Medication Would Have Been Helpful

Bear with me, as this will be quite a round-a-bout way of story-telling. Wait, what? You expect that of me? Pshhhh.

Did you know that Mia was a little bit premature?

She was, by about 4 weeks, and the only harm it caused was that she had to stay in the hospital on a bili-light for 6 days. 6 days of me descending into a pit of post-partum depression, which I didn't come out of for months. The hospital was filled with people -- nurses, visitors, patients milling around -- yet I was lonely. I was not myself. I was sad and weepy and terrified. I couldn't hold my baby because she was all strapped into the bili-bed, but I wasn't even sure I really wanted to, anyway. I felt no connection with her yet other than knowing that I had to take care of her, which I threw myself into with all the gusto of a depressed new mom: uncertainly and with much paranoia.

Each time we took Mia off the bili-light, we had instructions to turn the power off. In order for the machine to correctly record the number of hours per day she'd spent lit up with the warm, blue bulbs, it had to know when she was hooked up to it. And in my weepy, morbid state of mind, I thought bad thoughts each time we turned the machine off to feed or change Mia. I dreaded flipping the switch, because the bili-bed's constant, droning hum would slowly power down into silence. To me, it sounded like a life-support machine being unplugged. It felt like I was taking my baby off life-support, and I cried every time.

When we finally got home from the hospital, my state of mind didn't improve quickly. By the time Mia was one month old, we still hadn't given her a pacifier. I was determined to let nothing stand in the way of a good breastfeeding latch, and since Mia had a bit of a rough time learning to latch on, I refused pacifiers for her. I never intended it to be a long term refusal; I always assumed we'd use one eventually. But when the day came that we finally wanted to try a pacifier, it didn't work quite like we'd planned.

After a few tries of plugging a pacifier into little Mia's mouth, she still wasn't having any of it. It made her mad -- she wanted to suck with a purpose, and the binkie just wasn't cutting it. Justin held it to her face while she continually tried to push it out, and I sat across the room, fretting. Soon, though, it worked. She seemed to be sucking on it contentedly, so Justin cautiously moved his hand away.

And that's when I lost it.

Her tiny little head -- premature, remember? -- was almost completely taken over by the plastic pacifier. It covered her mouth from nose to chin, cheek to cheek, and made her look like a robot...a machine...something unnatural. A picture flashed through my mind of the mask worn by Hannibal Lecter, and I flipped out. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I immediately put an end to the binkie. It wasn't right for us. It wasn't worth it to plunge my fragile post-partum mind into crazyville, just for Mia to have a pacifier.

I packed the few binkies we had into a box of unused baby toys, and hid them away. Mia played with them a few times as she grew up, but she never 'used' a binkie.

Lauren never even tried one. Much like she never tried a bottle. It was all mama, all the time, around Heavenly house, and it was just the way I liked it. Although I didn't have the same bluesy mood with Lauren, I felt it was better to not tempt the memory of Hannibal Lecter's mask on my child. The binkies remained in the box of baby toys, and my girls maintained an artificial-nipple-free existence.

But now. Oh, now. Everything's changed.

Lauren found the box of baby toys a few months ago, and it was like Christmas. Toys?! Bottles?! Pacifiers?! I let her keep a few baby things out, thinking she'd use them with her baby doll, which is her favorite toy, by far. She's a consummate little mother, that one, and I had no problem letting her haul off a binkie or two for her baby.

Except, she doesn't use them with her baby. She uses them for herself. And she's grown quite attached. Over the past month, she's gone from playing with the binkie for a few minutes a day, whenever she happened across it, to seeking it out at all times and pleading to sleep with it. She cries for its companionship. She quiets and calms when it's in her mouth. She loves the binkie.



And, lord help me, I can't refuse it to her. (Other than at bedtime -- I refuse it then, for sure. It's been lost behind the crib slats more than once, and that's a nightmare. No thanks.) It's like she knows I don't want her to grow out of babyhood, so she's reverting to babyish behavior. KNOWING I won't mind.

Because I'm a spineless sap.

With a mixed-up head.

But seriously. Is she adorable, or what?






Tell me I'm not the only one whose postpartum depression caused the imagining of such disturbing images. Or, if you were perfectly sane and healthy, feel free to just smile and nod at this terrifyingly strange history of mine.