I’m going to take a break from the backstory to write about the frontstory. This week-end was tough on our little friend, although he and Dimitri sat quietly for just long enough at the diner for daddy and Erin to wolf down a couple of plates of eggs. Nothing got broken and no one threw up. Success!
Anyway, Jackson developed a bit of a nasty, phlegmy cough and was in a very clingy mood for most of the week-end. You know, the kind of mood where your kid follows you around the house on hands and knees like a supplicant at Lourds, pausing when he catches up to you to grab your legs and wail as if you just repossessed his little red wagon. When Jack is in that kind of mood you can pretty much forget about doing anything other than carrying him around and looking at interesting things. Somehow I still managed to cook dinner and get grocery shopping done yesterday; but I have almost no recollection of doing so. The reason I have no recollection of doing so is because I got about three hours of sleep last night. In addition to Jack’s cough, he seems to have developed a touch of insomnia. As you parents know all too well, when your child has insomnia, you have insomnia. Poor Jack was thrashing around like a cat in a dryer for most of the night, pausing occasionally to sit bolt upright in bed and scream. Nothing says good morning like a loud blood curdling scream at 3:30AM. Scared the crap out of the cat too. My guess is whatever was causing Jack’s, uh, difficult mood, and his appetite to be off over the week-end (sore throat? constipation?) also made him very hungry in the middle of the night. Seeing as I’m not much of a baby-whisperer, not to mention that my thought processes are kind of slow in the middle of the night, it took me a while to figure out that the ticket to getting him to go back to sleep was a good old fashioned bottle full of formula. Did I mention that my oil burner is broken? It gets surprisingly cold in the house when the oil burner has been off for three days.
Walking downstairs in the dark in your underwear in the freezing cold to mix a bottle of formula at 4:30 in the morning really drives home the parenting experience in a visceral way, as does returning upstairs to find your son entangled in your sheet, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and completely immobile. By the time I got him calmed down, eating and eventually back to sleep, it was about 5:15. I fell back to sleep at about 5:45. The alarm rang at 6:15. Happy Monday!
Monday, March 31, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
More Backstory
Spring is supposed to be a time of renewal. Last year, the arrival of warmer weather meant that I was liberated from the confines of my living room for the first time since the mercury headed south for the winter the day I brought Jack home from the hospital. This is the same room where Jack spent the first few months of his life, dozing his days away in a large bassinet, positioned on the sisal rug in the dining room in full view of my lazy ass which, at this point, was seemingly permanently affixed to the couch. I have always owned a television, but never spent much time in front of it. This changed in the winter of 2007. American Idol, local news, Jeaporday, Wheel of Fortune? All became staples of my new routine. Every night. Dancing with the Stars? You bet! Pass the popcorn and heat up some formula. On the positive side I finally had something to talk to my co-workers about around the water cooler. Slowly but inexorably, I started to feel my brain atrophying with every wisecrack that dropped from the lips of Simon, Paula and Randy. I developed a minor obsession with American Idol and became overwhelmed with emotion when someone got voted off before their time. Of course, this was clearly misplaced grief finding its way to the surface of my consciousness, but at the time I didn’t recognize it as such.
With the coming of warmer weather I started to take Jack for short walks. First around the block, then, when I got bolder, up to Silver Lake Park a ¼ mile away. I always made sure I had diapers and wipes (learned that the hard way), blankets, food and my cell phone in case I had to call 911. By the end of May I had him in a baby jogger and he was sleeping soundly while I banged out a five mile loop around the lake. Finally, we were starting to get comfortable with each other. Rather than thinking of him as an awesome responsibility that I was destined to fail in dramatic fashion at some point, I started seeing him more as a little friend who babbled nonsensically and just couldn’t control his bowels. Heck, I had a lot of friends like that in the '80s, and he was so much easier to handle because the police never got involved.
Tomorrow: Daddy takes too many nights off from parenting and skulks around Manhattan after work drinking a lot of beer.
With the coming of warmer weather I started to take Jack for short walks. First around the block, then, when I got bolder, up to Silver Lake Park a ¼ mile away. I always made sure I had diapers and wipes (learned that the hard way), blankets, food and my cell phone in case I had to call 911. By the end of May I had him in a baby jogger and he was sleeping soundly while I banged out a five mile loop around the lake. Finally, we were starting to get comfortable with each other. Rather than thinking of him as an awesome responsibility that I was destined to fail in dramatic fashion at some point, I started seeing him more as a little friend who babbled nonsensically and just couldn’t control his bowels. Heck, I had a lot of friends like that in the '80s, and he was so much easier to handle because the police never got involved.
Tomorrow: Daddy takes too many nights off from parenting and skulks around Manhattan after work drinking a lot of beer.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Backstory
I used to have a political blog where I would hold forth on topics like the assault on civil liberties and the fact that America has gone completely insane since 911. It helped me keep my own sanity and yet it made me a rather preachy and angry crank at the same time. I have recently discovered that I’d rather spend my time mastering the art of being a decent father instead of being the proverbial man in the basement shaking his fist at the drop ceiling. So, I am going to let go of my alter-ego The Patriot, and spend some time analyzing things other than the state of civil liberties and the economic free-fall. That’s what this blog will be about.
The day after Becky’s funeral it dawned on me that any expectation I may have harbored about resuming a somewhat normal life was complete nonsense. Despite the fact that I was solely responsible for keeping my son alive and reasonably well, I felt completely incapable of fulfilling the role of provider and single-father that had just been unexpectedly dumped into my lap. I took a personal survey and decided that the odds of success were not good. Here I was, a 39 year old classic Gen X underachiever, 40 pounds overweight with a taste for boozy night-life and a job that kept me on the road for two weeks out of every month. I didn’t make nearly enough money to live in New York City on one income and I knew absolutely nothing about caring for a baby other than what I had sort of picked up by a cursory reading of the pile of baby books gathering dust on my nightstand. Yup, I was fucked, no two ways about it. I also knew enough about human nature to suspect (correctly as it turned out) that the myriad offers of help proferred by well-intentioned friends in the immediate aftermath of Becky’s passing would start to dry up in a few months as people went back to their own chaotic lives. Faced with such an immense clusterfuck, I responded the only way possible; total denial. I went back to work a week after the funeral and cajoled various relatives to come up to New York to “babysit for Jack” for periods of about a week each. This left me plenty of time to drink large volumes of red wine and start to feel very, very sorry for myself.
During the early weeks and months following his birth, my beautiful son did precious little other than eat, crap, sleep, cry and scare the ever-loving shit out of me. No matter what I did, I was convinced that I was either going to inadvertently kill him or at the least cause the poor fellow some sort of irreparable and lasting harm. Sterilize the bottles? Heat the formula? What the hell are you all talking about!? Fortunately, after the first month of relative supported parenting I hired a a saintly woman from Trinidad who became (and remains) Jack’s caretaker. This took some of the pressure off and gave me an opportunity to catch up on the latest childcare controversies brewing on www.urbanbaby.com. I also started devouring Dr. Sears books and weighing the virtues of attachment parenting versus the Ferber method. Things gradually started to be less terrifying. Then spring came. I'll pick up here tomorrow.
The day after Becky’s funeral it dawned on me that any expectation I may have harbored about resuming a somewhat normal life was complete nonsense. Despite the fact that I was solely responsible for keeping my son alive and reasonably well, I felt completely incapable of fulfilling the role of provider and single-father that had just been unexpectedly dumped into my lap. I took a personal survey and decided that the odds of success were not good. Here I was, a 39 year old classic Gen X underachiever, 40 pounds overweight with a taste for boozy night-life and a job that kept me on the road for two weeks out of every month. I didn’t make nearly enough money to live in New York City on one income and I knew absolutely nothing about caring for a baby other than what I had sort of picked up by a cursory reading of the pile of baby books gathering dust on my nightstand. Yup, I was fucked, no two ways about it. I also knew enough about human nature to suspect (correctly as it turned out) that the myriad offers of help proferred by well-intentioned friends in the immediate aftermath of Becky’s passing would start to dry up in a few months as people went back to their own chaotic lives. Faced with such an immense clusterfuck, I responded the only way possible; total denial. I went back to work a week after the funeral and cajoled various relatives to come up to New York to “babysit for Jack” for periods of about a week each. This left me plenty of time to drink large volumes of red wine and start to feel very, very sorry for myself.
During the early weeks and months following his birth, my beautiful son did precious little other than eat, crap, sleep, cry and scare the ever-loving shit out of me. No matter what I did, I was convinced that I was either going to inadvertently kill him or at the least cause the poor fellow some sort of irreparable and lasting harm. Sterilize the bottles? Heat the formula? What the hell are you all talking about!? Fortunately, after the first month of relative supported parenting I hired a a saintly woman from Trinidad who became (and remains) Jack’s caretaker. This took some of the pressure off and gave me an opportunity to catch up on the latest childcare controversies brewing on www.urbanbaby.com. I also started devouring Dr. Sears books and weighing the virtues of attachment parenting versus the Ferber method. Things gradually started to be less terrifying. Then spring came. I'll pick up here tomorrow.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
So Who Am I?
I guess a good place to start would be with an article I wrote for the New York Times on the circumstances surrounding the death of my wife Becky and the birth of my son Jack. I thought it a stellar piece of writing but it disappeared into the maw of editorial process never to be heard from again. For your consideration:
Thirty-nine year old women are not supposed to die in childbirth. I remember repeating that sentence over and over as I watched the nurse disconnect my wife Becky’s respirator last January. I experienced an indescribable range of emotions at that moment. Here I was, standing in the critical care unit of NYU hospital saying good-bye to the woman I had been married to for the last eleven years, while three floors below in the nursery my new son Jack was engaged in the business of being a baby, blissfully unaware of the emotional maelstrom playing out above him.
Jack’s delivery by emergency c-section in the early morning hours of January 28, 2007 was not something Becky and I could have foreseen during the months leading up to her due date. We had taken the usual classes and had our contingency plans in place, but we never discussed what would happen if something went drastically wrong. Who does, really? All of the discussions that were nervously held in birthing class about complications that could arise during labor were focused on something happening to the baby. There was a shared assumption that the mother would perform her expected role without requiring the hasty intervention of neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists. Besides, hers had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. Aside from some borderline high blood-pressure and a few headaches there was nothing to indicate that Jack’s delivery would be any more complicated than the hundreds of other normal births that took place in New York City every day of the year.
I remember how happy Becky was when she found out she was pregnant. We had tried, and failed, for two years to conceive a child and we were both getting a little depressed. Right before she found out that our natural efforts had born fruit, so to speak, we were in the process of deciding where we could come up with the $10,000 dollars needed to start the first round of artificial insemination. This was not an insignificant question. Although we were both lawyers, Becky was a trial attorney for legal aid, hardly the most lucrative end of the profession. I had taken a job with an insurance carrier at highly reduced pay because I was suffering from serious trial law burnout. Our moderate salaries were further eroded by law school loans and large payments on credit cards we had run up paying expenses while we were in school. For a while it looked like we were going to have to resign ourselves to being childless; at $20,000 the cost of adoption was similarly out of reach. So, we were quite happy when we got the news that she was pregnant.
The next nine months flew by. The day before Jack arrived, we were down at a friend’s house in Asbury park. Becky was sitting in a chair talking about what to name our little friend who’s arrival, we correctly suspected, was imminent. The next morning at 4am her water broke and it was a mad dash in the car from Staten Island to the hospital in midtown. Something wasn’t right. Becky knew it right away. She was preoccupied on the way to the hospital and seemed a little out of it. By the time I had finished filling out the innumerable forms and leaving credit card imprints they had moved her to a delivery room. Shortly thereafter she had a seizure and they raced her down the hall to the operating room. My son Jack Becket Rutkowski was born 5 minutes later and handed to me ten minutes after that. Becky never regained consciousness and died the next day without ever seeing the son she wanted more than anything else in the world.
The doctor’s explained to me that a rupture of something called an Arterio-Venous Malformation, or AVM had caused her death. Apparently the stress of labor can cause this tangle of weakened blood vessels to burst, with disastrous results. This ticking time bomb was apparently present in Becky’s brain stem since birth, but throughout her entire life it was asymptomatic. I hear that AVM’s are present in less than 1% of the population. Of course, Statistics are meaningless if you happen to be the one.
Fortunately my son was born completely normal. He is today a happy, healthy one year old and I love him more than anyone could possibly imagine. This has been a difficult year for both of us. I had to learn to be both a mother and father from the ground up and he has had to suffer through my ham handed diapering and other well-intentioned mistakes. Whenever I look at him I can see Becky in his eyes and I remember her telling me repeatedly before he was born that she thought I’d be a great dad. It has taken a little while but I’m starting to think she wasn’t entirely wrong.
Thirty-nine year old women are not supposed to die in childbirth. I remember repeating that sentence over and over as I watched the nurse disconnect my wife Becky’s respirator last January. I experienced an indescribable range of emotions at that moment. Here I was, standing in the critical care unit of NYU hospital saying good-bye to the woman I had been married to for the last eleven years, while three floors below in the nursery my new son Jack was engaged in the business of being a baby, blissfully unaware of the emotional maelstrom playing out above him.
Jack’s delivery by emergency c-section in the early morning hours of January 28, 2007 was not something Becky and I could have foreseen during the months leading up to her due date. We had taken the usual classes and had our contingency plans in place, but we never discussed what would happen if something went drastically wrong. Who does, really? All of the discussions that were nervously held in birthing class about complications that could arise during labor were focused on something happening to the baby. There was a shared assumption that the mother would perform her expected role without requiring the hasty intervention of neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists. Besides, hers had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. Aside from some borderline high blood-pressure and a few headaches there was nothing to indicate that Jack’s delivery would be any more complicated than the hundreds of other normal births that took place in New York City every day of the year.
I remember how happy Becky was when she found out she was pregnant. We had tried, and failed, for two years to conceive a child and we were both getting a little depressed. Right before she found out that our natural efforts had born fruit, so to speak, we were in the process of deciding where we could come up with the $10,000 dollars needed to start the first round of artificial insemination. This was not an insignificant question. Although we were both lawyers, Becky was a trial attorney for legal aid, hardly the most lucrative end of the profession. I had taken a job with an insurance carrier at highly reduced pay because I was suffering from serious trial law burnout. Our moderate salaries were further eroded by law school loans and large payments on credit cards we had run up paying expenses while we were in school. For a while it looked like we were going to have to resign ourselves to being childless; at $20,000 the cost of adoption was similarly out of reach. So, we were quite happy when we got the news that she was pregnant.
The next nine months flew by. The day before Jack arrived, we were down at a friend’s house in Asbury park. Becky was sitting in a chair talking about what to name our little friend who’s arrival, we correctly suspected, was imminent. The next morning at 4am her water broke and it was a mad dash in the car from Staten Island to the hospital in midtown. Something wasn’t right. Becky knew it right away. She was preoccupied on the way to the hospital and seemed a little out of it. By the time I had finished filling out the innumerable forms and leaving credit card imprints they had moved her to a delivery room. Shortly thereafter she had a seizure and they raced her down the hall to the operating room. My son Jack Becket Rutkowski was born 5 minutes later and handed to me ten minutes after that. Becky never regained consciousness and died the next day without ever seeing the son she wanted more than anything else in the world.
The doctor’s explained to me that a rupture of something called an Arterio-Venous Malformation, or AVM had caused her death. Apparently the stress of labor can cause this tangle of weakened blood vessels to burst, with disastrous results. This ticking time bomb was apparently present in Becky’s brain stem since birth, but throughout her entire life it was asymptomatic. I hear that AVM’s are present in less than 1% of the population. Of course, Statistics are meaningless if you happen to be the one.
Fortunately my son was born completely normal. He is today a happy, healthy one year old and I love him more than anyone could possibly imagine. This has been a difficult year for both of us. I had to learn to be both a mother and father from the ground up and he has had to suffer through my ham handed diapering and other well-intentioned mistakes. Whenever I look at him I can see Becky in his eyes and I remember her telling me repeatedly before he was born that she thought I’d be a great dad. It has taken a little while but I’m starting to think she wasn’t entirely wrong.
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