The Book of Ruth Chapter 4: A Ruthless Homecoming

Following my attempts to squat at the hospital, I got kicked out of Casa de Civic and we made our journey home. Pro-tip: Don’t buy a car with raised edges on the sides of the seats. Not fun getting into following a c-section. We love our Subaru Legacy buuuut, yeah, unforeseen very specific design flaw for a very specific set of circumstances.

How to get into a Subaru Legacy post c-section: Turn sideways so your butt is in line with the long side of the car. Grab the door frame. Shuffle backwards. Hit head on the door frame as you lower your sore puss onto the raised edge of the bucket seat. Yelp in pain! Duck to get your head inside the car. Use your arm strength by grabbing onto the door frame and shimmying yourself into the centre of the seat. Move one foot into the car. Then the other. Phewf. Get Thomas to come around and close the door because, fuck that.

We drove home. All my thoughts were on Brisket. I was very concerned about how he would react. Would he make me pop a stitch? He is still very much a puppy in his behaviour. His excitement during greetings is overwhelming. Dude will knock you the heck over due to sheer joy at being in your presence. It’s a lot of dog coming at you. We’re working on it.

He hadn’t seen me in three days. We’d never not spent a night in the same home. My baby dog. I thought he’d bowl me over and I felt so defenceless to his overwhelming-at-times physical expression of love. Dude will hook his paw around your leg and bring you closer to him. He will not be denied.

I sat on our green, velvet chaise which took me five minutes to lower myself onto. I took in the quietness of our home. The contrast with the hustle and bustle of the hospital was shocking. I was home. It was so much better here. Why had I fought so hard to stay at the Civic? I Looked at all the baby stuff that had built up over the months. Oh right, because the baby who all this stuff belonged to was still there.

Thomas had left to pick up Brisket who had spent a glorious few days with my brother and sister in law and his favourite pup, cousin Ruby the dog. Thomas kept him leashed as he walked in. I was still so physically tender and psychologically scared of tackling the house.

The front door opened and Brisket bounded up to me while Thomas barked ‘gentle! gentle!’. He snapped to and stopped himself before he even got to me. He crept up to me and lay down beside the chaise. I didn’t know he was so sensitive. However, the day before Ruth’s birth I was at the vet asking all kinds of weird baby/dog questions. Do you think he’ll be jealous of the baby? Will he hurt her? Will he be depressed? Will he ever forgive me for having a baby that isn’t him?! The vet laughed and said “you know we call Berners Nanny Dogs, right?” And that checked out in Brisket’s behaviour towards me. He nannied me post-op. He wouldn’t even boop me with his snoot for the first week. He was so cautious. He’d stay three stairs behind me while I made my way down the flight. He’d track me with his eyes no matter where I was. He’d lay at my feet while I pumped or he would sit there staring at me. There was a lot of staring.

He had been through a lot, too. These dogs take in so much. He’d been so scared the morning of. He refused to go outside or move from his alert position at the front door when we were hurrying to the hospital. Who knows what was going on in that puppy brain of his.

We brought home one of Ruth’s incubator blankets. We’d read online that it's a good way to introduce your dog to the baby’s scent. That way they’ll recognize the baby when they come home. Thomas put the blanket in front of his snout. He sniffed it then grabbed it from Thomas, GENTLE!!!! we screamed, he nuzzled it and went looking around the house for her. After months of watching me grow and maybe hearing two heartbeats inside of me, he was also wondering when his baby would come home?

Not long after that I tackled the stairs. I don’t have anything triumphant to say about it. I thought it would be a bigger deal than it was. Same with the bed. We have a four-post canopy bed with a headboard that also has bars so I was able to pull myself up, not unlike the hospital bed. All the worries that had induced my panic attack didn’t come to fruition. That’s the fun part about anxiety, it feeds off of hypotheticals that keep you in a possible future instead of what you’re facing in the present.

Tip: put a softy soft nursing-friendly delivery gown or nightgown on your registry. Or buy one for yourself. Kyte has some glorious ones. Those first few days, I didn’t want to wear anything involving pants, elastics, or something touching me. Also Motrin and Tylenol are your friends. I’m still poppin' those buds.

By day 5, I was feeling a lot more like myself. I was pumping 8 times a day. We’d gotten into a steady rhythm of visiting Ruth at 11am for one of her morning feeds. We’d stay for two hours. Getting to know her as she grew little by little. “Can I pick her up?”, I asked the nurse. “She’s your baby, of course you can.” Of course I could. Of COURSE I could!

I am so lucky she’s okay. We are SO lucky she is okay. The fact that she survived inside of me for 31 weeks and 5 days is miraculous. But despite our joy and gratitude that she is fine, there are a few things that I haven’t completely reconciled. I didn’t have that movie moment where I heard my baby’s cries for the first time. I didn’t get to hold her after her birth. I didn’t get to see her until 24 hours (I think) after she came into the world. All of those cinematic moments didn’t happen for us. Our story is just that, ours. It’s not going to look or feel like anyone else’s. But it holds its own special singularity.

Thomas and I sat on our basement couch pounding back Uber Eats (thank you everyone!!!), after finishing The White Lotus. WATCH IT RIGHT NOW SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT OKAYYYYYYYYYYY?!!! “Do you want to come walk around the block with Brisket and me? Do you feel up to it?”. “Sure, let’s try”.

Our neighbourhood has a lot of character. The trees are huge and create a canopy as you wander down the streets at night. There aren’t a lot of streetlights, it’s very dim and romantic. “I don’t...feel quite like a mom.” I quietly squawked, trying not to tear up. My sad hormones had been rushing in at night. “I understand.” “I’m not taking care of her yet. I’m not tending to her cries. I’m not changing her diapers. And...part of me is glad. Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll never be able to take as good care of her as the nurses.” Thomas squeezed me and said, “we’re learning.” And I cried a little. Because as happy and thankful as we are and will always be that she’s okay, we both were able to acknowledge the situation is atypical. But as we said, it’s our story and it’s playing out exactly as it should. We’re learning. We’ve already learned so much. The education continues.

The next day, Rock Steady Ruth gained 60 grams! She was taking a bottle! She was developing at a great rate. She was doing great. She IS great! WE were the ones hung up on the things that didn’t matter. She was showing us, every day, that she was more than fine. A nurse whispered to me “she’s the happiest baby in the NICU. She’s very calm most of the time. Unless you move her. Then she gets pissed off.” That tracks. She IS my daughter. I hate being bothered.

We’re in a comfy rhythm with pumping and visiting her. Thomas is still running around getting little projects done for her every day and tending to me as I heal.

People have been empathizing with us, saying it must be agony not having her home. And of course, we want her here. That’s why we made her. But she is where she needs to be to grow, thrive, and mature enough for us to take the reins.

She was so delicate and fragile in the beginning. Hooked up to so many monitors. A CPAP machine with a little helmet to help keep it on. I didn’t see her unobstructed face until she was 5 days old. The hard truth is we couldn’t have done what she needed to surthrive. And to be blunt and not cute about it all, we weren’t ready. She came two months early. I kept going on and on about how I was taking mat leave a month early because I needed that time before her arrival. For me. Selfish mom. I needed it to get my ducks in a row and quacking. The nursery had only been painted. We needed supplies. To fix the house up. To read a bit about parenting. To physically, psychologically, and spiritually get our shit together so we could do this thing.

So, as hard as it is to say goodbye to her every day when we leave the hospital, everything we’re doing in a day still revolves around her. And it is joyous. We’re washing clothes. Getting her nursery mural installed, painting the house, organizing her furniture, getting supplies, getting EI in order, picking this up and that, pumping, labelling, cleaning, sanitizing, making doctors’ appointments. Everything we didn’t have time for because of her early arrival. And this is the only reality we’ve experienced. We’ve never had a baby before. We don’t know what it’s like to take your baby home 24 hours after birth and juggle all of those big things. Our journey has been different, but it’s all we know.

Suffice to say, we were beyond glad we’ve been hustling so hard since her birthday because the nurses told us she should be home with us by August 31st (!!!!!!!!) barring any major setbacks. She’s made so much progress in such a short amount of time.

Since her birthday she’s lost 13% of her weight, gained it all back and more, come off her CPAP machine, had her feeding tube removed, taken to a bottle, and somehow gotten cuter and cuter every day. How did she manage to focus on aesthetics at a time like this?! She’s already more high functioning than her Mahm.

Now we need to think about how to make her transition as smooth as possible. Ruth is a preemie and that means we need to bubble girl her for awhile. Her little lungs are still developing and the last thing we need is for her to contract Covid or germs of any kind. We need to give her the time and space to get stronger and thrive.

Are you asleep? If so, that’s fantastic because it means we’re reaching the normal phase. The nothing to see here phase. The nothing unique about these circumstances phase. We’re going to have regular parental worries. How will we keep her alive? Is she breathing? How will we survive on no sleep? Does this look infected? That means our story is naturally becoming less and less interesting. And we are here for it! We are so excited to bore everyone we know with stories of her typical development and behaviour as we slowly become our parents.

But because I’m me, I will not count my chickens before they’re hatched. Before my little chick is safe in her bassinet squawking by my bedside. She’s on track to be here with us this time next week...She’s on track to be here with us this time next week...She’s on track to be here with us this time next week, I repeat to myself as I fall asleep every night. Knowing that night will be one of my last 7-hour long sleeps for a long, long time. *Big grateful sighs*