The thoughts and reflections of a first-time father during his period of expectancy
by John F. Iekel
Part VII: Epilogue
The first days of Emily’s homecoming were happy ones. It was amazing to be able to hold her for as long as I wanted and never have to surrender her to a nurse. I loved to cradle her in my arms and read to her, something I did every day since her first day home. I loved patting her back and hearing an enormous burp come out of that little five-pound body after a feeding. I loved having her fall asleep on my chest. There’s no better feeling in the world. And how wonderful it was on an October day splashed with golden sunshine when she smiled at me for the first time from her wind-up swing!
But the joys of having Emily where she belonged were intermingled with a dose of fear and even a little residual worry. In the back of my mind was always the fear that there would be a real crisis to handle when her heart and breathing monitor went off, particularly when it broke the night with its insistent electronic beeps. And what lay farther down the road was still shrouded in mystery. It was just too early in those first days to know if she would suffer any long-term effects from the trauma of her entry into post-natal life. There were still horrors that could be lurking in the prematurity closet that would only make themselves evident in time. So even though she was out of the hospital, for all we knew our little miracle still could have to face great odds in life. It was frustrating to know that problems could still show up, but having to face those uncertainties was not as bad as it could have been, since I had so much practice facing the unknown. And it certainly was better to have concerns like that than to wonder about her very survival.
Emily even had a brush with greatness in her first month after her release. In October 1990, an organization for which I had worked in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, held a series of events to mark the formal dedication of the old 18th century house they occupied. There were many noteworthy guests, but the most distinguished of all was the Duke of Wellington, who headed the British side of the group’s operations. I was introduced to him, and spoke to him briefly of the history of the house, which I had researched extensively. He was polite, but was most actively interested in tiny Emily. She looked like a doll — she weighed around six pounds and was attired in a little red satin dress, white tights and bonnet, and black patent leather shoes. He, as well as the other guests, seemed captivated by her. Not many people can claim to have met nobility so early in their lives, at least in this country.
As wonderful as it was to have Emily home, it was also terrifying. What security there had been in having all manner of medical personnel at her beck and call. Now there was no one to help us but ourselves. What a responsibility! That precious little face suddenly inspired not only love, awe, and gratitude — it also awakened in me a pure fear. Instead of being freed from focusing on one day at a time, we were still sentenced to months of regarding each day of life as a victory — since the doctors thought Emily was still unstable enough that she needed the heart and breathing monitor for months to go, and that implied there was still at least a remote possibility that she could die from heart or lung failure. Would I be awakened at night and find my baby girl gasping for breath, or even worse, gone forever? I used to sleep heavily, but I soon learned to sleep lightly, and found myself checking her constantly to make sure she was okay.
Scariest of all were the first few days when I was home alone with her. One of the most frightening moments of my life was the first time my wife left for work and I was home alone with the baby. In a sense, that sounds rather amusing — just like classic tales of moronic dads who don’t have a clue about how to care for a baby and are more afraid of a tiny person than operating a big machine or hunting an animal. It wasn’t that I was terrified of being alone with a baby. What was scary for me was the notion that for an entire business day I not only did not have the psychological comfort of having another adult there, but that I also had to respond to any emergency by myself.
After Lisa left for work, I tried as much as possible to do normal day-to-day routine things. I fed the baby when she awoke, and changed her. That was fun — I loved holding her and feeding her. But then I had to face the dreaded dressing-the-floppy-baby stress. That was as complicated as it had been in the hospital; the monitor we had to use employed wires attached to leads that stuck to her skin, just as the machines in the hospital had. I was able to dress her fine, and didn’t disturb any of the leads in the process, thank God.
Once dressing was over, we went into the sunny living room and I read some books to her as we sat on the couch together. She took naps, as all infants do, and I watched old movies during those intervals. Periodically, I peeked in to see if she was breathing and if she was covered. There was no emergency, a state of affairs that was more to be expected than having a crisis; still, I felt such a flood of relief wash over me when Lisa came home!
Once I overcame the initial fear, the days I was home with Emily were happy ones, and I miss them a great deal. I will be forever grateful to my boss from those days, for her flexibility helped make it possible for me to stay home with Emily on Mondays and Tuesdays for the first three months after her release from the hospital. Those were some of the happiest times of my life, and I will always treasure them.
I was more than content with my regimen of caring for Emily, doing things around the apartment, and setting up my own pace for work and freelance projects that could be done while Emily slept. I cooked a lot, making more elaborate dinners since I had more time to do so. I couldn’t take Emily outside (doctor’s orders, necessary but a shame); still, we had a nice time and I loved bonding with and caring for her. I felt happy and fulfilled, and would have been delighted to stay home either as a full-time Dad or as an at-home employee. How I wish the time I had could have been longer.
Our plants quickly became lush, as the constant boiling of huge pots of water to sanitize bottles and nipples transformed our apartment into the tropics. Feeding Emily was a little challenging, since she refused to use any nice, simple, uncomplicated bottle that had only two or three components. She would only use the kind that disassembled completely and used the little plastic bags. I became quite adept at preparing bottles, even one-handed while holding a hungry baby in the other arm. That was quite a challenge at first!
As soon as Emily came home, we made it a point to read to her every day, before she was even able to hold up her head. It was great fun, but I also looked on it as an opportunity to plant intellectual seeds as early as possible and make books a normal and daily part of life. It was also a way to stimulate her brain — which we tried especially hard to do — so as to overcome any difficulties early that may have been lurking as a result of her extreme prematurity. I read all kinds of things to her during the day — classics, little children’s books, prayer books. It was so nice to nestle her in my lap and read to her during the day while the rest of the world went about its business and made money and conducted conference calls about nothing.
Frightening though it was, the monitor ended up being more of a nuisance than anything else. Emily’s heart and breathing rates were still irregular enough that once in a while the alarms were for real, but almost every time a shrill electronic beep shattered the relative quiet of the city night, it was for nothing. And God help me if I pushed the wrong button or even worse, pulled a “lead” out — then the beep would become an unending scream that would wake the dead. Luckily, such ear-splitting incidents were few.
There was one day in October 1990, however, when the monitor did cause me to become a little unglued. Alright, a lot unglued. If Emily had a certain number of alarms in a short time frame, we had been instructed to take her to a hospital to be examined and have the monitor’s memory read. On that particular day, she was one alarm away from reaching the threshold number. I was frantic, because it also happened to be a day when one of our cars was not operative and Lisa had taken the other to work. So there I was. It was just the kind of thing that I had been so terrified of when she first came home and I was new to being alone with her.
Fortunately, I did have an option. The residence of the Catholic community to which I belonged was only a few miles away, and David, another member who had lived there the whole time I did, was comforting and said he would be glad to take Emily and me to the hospital if we had to go. Thank God, I never had to take him up on his kind offer. There were no more beeps, and it became evident that they had been false alarms due to a faulty lead.
We learned to identify false alarms from real ones to such an extent that it became quite easy to respond without much worry, at least during waking hours. But while we were able to make such distinctions, other people unfamiliar with the contraption were not. Any beep would unnerve people who were not accustomed to them, and would make them think something awful was happening.
One evening in November 1990 when I met in our apartment with a member of my community’s advisory board and my friend Don, who was also a community member, the monitor alarm suddenly went off. I very calmly got up to see what was going on, and Emily slept peacefully in her swing — but they were very worried indeed, and watched me in silence, apparently wondering if they were watching a catastrophe that would send Emily to the hospital. Nothing was wrong with her, though, and I nonchalantly returned to the table as if this were a normal, everyday occurrence — which, of course, it was.
As part of the follow-up for cases like Emily’s, the hospital where she had stayed routinely arranged for child development specialists to make regular visits to assess preemies’ condition and intervene to head off any disabilities that may have begun to appear. Since Emily was essentially housebound (well, apartment bound) for four months to avoid unnecessary exposure to germs, they made visits to our apartment. I liked their visits. They were pleasant, upbeat people, and it was very reassuring to see how well they thought Emily was doing. There was very little intervention to be done, which was a tremendous relief and rather a wonderment, considering all she had been through and all that could have been. I was always eager to enumerate Emily’s achievements since their last visit, and I proudly recited all the things she could do.
Not only was it pleasant to spend time with the child development people — I also found it fascinating to watch them use the equipment they brought with them. It was amazing to see how they transformed simple toys into developmental tools to help with muscle development, motor skills, and mental stimulation. For instance, they showed us how a large ball could be more than a toy — it could help a baby laying on it on her tummy to learn balance and equilibrium. They showed us how to stimulate motor skills, muscle tone, and grasping. Seeing that helped make stimulation at home something attainable for a lay person, not just the realm of a trained professional. Who knew how many uses there could be for a large, multi-colored ball?
In the summer of 1992, Emily went once a week to the center, where the professionals who made the home visits were based, for group sessions with other little children the center served who were not housebound. The others suffered from a variety of disabilities that ranged all the way up to the profound. The sessions included circle time, in which they sang songs and clapped; play time; activities that incorporated various exercises meant to stimulate them and help the parents see what to do to help their children; and assessment by the staff members.
I was very proud when the center asked us if we would consider putting Emily in one of their morning preschool classes. They envisioned her as being one of the “typical” children (their term) in a class largely composed of handicapped children. They thought she would be the perfect child for such a role, owing to her cheerful personality, warmth, and success at beating all the odds stacked against her at the outset. The “typical” children were put in classes there to help lead the handicapped children in activities and provide them with an example.
We readily agreed to have her become part of the group. In addition to the benefits for the other children of her presence there, we also thought it would have a positive effect on Emily. We thought it would help her to become accustomed to people who are “different,” accept them, and not laugh at them and think they are weird. It was a golden opportunity for her to learn early lessons that could keep her from being enslaved by prejudice and stereotyping in the future. Another wonderful aspect of the arrangement was that it was a way of giving back what we had received. Our child, who had been spared from difficulties, could do something for those who had not been. And her service to them was in the form of play and mere presence!
Emily is now nearly 10 years old. Except for some scars on her feet and wrists from IVs and constant samplings to obtain blood gas readings, one would barely know that Emily had the experience she did. She has brown eyes like her mother, and strawberry blond hair that sparkles like it was dusted with gold when the sun shines on it. She blossomed into an articulate, warm, inquisitive, precocious girl. Emily displayed a passionate love for books at an early age, and there were evenings when I would read two dozen to her in a row. She was reading a few words just before she turned four, and now is a voracious reader who devours books beyond her grade level. She is an insightful, intelligent, sensitive child of deep faith and conscience.
For me, too, the experiences of expectancy seem a distant blur, as if they were in another lifetime. When I look at Emily, I can barely imagine the time when she was so miniature and the endless days when her world was a clear plastic temperature-controlled isolette. Especially in those dark days of uncertainty, with doctors telling us of the horrors she could have faced, I could never have imagined that she would be doing so well.
Emily’s future looks as bright as the dazzling brilliance of a January sun on new-fallen snow, or of a crown set with a thousand diamonds. I could never have imagined in those first awful days after Emily’s early birth how well things would turn out and how she would really be doing. I could thank God every minute of every day, and still it would not be enough.
P.S. Emily is now a big sister…
Copyright 1996
John F. Iekel is an editor and writer. His published work has appeared in Our Sunday Visitor, The Arlington Historical Magazine, Weatherwise, Tax Notes, and The Apostle, as well as other publications.
