Coming Of Age

When I think of coming to age part of me believes I’ve yet to see it. I have aspirations and I am deeply immersed in some of them. Hell I’d even made it to grad school before the pandemic made all of that come crashing down. I was a doctoral student in chiropractic college. That experience hadn’t made me though.

In my teenage years, I was a bit of a heathen. I had been married at 16 into an abusive situation by coercion. By 17 I was divorced and emancipated, soon after I dropped out of school. I was heavy into all the dumb things teenagers find themselves immersed in. Smoking weed and hanging out with a crowd that was going nowhere fast. I quickly realized this wasn’t the environment that was going to make something of me.

I went on to get a GED and find a stable relationship. I started working at gas stations. I had even enrolled in college. It didn’t take long for my inner self martyr to rip all that apart. Eventually I found another crowd that was going nowhere fast.

I left that relationship and found another. I was used to the rolling stone type of life I had been living since my divorce. I was working at a warehouse and an autism clinic. I was enrolled in an associate degree program and I really thought I had made something of myself.

The busyness was just a distraction but you couldn’t tell me that. Funny how we think we know something in our early 20’s. The relationship resulted in pregnancy rather quickly. I was not prepared for that. To add another level, I found messages on his phone from another woman. Yeah, ready or not.

I left that relationship and slept in my car for a couple days until I found the courage to reach out to someone. I finally called my sister to come to my rescue. She was over the moon excited about the pregnancy while I was still somewhere between disbelief and mortified. She assured me it was going to be OK. I found that hard to believe with my puppy and laundry basket in my car. I picked up the rest of my things and drove over to my sister's house.

It was never part of my big life plans to have a child. I looked at the adoption process. I entertained the thought for quite sometime even though some part of me had a visceral disagreement with it. The second ultrasound revealed that my baby was in fact a boy. When I told my dad about it, I really thought I was going to be punched in the face for a moment. Oh I had dropped out of college because of morning sickness too, by this point.

My sister was with me every step of the way. She had genuine excitement that I envied most days. I was anxious, scared and had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. “This is your son” a little voice inside me kept saying. My inner critic was going wild with all the reasons I wasn’t supposed to be having babies.

My attitude didn’t shift much and I believe that had much to do with our birthing complications. I arrived at the hospital just after 4:00 am with the idea that I would have a smooth vaginal delivery just like all my relatives before me. That was far from true. 23 hours later fetal distress was coded. His heartbeat had faded from the internal monitor, of which wires were hanging out my hoohah. My medical team discovered my epidural was fading fast after placing a latex catheter (of which I have an allergy). None of this mattered. What was imperative was that it had been nearly 24 hours since my water broke and roughly 4 minutes since a detectable heartbeat. I thought anesthesia was patting my head as I screamed at the searing, burning pain. I looked up and discovered my gray faced sister peering over the curtain saying once again that it was gonna be OK.

“Why isn’t he crying?” I demanded. My sister urged me to hold on. I was nearing black out zone. What she was watching was a completely purple Mason be resuscitated on his infant gurney. I had spent 39 weeks and 6 days carrying this boy and was absolutely crushed by the silence in the room. The anesthesiologist was explaining he knew I was in immense pain but wanted me to remember my first glance and offered no further sedation until they showed me my boy. I didn’t care, I needed proof that he was living.

After the longest minute of my life, I heard the smallest whimper. The OB brought a swaddled lump up to my side of the curtain. My tiny boy winked at me. He was rushed upstairs into a NICU while I was sedated, given a transfusion and posted in recovery until I could move my toes. Have you ever tried to regain foot function after an epidural? It’s no easy feat and this was my determining factor to make it back upstairs to my baby. Between black out periods I’d ask where he was, how much he weighed and if he was ok. “Your baby is fine Miss Looper, Can you move your toes?” they’d answer.

It was not smooth sailing from there. I was threatened with another round of surgery when I struggled to stand up after a night's sleep. I utterly refused being separated from him again. I went on to struggle with postpartum depression fiercely during his first few years of life. His birth was the catalyst of my coming of age.

The birthing experience itself was rough. My little warrior has undergone so much therapy to be able to communicate. The one thing I thought I’d never do ended up being the thing that has kept me going. I’ve gotten 2 college degrees, been a member of several honor societies, and will eventually return to my doctoral work.

I have grown in so many ways it's innumerable. From that struggling, depressed mom of an infant all the way to a reiki practicing, homeschooling, crunchy mom. I have learned so much patience, love and kindness from getting to have this awesome boy as a part of my world. I’m still learning how to parent, I think all parents are. They way kids grow and develop so quickly, keeps parents constantly adapting. It’s a beautiful -yet sometimes messy- process. Taking the time to slow down and gently parent him has helped me ‘re-parent’ myself. As you can imagine from my early story, I’m doing a LOT of that.

That little blue bundle helped me come of age in so many facets I’d still be searching for without him. Nothing makes you stand toe to toe with your demons or check your destructive behavior quicker than having the smallest, yet biggest fan watching your every move.