much more of an on-schedule baby.

The relief and gratitude we felt for the kindness of the staff. Volunteers like the one who came around calmly with a Medicare form and only asked for Glenn’s name and date of birth and then took care of all the rest. Or the daily parade of volunteers offering to be with E if I needed a break when the last thing I wanted to do was leave her but they were so kind nonetheless. The nurse who took care of C in the emergency department, making sure she was fed and entertained and cared for. The succession of emergency department staff asking if I was ok and should I have an X-ray myself, actually? The different women who had to ask me on subsequent days how I was, or what happened, seeing my uncontrollable tears and put an arm around me and helped me feel like a person who had had a terrible accident and not just an auxiliary person attached to a baby in traction. The night nurses who didn’t wake me when E needed a feed but fed her themselves from the stash of expressed breastmilk or formula.

The confusion – which persists – as to how I fell on my right side but somehow still managed to break E’s right leg. The horror and panic and relief, all mixed in and simultaneous and hasn’t gone away yet, when the triage nurse asked about E’s head, had I protected it, held it as I fell, landed on it or did it hit the ground, what sort of surface was it that we landed on.

The physical pain, like the sting of hand sanitiser being my first indicator that I too had fallen, or, hours later, finding the mud all down my side where I’d taken the fall, or growing numb in my forearm as I held E still for nearly 4 hours while everything was sorted out like finding traction weights small enough.

The panic, like wondering what number to call to make a hospital appointment in an emergency. Or forgetting E’s date of birth or middle names.

The horror of putting a newborn in such pain. A shaky cup of tea that I nearly spilled all over myself as Glenn took C to the Starlight Room and the staff applied a nerve block to E and I was finally alone with myself for the first time all day and the enormity of what had happened kicked in: I went for a walk and nearly killed my newborn.

And then, how to tell people? ‘Nothing to worry about’… no. ‘Everyone’s ok’… no. Not really. ‘Please don’t worry, but’… Everything I tried was hard and wrong.

The saddest memory I have though is not being able to hold her. She was already a snuggly baby, and the natural instinct when a child is hurt is to hold them, but there was none of that. At most, we could hold her hand, but the traction and then the cast made anything else difficult. And I longed to hold her close to me, feel that heavy weight of a sleeping newborn and heal us both.

We both healed, of course. I had marks on my hands for a time where the scabs had been but I can no longer see them. Because E was a baby, all her body was doing was growing and building so she was cast-free within a month and then doing all the normal baby things. The last few months she has started climbing everything she can, and has started walking in the last few weeks. It’s amazing what can happen in a year.

The Stuff of Our Life

A Year Ago, When We Became Five

One Year Ago