A new torture of apprehension

The day I decided to start this blog, my grandmother died.  My grandmother was my daughters’ only living great-grandparent.  We had, I guess you could say, a “strained relationship.”

 

Her only son, my dad, died of Hodgkins disease, and my grandmother purposefully created a great distance between us after that time, so that (at her specific request) I had no contact with her for several years.  She had many reasons, which I didn’t understand at all at the time and only understand a bit now.  Being a parent, I think I can only begin to grasp the immense difficulty of successfully bringing up a child into adulthood and then seeing that adult suffer for many years and eventually die.  

My grandmother and I reconnected much later, and her tears at seeing me after so many years, as well as our subsequent conversations, left me with the distinct understanding that it was never my fault, and that she loved me, without a doubt.  I am sorry that she suffered in her life. I’ll miss knowing she is there, and I’ll miss that connection to my dad and his history. There are a lot of questions I never got to ask her.  Thank goodness I still have my dad’s sisters and their children (not to mention a whole host of close and distant relations in tiny rural towns), and we’re determined to keep the good relationships that we’re still in the process of re-forming. 

In the last few weeks of my grandmother’s life, a new life was welcomed into our household. Our second daughter arrived prematurely, causing great upheaval and uncertainty for several weeks.  After weeks in the hospital, she finally came home, and what I thought would be relief somehow became instead more upheaval and uncertainty.  

Again I thought of all the parents like my grandmother who have watched a child truly suffer, from cancer or heart disease, or the wounds of war, or anything else more serious than what my relatively very-healthy baby was experiencing.  I don’t know what I can say to those parents. I just look at my tiny daughter and want all suffering, for all children, to end.  The fact that even one Children’s Hospital should have to exist is wrong.  

During my late-night marathon feeding sessions, I’ve been reading Anna Karenina for the second time.  I came across this passage the other night (my copy is a beautiful old 1939 version, given to me by my dear Aunt Mary, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett).

“What he felt towards this little creature… was a new torture of apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was so painful at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature should suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing that strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt when the baby sneezed.”  
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Why this title? It’s strange, I know. I realized as the parent of a preemie that certain words were becoming familiar to me.  These were words I’d never had any reason to know.

Fontanel: the “soft spot” on the top of an infant’s skull. At the hospital, we were instructed to keep a close eye on this spot to make sure it was not becoming recessed, indicating possible dehydration.  

Frenulum: the membrane connecting the tongue to the lower part of the mouth.  We had to have our baby’s frenulum clipped due to “tongue tie.”

These two words in particular seemed to stick in my mind, and I liked the way they sounded together.  I thought I might have some helpful or useful things to say to new parents or just to adults in general. So, here we go. I hope you enjoy it and find it enlightening, funny, or maybe even helpful.  I’ll try not to make it solely an exercise in navel-gazing.