Category: Alafair

Happy 2nd Birthday....4 Months Late

2/1/2021

Dear Alo,

This isn’t the nickname I would have picked for you, but it’s what you call yourself these days. Mostly in an extremely demanding, very LOUD, flappy arm sort of way… “alo!!!alO!!!!ALOOOO!!!!!!!!!” Yes, I understand. Even though that object you want is upstairs, through a locked gate, on top of a 6 foot tall shelf, you want to get it yourself. You pretty much want to do everything yourself. The other day you helpfully took off your poopy diaper for me. While standing up. Over a carpet. You are SO helpful.

I started this letter back in September right when you were turning 2. That part up there is still pretty accurate. Although now that you’re two and a half you would just open the gate, climb the stairs, then climb the 6 foot shelf. We really love your independent spirit!!

You are a kid with no middle ground. Your feelings are big, swift, and determinate. You are fearless, unless your sister has “suggested” something is scary, and then you are terrified of that thing. That’s because you worship the ground Alice walks on and want to do everything exactly like Alice. You always try to match whatever Alice is wearing. You like to wear the old clothes that used to be Alice’s best. This is a great phase. I know one day you will realize that Alice is getting all the new things and you’ll want new things too. But for now, you only want Alice.

You are exhibiting a remarkable ability to play independently right now for good lengths of time if no one bothers you (cough ahem, SISTER). You like to use the play kitchen foods to make White Ba brexy (breakfast) or "lunch-es". And recently you’ve started helping Mama make your special foods in the real kitchen. This is a really big deal for Mama since it’s been really hard building our food culture in a positive way around your different needs.

You and Alice have a healthy dose of sibling rivalry going on that I think is amplified by the fact that we’re still in a global pandemic and we spend nearly 100% of our time together. It’s….tiring. But I try to remember that it must be tiring for you guys too. You LOVE the mornings when Alice has Bibi School and it’s just you and Mama together. We play with all of Alice’s toys when she’s not looking (shhhh!), read books together, go for walks, or cook. I love getting to see what kind of person you are when you’re free to just do your own thing without much sibling influence. You’re creative and playful and so funny.

You are the type of kid that takes a LOT of energy to parent. You never stop moving and demand constant attention. The parenting books label you as “active” and even “difficult” (screw you, parenting books!). But what I know is that you also have a sweet side to you that is achingly sincere and innocent. You make a point to kiss ALL your toys. You give hugs with your entire body. You bring Alice her bunny when she’s crying. You are the full package, Alafair Bea, and I love you for it.

Here are some of your greatest words right now:

Helmoh, for helmet. I especially like it when we’re riding bikes, you see someone else wearing a helmet, point and yell at the top of your lungs, “HELMO HELMO HELMO!!!” Because let’s be honest, it sounds like you’re yelling “homo” at them and we always get sideways glances from people.

Umbli-eye--I think this is from a Mary Poppins song.

Seenaloo--We have no idea where this one came from, but you shout it as you run all over the house.

Boontz--spoon

Tarpano--piano

Baint--bacon

Effendent--elephant

Schlogit--chocolate

Stuffes (pronounced stuff-is)--plural of stuff

I’m sorry it took me 4 months to get your birthday letter posted. That’s life right now, and probably for the next...10 years. Happy Birthday, my tiny witch. I love you most of all.

Love, Mama

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Dear Girls, Covid Edition

5/22/2020

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Dear GIRLS.

I keep trying to write you this letter and getting stuck at “dear girls.” I want to talk to you about coronavirus. But also, I don’t want to talk about it at all. I want to pretend that it doesn’t exist, that the world isn’t upside down. For the first time ever, I’ve encountered something that I have trouble writing about. A lot of people started out writing profusely in the beginning of this mess, documenting what has to be one of the most unique situations in the history of humanity, but not me. It has just felt too big. Living in the time of coronavirus must be something like living in a slow motion car crash that you can see coming, but can do nothing to stop. Living in the time of coronavirus is living as active, on-going trauma where your brain constantly scrambles to normalize things around you that are a million miles from normal, attempts to make sense of the madness, the sorrow, the loss, the regret. Even though everything in our small world is fine, the bigger world is not even a little bit fine, and the weight of that is sometimes so great that I can’t bear it. And the fact that we saw this coming and did nothing as a country to slow it and minimize the impact just kills me. At least once a day I remember reading an article back in January that said, “American citizens should expect the virus to bring significant disruptions to daily life,” and thinking, “well what the hell does that mean?” And when I mentioned it to mom, she said, “well yeah, when you have the flu your daily life is disrupted.” And I think how far off her comment was, and how even if they had listed the disruptions as they have now happened, I probably wouldn’t even have believed it. And at least once a day, I think about people in the world who are so much worse off than us, who suffer beyond comprehension. People who live in refugee camps because they have no home country. People who walk THOUSANDS of miles seeking asylum from violence we can’t even begin to imagine only to reach here and be turned away. I think about them and wonder how their brains manage to cope. Do they readjust to some bizarre new normal? I mean, humans are miraculously adaptable animals. And maybe most interestingly, whenever I think about writing this, I think why bother--writing every single person in the world is living this right now, we are not unique.

In the beginning, we tried to protect you. We didn’t talk about what was going on in front of you. We told you spring break was really long this year. But then it became apparent that this was not going to be just some small thing. This wasn’t even going to be a medium thing. This is going to last for years, and have untold impacts. We had to start explaining to you why we can’t go ANYWHERE, even Bibi and PopPop’s house. Why we can’t hug anyone. Why we can’t go to school, or dance class. We said, a lot of people in the world are getting sick. And the best way to help those sick people is for us to stay at home and try to not get sick. We reassure you that it’s okay if we do get sick, just like we get colds every year, we feel bad for a while and then we feel better. Even though we don’t really feel that way. We don’t really know if it’s okay to get this virus. We know the statistics that most people are okay, but we also know the weird stories about it affecting people with rare blood types (me), or weakened lungs (Tio Toph), or middle-aged men (Dada), or even young children (YOU!). You call it “the sickness.”

Also in the beginning there was a lot of scrambling to help parents with their kids. Schools closed abruptly and suddenly everyone was stuck at home with nowhere to go and nothing to do. For us, besides school closing, not much changed. People started sending me suggestions on how to keep you entertained, mostly using online resources and remote video communications with people. Parents the world over panicked about how to entertain kids 24/7. At first I was resentful of all these suggestions. We’ve essentially been locked down like this for the better part of a year already, we have life at home mostly figured out, and it doesn’t involve computer screens. There was also a little voice in my head yelling, “where the hell were all you people a year ago when I desperately needed this help adjusting to immunocompromised lockdown life?!” I know all these people were good intentioned, and I appreciate that. I’ve also come to realize there are some critical differences between our previous lockdown and a worldwide pandemic lockdown. Namely, the isolation was even more complete than before. No physical contact with any people outside our home, maintaining strict social distances at all times, adults constantly speaking hushed tones, or thinly veiled code about the state of the world. And I’m not foolish enough to think that either of you fail to notice the EXTREME stress of the adults around you. And, now that we are just about two months into this, somewhere mid car crash, life has stabilized into a semblance of new normal, what I’m left with now, on a daily basis, is just a crushing sense of sadness and grief. And where in our old lives I would have given those feelings space to be, if I allowed that now, I fear that’s all there would be. So I spend considerable energy shoving that aside in pursuit of something at least resembling normal and find myself emotionally spent and fatigued on a daily basis.

So I want to tell you the things I’m thinking about. Maybe leaving them here will lift some of the weight. For both of you, this pandemic will shape the course of your lives in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Because of your young ages, it’s not as if you will ever remember a “before”, unlike us. And I feel profoundly sad about this. Because to be honest with you, I don’t know if the world will ever return to the way it was before. You will be defined by this period and the coming years, much like the generation of the Depression Era. And again, I feel sadness about this. What will your equivalent be of stuffing cash in mattresses? We don’t know. For you, Alice, I worry about you developing paranoia about germs, food shortages, being too close to people. And you, Alafair, will you be lucky enough to not remember? Is not remembering a good thing? I really don’t know.

It’s difficult to convey the environment in which all these big feelings reside. Taken alone, they look manageable. But there is a deeper political environment of corruption and divisiveness, where there is no clear and cohesive leadership, where the seeds of dissent, disrespect, racism and hatred are sown from the top. It is wrapped up in our economy collapsing as millions of Americans have lost their jobs and face uncertain financial futures. And in the broader context of world climate change that threatens our very human existence. It is difficult not to feel as if we are literally watching the beginning of the end of the world. Even just typing that last sentence makes my blood run cold. And then my breath catches and I am so sorry, beyond all words, that this is the world I’ve brought you in to. What have we as humans done to the world, and what will be left of it? I think every generation struggles with this question to some extent, but I have to think that at this particular time, it’s never been more relevant.

Which brings me here, to this (and yes, while you had to wade through two WHOLE pages of doom and gloom to get here, I had to go through two months of it). My brain’s natural response to watching a car crash unfold, of course, is to scream “what should we do???!!!” And now that the initial shock has worn off, lately I’ve been attempting to reframe that question: what CAN we do? Yes, the world is upside down, but what can we do so that when you grow up you remember it as that special time when there was no school, we spent the days together, playing outside, doing art, exploring the smaller parts of the universe right here? Where are the opportunities to teach you empathy for those who aren’t as fortunate as us? Yes, life as we know it is over, but now is an opportunity to take the parts that were good, for us, for the environment, for humanity, and shape them into something better and more sustainable. How can we permanently alter our lives to reflect a respect for our planet and our fellow humans? And because I’m only at the very beginning of this journey, and I’m attempting to shed a lifetime of excess and privilege, I’m still identifying the questions that should be asked right now, and even still trying to figure out the answer to the questions I already have figured out. I feel a determined sense of responsibility, and opportunity, to shape this into something other than a worldwide humanitarian disaster (pffsst easy!). And in the meantime, while Dada and I work on figuring it out, we’ll gorge ourselves on the comfort foods of doritos and ice cream. We’ll drink wine and watch bad TV after you’ve gone to bed. We’ll sit on the couch and commiserate on the poor state of the world while your sweet sleeping souls can’t overhear us complaining. Because once we figure it out, the junk food is gone, the wallowing will end, and our lives will go on, in whatever beautiful new way we manage to carve out.

We'll have to check back in a few months and see if we're still eating doritos.

Love, Mama

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The Seven Month Photo Shoot

7/29/2019

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We did a mini photo shoot back in April and I can't believe how much Alafair has already changed since then. I would have posted them sooner, but we got the final edits back on the same day we found out we had to stop breastfeeding and they kind of just got buried in the mess of life. But...I love them!! Thank you Opal + Olive Photography!

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In Pursuit of Starlight

4/11/2019

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Dear Alafair,

Yesterday you turned 28 weeks, and even though the calendar says you're not 7 months for another couple weeks, I'm saying you've been with us now for 7 whole months. I've been waiting to write this first letter most of that time because I wanted it to be a letter full of nothing but joy. But I'm realizing I can't write that letter until I get this letter out of the way. I have to tell you how hard it's been first--for us, for Alice, but mostly I imagine, for you.

Things with you went South pretty much immediately (if we're being honest, they've been hard since you were about 8 weeks in utero). You failed your hearing screening in the hospital (but passed a month later). You have severe reflux and gastrointestinal problems, including possible micro aspirations and bleeding intestines. You have struggled desperately with latch from the beginning. We have had your tongue tie clipped, taken you to THREE different physical therapists, done mouth exercises at home, seen a chiropractor, a naturepath, two different pediatricians, an allergist, and a gastroenterologist. You've had over 35 physical therapy appointments, 15 visits to the doctor's office, 12 visits to the lactation nurses, and one visit to the ER. This means that in just 196 days of being alive, you've attended over 63 appointments, and that doesn't even include the countless phone and email consultations we've had on top of that. You've tolerated an allergy panel, having blood drawn, multiple rectal exams (to gain stool samples), countless weigh-ins on cold, hard scales, abdominal palpitations, a bout with thrush, a nasty head cold right in the middle of sleep training, and a constant barrage of medicines. In an effort to make the breast milk easier to digest, I've done a total elimination diet that consists of turkey, rice, potatoes, millet, and pears. Over time I've added back in avocado, bananas, oatmeal, and chicken. To say I'm starving is not just a turn of phrase, but a literal truth, as my clothes grow larger by the day. For three months you could only latch on one side so I pumped the other side for you. Your stomach was so angry all the time that we never put you down. You woke up to eat every 30-45 minutes for five and a half straight months. The only way you could get any sleep was if you were held almost straight up and down. Your dada spent the winter walking the dark and snowy/rainy streets with you at 3 in the morning while you wailed miserably. And while this has been unimaginably hard for us, I can't help but think it's been a million times worse for you.

Upset cry face is pretty common around here.

Not one, but THREE medical professionals have told us you are “the most difficult baby” they've ever met in their careers. The first was a physical therapist who told me she used every trick she's ever learned in 50 years of practice on you, to no avail. She also said you are the loudest baby she's ever heard. Then your pediatrician told us you were the most challenging baby to treat in her entire career. And then the lactation nurse said you were the most difficult to feed baby she’s ever met. YES!!!! WE WIN!!! Hearing something like that as a parent is both validating and horrifying at the same time. I have to admit though, I feel a perverse sense of pride in this somehow, especially the scream volume. I mean, here you are, only 7 months old winning awards and breaking records all over the place! Way to be committed, baby girl.

We've aggressively pursued every possible course of treatment we could for you, both traditional and voodoo. I've had many people, including medical professionals, tell me to just give up breastfeeding, which I've refused to do. ….Until this afternoon, when I was advised that it's medically necessary (practically mandatory) for your survival. There is literally nothing left to try, and in the past month you have only gained an average of 1.6 grams per day when you should be gaining between 10-15 grams per day. Additionally, if we continue down this path, we run the risk of creating lifelong food allergies, rather than just the sensitivities that you should be able to outgrow. This was devastating news, not only because I've fought so hard for breastfeeding, but also because you are still suffering so much.

How apropos for this day. I'm just not sure how many more times we can get up.

At the moment, I am literally sick with grief. I am nauseous, my head hurts, and I can't breathe from the sobbing. It is 4 in the morning and I am lying here wondering how you will know that I love you. I was already forced to take you out of my bed and now I am being forced to cold turkey wean you at the age of 7 months, a solid year before I even planned to think about such things. So how will you know??

A while back, a very dear friend jokingly called me a witch when referencing my power to influence her cycles whenever I'm around her. It made me laugh, and I've started to think of you as my tiny witch, with your fiery disposition and Earth-shattering howls. As your physical therapist so aptly put it, you experience ALL emotions with a greater intensity than the rest of us (this is one reason I love her).

I summarize all this not to complain, but to illustrate how hard it's been for you. We came home from that appointment today with a plan to finally get you on the right track. To the detriment of your health, I nursed you one last time and these were the things I thought about as we sat there together. You were so tired and fell asleep on the breast so I just held you and watched your sweet face, your tiny fingers resting on my chest. My heart breaks that we are losing this moment far too soon. It breaks more that you are suffering. Your doctor has suggested we try this for two weeks and then try breast milk again to see how you react so we could potentially return to breastfeeding. But we both know in our hearts that this is the answer for you and that this was the last time.

You are reacting to the proteins in the milk, which are impossible to completely remove from human milk. The milk I'm producing also isn't fatty enough--not hard to believe given my diet restrictions. And because you can't seem to just catch a break, this transition is proving to be hard too. Formula tastes bad apparently, and you do NOT like it. If I thought sitting through our final breastfeeding session was hard, I had no idea how hard it would be to watch you struggle against the bottle after. And then at bedtime, you anxiously nibbled on my shoulder as you usually do and I had to turn you over for another fight with the bottle and let you go to bed hungry. I can't bear it that I can't explain to you why this is better. And I can't bear it that all of these “better” things we've had to do feel like the worst things.

And that's maybe why I can't write the letter of joy first. Because even though there has been joy, it's also been the single most challenging period of my life on all possible levels. I grieve for you and your health problems. I grieve for us as a family and the stress this has put on us as a unit. I grieve for Alice and what I thought was going to be a difficult adjustment to a new sibling, has been so much more as both her parents try desperately to balance an impossible situation. I grieve for myself, and having to give up control over the way I'd prefer to do things with you. The single most fundamental human relationship--a mother nursing her child--is causing you harm and I feel powerless to help you.

And yet... despite this PROFOUND grief...if I look deep within myself it's abundantly clear that I'm not remotely powerless. We've done this together, you and I. To call this a struggle is to call a tiger a kitten. And even though my brain keeps skipping back to, “but what if we tried X instead,” my heart knows the way forward, even as it grieves. Because one thing is clear, when you don't feel like total crap, you are joy incarnate. You are starlight and pure golden sunlight wrapped all in one. Who wouldn't want more of that? So, we will keep doing the worst things in pursuit of starlight. We will cry together, for different reasons. And hopefully you will start to get better, and we will both have fewer tears. And you will still know, my sweet, most treasured, Tiny Witch, in every cell of your body, even without breastfeeding, that my love for you runs from a place so deep, so profound, and so fierce even I can't fathom. You will know. And we will have light.

4.12.19
UPDATE
After a SINGLE day on formula, you are an entirely different human. There were mercifully no more battles over the bottle today and you were consistently in a good mood nearly the entire day. It is clear that you already felt better. We are ALL holding our breath that this is just the beginning of better times to come.

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And Then We Were Four

10/17/2018

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She came to us in the ice storm of the century down in New Orleans. In a flurry of broken pipes, frozen floods, fertility drug-induced insanity, and a last ditch try before giving up in the name of self (and existing family) preservation.

But there she was, after a year and a half of letdowns and heartbreak, a little blue plus sign on a cold and sunny January morning. Doing Mardi Gras before she was even born. All 3 of us ran around dancing with joy.

WAHOO!!!!!

And of course, carrot cake!!!

Then a fire on a Friday night. Four days before her arrival. It will be impossible to ever separate the two events in my mind. I'd been having contractions all day that came to a screeching halt the moment I stepped into the upstairs hallway and saw two story flames shooting out of the garage. As we sat across the street under the incongruously festive lights of someone's graduation party waiting to see if our house would be saved, I felt her retreat. Back up into my lungs, as far as she could go. I didn't blame her, I wouldn't want to come out in that mess either.

There was nothing for the next couple days. Not even the frequent Braxton Hicks I'd previously been having for months. On Tuesday morning I got up to pee and didn't quite make it to the bathroom in time. Just one more unmentionable indignity of pregnancy. It took me until after 5 pm to realize MAYBE I hadn't been peeing myself the entire day and I should possibly call our Doula. She advised me to call our doctor, who then told me to go immediately in to L&D triage where they could test to see if my water had broken, and then imprison us in the hospital once confirmed. We decided to sit down and have dinner first.

Leaving that evening was a bittersweet moment. Pregnancy had been brutal. I was more than ready. But it was the first night I'd ever spend away from Alice since her birth. And the last time we'd be a family of 3. Later, in the wee small hours of the morning, when a nurse walked in to find me sobbing, she hurriedly checked my vitals, then finding nothing going on, sat down and told me stories of her grown babies.

In triage they confirmed my water had in fact broken. They sent us out to walk the halls of the hospital for one hour to see if things would get going. It was 11 pm. We spent the time trying to answer calls and emails about the fire, getting stuff set up for our absence over the next few days. We walked the Hall of Ridiculous Maternity Photos, and The Hall of Premies. And even though we still barely know anyone in this town, we ran into our old neighbor, who stood there telling us all about his new place, his terrible roommates, his parking situation, never once asking us what we were doing in a hospital hallway at midnight or even seeming to notice when I'd double over to breathe through a contraction. Upon our return to triage, with still not much going on, the nurse informed us they would move us over to L&D and, “sleep” us for the night. Um…. excuse me?! “Oh, that means we'll just let you sleep.”

Around 7 that morning, our doctor, with whom we'd carefully cultivated a relationship with for months, the person who was supposed to get us through this delivery without repeating the damage from our first, apologetically told us she had to leave at noon and would likely not be able to deliver us. This was a devastating blow. And while we had a pretty loose birth plan with lots of room built in for flexibility, things were NOT going even a tiny bit according to plan:

Instead of laboring at home like we did last time, we spent the night in an austere hospital room, not really sleeping, and not really laboring either. Instead of having the reassuring presence of a well known doctor, we were going to get someone we'd never even met before. Instead of being relaxed and focused on our upcoming birth, I was busy making sure every nurse who walked in the room all night didn't turn off the lights because I was afraid of the dark since the fire. Instead of being at home just snuggling my girl I was at the hospital about to have another girl! What the hell had I been thinking a year ago!?

Our Doula, Heather, urged me to shove it all aside and focus on the task at hand, to which I MAY have replied, “F**k no, I'm so mad!” I could tell this was not the response she'd expected. And even though she was right, I didn't care. I informed her that for the next 20 minutes I was going to have a Bad Attitude and she could get out of my face--another statement she likely hadn't been expecting. To her credit, she just rolled with it. Our nurse, Jennifer, found a continuous string of reasons to be in the room, most likely interested to see how this was going to play out.

I took the time to be sad and grieve unmet expectations. Then 20 minutes later, with Heather practically counting down the seconds, I pushed all the crap (mostly) outside that hospital room door, brought my mind back to the present, and at 10 a.m. we began.

While it had been progressing steadily already, labor seemed to really pick up at that point. An hour and a half later, while sitting in a tub of warm water, I called for the epidural.

Here's the thing about the epidural though. You have to give them 45 minutes. They have to get an entire bag of IV fluids in you for safety reasons. So while your brain has already given up and made the switch, you have to make it though 45 more minutes of pain. And then you have to sit STOCK. STILL. while someone puts a needle in your spine.

It was during this time that I almost broke Andy's finger. And while I think he was exaggerating, he did have tears in his eyes, and it wasn't out of sympathy for me. I remember retreating at this point, beyond all awareness of anything but pain. I remember sitting with my eyes closed, dimly aware of hands all over my body trying to help me through a contraction. So many hands. How many people were actually in this room? I didn't care.

And then it took the anesthesiologist THREE tries to get the epidural placed correctly. If there wasn't a risk of lifelong paralysis, I would have turned around and stabbed her in the eye with the epidural needle.

Once the epidural was finally in place and starting to take effect, the Kiwi's heart rate dropped, along with my blood pressure. Within moments I had an oxygen mask strapped on and they were rolling me to a different side. This was the moment during Alice's birth where it all went wrong. Andy and I looked at each other in disbelief. There was no possible way the SAME thing was happening again.

The Kiwi didn't respond and Jennifer ordered everyone to get me flipped up on to my hands and knees, no small feat when you can't feel anything below the waist. When my blood pressure still didn't recover, she jammed a shot of ephedrine into my leg. Andy and I worked on not panicking. Within minutes everyone stabilized and we were able to settle in for the wait.

Heather urged me to nap since I hadn't slept in days, but I didn't feel sleepy. A few hours later, when it was nearing time to push, I finally started falling asleep between the great pressure of contractions. Maybe I could just nap this baby out.

The epidural wasn't so strong that I couldn't feel pressure so I was able to direct the energy after some coaching. I had to ask for instructions after the first contraction, realizing that we really didn't do this part the first time around with Alice. Even though I was working hard, it was a really relaxed and calm atmosphere. We chatted and laughed between contractions. There was no sense of urgency or fear. And when, after about an hour of pushing, Dr. King laid her on my chest, all the stuff that came before ceased to matter. Here she was at last.

Alafair Bea Svilar Finley Newlin. September 26, 2018. 6:03 p.m. 8 lbs 15 oz 19.5” Our hard-won baby girl, born of fire and ice.

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Happy 2nd Birthday....4 Months Late

Dear Girls, Covid Edition

The Seven Month Photo Shoot

In Pursuit of Starlight

And Then We Were Four

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