It’s a Girl

By the numbers, Delphine is a pretty special baby. At her four-month checkup this week, the Plumpster was off the charts for weight, busting the scales at 17 pounds, 6 ounces. She already has the distinction of belonging to the select club of breech babies; we jokingly call this the Five Percenters, since only 3 to 5 percent of full-term babies are breech. And now she’s put her mom into another unpleasantly special category: the up to 12 percent of pregnant women who develop (or develop problems with) gallstones during pregnancy. Like Groucho Marx, this is not a club you want to join.

The culprit? Pregnancy hormones that slow down the gallbladder’s usual functioning, increasing the risk of developing stones. But while 12 percent of pregnant women sounds high — and the complications of having gallstones, once they start passing out of the gallbladder, can be fatal — nobody in the maternity world seems inclined to put that PSA out there.

None of the pregnancy or new-baby books we read mentioned gallstones as a risk factor. Neither did our childbirth-class teacher, nor the moderator of our drop-in parenting group. And nobody in my family has gallstones. If asked, I would’ve said, “Gallstones? Isn’t that the sort of thing that old geezers like Sir Walter Scott used to get?”

So when, in early July, I started having nighttime attacks of upper back pain and nausea, I chalked it up to new-mommy stress. Not until the attacks started happening frequently, and then not going away at all, did I start to think, “Gee, maybe this is something serious.” Even then, the three doctors we consulted all shrugged and said, “Well, maybe it’s your gallbladder.”

We finally hauled the family off to the ER and did a variety of scans, which the Doc Cottle-esque attending doc looked at briefly before announcing, “You’ve got a whole bagful of stones.”

Bag lady, that’s me.

We met with a few GI docs after that, who nodded sagely and said things like, “Oh, we see someone in your situation — a new mom with gallstone problems — at least once a week.” And hospital nurses eager to show off their own gallbladder laparoscopy scars, who agreed that moms with gallstones was very common.

Apparently the medical mnemonic for gallstone risk factors is known as the 5Fs: fair, fat, female, fertile, and forty. This means that overweight Caucasian women around the age of 40 who’ve had at least one baby are at higher risk for developing gallstones.

In other words, me.

Rapid weight loss — such as the 22 pounds I dropped in the first few weeks after having Delphine — is another risk factor. So is using oral contraceptives. And if you’re Native American, Chicano, or just plain old, you’ve got risk factors for gallstones, too. Just so you know.

Plenty of folks have gallstones that don’t do anything; they just sit there, rattling around inside the gallbladder. But once the stones start passing out of the gallbladder into the intestines, they can cause problems. Best-case scenario? You pass the stones without feeling them. Worst-case scenario? The stones get stuck and infected, and you die.

The standard medical treatment is to have the gallbladder surgically removed. Other treatments focus on diet and supplements to ease the stress on the gallbladder and dissolve the stones. But by the time I figured out what was wrong with me, I had run out of time to try less invasive options.

So now, in addition to my C-section scar, I have four other scars dotted across my belly. I look like the victim of a drive-by. I kinda feel like one, too.

For those who believe that having a baby means your old life is over, let me tell you: Forget about the baby. Having gallbladder troubles is truly the end of your old life. Because while you can live without a gallbladder, it’s not exactly an unimportant organ; its job is to help digest fats. Having a tetchy gallbladder, or having none at all, means that you simply cannot eat fats the way you used to.

Unlike people who try to eat low-fat diets because they believe that dietary fat goes straight to the hips, or straight to the arteries (both questionable propositions), people with gallbladder woes have no choice: If they don’t eat a low-fat diet, they get sick. And since fats, frankly, are what make food taste good, a troubled gallbladder (or none at all) means no more bliss in the kitchen.

When we got home from the hospital, I threw out the old grocery list that had been sitting around from the previous week. Ice cream? Pâté? Bacon? Sure, I can still eat these things, in very limited quantities. But I won’t be eating them for a while, and I’ll never be able to thoughtlessly enjoy them the way I used to.

The upside? Not having to worry about developing gallstone problems during any future possible pregnancies. Because while surgery for gallstones is no picnic, surgery while pregnant is far, far worse.

A few years ago, a friend from elementary school who’s now pursuing a high-pressure career in medicine and public health started moaning about Atul Gawande. “He’s so perfect,” he complained. “He’s a successful surgeon, a popular writer for the New Yorker, and he’s apparently happily married with well-adjusted kids. I hate him.”

Much the same envious argument could be made about Jill Lepore, a female counterpart to Gawande. She’s a history professor (at Harvard, natch), another one of those New Yorker staff writers, and a mom.

Gawande doesn’t write about his family in his New Yorker pieces, but Lepore occasionally does. And in her most recent article for the magazine, “Baby Talk,” she essentially declares parents who worry about parenting to be — gasp! — navel-gazers.

Guilty as charged. But so what? If parents need to indulge in a little fretting now and then, it’s probably not harmful; on the contrary, doing a little meta-parenting, as it were, is probably beneficial.

Lepore, who naturally takes the historian’s long view, says that in the bad old days before birth control, everybody took kids for granted because they were always around. But nowadays — with the birth rate falling, the average age of the first-time mother rising, and a shrinking collective experience of child-raising — having kids has become precious, in every sense of the word. Too precious, according to Lepore:

A few years back, in “Confessions of a Slacker Mom,” Muffy Mead-Ferro admitted that during her pregnancy she did not actually buy a gizmo that was supposed to pipe Mozart into her belly; in “Dinner with Dad,” Cameron Stracher offered an account of his valiant year of getting home in time for supper. Frankly, I’d just as soon stipulate that most baby gear is worthless, stupid junk and that eating dinner with your kids is really important. Then I’d like to get back to reading the paper. But, hey, sure, amnesty, ovation, whatever gets you through the long, sleepless night.

Boo hoo for all you parents out there who are overwhelmed with, you know, parenting. Buck up already.

Lepore blames parenting blogs (all of which, she says, are nothing but confessionals), parenting magazines, and parenting memoirs for feeding the paranoic parenting monster. As for that newspaper she mentions preferring to read instead of worrying about being a parent, well, she really, really likes it — although she disses any parenting coverage associated with it, including Lisa Belkin’s popular New York Times parenting blog, Motherlode.

Sure, the concepts of parenting and childhood are, historically speaking, relatively recent concepts. But here’s the logistical leap that Lepore doesn’t mention: Just because most people had kids in the olden days, or at least grew up around plenty of them, didn’t necessarily make them better parents, or even parents at all. Familiarity, as the saying goes, can breed contempt, if not outright neglect. And it sure doesn’t breed skills.

In the first few days after Delphine was born, not a few friends stopped by who hadn’t the least idea how to hold a baby. But our knowing how — from having been around babies when we were little, and more recently, from having been around our friends’ babies — does not make us natural parents.

So we ask friends and family for parenting advice. We have several books on parenting, chosen for their moderate, practical tone. We even occasionally troll through parenting blogs, which are generally kicking with passionate comments and conversations.

Parenting magazines, on the other hand — with a few exceptions, such as Brain, Child and Hip Mama — usually feel frustratingly skimpy and annoyingly chipper. And yes, we like the newspaper, too — but we don’t subscribe to one anymore.

Maybe if we were Lepore’s age — not that much older than us, frankly — we’d still be taking parenting for granted, third on the list of activities behind pursuing a career and reading the newspaper. But we don’t, in part because we’re typically trying to do all three of those activities at once. We need all the help we can get.

Buried in Lepore’s article is a faint call to legislative arms, in which she stops pointing a finger at parenting publications and instead points it at society:

Employers are seldom asked to accommodate family life in any meaningful way; employees do all the accommodating, which mainly involves, especially for women, pretending that we don’t actually have families. Everyone has a story about how painful that is. It’s also crazy, and maddening, and unfair. We’ve all got stories to tell, but stories aren’t going to rewrite employment law.

So how are we supposed to reform society so that parenting is no longer weird, and we’re no longer struggling with it quite so much? Good question.

In the past week or so, Delphine has finally — finally! — started to look at books when we read them to her. Sure, OK, she’s probably not getting much out of the exercise besides pretty pictures and the sound of our voices. But still, it’s nice to have a new activity to do with her.

Most of the children’s classics we grew up with are available these days in board-book format: Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Goodnight Moon. These books are classics in part because they’re satisfying for adults as well as kids. One hand-me-down board book, however, made me cringe: Nippy the Speedy Dinosaur, by Janet Allison Brown. There’s good reason why this book isn’t a classic.

Nippy begins promisingly, with a zippy green girl dinosaur (complete with punk pink hair, of all things) exulting in her ability to fly through the air. A plump red T-Rex dinosaur named Chomper admires her skill and tells her so. Here’s the text from the last two pages of the book:

Chomper asked Nippy to teach him how to fly. But Nippy couldn’t imagine big Chomper floating in the air.

“I think everyone will be a lot safer if you stay on the ground,” she laughed. “Stick to chomping, it’s what you do best!”

I scraped the edges of the book, thinking that there must be more pages to the story — Chomper demonstrating that he can indeed fly, or Chomper discovering that he has other worthy skills besides flying. (Isn’t this the lesson of the hit movie “Kung Fu Panda,” after all?) But no, that was the end of the story — a bitchy acrobat with blue eyeshadow and mascara humiliating the poor lumbering fatso.

I should’ve taken warning from the book’s early pages, which show Chomper chomping on an anachronistic pie. Because, of course, all fat creatures are fat simply because they lack the willpower to stop eating too much, right? Hardly. (And all dinosaurs lived in a desert environment, according to Brown.)

“Baby, I think this book is going into the Goodwill bag,” I told Delphine.

Caleb took a look and said, “Why Goodwill? I don’t think anyone should be allowed to read this book.”

So here we have a journalist (me) already editing her three-month-old’s book collection, and a librarian (Caleb) advocating book burning.

Yikes!

Unlike us, Baby D. is often at her perkiest first thing in the morning. Here she is doing her best flirty smiling for her dad.

Around the seventh month of pregnancy, we borrowed two baby items from our friends Rachael and Stan: an automatic breast pump, and a cosleeper. Both items turned out to be essential parenting tools, but not necessarily in the ways we expected.

The breast pump — a misnomer if there ever was one, since the device deflates instead of inflates — has proven most useful not as a machine that allows Mom to resume the daily office grind or have an evening out, but as a gadget that solves the problem of excessive milk production. And the cosleeper served mostly as a gargantuan nightstand for the first couple of months before getting shoved into a corner of the bedroom and turned into a bassinet.

As most of our friends who’ve used a cosleeper told us, you might start out with the baby in the cosleeper, but you’ll end up with the baby in your bed. This has turned out to be true not just over the course of the past four months, but over the course of each night. We might get Delphine to sack out around 9 or 10 p.m. in the bassinet-cosleeper, but by the wee hours, after middle-of-the-night nursing, she usually joins us.

Sometimes she’s a little fussy after feeding, or she seems a little chilled, or the cat is inside and we don’t want to shut the bedroom door to keep the cat out and the stuffy air in. And occasionally Delphine has trouble with spitting up and gagging, so we put her with us to keep the proverbial eye on her.

But often the real reason is simply that we miss her. Sleeping in her bassinet on the other side of the room just seems so far away.

As with baby wearing, we didn’t realize that cosleeping was so politicized. The baby’s fussy and calms down in a baby carrier? Heck, stick her in there and skip the rhetoric about how wearing your baby makes you a righteous parent. The baby sleeps comfortably in your bed and makes you feel better about her? Sheesh, put her in there until she’s too big for it and don’t worry about the nervous nellies who say cosleeping is dangerous.

Delphine sleeps in the middle of our bed, her head between our pillows (both firm memory-foam thingies from Ikea) and her body mostly above the covers. In theory, this pillows-and-covers strategy will prevent her from getting smothered. So far, the practice has proven pretty successful.

But at some point in the next few months, the combination of Delphine’s increasing size and the restless kicking she does in her sleep will boot her out of our bed. And the bassinet that she naps in right now — the former cosleeper, remember — will soon be too small for her. Which means that she’ll have to start sleeping in her own crib. In her own bedroom. Far away from us. Sob.

Being a first-time parent means having baby on the brain pretty much all the time. Even when I’m not thinking consciously about the baby — usually when she’s asleep and I’m trying to catch up on the life I used to have — I’m still thinking about the baby.

Take the recent memoir The Unheard, for example. Several people recommended this book to me because it’s by a deaf guy — I’m hard of hearing, he’s hard of hearing, so we must have lots in common! OK, sure, the author has thoughtful things to say about being deaf. But what really broke my heart while reading this dark, hilarious, sad book was its constant reminders of Africa’s ongoing health-care crisis and how it affects, most grievously, its children. A two-year-old baby that only weighs five pounds? Knowing that a third of the kids you meet under the age of five will die before reaching that birthday marker? Grim.

On an airplane flight last December, I watched the costume flick “The Duchess.” The movie stands out for me now for two reasons: its searing scene of baby abandonment, and the fact that it’s one of the last movies I got to watch all the way through before having a baby myself. As a colleague with a five-year-old daughter pointed out recently, “I haven’t watched a movie in about, oh, five years.”

Available time or no, I still find myself thinking repeatedly of two very different films: “Witness” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

The first has the dubious honor of being a movie that my own mother literally could not sit through — not for the cowboy shoot-’em-up violence at the end, but for the child-in-danger violence at the beginning. “Witness” came out in 1985, when my little brother was two years old. My mom couldn’t help but link the little boy — the witness of the title — with her own vulnerable baby, and it was just too terrifying.

The second isn’t really about a man who knew too much — like, say, a scientist who figured out the meaning of the universe. Rather, this Alfred Hitchcock classic is about a man who accidentally learns something about a murder and whose son is kidnapped to keep him quiet. James Stewart plays the man who knew too much, but the movie belongs, as they say, to Doris Day, who plays his wife. Not only does she get the big climactic scene in Royal Albert Hall all to herself, she’s also the mama bear who, in her determination to find her little boy, gives the movie its quintessentially Hitchcockian touch of urgency.

There’s a creepy scene early on, when Day finds out that her son has been kidnapped and goes into hysterics; Stewart, playing a doctor who happens to carry tranquilizers on vacation in North Africa, force-doses her with a sedative to calm her down. Scarier still is the scene at the end of the movie where Day, having found the house where she knows her son is being hidden, sings the perky-yet-depressing song “Que Sera Sera” to call him out of hiding.

Why this strange song? Why is she forced to grin and bear it, literally, when all she really wants to do is rip that house to shreds in order to find and save her kid?

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera