My Pregnancy with Liam (in Hospital) - Part 2.

At the hospital, 10 p.m. on a Friday night, they put the baby and me on monitors, which displayed I was having up to 13 contractions an hour. They gave me a shot of turbutaline and then another. The contractions slowed enough for me to be wheeled into a room overnight, which turned into a weekend and then into 10 weeks. Yes, 10 weeks in the same 8 x 10 foot room laying in the same bed without leaving except for 3 times - 2 times Jay wheeled me around the corridor and once we went to visit the NICU, knowing that probably our baby would end up there for a little if he chose to come out early.

Jay was wonderful and brought comfort items from home to redecorate my room - my bedside lamp, which provided a warm golden glow in the room (no more florescent lights), cherished photos of us and our travels, books, magazines, our Powerbook with movies for us to watch together at night, etc. He came to stay with me every evening right after work until bedtime except on the nights he had school. I don't know how he managed because I never saw him study, but then again, he is a brainiac, one of the many reasons why I married him.

Graciously, my mom was with me every day, sitting next to my bedside knitting, talking until I needed to her to be silent so I could rest. She said it was her turn now, since she'd been in the hospital with me (for completely different reasons), and her mother had waited patiently by her side, now the cycle of giving strength and love to the next generation was complete. She put up with my bad moods and all of the ways the drugs were affecting me. They gave me turbutaline and Procardia every four hours to stop the contractions, and also monitored the baby's movement and heartbeat then for 20 minutes. And God forbid if he wasn't up doing somersaults, they would make me drink something sweet to wake him up, when then made him kick me into contractions. It was an endless cycle. My mood fluctuated between wanting to run out of there saying, "No more, please" and wanting to be left alone. So half the time I put a "Do not disturb" sign on the door and turned people away to the Nurses Station who asked them kindly to leave. I turned completely internal for the ten weeks, thinking more than necessary, disecting every thought, physical feeling, hope, and fear for what the future would bring to us and our baby, if he survived. I held on to hope immediately by the fact that in my room, the framed picture on the wall was that of a bright butterfly. And as silly as that would seem, while I'd been bedrested at home I had started writing a children's story about a worm and his fear of the unknown in the process of becoming a butterfly. So Hispanic as I am, I took this as a sign.

So I got in the groove of the daily routines the nurses and sonographers performed - the pills, the belly monitors, the vaginal and belly ultrasounds every other day, the measuring of my amniotic fluid, the draining with medication of it so it was me and baby, so as to relieve cervical pressure. Which only made me feel each and every one of the baby's movements far more and see them too. I got to actually see his feet while they kicked me like the ones of the pictures they have on the internet. So I kept going further inside myself. Jay was worried that I no longer wanted any visitors but him and my mom, but I was practicing my Buddhism more now than I'd ever had to. I was learning about myself, my limitations, physical and mental. I was learning for the first time in my life learning to really learn about myself, discover my potential, seeing my flaws and and digging deeper to change them into the woman I wanted to be for the mother that I was about to become. While most people would think this position, this hospital stay as dreadful, I was actually living it up. Who gets the chance to experience pregnancy in this beautiful preparatory way. And yes, there is no way to prepare to be a mother for the first time, because while you may know some things it may take, you never actually know, it was beautiful to feel it so thoroughly without anything else competing for its attention. This was my job at the time, 100% of the time and nothing else. So I truly learned for the first time how to be mindful and practice mindfulness, doing only what was required the 24 hours in the day, and nothing else. There were no distractions, there was no one else to do something for, just for my baby. The selflessless brought me so much internal peace that having to be in bed every minute of every day for 10 weeks became second nature.

This mindfulness served greatly to help me see parenting in a different way, that it wasn't about me, and that children live in the moment, there is no later or yesterday, there is the here and now. It taught me to practice the selflessness required to be a stay at home mom as I had chosen to be. Because the schedule after the baby would come would be set and followed and life would no longer be just about me. We would be adapting together to a new way of life, one where I had no other boss to give me a review and a passing or failing grade. This was more important. I was about to shape the life of another person who was a blank slate. And the colors I painted would make a vast difference onto his genes and how he would embrace the world.....but more on that later.

When I needed time to get out of myself I just did two very simple things: Sudoku puzzles and colored in a coloring book. The third thing that was not as easy was taking up origamy. I did several pieces that I'd intended to use for Liam's crib mobile. This was enough. For the first time I'd left behind the obsessive reading about everything fiction and non fiction and the constant researching about what could be the outcome of having a preemie. I had already learned about the possibilities of blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, etc. So I just chose to do my physical part and relinquish the delusion of control that I've always clutched to my heart - ever so erroneously.

One of my daily pleasures came at 5 p.m., my mid-day shower. While other people did this - I was told- early in the morning, I thought "Why, I've got nowhere to go." So it was my delay gratification, which aside from spending time with Jay, were my guilty pleasures. So every day, as my day nurse changed my bed before she left for the day, I sat in my shower, in that hospital chair they leave for all of us afflicted physically. And since I still had to be careful because sitting perfectly erect still put pressure onto my cervix, I had to hurry. The one thing I had to figure out was how to shave my legs - yes, there is something worse than having to shave, it's not being able to do it regularly so having to find a way of doing it, sitting on a chair, while not hurting the baby. And yes, while the baby was the most important thing in my world, I am a very hairy woman who was seen every day by tons of medical people, yes, in private areas so I had to stay as hygienic as possible, even under the circumstances. So I learned to use the bathroom garbage can, upside down and place that in front of the chair so I could prop my legs for the time it took me to shave quickly and enjoy the rest of my 15 minutes in the shower. Only to go back to bed and lie down almost with upper body lower than my lower body to release the pressure.

Because the hospital stay is long and I don't want to forget any part of it, I will have to continue this onto My Pregnancy with Liam (in Hospital) - Part 3.