Are you my mother?

This is a question I’m fairly certain Arie has unknowingly asked almost everyday since he was born nine months ago. And I don’t feel guilty about it, which may come as a surprise. It seems like I’m always reading blogs and articles about mom guilt, and if there was ever something to feel guilty for – your child not being sure who his primary care taker is, seems like it would be it. But I wholeheartedly reject that.

Here’s a fun little backstory for you…Arie was termed a ‘social induction’ by my OBGYN. She just happened to be married to Eric’s primary cancer doctor, so HIPPA be damned, she knew all about us. (Honestly, we picked her as our doctor because we loved the beauty of Eric’s doctor trying to save his life, and his wife bringing us a new life.) Anyways. She was aware of Eric’s situation…he was scheduled for his lung’s to be de-cancerized approximately a week after Arie’s due date – major major surgery -…so an induction date was set. If our mystery baby (we didn’t know what we were having) didn’t show up by a few days after the due date, it was going to be forcefully evicted. The due date came and went, so induction it was. I. Was. Terrified. Not to be induced, but just the general ‘having a baby’ situation. We’re talking, tears, panic, preparing Eric multiple times for the game plan if something went wrong (whip your shirt off dear – no time for modesty – and be ready for skin to skin if I can’t do it!). I was sure I was going to die during the process. So naturally, everything went wrong. Because, of course it did.

I had a nice little bout of labor onset pre-ecclampsiya, which either turned into, or was combined with (I’m still not sure) HELLP Syndrome. Want a fun read? Go ahead and look that up. I have vague memories of making Downton Abbey jokes about Sybil and being glad modern medicine has come such a long way. In all honestly, my memories of the whole birth are fuzzy at best. I maybe remember a few minutes total? I remember pain (4 hours of pushing – that covered my exercise quota for 9 months), I remember Eric saying “it’s a boy!”, and then I remember little things here and there like pain from a  needle being shoved into my arm and the nurses saying something like “that finally got her to respond!” and Eric trying to get me to talk to my mom on the phone and my mom (thinking she was just talking to Eric) saying “she sounds awful!”. I woke up a day later and here we were, a family of three, but I could barely remember how we got there.

What an added insult to injury. My husband was sick, we were going to have minimal time to enjoy our new little family before surgeries started, everything had gone wrong, and I didn’t even get to keep the memory of Arie’s birth. We never told anyone when we were being induced because we wanted time alone after our baby was born, but we didn’t really even get that because I was essentially (not technically) in a coma for 24 hours afterwards. I still can’t believe things went so wrong, when our lives were already in turmoil. It’s not fair – we had enough we were dealing with. I’m still angry.

All this was to say, I could barely take care of Arie for the first month of his life, and when I did get back on my feet it was Eric that needed me more. Arie was bound to be a well adjusted, easy going kid because he didn’t have a choice. He went from family member to family member, house to house, crib to pack and play. When he was a few months older we spent weeks in the U of M hospital, meaning weeks without seeing our son. As Eric declined, Arie didn’t even live with us anymore. We were up every hour some nights -staying on top of Eric’s meds, so there was no way I could care for an infant on top of that. Our families stepped up, without hesitation. Sara and Jon (Eric’s sister and brother-in-law) took the majority of the responsibility, and were the parents to Arie that we wanted to be, but couldn’t. After Eric passed away, my mom and sister came to live with me for a while and essentially did everything for him that first 1-2 weeks. Even now, officially a month later, and I still feel like I’m just getting back into this “mothering” thing.

But no, I don’t feel guilty for the ‘are you my mother’ question. I feel proud of our families for stepping in and being amazing caretakers to Arie, I feel strong for acknowledging and accepting that Eric needed me more, I feel logical for understanding that Arie won’t remember any of this, and I feel completely confident that Arie will (eventually) always know that I am his mother.

And I enjoy telling Arie that Grandma Carla is his mother whenever he needs a diaper change 😉