Holding on - and letting go.

I had the experience, for the first time in my life, of holding (one of) my newborn children. The girl for whom we haven't been able to agree on a name yet. I had her in my arms for about an hour. Of the three, she is the weakest and maybe has an infection in one lung. So she is still on the CPAP mask and getting oxygen at times.

It's an interesting situation. I have this tiny girl in my arms (she weighs about four pounds) and there are several wires leading from her to a computer, plus the alligatored-tube for the breathing mask. I can hold her in my arms and watch a big screen nearby and keep track of her cardiac rate, her respiration rate, and her O2 level.

A couple of times a yellow lamp started blinking, or a red lamp began blinking and an alarm went of. Paula the nurse, who is taking care of all our children 12 hours a day for the next few days, walked over casually and punched a button. "You can rub her back a little, that would help." I rubbed the girl's back and after a few seconds the cardiac rate came back up to normal. "Sometimes you need to stimulate her a bit to remind her to make her heart beat or to keep breathing." Oh, okay.

Actually, this is very cool. For the first time in my life, I'm holding a fragile little newborn who seems wrapped up in a trance. Can't open its eyes, can't even really cry right now. And I'm able to stimulate her so she keeps breathing. I think I can begin to understand all the moms I've been treating for years who are struggling and struggling with their teenagers. The moms come across as very controlling, very anxious, very literal about everything. One woman I've been working with, who is locked into an intense control struggle with her 30 year old alcoholic son, often responds to my suggestions for detachment by saying, "But I'm a mom and that's what moms do." Now I think I get it. If you are a young woman (not a 54 year old man), and you suddenly have this intense experience of bonding with a completely dependent infant, and you are responsible, maybe for the first time in your life completely responsible for another person's moment to moment existence, it may be an experience that you never fully master.

If you are a typical young adult, caught up in your own life, and mainly focused on breaking away from your parents' authority and from your own dependency on them, and you suddenly fall into an intense relationship like this where you have total authority and responsibility, and your child has complete dependency on you, you face a great challenge to enter into this experience and another great challenge to exit out of this experience into the next phase of development.