June, 28 2009

The Unexpected

by The XY Files

“Everything changes, nothing remains without change.” (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

Things are always changing. Change is a necessary catalyst for growth. Even if you are sitting still, deep inside your body your cells are changing without your knowing. From the formation of the stars and our planet all the way to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the far more beautiful butterfly, everything is permeated with transformation, whether you like that fact or not. So it is with family. Over the course of generations the changes that a family faces serve to keep the family tree growing and evolving, forming strong bonds through adversity and amendment.

The family dynamic in my household has been radically altered with the arrival of my new son. This is the third child for me and my wife, joining our five-year-old daughter and our three-year-old son. Unlike my first two children, though, the arrival of this newborn seems to have caught me by surprise. With my daughter, I was looking forward to all the joys and experiences that come with being a first-time parent. With my first son, I was looking forward to adding a sibling to my family, as I had grown up an only child. I was never privy to the experience of watching the blossoming relationship between brother and sister.

But with my third child I suppose I was guilty of growing a little too nonchalant with my expectations. After all, this is no longer uncharted territory. There are already two kids running around the house so how much different could it be to add another? When the big day finally arrived two weeks ago, the change was quite substantial, a tangible alteration to the routines we had developed with our first two children. Unlike the first two pregnancies, my wife had some complications after her c-section that required surgery and pretty much turned our entire way of life upside-down. Life is never what you expect it to be and with this third child we have definitely been walking a path that I don't think any of us expected to be taking.

And it all started with a pair of scrubs. I had to be an ass and steal the hospital scrubs that they let me wear into the delivery room. I thought they would make a neat pair of pajamas, a little memento from what was going to be our last child. Yet it seems like ever since my fast hands jammed that light blue clothing into my knapsack we have just gotten one piece of bad news after another. The baby was healthy, but my wife had to have five spinals. Then the doctors had trouble getting the baby out because the umbilical cord was around his neck (and knotted, too!). Then her c-section scar split. Then there was an abscess inside that got infected. Then she needed another surgery to remove the abscess. Then that got infected.

Between getting little to no sleep and caring for my kids and trying to clean the house and missing a week of work (no complaints about that) and having to get family members to take time from their lives to help out, I would say that the past two weeks were some of the absolute worst parts of my life. And that includes having to watch the "Bratz" movie that was on the other day.

Now that we are struggling to get through all of this bad stuff (and the fact that we have the privilege of paying a boatload of money to endure it all), we are also trying to establish all new routines with our newborn, as well as trying to re-establish some semblance of the old routines that we had with our other children. The result is a confusing mess that makes me think that the entire project needs to be reworked for efficiency.

I had originally intended to discuss the ways I think our newborn will be raised similarly yet entirely differently than our older children. For instance, I already know that I want to teach the new child early that we do not hit each other with hands or household objects, we do not tell mommy and daddy that we hate them and we listen the first time, not the 185th time. For starters. I also wanted to touch on the aspects of sibling rivalry, and how the balance of power was now shifted from girl/boy to girl/boy/boy. This could lead to some interesting power struggles as they grow older, especially if one of them learns to play one side against the other. And there is also the matter of the Middle Child Syndrome and the Third Child Syndrome to discuss. And my pending vasectomy, because we are done having kids and while I love the ones I have, it only takes one of their special kinds of tantrums to make me want to push my crotch in front of an X-ray machine for several days.

But the thing I keep coming back to is just how absolutely terrible these past two weeks have felt. There was just so much bad news floating around that for a little while things seemed like they would never turn themselves around. Here we were, sitting at home with our beautiful new baby boy, daddy home from work for a week, and things were the opposite of how they should have been. My wife grew sicker and sicker. We had to make trips to this doctor and then that doctor, the whole time toting along a newborn baby and our two older children. On top of that, it seemed like it rained from the day we went to the hospital until just a couple of days ago. Just cloudy, gloomy, rainy days that drove my kids stir crazy while my wife tried desperately to convalesce when really she was just getting sicker. And little to no outside help the whole time. And an avalanche of guilt every time I saw those scrubs sitting on my dresser. Like Poe's tell-tale heart they mocked me and made me think that my indiscretion was at the heart of the matter.

Yet the entire thing has made me love and appreciate my wife and my children in a way that I find difficult to describe. We reached a deep place of despair but we did it together. I can only assume that the bonds we forged during this dark time are for the good of our family. There is still a long rehabilitation ahead for my wife and I don't feel that the changes we are facing have all come to pass. There are lots of shifting landscapes right now as the whole of our lives have been sent off in another direction. Yet without that change you will not grow and growing pains now will only make you stronger.

While there are lots of new subjects for me to dwell on now that my family has a new addition, right now it feels like I needed to try and make some sense out of these past two weeks. Maybe a little exorcism of the bad stuff will make things start to heal quicker. Sometimes you get accustomed to life happening the same way every day - you get set in your routines and just expect that is the way things will go ad infinitum. While you can never prepare for the kinds of curve balls you will be thrown, they will reach you eventually. When they effect your family, you have to hope that you will find the strength to find yourself closer for your troubles.

By the way, you'd better believe that at one point during this, I sheepishly returned the scrubs to the hospital and told the nurse that I had "accidentally" ended up taking them home. You know, just in case.

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