Meteorites in Suburbia

No.

It's not going to be 2007.

Nooooooo.

It's actually 1990 and I just haven't come down from that acid trip yet. The one where my friends kept expanding and contracting and it took me half an hour to make a single cup of tea, all while listening to REM's "Losing My Religion" over and over. 1990. Not 2007.

No. I refuse to believe it. Honey, did you put something in my Earl Grey? No? Then maybe you should.

Ha-

Hap-

Come on, spit it out...

Happy New Year, everyone.

















Want to try something different? Here are new Year's wishes in other languages. Try them out!

Afgani Saale Nao Mubbarak
Arabic Antum salimoun
German Prosit Neujahr
Greek Chronia Polla
Hebrew L'Shannah Tovah
Hindi Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkamanyen
Hungarian Boldog Ooy Ayvet
Japan: Akimashite Omedetto Gozaimasu
Kurdish: NEWROZ PIROZBE
Lithuanian: Laimingu Naujuju Metu
Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
Malayalam : Puthuvatsara Aashamsakal
persian Saleh now ra tabrik migouyam
Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
Serbo-Croatian: Sretna nova godina
Swedish: GOTT NYTT ÅR! /Gott nytt år!
Tamil: Eniya Puthandu Nalvazhthukkal
Telegu: Noothana samvatsara shubhakankshalu
Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Ukrainian: Shchastlyvoho Novoho Roku
Urdu: Naya Saal Mubbarak Ho
Vietnamese: Chuc Mung Tan Nien
Welsh : Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

I was listening to a song called "Wires" by a group called Athlete and was enchanted. I got it instantly: there are a thousand ways you can describe the slow-motion black wave of fear you feel when someone you love more than your own life might just die, might just be one of neat rows of lives that might just die. There are facts you cling to, and every second of every minute of every day is reduced to those facts: wires, alcohol swabs, drops of blood on the sheets, the heaving chest struggling to draw breath, the cries of pain and the forms that need to be filled out.

Eight years ago, I lived that life. The wires were little wires. The drops of blood were little drops. The cries were little, and so was the heaving chest - about the size of the palm of my hand. Little and cruelly weighed down by sticky wires and the crushing power of an atmosphere far too heavy for a human being who weighs a mite over three pounds. This was the birthday of my first child: born to parents who had no idea what they were doing with a baby at all, never mind one who would die if removed from the plastic box they placed her in at birth. Who couldn't drink. Whose body was pricked, prodded, left prone for hours under harsh lights. Who smelled like the nectar stolen by a hummingbird and who looked with huge eyes that reflected a whole new world.

When you see this - no, let's be honest, when I saw this - I shut off. I just...shut off. No tears, I whispered to myself over and over again the first day. I was not in a plastic box. I was not being tortured by the air and light and food of a world that should have remained alien for at least two more months. Someone else was, and that someone else needed me absolutely to help her through somehow. She was alone. And, being in a strange country absolutely without family to help, so was I. We had that much in common.



The first day:


I am being wheeled down long corridors as my vision alternately fogs over and clears. "We can take you to your baby any time. Don't worry," says a nurse to me brightly. On the way to the NICU, I am provided with the information I need to know: I have a daughter who weighs three pounds plus change. I am lucky, because she can breathe on her own. She is doing fine. Just fine. I have a fifteen-centimeter long incision in my stomach. Big incisions for small babies, chirps the nurse brightly. Aren't I lucky?

Lucky me lies flat on her back next to an incubator nestled in a group of many others. The others pale in my memory, probably because I am fascinated by what I see inside the one before my eyes: a baby with reddish-blonde hair, tiny like Thumbelina, with hands the size of my fingernail. Her eyes are open and she is looking at me. I can't tell if it's an approving or disapproving gaze. She has been lying there alone for the two hours following her birth, and the urge to rip the wires, take her out and enfold her in my arms is overwhelming. Holding her gaze, I stretch out a hand and touch her head.

"She's tired," warns the nurse. Can she come out? No. When will she be able to? No one knows.

The eyes hold mine for a while, then close. Time for me to go - there are very sick babies there, monitors and alarms beeping constantly as oxygen levels fall too low or tiny hearts skip a beat. No room for a useless fogged woman in a bed round here.

Being wheeled back to my room, I feel piercing pain in my lower abdomen from the cesarean. A nurse comes to try to help me pump life-giving colostrum for my baby and I realize that I can neither sit nor stand and that if I want to see my daughter again, something will have to be done about that. I send my husband away to eat something. I ask for a book about breastfeeding and ask the nurse to pile pillows under me until I am able to sit. I then feel like I am going to throw up or faint, so I ask her to take the pillows away. No tears. I fall asleep and dream about little hands and big eyes.

Close to midnight, an angel in white wakes me: "She's awake. Do you want to hold her?"


Yes. I do. And in a corner of the NICU, the angel hands me something unbelieveably small. I sigh and hold the bundle to my chest. She is awake, very still and looking at me. I can feel her heart pumping. The nurse-angel begins to show me how to breastfeed such a tiny baby, and for half an hour I hold my child in my arms while the alarms beep and ring all around us and the bilu lights cast blue light over the room. It's like Christmas.















Second day:

I can be wheeled in a wheelchair now. I am being wheeled to my daughter for a visit, this time to be initiated into the rites that will become my religion for the next month.

First, put on the holy robes. Then the genuflection with alcohol and disinfecting agents. Fill the bottle with blessed life-giving fluid and approach the incubator with awe.

When you bottle-feed a baby inside an incubator, you hold the head and back up with one hand and put the bottle in the baby's mouth with the other. Five milliliters, then stop and pat. Another five, stop and pat. And so on...

You can change a baby's diaper from inside the incubator too: open the diaper and clean the baby's bottom with tiny wet gauze strips, then remove the diaper and pout on the new one. I note that preemie diapers are still far too large. The. I weigh the diaper and write the magic number down on a sheet of paper covered with numbers, weights, volumes, percentages, rates per minute, day and hour.

This is a feeding tube. That is an IV. This is a heart and breathing monitor. That is a oxygen saturation monitor. Lots of wires for a mite like my daughter.

I manage to stand. That means I get to care for her myself.

Can I hold her? No.


One week later:

I walk into the NICU and as the great double doors whoosh open, a thrill of pleasure zings through me. I can see her feet and hands are free of wires of any kind. Soon she can come out! No wires means no more incubator!

Ah, an error. The wires are in her head today. Reproachfully - as I see it - she turns her head towards me as I listen to the nurse explain how it's getting more and more difficult to find veins for the needles.

I will not cry. I will not.

I have held her twice up to now. She is too weak and can't control her temperature very well. She needed oxygen once when she went hysterical and fought the new needles. It happened at eleven o'clock at night and they never even called me in my room to tell me. She has lost too much weight and is not taking in enough calories.

Jaundice. Bilu. She can't drink as much as she needs, so the wires stay. Her hands and feet are spotted with red scabs from the IV that will eventually pale into white stars. Tiny veins swell easily and the IV needs changing twice a day at least. The feeding tube stays in. I ask for permission to stay and hold her head and hands when they draw blood, and at first they refuse but when I promise not to cry they let me stay.

They draw blood. She wails piteously until I lay a hand on her head. After that I get to stay every time, a special exception made just for me, the mother-who-does-not cry.

I ask for advice: how best to get her out of there? I get different answers:

"She is tired and needs to gain strength. Let her sleep and we'll feed her through the tube for the next few days."

"She needs to learn to breastfeed. Ask that she be taken out at least twice a day, even if it makes her tired."

"Get her out of the incubator as soon as possible! The bottle is the easiest to learn to drink from."

Oh. Okay. Thank you. Now I know what to do.

I decide on bottle feeding her breast milk, which is weary work. Seven days later, she is upgraded to a warming bed, the cabriolet of the incubators. She is still hooked up to wires, but no longer on IV and my husband and I can hold her when I want.

My husband holds her all day. I hold her all night.

We have another week to practice living without a sheet of plastic between us. I sneak a look at nurse's notes:

3:30 am - Patient wakes up and cries loudly for twenty minutes. Source is abdomen pain. Drops administered.

4:30 am - Patient is lying with mother.

5:30 am - Still cuddling in mother's bed.


One week later:

We are going home. After getting to know the other babies in the hospital who struggled right next to mine, who were the only human beings allowed to be close to her in the first few weeks of life, I know that going home with my child is the greatest gift a mother can ask for. There are babies who have spent months in the hospital, who still struggle with every breath, who have rasping coughs, who look with expressions as innocent and blank as the stare of a bird. Some, like the one who was born at twenty-seven weeks and weighed one pound at birth, have never left the confines of their incubators before. They cry for hours sometimes. The nurses are on the verge of breaking down because there is no time to hold the babies when you are constantly preoccupied with whether or not their hearts are beating, they are taking in oxygen, they are free of pneumonia and streptococci. Sometimes I hear nurses whisper to the babies in incubators, sometimes singing, sometimes telling them they are sorry they can't take them out and carry them so they will stop wailing.

We are going home. My baby weighs four pounds. She can breathe. She can eat. Her eyes show lively interest when they are open. There are no tubes coming out of her nose and no needles sticking in her head. I can pick her up when she wails, and it is a matter of a few days before she stops wailing altogether. I feel thankful every minute of the day for these simple facts.


Four months later:

Me to doctor: Doctor, why does my baby never cry?

Doctor:

Me: I mean, she never, ever cries. Not at night, not when she is hungry. Never. Is she all right?

Doctor: Hm. I think it's the hospital experience. If the worst thing she got out of it is that she does not cry, I'd say she's lucky.

Me: But is she all right?

Doctor: You see how intently she's looking at me? She's observing me rather sharply for a seven pound baby, wouldn't you say? Of course she's fine.

Me: But she never cries.

Doctor: Yes, it's the trauma. But she's fine. You'll see.

You Are Mexican Food

Spicy yet dependable. You pull punches, but people still love you.

He's an eleven-year-old German boy spending one year in the US with his family.

Hello teacher!!!!!

I write somthing about me.
When you will look on the end of this page. There is a power point prsantitation.
It is German. One, what I write is wrong, on the last slite wow is not a bad word.
But this e mail is in English.
You have to klick with your Computermaus, then the next slide comes.
I learn much English here.
The school is hard but I learn a lot.

At first I have much Homework (3-5 hoeurs the afternoon).
But now I haven't much.

I have some friends.

I find it here funny because all people are so friendly an they say sorry to everyone.

yours
K. and my family





I love when students write me to tell me how they are managing. K. was one of my favorites and I still have a note from him that he wrote before leaving Germany that said "You're the best teacher in the whole world."

I remember being panicked at the idea of doing private lessons with an eleven-year-old boy because I thought, "What the heck can I actually find that interests him?" Teenagers are easy for me, little kids are easy, but the pre-puberty set is daunting.

I was wrong - K. is one of the sweetest, most positive kids I ever met. We read books, cooked, did yoga, played hangman and charades - all in English, of course. It was a huge burden trying to decide which words he really needed to know before he went to the US and which words could wait until he was already there, but I'm relieved to hear he's doing well. He's been living in the US for three months now and reported back in his power point slide show in German, "The people here are friendly, positive, and very fat. Everyone drives everywhere instead of walking. My house is plastic on the outside, which I find very strange, but from the inside it is beautiful. The kids at school are not allowed to push each other or play with each other's food, which I find good."

No idea what the kids here were doing with his food, but I suspect I do not want to know.

Toddler Meteorite.




I guess that means she's not a toddler any more? I mean, she can swim, she can ride a bike, she can say "otherwise..." while raising her eyebrows. Four years old - not a toddler? She still crawls into my bed at night, right?

*sniff* I need to rename my baby - should I call her Little Dynamite?

Some readers may not care for long blog entries. For those of you who prefer pictures, which say a thousand blah blah blahs...

Here was the dining room at the hotel. It had a lovely view of the sea, which is to the right of the photo. The mountain view, which you can see in the back window, is somewhat less impressive.




The restaurant's name? "Panorama."