My little strong new(ish) daughter is breastfeeding on a pillow on my lap and its the best seat in the house. She's brought me new stuff - new thoughts, new emotions, new me. Her hands have grown; they look almost big! In the last ten weeks, plus the nearly 10 months it took to make her, I've grown too - so much bigger now! And not just my middle...
I want to write here about baby stuff, preggers stuff, and all the stuff inbetween. I want to write about choices, because it's an interesting word, with some strange permutations as far as I can make out.
As soon as that hugely tiny new potential person takes hold in your belly, you're riddled with new choices to go with her. Medicine seems to be oddly interested in the goings-on in there, and there's doctors for every occasion. Doctors to scan, doctors to inject, doctors to poke about, doctors to cut and suction and birth, doctors to help and hinder. I liked some of it. The sight of that delicately beautiful curve of spine on the nineteen week ultrasound, the little leggy blob on the eleven week one were the happiest pictures I've seen. The doctor who said, "You have one baby' changed my world - I have a BABY in there?! Being pregnant is one thing, but a BABY?! And the one who said, "Here's your baby!" and held aloft a tiny slimy whitish person with wriggling thin limbs and a keen face who is the love of my life, of our lives ... I like that doctor. But the one who prescribed antibiotics while I was breastfeeding, assuring me they were safe, information which clashed with what I later researched ... hm, not so sure. Particularly for an infection that turned out not to exist.
Maybe then it's as much about the news they have as about what they do. But regardless, there are so many lollies to choose from now. Tests, anyone? Amniocentesis? Induction for one? Vaccinations galore for you, Madame?
Already I've made some choices that I wouldn't have if I knew what I know now. I wouldn't allow that monster Syntocinin into my body to kick the baby out of my belly again. Not when she was demonstrably well and happy in there, hiccuping and squiggling, when my pregnancy was just an unliked length. I am sure, though, that I won't allow those tiny needle pricks of vaccine into her precious body, and that's a choice that's made harder by emotion. Why is that one about guilt? Why is it not just another decision about an invasive medical procedure like all the others?
That's where the concept of choice gets murky, sticky, because there's free, knowledgeable decisions, and there's shoulds, musts, why nots. There's humped backs from the tiniest questions, there's eating guilt from the non- herd decision.
But, there's right for me. Hopefully I'm doing that.
Back to my baby, who needs me more than internet world does right now!
No comments:
Post a Comment