Preparing for the Prom

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have had very good health. Better than average, I’d reckon. I’m told I was in the hospital briefly when I was two years old for a bout of pneumonia. But other than some ordinary colds and seasonal allergies, I’ve not been terribly sick at any point. Joshua, allergies notwithstanding, is fairly hardy as well. He picked up a stomach bug or two, and he shares my allergies (though his are worse in that they include life-threatening reactions to shellfish and possibly raw eggs*), but is otherwise hale and impervious to major illness. Jack is even more stout, having thrown up just twice in his life, and one of those was the result of his brother spinning him around in a swivel chair. Kids, eh?

Harper, though, did not win the genetic lottery as her brothers did when it came to frailty. She hasn’t been sick, per se, but her growing list of health problems seems to include everything her brothers didn’t get. A milk protein allergy led us to unintentionally starve her for about two months. A bleeding hemangioma around her anus** makes every diaper change an opportunity for infection and potential scarring. A lipomeningomyelocele (a term I am equally challenged to spell and pronounce) on her spine showed up when we had her hemangioma examined. Harper’s first seven months have been unpleasant, and that doesn’t even count preeclampsia and a partial placental abruption on her way into the world.

It’s been a strange thing, worrying this much. Parents always worry about their kids, of course. My mother raised this art to a transcendent state in which she no longer worries so much as she has become worry. We haven’t gotten that bad, but it’s been an interesting evolution. When Joshua had his first vaccines in the doctor’s office, his cries were enough for us to scoop him up and smother him with hugs and all the comfort we could secrete. And that was knowing it was going to happen. Harper had to literally bleed from her anus before we started worrying in earnest. We certainly did not prepare, emotionally (or financially), for Harper to require five specialists, two medications, some ridiculous formula which smells like rotting death, and spinal surgery before she turned eight months old.

It’s hard not to treat her differently We’re not raising her any differently, at least so far. I mean, she’s only spent eight months with us, her time in utero notwithstanding, so we’ve got seventeen more years or so to screw things up. But I know we think about her differently. The boys are tumblesome and prone to rowdiness***, but Harper seems a delicate flower by comparison, as if some gust of wind might come and knock off a leg or something. Some of that is her already pages-long medical history achieved impressively before turning a year old, and some of it is just being a baby. Babies are stupidly easy to hurt or break. They even have a self-destruct button right on the tops of their heads (the fontanel if you’re playing at home).

But all that aside, Harper’s tough as nails. She’s been under general anesthesia twice, endured a 9-hour spinal surgery with three days in the ICU (with three days more in humbler digs in the hospital), and as I mentioned, we starved her for two months. But she’s still happy and smiley and doing all the things babies are supposed to do. In a few years, we’ll probably stop thinking of her as frangible and start shouting at her to stop trying to swing all the way around the bar of the swing set (I’ve already had to do this twice with Joshua, and from the excited gleam in Jack’s eyes, I’m pretty sure I’m not done). Plus, she’ll have a bitchin’ scar on her spine to show off in the biker bars and pool halls.

What I don’t know is how long that transition will take. Right now, I’m overcautious when I pick her up, downright fretful when I put her down, and hypersensitive to every cry of discomfort as if Bane broke her over his knee on her way to reaching for her stuffed monkey (cleverly named “Monkey”). We studiously, perhaps obsessively, watch her using her legs to see if they’re moving The Right Way after her surgery, making sure that they’re not Moving Wrong as they did before. We’re right to be watchful, but the gnawing disquiet in my belly just won’t go away, even as she’s learning to crawl a full month before her brothers did. By all objective measures, she’s doing great. By all subjective measures, she’s one warning sign away from living in a bubble the rest of her life.

My mother probably seems the same way about me. Her concerns about my diet and exercise habits (or the lack thereof) exhibit as much. “It’s a mother’s job to worry,” she always says. I think she’s half-right. It’s a mother’s (and father’s) inclination to worry, our right to worry, but making it a job is approaching Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Trying to mediate concern with realism is a challenge. Practicality and worry mix about as well as toothpaste and orange juice. I know Harper’s going to be fine. She’s already so much better than she was just a few months ago, and her trajectory should remain more up than not. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at her without seeing her hooked up to IVs and machines, lying motionless on her belly in a hospital crib****.

But we adjust, I guess. It takes time, but eventually we normalize the abnormal. We have three healthy kids. Maybe two and a half with room to improve. And in time this will all just be baby pictures we show our kids’ prom dates to embarrass them. Joshua’s face swollen up from eating some noodles cooked with shrimp. Jack’s skin blue from having colored himself with sidewalk chalk. And now Harper’s back carved open while she sedately drools on Monkey. Enjoy the prom!

 

 

*Jen and I suspected Joshua’s allergy to eggs after he developed rashes after a couple of baths using homemade bubble bath containing egg whites. We conducted a super scientific study of Joshua’s possible allergy by putting a small drop of raw egg on the back of his neck as he walked by one day. Within a minute, he was pawing at the back of his neck like he was trying to dig a vertebra out of his spine with his fingers. Allergists are overrated.

**Future Harper, if you ever read this, Dad is sorry for telling the Internet about your anal bleeding.

***Which is to say, they’re boys.

****This is one of the saddest contraptions ever made.