I feel so guilty for how little time I get with the boys, and specifically with Linc.
I have many reasons for feeling this way, everything from normal working mom guilt to the fact that we are busier as a family than we’ve ever been to the sad truth that I have been lugging around a certain chip on my shoulder about my lack of bonding time with Linc since the day he was born. Unlike with Nico, Linc was whisked away from me almost before I got the chance to look at him. He wasn’t brought in to nurse when I was in the recovery room, and he was never allowed to stay in our hospital room. He went straight to the NICU, and if that wasn’t hard enough to swallow, I was told not to try and nurse him for the first few days because they didn’t think he was strong enough to handle it, and there were many days early on when his need for oxygen and bili-lights was so acute that we even had to ration the amount of time we held him each day. Some days, we only got to take him out of his oxygen tent twice a day to hold him for a few minutes.
That was so frustrating to me as a new mother. I wanted him in my arms at all times, I wanted the near magical bonding moments of nursing sessions. I wanted the first smells he was surrounded by to be my shirt and skin, not antiseptic and the faint but oddly cloying smell of pumped in oxygen. I blamed the doctors that kept me from nursing him right away for the fact that he never was willing (or able) to nurse and the fact that my milk never seemed to come in fully, which made even pumping milk impossible in the end. I felt so completely gyped out of my hard earned early bonding time.
And when we did finally get to bring him home, it wasn’t that blissful, bonding, recuperative time we had with Nico. For one thing, now we had a two year old to take care of, and a two year old who decided to choose the exact moment of his brother’s birth to hit the terrible two’s with all the force of a bug smacking a windshield on a west Texas road trip. He landed so hard against the brick wall of toddler-dom that keeping him together he would have been a full time job in itself. And here we were with a newborn who took 45 minutes to drink 2 oz. of milk, a mom who was constantly pumping milk because she desperately hoped that Linc would eventually take to nursing, a father who had long had to go back to work because the 2 ½ weeks of NICU time had taken up more than all of the time he could afford to take off. Oh yeah, did I mention I was also in school at the time? Granted, my classes at the time were online, but I still had to find time to fit that in, which was just one more thing to take me away from the time I should have been bonding. Shortly afterwards I graduated and started a full time job, which meant that I would leave the house before the kids woke up and get home (during the winter time, at least) right about the time that the sun goes down. Add to that the fact that Linc has always gone to bed early and slept later than his brother, and what you have is a mom who spends five days a week only getting a few hours with her baby boy.
Let me say for the record that I am NOT a good candidate for stay at home motherhood. And not just because if I didn’t have an income, we wouldn’t have a home to stay in. I just do not do well with large amounts of unstructured sit around the house time. That is a recipe for crazy right there, if you ask me. And I have enough crazy as it is. So, I am not really bemoaning that terrible money stuff that forces me to go to work and leave my true calling of full time parenting behind. I like working, and I think it makes me a better wife and mother in the long run. But, I am throwing a bit of a pity party about the fact that I can’t have it both ways. I hate that I missed the vast majority of therapy sessions, hate that Sam has to do the long day shift with the kids in all its thankless frustration, hate that events and activities we have planned to bring depth to our life rob me of even more time with the kids several evenings a week. I have been bothered by my increasingly distant position as co-parent and am struggling with feeling like a stranger in my own youngest son’s life. I ask myself why am I the one writing this blog anyway, when I hardly see him more than his new teacher does.
And, honestly, I think that’s why it’s bothering me so much now. Before, although I was not there as much as I would like to be, I knew that Sam was; and since I consider Sam part of me, it was always like I was there in a sense. We were all a bridge to each other in some mystical sense, and if they were all together, then I was present in the bond of love that is our family, as if the thread that binds us together extended to me wherever I was. Yet now, it feels like that thread is broken, and Linc suddenly belongs to someone else. He has a life outside of us, a school family that takes up a bigger chunk of his weekdays than his time with me. And I am jealous of it. I know this is just the beginning of those two decades of pushing away that occurs as your babies start to disentangle themselves from that very thread you have meticulously used to wind them up in your life, the thread that, like a lasso, you have fastened around their middles to pull and tighten them against your side with hours of reading, holding, feeding, cleaning, singing, and kissing. I tell you I am not ready for it. It’s too soon. I have hardly had the chance to snare Linc as I would like; the thread has barely been attached and already it is unwinding, and I see myself losing him to the world.
These things were on my mind last night as I cleaned up the dinner dishes and thought about what I would write about today. My thoughts kept edging back to the worry over whether I even had the authority to be a spokesperson on parenting a child with Down syndrome when I felt so pushed out of his life. Good ole Linc would have none of that, though. He came over and held his arms up to me, asking to be picked up. I held him, and he patted my cheek softly, saying oohhhh in this sympathetic way he has learned by mimicking our tone of voice. Then, Nico came in and asked if we could try on the Halloween costumes as I had promised. Nico threw on his pirate costume, and we tried on a couple for Linc, finally settling on a skeleton costume we were given last year. Nico said, “Perfect, I can be a pirate, and he can be my skeleton crew!” I said, “Oh, like in Pirates of the Carribean?” “Yeah!” he said, and promptly pulled Linc outside for a ride on their pirate ship (or, the play fort and a dusting of imagination). As I laughed at their game and snapped pictures, I started shaking off some of those lingering fears of losing Lincoln. He wanted nothing more than to impress me, to have my attention as he tried to do everything his brother did, waiting for his turn to steer the ship and abandoning ship when ordered by means of the slide, which despite my knowledge that he can maneuver completely on his own, he insisted on having my help in getting down. It was a good night, and a good lesson. Children leave. They walk too soon, run too fast and get too far away at the park. You are constantly pulling them back away from the curb to keep them out of the street, or some variation on that, until they break free once and for all, climb in their car, and drive off into their life.
I’m not ready, but I don’t have to be yet. For now, the only voyage they’re going on is this one, an imaginary journey that still leads them like clockwork back to the safe harbor where they dock their heads against my shoulder and nestle in against my side ready for a snack and a bedtime song…
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