Why Not Me?

Throughout my pregnancy with Olivia, I wondered if I was being selfish. I already has the most wonderful little girl I could imagine. She was healthy, she was smart, she was beautiful. I loved that child more than I’d thought possible.

I honestly wondered if I would be able to love another child as much as I adored Alyssa. She was my whole world for those first few years.

On top of my love for Alyssa I had friends who were struggling with infertility, a friend who had a really, really hard pregnancy that ended in an extremely premature birth. Was I being selfish to want another hassle-free pregnancy and a healthy full-term baby?

Maybe, but that’s what I wanted and so we went for it.

And I got that hassle-free pregnancy. My second pregnancy was actually easier than my first. I didn’t throw up nearly as long during my pregnancy with Olivia (every day for 10 weeks) as I did while I was pregnant with Alyssa (every day for twelve weeks.) I didn’t gain as much weight during my second pregnancy (fifteen pounds) as I did during my first (twenty pounds.)

I was had gestational diabetes during my first pregnancy but not during my second.

The only bump we encountered was around 20 weeks, when the doctor announced that I’d ‘failed’ my triple screen test, the test that looks for high risk for Down Syndrome. We had to wait two weeks for a perinatalogist to get us in for an ultrasound to check the fetus for soft markers for DS.

During those two weeks, I looked at Alyssa and wondered again if I’d been selfish in hoping for just one more healthy, happy baby. My cousin and his wife have three sons. Their second was diagnosed with autism around 18 months. I wondered if perhaps I should have been content with my one perfectly average and yet perfectly perfect child.

But she was already growing and I was already so in love with the child we were waiting to get a look at.

At the ultrasound, the doctor did a full scan. He checked her bone length, her heart, her kidneys, he was the one to tell us we were expecting another little girl.

When he got to her head, several times he murmured, “What a beautiful brain.”

He found no soft markers for Down Syndrome. We chose not to do any other testing. We were going to go on faith that this baby was just fine.

And when she was born nine days overdue, at only five pounds two ounces, having great difficulty breathing, I wondered again if I’d tempted the fates by wanting another baby when I’d gotten so lucky with the first.

During Olivia’s eleven days in the NICU, I never asked, “Why us?” I saw so many babies in that hospital who were so much sicker than my baby. Sure, she had the most distinctive cry in the entire NICU but she was already kicking her blankets off her legs and causing a fuss whenever her nurses needed to change her IV. I knew she was going to be just fine.

And she was so beautiful. She had these amazing dimples, this beautiful dark silky hair. She was feisty and vocal and perfect. She was absolutely perfect.

We took that perfect baby home and she cried and cried and cried.

I came close to losing my mind. We drove to my mom’s many weekends during my twelve weeks off for maternity leave. I needed to get out of our house, to a place where I knew there were people to help me care for this screamy baby. Tom was great but he was working and quite honestly, perhaps losing his mind a little too.

My mom once said of Olivia, “It’s a good thing she was born to older, more mature parents because honestly, I can understand shaken baby syndrome.”

It was that tough dealing with a crying Olivia. But even in those first months, when she was either crying or in the bath (I gave that baby three baths a day on some days because in the bath she actually stopped crying) I never asked myself, “Why me?”

Why not me? It never occurred to me that I deserved anything different than what I had. Sure, my baby hadn’t stopped crying in four months but she was mine and I loved her and I wouldn’t have traded her for all the cherubic, non-crying babies in the world.

Let me interject right here that any mom out there who did think, “Why me?” , especially in the beginning, I’m not saying I’m a better person by not thinking this. Not at all. Our circumstances were so different. We didn’t get Olivia’s diagnosis until so much later, until I’d already gotten to know HER, as she was. I didn’t have some imaginary baby in my head I was expecting to come in and complete our family. I had Olivia. I had this tiny, screamy baby I thought was perfect. And by the time I got the news that her genes weren’t what science considers perfect, well, in my eyes, in my heart, SHE was perfect, my child, my love. It didn’t matter by then what her chromosomes looked like. She already fit my idea of the perfect addition to our family.

I knew, though, early on that she wasn’t developing quite the way she should have been. I tried to tell her doctor from about the time she was four months old that something was up with her. I was patted on the head and told I was being a worrisome mommy.

In the end, though, I was right. My ‘worrisome mommy’ instincts were right.

I know that I’m still in the early years of raising a child with 5p-. I know that things might get so much tougher in the years to come. But I also know that I’m lucky to have this child. I’m lucky to get to mother her. I have a dear friend who would give anything to have her sweet 5p- child back. This friend would have been an amazing mother to her daughter. She’s an amazing mother to her daughter’s little brother. She’d have never asked, “Why me?” had she been able to bring her child home and parent her.

My Olivia drives her sister crazy. She wears silly glasses to make everyone laugh. She’s been called one of the sweetest kids every by her teacher, who has known her for two weeks. She rides the bus like a big girl and she snuggles in deep at night as she falls asleep.

And my Alyssa asks for help with her homework, she talks to me in the darkness of our bedroom after Olivia’s asleep, sharing confidences, confiding fears. She is kind and loving and yes, sometimes very, very bossy to her little sister but she’s mine and I am so, so lucky that she sometimes still wants to sit on my lap and cuddle after her sister is asleep.

These days I do sometimes ask, “Why me? Why did I get so lucky to have two such amazing, beautiful, perfectly perfect kids?”