Becoming Mom

Fall 1996

Although my pregnancy at 16 wasn’t planned, once I got over the initial shock I was really excited. Yes, I was aware of the many obstacles I would have to overcome as a teenage mother, but I knew in my heart that I would be a good mother to my child. Especially after my family rallied behind me.   Finally the day came and I delivered my daughter.  I pushed and pushed for two hours and when she finally came, I was startled by the reaction of the doctor nurses my parents and the baby’s father.  He began to pass out, which sort of made me laugh!  But, I stopped when I saw the faces of everyone else.  They wisked the baby away and began a thorough exam with a flurry.  I could sense that something wasn’t right.   They hadn’t even told me whether the baby was a boy or a girl!  So, I started to panic.  What was happening?  What could be wrong?  I could hear my baby crying from the other side of the room.  But they hadn’t even shown the baby to me yet.  My mom and dad were talking to me and saying everything was ok and it would all be fine.  What would be fine?!  What’s wrong?  Is my baby ok?  One of the nurses came over and gently explained that my daughter (it’s a girl!) was born with a birth defect called a cleft lip and palate.  She would need surgery…I couldn’t help but interrupt her – Is she ok?  Is it correctable?  That was all I needed to know.  It was a correctable defect.  As the hospital staff explained later in detail,  she would need a series of surgeries lasting into her teen years to correct the deformity.  After determining that the cleft was her only defect, my nurse Annie finally placed my beautiful daughter into my arms! What a precious gift I had been given. She was absolutely perfect, even with her lip and palate incomplete. It was a definite adjustment, becoming a mother. Certainly having a special needs child didn’t make it any easier. She choked a lot on her bottles the first few days, and she spit up at least half of everything she ate for a good 4 months. There were lots of visits with specialists and her first surgery was scheduled when she was only 3 months old. I was scared out of my mind the entire time, but she had a great doctor whom I had complete trust in. I waited so anxiously in the waiting area, trying to stay calm, but pacing a lot of the 2 1/2 hours the surgery took to repair her lip. I knew it was going to change her appearance, but I was not prepared for what I saw when the nurse took me back into the recovery room. My smiley bundle of energy was laying in the bed, her face all swollen, especially around her mouth where the doctor had repaired the defect in her lip. Every few seconds a tiny whimper would escape.  One of the nurses turned and picked her up to place her into my arms. When I looked up at her, I realized I knew her! What a relief to have someone I knew back there…but it wasn’t enough. Another nurse guided me to the rocking chair while I was quietly crying, holding my daughter so carefully. Susie, the nurse who was a family friend, asked if there was someone else in the waiting area I would like her to get for me, and then she went out and brought my mom in for me. I feel a little foolish about that now…I was a mom, crying for my mom. I guess it makes a little bit of sense though, I was just a kid who had a kid. My daughter has since had 5 more surgeries for her birth defect, and will need at least 1 or 2 more in the next few years. She is the greatest patient, always remaining optomisitc and never complaining about the inconvenience or about any pain. She does everything the doctors tell her to, so her recovery is as quick as possible. She is not embarrassed or ashamed of her condition, she embraces it. It makes her special, she says. Not that she wasn’t already special enough!