A few days after Kitty had died, I found myself lying curled up on the kitchen floor, at 4 in the morning, convinced that we’d lose the baby in Shanthala’s womb again, that Shanthala would also die and that there was nothing I could do about it. I was terrified, crying and I could feel my heart beating so hard and fast. I called a friend in India but could not reach him. I hung up not knowing what to do. A few minutes later, I told myself that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life terrified like this. I realized that I had even less control in life than I had thought. That was an epiphany.

Fear. Along with death, it is one of the great unmentionables in life. We tiptoe around it, we allude to it and though we run our lives driven by it, we won’t openly admit to it or talk about it. Parenting comes with one of the biggest fears of all, the fear of losing a child. The primary fear of parents, of even my parents generation was of losing the child. Even today, the under 5 infant mortality rate (U5MR) is significant in many parts of the world, of the order of 185-285 deaths per 1000, though the world average has decreased from 198 in 1960 to 83 in 2001. India has the highest absolute numbers of infant mortality and maternal mortality according to a report by the organization, Save the Children. After Kitty’s death, I came to the realization that an unspoken reason why many parents have a second child is to help them overcome the potential loss of one child. That fertility rates are higher in places where infant mortality is higher bears out my observation. When I asked some parents about this, they admitted that it was a factor though they didn’t openly talk about it.

I sometimes wonder how I’ll survive if Maya were to die, if I’ll survive. A good friend’s brother-in-law lost their two year old daughter to SIDS. They had left her sleeping with her grandparents and gone out. When they came back, she was dead, she had never woken up. I wonder sometimes how they go through life, how they find the strength to wake up each morning. But thanks to my 4 am epiphany and Kitty, this is not really a fear I live with.

One of the myths of parenting is that if we’re good parents, bad things can’t happen to our children. If bad things do happen to our children, we’re somehow responsible for it, there was something that was in our power to affect the outcome, but we failed to exercise that power. We so accept this myth that I think many parents are unable to openly admit to the feeling of powerlessness, of the illusion of control, of the fear of walking at the edge of the precipice all the time. As a result, we express our fears through behaviors that cause our children to suffer from different forms of neuroses. The lines from a Louis Simpson poem “The Goodnight”, speak to the dangers of such expressions:

A man who cannot stand
Children’s perilous play
With lifted voice and hand,
Drives the children away,
Out of sight, out of reach,
The tumbling children pass;
He sits on an empty beach,
Holding an empty glass.

While I think I lost a major part of my fear that night on the kitchen floor, the feeling hasn’t entirely left me. All through the pregnancy, I found myself keeping an emotional distance from the outcome because I was afraid of another loss, so soon after Kitty’s death. Of course, Kitty’s death had numbed me too. Typically, I like to read up a lot about whatever it is that I’m going through. But I didn’t read up much about pregnancy. I didn’t read about all the possible things a mother can do to ensure that she has a healthy baby. I didn’t read up about labor and delivery, of what it maybe like to be present at a caesarian section. I didn’t want to know all the possible things that could go wrong and then add my fears to Shanthala’s labor. I decided that I’d worry when someone told me to. That made for a very enjoyable labor and birth for both of us.

When Maya emerged, I didn’t check to see if she had the right number of toes and fingers, that her face might be misshapen or that she may be damaged in some way. Apparently most men count the fingers and toes when they first see a new-born baby. I said to myself that if something was wrong, I’d know about it soon enough and therefore all the worry of how she might turn out was useless.

The fear started the second day after she was born. All infants lose weight after they’re born and it takes them upto two weeks to regain their birth weight. Western medicine has decided that it is not OK for a new-born infant to lose more than 10% of her birth weight. I have not been able to obtain the data that forms the basis of this diagnosis. Maya was weighed every night, just after midnight, when we had finally managed to put her to sleep and were just shutting our exhausted, sleep deprived eyes. A nurse would come in, start undressing her to weigh her, which would wake her up and we’d all be up for another hour or two with an unhappy baby. I don’t know why they chose to come at midnight or at a time when the baby was asleep. The third day I requested them to not wake her up, that we’d call them the first time she woke up after midnight, before we fed her.

Maya lost almost 8% of her birth weight in the first three days. The pediatrician who came to visit us told us that she recommended Maya be given some formula to supplement the breast milk to reduce the weight loss. We ignored her recommendation because we had hoped that Maya would be exclusively breast fed. The next day she insisted that Maya be given formula as she had continued to lose weight. We gave in.

Thus began almost two months of fear that Maya was not drinking enough milk. We meticulously noted down how much she drank every day, when she peed and when she pooped. Every reference I could find said that a healthy, normal infant must drink about 2-2.5 times their body weight of formula. So, Maya who weighed 8.25 lbs at birth needed to drink at least 16.5 ounces of milk everyday. We had decided that even with formula, we’d only feed her when she wanted rather than on a schedule (such as every three hours which is what pediatricians in this country recommend). With this fear running inside me, I’d start worrying if she drank less. Even though she regained her birth weight in ten days, I worried if she drank less than the specified amount each day.

I scoured the web for determining the basis for coming up with 2-2.5 times number. If a baby is exclusively breastfed, how do you determine how much milk the baby nurses, I wondered. I found references that said that this number was for formula-fed babies and that it didn’t directly translate to breast fed babies. I also read that breast fed babies tended to gain weight slower than formula-fed babies, that the growth charts carried in pediatrician’s offices were based on formula-fed infants and that they were based on white caucasian kids. Maya was Asian and also was not exclusively breast fed or formula fed. So how was I to interpret all this information ? My fears of how much nutrition Maya was getting didn’t subside till she was almost three months old.

The other big fear was of of her falling ill at so early an age. So I insisted that people wash their hands before even touching her, demanding it even of Shanthala’s parents who were living with us. If someone wanted to visit Maya, I’d ask them if they were ill. When one of Shanthala’s cousins from out of town came to visit us, he came with his cute three year old son. I had asked Shanthala to check if her cousin and his family was free of illness before they came to visit. She didn’t and I was furious. I refused to take Maya down to meet them, pretending that we were asleep. When her father came to inform us that they were here, I asked him if the kid had a cold. “No, he doesn’t”, he replied, “But you can give him one if you want to”. I didn’t see the humor.

Maya started sleeping through the night when she was five weeks old. A good seven hours, from midnight till seven. Whenever anyone asked if I was getting enough sleep at night, I told them about her sleeping hours and I’d get shakes of wonder, of envy. You’re really lucky, they’d say, we didn’t get a whole night’s rest till our daughter was almost nine months old. So I awoke one night to find Shanthala staring intently at Maya’s sleeping form. Is everything OK, I asked. How can this five week baby sleep through the night, she said, something must be wrong. So in the middle of the night, I sit there explaining to her why I think she’s wrong and that everything’s well with Maya. The fear, awkwardness and insecurity of first-time parents is well-known.

Shanthala says that she worries about the future, especially of Maya having some kind of learning disability or developing that dreaded scourge of modern parents, autism. According to the famous Lucille Packard Children’s hospital, the number of school kids in the Bay Area diagnosed with autism has increased by 150% between 2001 and 2007. It almost seems an epidemic in California. I don’t worry about it too much, at least not now. I don’t know what I can do to prevent her from developing any of these problems.

Louis Simpson concludes his poem “The Goodnight” about learning to live with our fears as a parent, about never letting them become the guiding light in raising our children, that even though we maybe afraid, we must hope that each night is always only good.

Who said that tenderness
Will turn the heart to stone ?
May I endure her weakness
As I endure my own.
Better to say goodnight
To breathing flesh and blood
Each night as though the night
Were always only good.

Related posts:

1. On Parenting: The Initial Months
2. Two Months Into The Adventure of a Lifetime