Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness
Section 3: Chapter 21—Stretch Marks
Dear reader: One-word introduction only: Motherhood.
Enjoy!
Chapter 21: Stretch Marks
Shortly after the calendar flipped to the new millennium, my husband and I flipped our lives upside down to begin yet again. Todd’s company offered him a job in Pennsylvania, along with a promotion and a raise. The transfer gave me the chance to slip into a role I now coveted: a stay-at-home mom. A businesswoman I most certainly was not, a Christian woman, questionable. But I thought I’d be a good mother, wife, and householder, able to forget about God once again. I still subscribed to the “believe like a child” mantra, and, like a good wall should, it seemed to be holding back the flood of questions on the other side.
Motherhood began just as expected — with delight, confusion, sleep deprivation, and feelings of being overwhelmed. But when our daughter Cameron was three weeks old, my husband and I noticed something we did not expect: she cried often, with great intensity, for hours on end. After changing, feeding, rocking, burping, bouncing, shushing, walking, and patting, all we could do was stare helplessly as she wailed with a red face and closed fists. Unable to locate the phantom tormentor anywhere on her tiny body, or pull a solution out of the wide array of baby books scattered on our living room coffee table, we sped to the emergency room.
Thirty minutes later, with our thrashing child lying on the exam table, the doctor bellowed his diagnosis: colic. “There is nothing you can do but allow it to pass,” he said as he tucked his stethoscope back inside his coat pocket.
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“It usually dissipates at about three months of age,” he replied.
Although my husband’s job had indeed provided the financial means for me to stay home with our infant daughter, this privilege now came with a price tag — long hours alone with a colicky baby while work kept my husband away for all but a few waking hours. With no friends or relatives around to help, I soon felt more isolated and incompetent than I ever had in an office cubicle. Small logs of resentment toward my husband began stacking up inside me. I didn’t dare acknowledge them since ingratitude was surely a sin in God’s eyes.
“Let’s see, we’ve still got dinner to prepare, a diaper to change, your husband’s dry cleaning to pick up,” Fear said one afternoon, ticking off items on the day’s to-do list, slithering up and down my body, sending me chills and hot flashes, headaches and digestive pain.
“You should be better at this; after all, a woman’s place is in the home,” Guilt added.
I would take Cameron for car rides because I subscribed to the common belief that “all babies sleep in cars.” But apparently my daughter hadn’t read the manuals. I would try buckling her in her car seat and placing it on a running dryer, but rather than soothing her it frightened her. Rocking her was too hot, loud, and frustrating. Images of holding and cuddling my cooing, adorable infant proved to be only daydreams.
Ultimately, only one combination worked consistently: placing her in her baby swing, turning the vacuum cleaner on high, and leaving her be. Her eyes would gloss over, and she’d fall asleep. I would run to wash clothes, fix myself lunch, or go to the bathroom before she’d wake with a wail and we’d begin again.
“Even a vacuum makes a better mother! I don’t think this is who you are,” Shame would admonish me.
During these weeks of her colic, I never met anyone who had struggled so much with motherhood — or at least anyone who admitted to such struggles. All I felt was the judgment of “better” moms wondering why I didn’t soothe my crying child sitting in her car seat or stroller, or, if I was holding her, thinking I must be hurting her. When I did confide in someone about our long, hard days or how I dreamed of quiet days reading a book and enjoying a glass of wine, people sometimes said, “Oh, the poor baby! You know, I had a friend whose baby had colic, and she found that fill-in-the-blank worked for her.”
“Yes, tried that,” I would reply with a tight smile and an obligatory thank you.
One day I admitted sheepishly to my mom over the phone, “I can stand it for about five hours, but then I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Put her down then,” she advised, calmly. “She’ll be okay.”
I placed my crying daughter in her crib, snuck outside, sat down on my front step, and closed the door behind me.
Fear and Shame traded remarks: “What if it’s something worse than colic?” “She needs a loving, attentive, patient mother, not someone who walks away.” “Maybe we should take her in again?” “You should already know how to do this.”
Ultimately, the doctor was right. After about three months, we observed a slow but evident reduction in the intensity and length of her crying spells. Now she became a happy, adventurous toddler showering us with smiles and laughs, ready to take on the world with the same vigor and passion she had previously funneled into crying spells.
Meanwhile, I had been experiencing a growing list of physical symptoms soon too obvious to ignore. While I wanted to embrace Cameron’s enthusiasm and appreciate this gift of life that God had entrusted me with, and not address the bodily symptoms that had been piling up like dirty laundry — fatigue, cold sweats, chest tightness, chronic digestive pain, insomnia, low libido — I feared that something serious and maybe irreversible was happening to me.
With my husband’s support, I shared my symptoms with my doctor. He glanced at my list, then took my blood pressure, checked my pulse, listened to my heart, poked my body, and finally concluded, “Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything physically wrong. Maybe just some stress.”
***
Three weeks later familiar red circles which bled into large masses appeared on my skin, for me tangible proof that there was, in fact, something wrong with me. I went to an allergist, who after doing blood tests proved that my hives were not a reaction to a known allergen, and prescribed Benadryl for the itching and Prednisone to suppress or minimize the outbreaks.
“You’ll want to use Prednisone with caution,” he said. “And don’t stop taking it, even after your hives go away. You have to step down from it. There are some side — ”
“I know about all about Prednisone,” I interrupted. “My mom has been on it for years after a kidney transplant.” My mom had told me about the side effects of Prednisone — possibility of weakening bones, weight gain, swelling, high blood pressure, and mood changes. I didn’t want anything to do with Prednisone, but I also couldn’t effectively take care of my family with daily hives plaguing me. My solution was to allow the hives to build up each day to the point of intolerance then, frustrated, slam down a Prednisone.
***
My midwestern roots had proved their ability to bend during my youthful travels, but after facing infant colic and chronic hives their natural flexibility, like my body’s, wore out and snapped my family and me back “home” with a force reminiscent of a mother pulling her delinquent child home by the ear.
Minnesota, which I had left five years earlier to escape the disappointment of my boss Steve and sure I was seriously done with winter, became home for me again. It seems I had to leave it and return to appreciate all its snowy goodness.
Slowly, once our move was complete, my hives and associated bodily aches and pains, which had lasted over six months, faded. Ignoring my doctor’s warnings I threw out the rest of my Prednisone, followed by my birth control pills since my husband and I had agreed that the odds against a second colicky baby were astronomically in our favor. But the odds beat us, and within a few weeks of our second daughter Kelsey’s birth we noticed the telltale signs of colic.
Kelsey’s colic was like Cameron’s in many ways. However, Kelsey cried with a pained, desperate expression on her face and at the kind of volume that turned heads in grocery stores, parking lots, and restaurants, that stopped people on the sidewalk in front of our house, likely pondering if they should call the police. Her screams prompted us to race twice to the emergency room, where she was always pronounced healthy, and where I was encouraged to be patient.
This situation made all my usual emotions battle for power, while another emotion, one I had never allowed myself to acknowledge let alone consciously express, now arrived. Before I could stop him, Anger unleashed a fiery rant: “It’s not fair! What the hell did I do to deserve this torture? Can’t anyone get some fucking peace and quiet around here just for one day?”
No one had ever taught me how to deal with this brutal, profanity-speaking force within me. So I rolled my eyes and silently spewed anger toward “better” moms and other well-meaning, concerned citizens on the street who dared to say, “Poor child.” I stomped my feet and roared at my husband for making me pregnant, and for his blatant inability to “fix” this problem when he could fix anything else. I hurled imaginary rocks at the doctors and the line they fed me: “Don’t worry, it’ll only last three months.” Those doctors seemed blind to the fact that every day with a colicky baby, not to mention a toddler in tow, aged my body by a week. I roared rage at glowing mothers on the covers of my parenting books, our dog for ripping up the couch, the dusty bookshelves and the unmade beds, and the nice day outside that I couldn’t enjoy.
“There must be a way to blockade Anger,” Fear whispered, “Keep him locked up inside. Then over time he will likely lose fire power and convert to something less risky — and if we’re lucky, less vulgar.”
“Like Self-loathing or Depression?” Guilt suggested, drooling over the idea.
Fear frowned and replied, “I don’t know, Guilt, but we must try something before Anger burns any other point of view to ashes!”
***
From childhood to college life to corporate life to married life, I had been down, but no one and nothing had yet knocked me out. Two infants, however, had brought me to my knees, humbled and light-years away from the warrior’s independence, self-assuredness, and confidence that had characterized my earlier years. I finally had to admit I needed help — from my mother.
“She’s going to see what a horrible mother you’ve turned out to be!” Shame and Fear said in unison. Yet despite their warnings I asked my mom if my daughters and I could live with her until the colic subsided. Luckily for me, Fargo was only a four-hour drive away from our Minnesota home. A couple days later my mom opened her door to allow in her sleep-deprived daughter and her let’s-just-call-them-spirited granddaughters. She greeted my girls with kisses, hugs, and playful talk. Watching her with her guard down gave me unexpected pleasure and made me hope that she had cooed over me like that when I was little. My mom, in the same confident, take-charge way she had once shoved pillows into broken windows to protect against hail, organized my overstuffed closet of struggle and strife into a single drawer of perspective. Her poised manner and level-headed tone said to me: Let’s take care of this crisis now, we can panic/cry/get angry later, just as she had behaved during the crisis of the storm earlier in her life.
As if in a three-legged race, my mom and I hobbled to the finish line. During these weeks under my mother’s wing, I benefited and learned from her resilience and perseverance. As her daughter, these qualities had sometimes seemed stoic and unfeeling. But as an adult and a mother myself I saw them anew, as wise, capable, and strong.
When reflecting on those early years, I joke that my girls were colicky because their powerfully charged souls simply couldn’t abide the helplessness of infant bodies. Or that perhaps they were trying to inform me, through the language of colic, that they had not chosen their human lives simply to make me proud but had their own desires, hopes, dreams, and life purposes. Certainly their colic blew away a belief I had held that having children would be like making instant coffee: add water, mix, get happiness. The error of this belief lay within me — how I entered motherhood, placing my desire for happiness in their tiny laps, thinking they would make me whole in a way I had not been able to do for myself. If their infancies had been easier, I might have continued living vicariously through them, using their behavior and accomplishments in the world as a reflection of not only my parenting skills but my own value as an individual.
My girls would not accept that kind of half-life. They would only accept a genuine love with no requirements. Maybe because of our colicky beginnings my love for my children then and now is not the instinctual, picturesque love I had once imagined mothers had but more of a cultivated love that overwhelms me every single day. Ultimately, my girls saved me from a lifetime of believing that conditional love is all I deserve or all I’m capable of giving.
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