Porter's story, part 1

It's hard to know where to pick up on Porter's story. My pregnancy, labor and his birth are so entangled in the larger narrative of our family's last year that his story can't easily be pulled apart from ours. Maybe that's how it goes with third babies?

The months leading up to that very surprising, very positive pregnancy test were some of the hardest for our family. Just nine days before I flippantly took that test, I described our fifth year of parenting like this:

"Ya know that scene in the Lion King when all of the wildebeests run down the valley and trample Mufasa? That's year five.

The abbreviated background: The company Chris worked for from home unexpectedly closed their doors last April leading to several months of underemployment (re: MAJOR stress). I was twelve hours away from accepting a job offer back in Dallas when Chris got a job offer here that was too good to be true. And although his job is truly that good, it brings us to full-time preschool and daycare, which brings us to complicated drop-off schedules (all four of us spending our days in four different townships), packing (what feels like) suitcases every night, full of clothes and food and bedding and favorite nap-time stuffies, all the while trying to remember who needs to be dressed up for Dr. Seuss Day, who can't bring nuts in their lunch box, and which class needs St. Patrick's day napkins. It brought us vomit that splashed all over the walls, strep x2, the flu x3, adenovirus, four double ear infections, and Children's Motrin by the jug. And if that paragraph reads like a run-on sentence, just take it as a metaphor for our life." (ICYMI)

But the weeks of 105-degree fevers and color-coded iCal schedules were just the background noise. With the transition to our new family rhythm, came increasingly intense tantrums, not from our toddler, but from our almost five-year-old. You'd think that I'd be uniquely prepared to help Mary Allison given my graduate degree in behavior analysis, and almost a decade of training by some of the most brilliant clinicians in the field. Instead I found myself woefully incapable and helpless to help her. 

Our bright, enthusiastic daughter was still months away from her diagnosis with ADHD-HI (the hyperactive/impulsive subtype of the disorder that is characterized by intense disruptive behavior and deficits in self-regulation skills). Her diagnosis, exactly seven days before kindergarten, was finally an explanation for a long list of maladaptive behaviors that made Mary Allison-- my own daughter-- almost unrecognizable to me. If you haven't had a similar thought before about someone you love, it's impossible to understand how deeply that thought can cut. Many nights after surviving hours of suffocating tantrums, afraid of the next time I would step on a land-mine, I would hide in the bathtub, sobbing, re-watching her baby videos trying to remind myself that it was still her. She was still my daughter, and I would re-learn how to be a good mom to her.

So right there. That's where Porter's story began. With texts to a couple friends at 6:30am on a Monday morning right before work, with a picture of two very pink lines and uncharacteristic expletives. If the indescribable stress and exhaustion of watching my child suffer every day, sitting on waiting lists to be evaluated by developmental pediatricians while I failed time and time again to help her, as a mother and as a behavior analyst, a shit-ton of progesterone wasn't going to make anything easier. 

And it didn't. 

This pregnancy proved to be the most physically draining and mentally exhausting of my five. My postpartum mind has tried to dump and bury the 20 weeks of nausea and lightheadedness, the ten months of insomnia and exaggerated anxiety, the heart palpitations and the heartburn, the back pain that sent me to the chiropractor twice a week, and the damn lightening crotch that regularly made me do awkward squats and yoga poses in public places. (If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing lightening crotch, the bolts feel exactly like you think.) 

My experience is decidedly not unique. It feels silly to mention and inconsiderate to describe, especially since I know the hollow feeling of (secondary) infertility when all you want is to be doubled over by morning sickness. And unlike other pain and illness, these discomforts were signs of health! How could I complain? (oh, but I did..)

Everyone kept telling me that the third birth is the “wild card.” Your first is long and brutal, the second one usually much faster, and just when you think you know what birth will be like, you do it a third time and it’s nothing like the rest. Nonetheless, birth had been good to me before and you would think that I’d feel confident in my birthing powers after two unmedicated births that both left me eager to do it again. (Really, who wants that!?) But unlike my other births, I didn’t trust my body to do it’s thing. 

Although Declan’s birth was all things empowering and all things healing, I still look back and wonder why it didn’t begin on its own. That nine and a half pound baby head-butted my dilated cervix for WEEKS and my body still didn’t get the memo. I’m still haunted by his dry amniotic sac, with barely a teaspoon of fluid left by the time my midwife broke my "water,” and I will always wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t had some maternal alarm bells that told me to move my induction up by one day.

By the time we made it to Porter’s due date, we had climbed to the top of the waiting list for Mary Allison and had landed on the right medication to regulate her dopamine levels, which made her more receptive to the behavioral strategies we'd been using for years. Our home no longer felt like a war zone, and our daughter felt far more familiar-- still spunky but more calm. But my mental endurance was depleted; my body couldn't keep up with my white-haired mom at the grocery store (in my defense, my mom is a member of the "Silver Sneakers" club), and I carried new motherhood scars of inadequacy and self-doubt.

All that to say, when I finally did go into labor, in many ways it felt like I had been laboring since the moment I took that pregnancy test last May.

Desiree Hoelzle Photography