This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Password:

You were five days old and five weeks early and you almost died.

When the doctors and nurses rushed into your room, this little world within a world within the NICU, your dad and I looked at each other and we knew it was bad. We were told to go to the family room while they called in an emergency x-ray. As you howled in pain, in confusion, in trying to understand life at five days old while your intestinal walls filled with air bubbles that almost burst through into your gut, your dad and I looked at each other and we vowed:

No Googling about NEC.

Only when you were in the clear did we finally do the reading, did we look at the statistics. Only then did we realize how incredibly, amazingly, blessedly lucky we were.

“Necrotizing enterocolitis is a serious disease with a death rate approaching 25%.”

When we tell people about why you were in the hospital so long, when we talk about NEC, we talk about morbidity and mortality rates. We don’t actually say, “Our son almost died.”

But you very nearly did. We don’t drop the “D” word like it’s some taboo, some Voldemort, some verböten verbiage never to be uttered in front of the newly born.

You almost died.

In another Universe, in another version of events, you’d have been gone just as quickly as you came into our lives.

[break]

In the almost two months since you’ve arrived, I wonder if now, I feel like I have to step up my game for every moment you’re awake, for every breath you take. Even with the NEC long gone, that 1 in 4 statistic still looms large in my mind. It makes us vigilant, sometimes even hyper-aware. We worry over every fussy feeding, the spit up, the gas. Is it too little of a poopy diaper? Too much poop? The crying – my G-d, the crying after he eats…

We worry and we think, “My G-d, is it coming back?”

[break]

Sometimes I feel that because we almost lost you, we have no right to complain. Because we dealt with infertility, I should be a trooper about all of this.

That we should cherish every single second of your life – and we do, believe me, we do: when your room is dark and quiet and you’re nursing at my breast, your breath punctuated by that soft suckling sound and the tears roll silently down my cheeks as I blink them away, thanking G-d with every breath of mine that you’re here, my G-d you’re really here now after all this waiting, after all this time, after all the heartache and pain and shots and morning sickness and gestational diabetes and NICU and NEC you are really and truly here…

Who am I to talk about how overwhelmingly exhausting, challenging, confusing and bewildering it is to be a new parent?

Who am I to complain?

Who am I to voice anything except praise and humble joy at this living answered prayer in my arms?

[break]

I have never known guilt like I have in the last eight weeks.

I should have taken better care of myself so he wasn’t born early. I shouldn’t have gone out shopping with my mom in the morning the day he got sick in the NICU so I could have seen that something was wrong earlier. After everything with the NEC, I shouldn’t be giving him formula two times a day. I should be producing more milk, so that he could have gained more weight a few weeks ago so he shouldn’t even be on supplemental formula in the first place. I should answer his cries sooner instead of playing the wait-and-see game in the middle of the night. I should be picking up around the house more. I should be writing more. I should finish start my baby shower(s) thank-you notes from two months ago at this point. I should be getting out of the house more. Getting dressed on a daily basis. Showering more regularly. I should be talking to him more, engaging him more, making sure he’s developmentally okay.

Should. Shouldn’t. Should. Shouldn’t.

I vacillate between priority and obligation with no clue what the hell I’m doing at any given moment, trusting my gut as much as I can, pinging into that “mother’s intuition” that doesn’t really feel intuitive at all.

[break]

You are in the trenches when you have a baby. To the untrained eye it seems pretty straightforward and easy — you feed them, you bathe them, you pick them up when they cry — but it’s more than that. It’s perpetual motion with a generous layer of guilt and self-doubt spread on top, and that takes its toll. (Source.)

And you’re falling into a love you’ve never known. It’s like quicksand; the more you struggle the deeper you fall. Only you’re not struggling, because it’s a gorgeous catastrophe, and there’s nowhere else to go. (Source – and worth the full read.)

And while… I certainly asked myself whether I might have PPD [post-partum depression], I generally didn’t find that line of questioning helpful.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s an important question that we should keep asking ourselves and each other, and we should seek treatment unapologetically if the answer might be yes. But the problem with that question as our primaryapproach to the struggles of new motherhood is that it suggests that the post-partum experience itself is just fine, unless of course you have a legitimate clinical illness that distorts your perception of it. And the post-partum experience is not just fine. It is immensely, bizarrely complicated. It is, at various times and for various people, grueling and joyful and frightening and beautiful and disorienting and moving and horrible. There’s a lot going on there that will never make its way into the DSM V. (Source.)

We know it’s true that they grow up too fast. But feeling like I have to enjoy every moment doesn’t feel like a gift, it feels like one more thing that is impossible to do, and right now, that list is way too long. Not every moment is enjoyable as a parent…

You’re an actual parent with limits. You cannot do it all. We all need to admit that one of the casualties specific to our information saturated culture is that we have sky-scraper standards for parenting, where we feel like we’re failing horribly if we feed our children chicken nuggets and we let them watch TV in the morning. (Source.)

[break]

Body odor and personal hygiene aside, I really do need to shower more.

The sound of the water from the shower head is a kind of white noise. Between that and the bathroom fan, I can’t really hear anything when I’m in the shower. Not the noisy window air conditioners that run 24/7 because of this ungodly heat, the cats meowing for more food, the baby that cries and cries and cries, often inconsolable no matter what we do.

The shower is my retreat, my escape. A fig and honey and orange and cherry blossom body wash scented escape.

It’s the reset button. It’s when I’m washed anew, when the water washes away the dried milk, the dried spit up, the dried pee, the dried poop, the dried, salt-stained trails on my cheeks – and the still very wet tears.

The shower, a baptismal of quiet relief, however momentary, however fleeting, both blessing: “Thank you G-d, for this moment, for this child, for keeping him alive and safe” – and prayer:

“Grant me the strength to keep going.”

First, it was my friend, Neha: “Are you prepared for an Anne Hathaway Oscar win tonight?”

Then, my friend, Tom: “Whenever i see Anne Hathaway I think of Keiko Zoll. Lol”

Chrissy weighed in moments later: “…i had to post… she’s accepting her Oscar right now. Ugh. I hate her too…”

So I finally relented and acknowledged the unavoidable:

I got lots of likes and sympathetic comments. My dislike for Ms. Hathaway is well-known among my friends and has been kind of a running joke since high school. For those not in the know, let me fill you in…

Back in the misty memories of the late 1990s, well before GLEE or even High School Musical, high school kids were still singing, dancing and acting their little hearts out. I was one of them. For me, Choir, Chorale and Drama Club were my life. People, this was my art we were talkin’ about here.

Back in New Jersey, I was very priviledged to have a state that supports the arts as much as it did back then (now, not so much). I was involved in my music groups and drama club after school and on weekends, participated in select ensembles comprised of students from regional high schools. I was section leader for All South Jersey Chorus and chased after the section leader title year after year in All State Chorus. Every year, I got closer, always within the top five highest audition scores.

My junior year of high school was particularly noteworthy: if I made section leader, I was guaranteed to participate in the MENC All Eastern Honors Chorus. All Eastern only convened every other year, alternating their performances between Miami and New York City… at Carnegie Hall. When the scores came back from All State auditions, my choir teacher pulled me out of French class to give me the good news: I was going to All Eastern! I was the first student from our district to make it to All Eastern!

The bad news: “But you didn’t make section leader… but that’s okay because All Eastern takes the top TWO from each section!” Meaning: I had missed section leader by 3 lousy points, but I was still on my way to Carnegie Hall that spring.

The name that sat above mine: Anne Hathaway – Millburn High School.

Come that early spring of 1999, I got to meet Anne in person, since our seating arrangements during rehearsal were organized by state. We chatted on and off in between pieces as we rehearsed in the Performing Arts High School where FAME was filmed. At one point, I mentioned how in awe I was of the fact that I was actually going to perform on the stage of Carnegie Hall – at sixteen no less. And what happened next is where Ms. Hathaway and I got on two very, very different ships sailing in opposite directions.

She shrugged. “Yeah, that’s pretty cool I guess. I’m going to be a on TV show in the fall and my agent said that if I really wanted to be marketable in Hollywood I need to be a triple threat, so I’m just doing All Eastern to beef up my resume.”

(Liberal 15+ year-old memory of what she said, not direct quote, just to be clear.)

I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging open. See, if you knew me when I was 16, you’d know that music – particularly vocal performance – was my life. It’s really, really hard to emphasize just how obsessed, disciplined and passionate I was about my singing.

To know that only 3 stupid points separated me from section leader, to know that she wasn’t as committed I was, to know that All Eastern was just some kind of Hollywood resume bullet point… In retrospect, I think I can understand the one about Ramses and how G-d “hardened his heart” because at that moment in my life, I was done with her as a person.

And since then, especially after the Harry Potter books and films, she became known as “She Who Must Not Be Named” in my circle of friends and family. To this day, I make a point not to watch her in film or on TV. I only watched Brokeback Mountain because I didn’t know she was in it. It took all of my resolve to sit through The Dark Knight because I was really invested in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. I refused to watch the 2011 Oscars when she hosted.

And as much as I love Les Miserables (remember, psycho-obsessed with music and theatre in the mid-90s here), no matter how much I want to see Hugh Jackman portray one of my favorite musical protagonists – I won’t see it.

Ever.

Sounds totally whacko, right?

Yeah, I know. I feel like it sounds crazier each year that passes from that moment in my life and in each retelling of this story.

But at least I’ve got proof:

Fast forward 15 years to the night she’s accepting an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. I’m sure Amy Adams, Sally Field, Helen Hunt and Jacki Weaver can all sympathize with my tale of woe, of coming in second best to She Who Must Not Be Named.

And then, several friends this past week sent me this link:

Why Do Women Hate Anne Hathaway (But Love Jennifer Lawrence)?

“I can’t figure out why I don’t like Anne Hathaway. Or rather, why we don’t. In all the social-media fallout from the Oscars, the Best Supporting Actress winner also almost won Most Detested Figure of the Night, finishing just behind Seth MacFarlane and the idiot at The Onion who tweeted a slur about 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis…” (Read the rest here.)

My gut reactions:

1. See, it’s not just me.

2. I just planted a cultural seed of trendy-hate all those years ago.

In any event, congrats? I guess? I mean, yeah, the Oscars are Hollywood’s acclaimed masturbatory celebration of itself, but whatever, having not seen Les Miz I guess it’s well-earned?

Whatever.

I still got the NJ Governor’s Award in Vocal Music that year and she didn’t.

So really – it all washes out.

Right?