The Collection

Every day I get up and fight a genetically-bred natural instinct to hoard. It’s a dominant quality passed down from my mother’s side. I can remember my grandparents house having two or three rooms dedicated to floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxes and random things that their seven children passed off to them for storage. And I want to personally thank TLC and A&E for their reality docu-shows on hoarders. I think after seeing two episodes my mom went through and finally donated her stacks of unworn clothing gathering dust in her bedroom. She painstakingly washes and saves plastic food containers with lids. From butter to yogurt, she washes them and adds them to her Tupperware. That is a cabinet I dread opening in her house, so I am more than happy to recycle mine.

As a modern day nomad, one would think that I don’t have the stability to hoard things. I admit we do have boxes of things that we have just never gone through and that make move after move. I’m more of a passive hoarder in that way. But there are two items that I consciously and fastidiously cannot get rid of. The first are boxes. Hey, I move… a lot. I need those things. Appliance boxes are my favorite because the packing materials make it go back so nicely and safely. I literally have a 20-foot wall in my basement four rows high with nothing but boxes.

The most important collection is the breast milk. Lil Bit joined us in July of 2010 after her healthy, text-book pregnancy quickly turned dangerous. She was six weeks premature and the ordeal left both of us hospitalized. She was transferred to the NICU in a hospital about a mile away and I stayed in my recovery room. I could hear the babies crying in the rooms next to me, the family members coming in to visit with joy and hope in their voices. My room was quiet with the exception of IV beeps and the whir of the pump.

There I would sit, staring at her pictures on my cell phone, willing out any drop of liquid gold. When I was released I could still only visit her in her hospital, returning home to snuggle my toddler, build my own strength and try to sleep. Oh how a mother’s heart aches without her baby. To have a person grow there inside you under your heart and then be forced away from them, albeit for their own health and safety, is such a helpless feeling. All I could do to help her was build my own stamina and pump.

It was a week before she learned to breathe well enough to try suckling. It was another two weeks before she could eat without feeding tube supplements. I spent six hours a day with her at the hospital. I would go in, change her, weigh her, attempt to nurse her, weigh her again only to realize she had only taken in a small fraction of a meal, hold her during her tube feeding, sing her to sleep, lie her down, and then pump. The mmmm-chhhh, mmmm-chhhh, mmmm-chhhh of the pump became my battle cry to get her home. And within ten days, I was easily pumping 50 ounces a day. Months later, I’m down to just once or twice a day as her tummy and my supply catch up to one another. Sometimes, I still go out to the garage freezer and “manage” the collection, making sure the bags are sorted properly. I catalog in my mind just how long she will be able to have milk if something were to happen to me. Sure, it’s a morbid thought, but we went through a lot.

Today, Bit is four months old. She is healthier than I am, gaining weight and size so fast she is no longer measured by her gestational age but by her birthday. Developmental milestones do seem to be following by her due date though and hopefully she will catch up to the other babies soon enough. She is working on reaching, grasping and some days I think she will roll over at any moment. She is a very happy baby and only gets upset when she is hungry, wet, tired or has to spit up, which happens A LOT.

It may seem in my writings that she is an after thought rather than a role player but that is not the case. She just sleeps all the time so it is hard for her to inspire plot development. But she is stirring a completeness in me that I didn’t expect. And her health saga is inspiring a lot of writing I am compiling together for a series of posts on HELLP Syndrome. After I was hospitalized I couldn’t find many personal testimonies and if Balanced Rock serves no other purpose, I would like to help other families who go through the same thing understand what they may be able to expect and feel some comfort in knowing that they too will be okay.

We rarely need to use the collection these days, but when I do need to defrost a bag my mind goes back to August 5^th at 11am and see the proof of my devotion to this little baby girl. This collection does not hide under the stairs in the dark. It is one I feel proud to share with the neighbors, to say, “Hey, look what I made!”