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The thing about trauma triggers is that they create a break in one’s pathway through life beyond which we cannot easily pass in the present moment.  They always come because the trauma from the past has not been able to resolve itself within us.

Today might be one of those tests of the healing power of writing.  Will I be more whole at the end of this post than I am right now as I start it?

My dear daughter who is pregnant with her firstborn, a son who will be named Connor, who was due to pop into this world on April 20^th.  Because of a surgery my daughter had last year everyone has known from the beginning that he would be born c-section.  All has been well through the pregnancy, and all is well with mother and baby at this moment.  The only problem is that my daughter’s water broke last night and her labor began early.

In today’s world of modern medicine I guess any delivery after 34 weeks is considered to be very low risk, even though the babies have to spend the first two weeks of their lives not cuddled within their loving mother’s tender arms, but instead have to live inside a neonatal intensive care ward being watched over as their temperature is artificially regulated as their lungs continue to develop.

There are evidently times when a person can know too much.  I know how critically important mother-infant bonding is to the well-being of both baby and mother.  One of the biggest risk factors there is for attachment disorders is complications at birth.

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So this brings me head-on to my own trauma triggers and my natural tendencies to overlay my past experiences onto a situation in the present that really is NOT about me, and in fact really has nothing to do with me, even though this infant is my first grandchild.  I am not his mother, and what happened to me and my firstborn daughter has nothing to do with either of THESE children – my daughter or her son.

Last night when I spoke with my daughter, who lives well over a thousand miles away from me (I’m on the Mexican border and she’s nearly on the Canadian border), I could hear all the love and connection in that hospital room where my daughter and baby have to live for as long as it takes for this process to play itself out.  My son, soon to be 25, is out of the Air Force and moved in to stay with his sister and brother-in-law in their home a week ago.  He was there.  My oldest daughter was also there.  Father of the baby was there.  His very best friend, like a brother, was there, so excited that he could barely contain himself!

So much love.  So, so much love.

It is such a miracle to me that given my own past of an infant-childhood of 18 long years of hatred and abuse from the first breath I took that I could have participated in the creation of a family where there really is NOTHING but love between my three children and those who love them.  While I know it really isn’t a miracle in some sort of objective, detached way, but rather is a consequence of lots of choices that everyone has BEEN ABLE to make along the way that were so different from the unconscious ‘choicelessness’ that was the way of my mother and father regarding me.

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My daughter has been given antibiotics.  She was given a shot to stop the labor.  She is not allowed to leave the hospital now.  The clock is ticking.  Everyone will do whatever is in their power to keep that little boy, who is a healthy six pounds, 11 ounces, inside of his mommy for as long as is safely possible.  Nobody knows now if that will be 3 more hours or three more weeks.

My daughter has excellent insurance, but no paid maternity leave and very high bills.  Her husband is underemployed, and like nearly every young family they have little savings and already worry about daycare and separation of mother and child because my daughter will have to go back to work shortly after Connor is born.  I certainly am poor and have nothing to offer them financially.

My daughter and her husband are in their early thirties.  They waited to have children until they were more mature, and I can count absolutely on their maturity.  That is something I did not have when I got pregnant, unmarried, at 18.  My daughter does not have a background of trauma and abuse.  She does not have an attachment disorder.  But what she evidently now will have is a major challenge to get through the first two weeks of her son’s life without him in her arms.

My daughter is very wise, very practical and very resilient.  She and her husband are very much in love and have been together over 12 years already.  They have close and dear friends.  My daughter has a flexible and supportive work environment.  She is in good health.  There is nothing about my worrying that is helpful right now.

Yet how do we get ourselves internally to an emotional hands-off state when the need arises?  Faith and hope and trust are all about our increasing our margin of feeling safe and secure in the world no matter WHAT is going on.  Admitting helplessness and an inability to affect outcomes is never easy when there is an investment of love and caring.  I will, of course, not rest until this whole birthing drama has completed itself and everyone is fine.

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Life is full of risk factors and their corresponding resiliency factors.  As parents, we continually work to build up the latter while trying in any way we can to lessen the possibility of the former.  Giving birth to a preterm baby is a risk factor.  Interference with the natural bonding process at birth is a risk factor.  Even the fact that in our nation we do not put preterm babies into rocking incubators is a decreased resiliency factor for the infant.  I would want to send my daughter links like these, which of course I won’t:

Tips on Sensory Stimulation of Your Premature Infant in the NICU

Common Drug For Stopping Preterm Labor May Be Harmful For Babies

Infant Massage Research

INFANT HOSPITAL BED

“At birth, the rich intrauterine environment is suddenly replaced with a whole new world of sensations. The gamut of stimuli given the fetus before birth suddenly stops. Recent investigations indicate that kinesthetic stimuli such as touching, movement, sound and definition of space, stimuli provided by rocking.”

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My daughter’s life is hers.  I can’t be up there with her, which of course is hard.  It is hard knowing that I, as her mother, have such a trauma-changed body-brain that I’m not much good, honestly, in any kind of crisis.  That makes me mad and sad, but it’s a reality.

The other part of this relates to the ‘preoccupied insecure attachment’ pattern I mentioned in my recent post.  My own birthing experiences with my first born were traumatic.  Her current circumstances are triggering all my memories of that experience.  Most simply put, it all went something like this:

I was oblivious at 18 when I left home both about the 18 years of abuse I had just survived.  I had no frame of reference that would have allowed me to know how terribly hurt I was.  Four months out of Naval boot camp I was pregnant.  I carried the baby with no family support, not even from the father.  I was terrified about the future, and didn’t know if I could keep my child.

I counseled with a social worker through the pregnancy who told me that I did not have to rush to make any decisions.  She told me that I even could wait until the baby was born, hold the infant in the hospital, and make my decision then.

Because I conceived while still in the military (in those years a woman was thrown out if she got pregnant, married or not), the military was committed to covering my delivery.  I entered Balboa Naval Hospital in hard labor on a Monday afternoon.  I was left in hard labor, all alone, until late Wednesday afternoon before they finally decided to take X-Rays to find out what was wrong.

My daughter’s head was pushing hard against my spine and could not come out on her own.  The treatment I received during my extensive labor was anything but kind or compassionate, or even helpful.  When they decided to take the baby by turning her with forceps, they gave me a spinal block.  Once she was born, the doctor ripped the afterbirth out of my body.  I remember the flashing stabbing pain and then I was gone.  I woke up late the following Saturday, having spent the interim days unconscious and hemorrhaging.

I had friends who had driven me to the hospital but because they were not family the hospital refused to release any information to them about what had happened to me or to the baby.  I didn’t dare tell my parents I was delivering.  Their reaction to my pregnancy had been abusive and terrible.  Obviously I could have easily died in there and nobody would have known.

Once I was placed in a regular hospital room I waited for my daughter to be brought into me.  I watched one by one while all the other babies were wheeled down the hallway past the doorway of my room in their little bassinets to their mother as I eagerly waited for mine.  No baby came, and nobody would tell me why not.

I was an incredibly passive victim, but eventually I found my demanding rage.  Only when I began to scream, cry, yell and shout for my BABY did the pediatrician enter my room to tell me the following as he stood in the doorway of my room:  “You are an unwed mother and your baby is going to be given up for adoption.  She has a cut on her cheek for her forceps delivery, and if I allow you to touch her that cut will become infected and she will have a scar on her cheek for the rest of her life.  What prospective adoptive family is going to want a baby with a scar on her cheek?”

For the first time in my life I erupted with emotion.  I picked up the full stainless steel pitcher of water on the table next to my bed and screamed “You mother f****r” at him as I heaved the pitcher at his head.  I missed him by a fraction of an inch.  The pitcher dented the wooden door jam and crashed to the floor.  The doctor disappeared.

During the next several days I was in the hospital I was allowed to touch my healthy, beautiful nine pound baby girl only once.  In the middle of one night a nurse wrapped me in a sterile gown, put a sterile mask over my face, and quietly led me into a room off of the nursery as she settled me in a rocking chair.  She brought me my baby and a bottle of milk so I could feed it to her.

I can never describe how I felt in those few stolen moments.  But the next day, somehow, the doctor found out that nurse had broken his law and I could hear him screaming at her from a hallway away.  She came to talk to me later, apologizing from the bottom of her heart for how my daughter and I were being treated, and told me she had been put on probation.

I left that hospital without my baby girl.  She went into a foster home for the first month of her life.  But as I had stood with my face pressed to the glass of the hospital nursery window and watched my daughter – not crying, looking around as if she owned the place – I had vowed to her that if this was the kind of world she was going to get adopted into, there was nothing worse I could do to her if I raised her even though I had absolutely nothing to give her.

Nobody had told me how to prepare for a baby.  In my destitution and confused aloneness while being pregnant, I had not been able to take a single step in preparation for OUR future.  Looking back now, I can see that I might as well have been living in a next of poisonous vipers.  That’s how dark and lost and traumatized I was as a terrible abuse survivor.

I was not mentally capable of conceptualizing ANY future, let alone one that included me as a mother of a child.  Nobody helped me.  But I went home, took a city bus to the local Salvation Army office, and received an entire baby layette with hand crocheted blanket, sweater, bonnet and booties.  It had bottles and diapers, everything we needed except for what we needed most:  Love, guidance, connection, and hope for the future.

I had thought I would bring my daughter home from the foster home during the second week of her life.  There’s an entire story about what happened then, and why it took another two weeks before a social worker came to pick me up and drove me over to the foster parent’s home.  I never entered that house.  The social worker retrieved my daughter and brought her to me and laid her in my arms as I stood on the side of the road outside the social worker’s car waiting.

Thirty nine years later the rest is history.  Included now in this history is the moment-by-moment wait while my second daughter is watched over with her own tiny boy inside of her.  My heart aches knowing my own pain of separation I went through with my first newborn baby.  I see no way that my daughter and her son are not going to experience some of these feelings if he does have to stay in a preterm incubator without her.

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It is not ideal that I am not up there with my children right now, either.  What I am describing to you here is a big part of the reason I am not.  I can never magically evaporate the effects my traumatic past has had on me.  There is no magic wand that can make me forget, and no dissociation so complete that I can be in my daughter’s presence without my own emotional turmoil being present with me.

Right or wrong, I am here and she and baby are there.  I have, in effect banished myself because I know full well that I cannot predict or control how my posttraumatic stress disorder can or could or might or will manifest itself, and I want no part of the presence of my trauma in her life at this critical point in her and her husband’s new parenting experience.  I absolutely trust that they will work out every single tiny detail, each instant of this process, together – and well, no matter how this all plays itself out.

Nothing I am going through HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH MY DAUGHTER.  Nothing.  I do not wish to have any part of my trauma, as it is contained in the body of my daughter’s mother, to have any chance in HELL of contaminating or toxifying what she is going through right now.  Of course I am sad.  Very, very sad.  But this sadness belongs to the relationship I had with my own mother.  Her trauma and traumatized reactions did this to me – and now through intergenerational ripple effect is depriving both my daughter of having a happy, healthy present mother beside her right now as it deprives me of being there.

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So, where does writing this post leave me?  Mostly in a state of resignation.  My own integrity, the same integrity that has given my children a chance at a better life that they have grabbed and run with, does not let me ever lie or pretend with my children.  I am not a carefree mom.  As much as I might WISH that I could set aside all of my own problems to benefit my daughter right now, reality is that my absence is what is best for all of us.

Just because the psychotic break my mother suffered in her difficult labor with me prevented her from ever boding with or loving me, and just because the difficulties of my 18-year-old mothering life complicated my bonding with my firstborn, does not mean that my daughter NOW won’t be perfectly able to establish the vitally critical bond with her own son when he is born — even if she cannot hold him in her arms for the first two weeks of his life — that this little boy will need to experience his own life in the fullest.

But at the same time I am perhaps more consciously aware of the risk factors present, the resiliency factors needed, and of the obstacles that my daughter (and her husband) will have to overcome to create a bonding after birth with her newborn than nearly anyone else could possibly be.  When push comes to shove, and the most important priorities of life are considered, other than the most basic, fundamental necessities that staying alive in a body require, there is NOTHING in this world more important than the bond a mother has with her newborn.  NOTHING.

I think more than any other time in my life with my daughter, this time – exactly NOW – is the testing point.  Every resource she has a person will be tested, both inside and outside of herself.  Life has its critical moments, and this is certainly one of them.  I have always done the best that I possibly could to parent my children well so that they could live their own life in the best way they possibly can.

My daughter has her wings.  I know that.  She can fly.  It is my job as her mother to let her.

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