The Survival Guide for Rookie Moms

Things you need to know that no one ever tells you is the subtitle to our book. As well as covering the obvious mom and baby topics in The Survival Guide for Rookie Moms, it was our aim to also highlight the things our comrades wished they’d known before becoming rookie moms. Some of them aren’t so pleasant, but I’m a firm believer that it helps to know what’s in store. Even so, I’ve been putting off writing this particular post, mostly because I like to try and inject a bit of humor into the topic of discussion. Then I read something that spurred me on. No laughing this week.

The subject we skirt most when talking about the arrival of a new baby is how often things don’t turn out quite as expected. I wasn’t very good at fine detail when baking my buns in the oven, so it’s a topic I’ve been forced to read up on quite extensively, yet the stats for how often things can go awry still shock me. Most of us expect to give birth to a ‘perfect’ baby, yet amazingly as many as 1 in 33 babies are born with some kind of birth defect*.

That’s not to say all those birth defects are serious – of the more than 4000 known birth defects many are treatable; fixable. Doctors can do so much to repair the glitches that happen in utero, but no parent ever wants their child to require an operation, least of all to hand over their brand new baby to the operating team.

Having been parents for only 5 months we anxiously waited for the longest 2 hours of our lives as our baby Pickle had her first patch up operation. And at age one Bowser was wearing some very attractive, very noisy ’corrective footwear’ for 22 hours a day to encourage his feet to grow straight after our pediatrician diagnosed Metatarsus adductus. Unfortunately for our poor neighbors Bowser’s new footwear coincided with us moving apartments to one with hardwood floors. With the constant clatter of a toddler on the go above their heads, they must have thought a family of tap dancers had moved in.

And we certainly weren’t the only parents dealing with not-so-perfect babies. In my small circle of friends we’ve had 5 operations on babies in their first year of life. We’ve had babies born with wonky eyes, wonky feet, hernias, laryngomalacia, and cleft lip and cleft palate (2 different children). We had a premie in NICU for weeks (1 in 8 babies are born prematurely*) and most tragically the birth of a baby who didn’t make it to see the dawn of her first day.

Then there are the more sinister mental abnormalities that aren’t obvious at birth and crop up later to bite you on the butt. My good friend first noticed her baby girl wasn’t responding ‘normally’ at around 6 months. It took until her second birthday before she was officially diagnosed with a developmental delay on the autism scale. While my friend welcomed the diagnosis that would allow the family to get the extra support and access to special needs resources they needed, she struggled to come to terms with the fact that her baby girl couldn’t be ‘mended’.

And if there’s any doubt that talking about birth defects shouldn’t be taboo read ’the post every pregnant woman should read‘ by Kristine McCormick. Kristine decided to write down everything she wished she’d known about the most common birth defect, congenital heart defect.

Having a baby is a lottery. We have no idea what hand we’ll be dealt. Some new parents have more to deal with than others, but we find a way to overcome the challenges. And no matter how broken our baby may be, they will always be perfect in our eyes.

(*N. American stats taken from The March of Dimes)

Filed under: Parenting Tagged: | anxiety, Baby, birth defects, CHD, Family, infant, Motherhood, Parenting