All About The Little Girl

Hello I am Louise, the little girl in the blog. I am now 8. I am VERY!!!!!!!! proud of my self that I DID NOT DIE. And I love the blog entry about me.

(The blog entry Louise is writing about is: Louise's Scars.)

Louise's Scars

If you met my daughter Louise, you would probably see an ordinary – if lively – eight-year-old girl. If you managed to catch her in a quiet moment, and sat down with her to read a book, you might notice how beautiful she is. (Okay I’m biased!) Then as she turned the pages of the book you might notice her hands are covered in tiny white scars. If her feet were bare, as they often are, you might glance down and notice that they too are covered in scars.

Every one of those scars Louise got before she was four months old. Mainly they are from a time when most babies are still in the womb. Louise was born over three months premature: due in November, she arrived in August. (According to one of the nurses, Leos like a sense of drama.) Louise is proud of her scars and says she loves them. She doesn’t remember now, consciously at least, how she got them.

I remember. I remember the first time I saw a doctor prick her tiny heel and squeeze. Or do I? Now that I think about it, I’m not sure. Maybe I remember remembering it, my story of what happened: how she cried, how I nearly fainted. I tell people this, I’ve written it in articles about her birth, but eight years on it has a hazy unreal feel to it. Did I nearly faint? Is that true? I’m not sure any more.

What I do remember are my thoughts. I remember that I was afraid she would be psychologically scarred for life having to suffer so much pain at such an early stage. I remember the anger that passed through me: hopeless anger at the nurses and doctors for doing this to her and not finding some other way, and anger at myself that I hadn’t carried her to term, that because of some failing in me she was suffering. I wanted to take her back inside me, I wanted to protect her and I felt useless because I couldn’t.

After that, if I was by Louise’s incubator when someone came for blood, I would open the little doors and put my hands on her back in what is known as ‘containment holding’. Not surprisingly, premature babies like to feel enclosed so this helped her to stay calm. It helped me stay calm. And I didn’t look at the needles.

Louise was 39 hours old when I held her for the first time. She had so many wires and tubes attached it took two nurses to carry her from the incubator. I didn’t willingly hold her. Even though it was what I longed for I was terrified I might do something wrong, might hurt her fragile body. But one of the nurses, Theresa, specialised in the babies’ emotional care and she insisted, for which I am eternally grateful. She even stayed on after her shift had ended to show me how to hold Louise upright on my chest in a ‘kangaroo cuddle’. This is what I remember of that time: the feel of her bird-like body against my chest, her tiny feathery movements, I remember crying with relief, the relief of becoming still again after days of reeling, of feeling half-insane with fear and guilt. I remember Theresa, before she went off home, looked at the monitor above my head and said Louise’s oxygen saturations had gone up, a sign she had relaxed.

A few days after Louise was born I decided to keep a journal, for her if she survived, for her sister if she didn’t, and really of course for me. In my journal I wrote of that first cuddle that it was as if a part of me had been brought back – the mother part. Yet I kept rejecting this part. If anyone congratulated me on the birth of my baby, I thought, “How can they say that when I’ve caused this terrible thing, when I’ve messed up so badly?” Guilt was my constant companion in those early months. I can see now it stopped me feeling grateful. A neighbour said, “At least one good thing was you didn’t have to have another C-section.” (Like I did with my first baby.) In reply I snapped, “I would rather have that than this.” To see any good had come of it, especially for me, seemed like a betrayal of my baby. A nurse told me about a father who felt honoured to watch his baby grow and develop. He felt privileged to see the changes most parents never see. Honoured? I thought. Privileged? It’s easy to see he’s not the mother.

And it’s true he wasn’t, yet how much more peaceful an attitude than mine.

Should I have been grateful? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I wasn’t, not because of wickedness on my part, but because I was afraid to be, afraid it would make me a monster. When Louise was about 4 weeks old and her condition was stable Theresa suggested baby massage. As Louise lay on my lap her tiny arms went into a salute. I had already read that this salute, where one hand shields the face, is classic premature baby language for, ‘I am not happy.’ I believed then that my baby couldn’t look at me without fear.

Now I can see another side. She was adjusting, taking in as much of her surroundings as she could cope with. She was incredibly good at this, at somehow conveying her needs. After a week of laying Louise on my lap for a few moments before her kangaroo care she was ready to have her legs and feet massaged. A few days later she transferred to our local hospital. I carried on doing what little massage I had learned. Then she got ill again. There were more blood tests, a transfusion, drips in her feet again. After that if I touched her feet during massage she gave the salute. I rang Theresa who suggested gently holding them during kangaroo care. We began breastfeeding. Sometimes the effort of this exhausted Louise so much the stimulation of massage was more than she could cope with.

I felt like I was failing her. A good mother would know how to get beyond this, would know how to massage and comfort her baby, so I believed. Premature babies needed the contact of massage, and I wasn’t providing it, when I should have been. All I could do was what Louise asked for, which was to be held quiet and still. It seems crazy now that I couldn’t see that what I was doing was okay, but that’s how it was. Like so many mothers I held myself up against some imaginary ‘perfect’ mother I thought people expected me to be, and inevitably I didn’t match up.

Louise came home two weeks before her due date, and three days after it she was back in hospital, her lungs collapsed with bronchiolitis. This time there was a middle of the night drive to a different hospital, further away than the first, followed by nine days on a ventilator. She had another blood transfusion, more tubes, more wires, and then a slow recovery at the local hospital. By then during kangaroo cuddles Louise sometimes wriggled down to lie in my arms where she could see my face. I moved my finger and she followed with her eyes. The first smiles came then, with her eyes well before they came with her mouth.

Yet when she came home she was tense, stiffening when I picked her up. Or maybe that was me. Did I stiffen as I picked her up, and did she react to that? Whichever it was, I took Louise for baby massage lessons and after a few weeks she relaxed. I guess I relaxed too because although Louise never wanted a full massage, I came eventually to see that was okay, not my failure again, just Louise letting me know how much was enough.

I believed then that babies shouldn’t have to feel pain, shouldn’t suffer. Believing that didn’t stop her pain, but it certainly added to mine. I believed it so strongly that one time when she was seriously ill I thought she might be better off dead. I thought she might be damaged, that the emotional and psychological scars would be as obvious in years to come as the ones on her hands and feet. Yet, people have often commented how happy Louise is, and how full of life. (Of course she has her angry, whiny, miserable moments too.) She sees herself as overall a happy person, and thinks that she is brave – because of her experiences as a baby.

I often wonder if her zest for life comes as a result of that early dice with death, in the same way that many survivors of near-death experiences report a renewed love of life after they recover.

My daughter’s hands are covered in scars. Tweet

welcome

Hello, and welcome to Deeper Azure.
Azure, the colour of the sky, and of the ocean. The sky and the ocean are, to me, a reflection of all that is vast, unknowable and wonderful in life. (And it's one of my favourite colours.)

The first post on this blog is the opening of an (almost finished) novel-in-progress. (I was on a computer course and blogging was one of the course components, and I had nothing else to post!)
Now, if I had a lofty plan for this blog it would be to post writing that reflects the beauty of life, that turns the ordinary into the azure (vast, unknowable and wonderful.)
And if I had a less lofty plan, it would be to have fun.

Pictures

1
PICTURES






She is so small, small for her age. Although he is only five and she is six, Sammy has overtaken her. He is already long and thin. She is a speck of dust hiding in the curtains. The curtains are green velvet. Her bedroom walls are creamy white and scattered with sprigs of tiny green flowers. The carpet is pale brown, dark brown, grey brown, red brown, all coming together and going away again, like a big spider that will swallow her up. Like a thousand big spiders that cling to her legs every night as she runs across the room and dives into bed.
The carpet doesn’t go with the curtains or with the wallpaper. But the carpet is good enough for children who never appreciate anything, who will only get it in a mess. There’s no point putting down a brand new carpet in that room. It will only be destroyed. Especially by Stella.
Especially by Stella. Once Stella peed on the carpet. She woke in the night too late and peed all over the spiders as she ran for the door.
It’s a blessing we didn’t put down a new carpet.
The dust in the curtain makes Stella feel like she is choking. The smell, and the way it catches in her throat. The dust is so fine she can’t see it, and yet it chokes her. If she was dust she could disappear. No one would ever find her again.
You have to lie down and then wriggle up to get between the curtain and the lining. You can’t see much when you are inside, but there are enough holes in the lining that it isn’t dark. Stella closes her eyes and sees magical pictures. It is like painting, except the pictures are inside her head, so she can choose any colour she wants. Bright pink, lime green, red. Stella can see anything she wants when her eyes are closed. Sammy is afraid of the dark, and of squashed up places. He gets scared inside the curtain. Once he made a noise, and Stella had to dig her nails into his hand. You must be quiet inside the curtains, so no one can find you.
Then one day Sammy trips as he is looking for Stella. It is a game of hide-and-seek. Sammy runs up laughing, and he catches his foot in the lining. It tears. The hole is the size of a teddy bear and the shape of a banana.
Mummy doesn’t know, but one day she will find it, one day she will blame Stella. One day she will say

You are the most careless creature I ever met. Look what you’ve done. And you didn’t even have the common decency to tell me you’d done it. Did you think I wouldn’t find it you stupid girl? These are no good now, no good at all. Well, I’m not buying new curtains for someone who cares so little, who looks after her things so badly.

Stella doesn’t like the curtains any more. Because of them she is in trouble. She will never again hide between their layers of velvet and lining. Besides, Stella is bigger now, and it is not so easy to disappear. And she likes to draw. You can’t draw when you are inside the curtains. Now Stella takes her pencils and paper and sneaks past the kitchen, down to the basement and her own secret place where no one ever goes, not even Sammy, where no one will ever find her.