A day in the life.

My days are consumed with giving pieces of myself away to children who need them more than I do. It begins before I even open my eyes in the morning, when my 5 and 2 year olds are hovering above me, taking the pillow off my head to ask me to fix the wifi on the iPad or fix the strap on the diaper. Feed them breakfast, a crazy circus that involves throwing food at them as fast as I can make it, ignoring the fact that I've literally just crawled out of bed, and I'm standing in the community kitchen of the Ronald McDonald House amongst dozens of other people, and I haven't even looked in the mirror yet, but I can feel my hair floating around my head like Einstein and my boobs are bursting comically from beneath my sweater because I haven't pumped breast milk since I went to bed last night.

The 2 year old screams, and I look over at them, and she's flat on her face. My son looms over her, and he's looking at me with wide eyes, frozen in place, a deer in the headlights. 

What is going on???

"I hit her with this" (he holds up the Elf on the Shelf like this is Pride Rock and he's displaying baby Simba to the prideland).

I take the Elf away, and I snap something sharply at him, and he sits down, resigned. He doesn't protest, but the silent tear that slides down his cheek as he watches his toast breaks me. We talk about it, and I give him the Elf back.

I go back to our room and hook myself up to the pump, the cold, mechanical baby that vacuumes the milk from my sorry, unhappy breasts. I pump six bottles full, my boobs are so overloaded. While I pump, the 2 year old has become a baby monkey, and I am her mommy monkey, and we both must speak in high-pitched sing song voices. The ridiculousness of this situation does not escape me. Eventually, I milk myself dry, and I get in the shower. There is the 2yo, yanking off her diaper to get in with me. There is never a moment alone. When it's all done, we get out and I dry her off, and she immediately wants to take a bath.

There's the bath,

The poopy diaper afterward,

The detangling and brushing of her hair which requires all of my negotiation skills and sharp reflexes,

I get myself dressed somewhere in there,

There's laundry,

There's cleaning,

There's washing the pump parts,

There's telling my 5yo for the hundredth time not to throw his Elf around the room. 

I finally distract them with raisins and pass them off to our visiting aunt, who leaves tomorrow, God help us. 

I catch the shuttle to the hospital, and when I get there, I feel like I'm home. The halls are endless and the florescents bounce off the floors, somehow making them look even longer. I've wandered these halls more times than I can count, and they have still remained a labyrinth that confuses and befuddles me. Where am I, again? Which way do I go?

I make it to the NICU and I peer into the isolette of my littlest baby, my biggest miracle, the child who, by all accounts, shouldn't be alive today. I notice something different, something unusual. The feeding tube that is threaded down his throat and into his intestines is somehow pulled entirely out of his mouth, despite his tight swaddle, and my pumped breast milk, the liquid gold that I drop everything every three hours to produce, is flooding his blankets.

"Um, excuse me?" I stare at his nurse with wild eyes, the nurse who is staring intently into the computer screen, paying no mind to the tube on the loose. I remember just the other day when I came to check on this same baby, and his c-pap, the big ugly breathing mask, was gone. It was replaced by nasal prongs that delivered oxygen into the baby's nose. I pointed out to the proud nurse that they might work better if they were actually IN his nose, instead of on top of his nose.

There was a flurry of "Oh, how did that happen!" And the correcting of problems and the adjusting of the baby, just as there is now, with the feeding tube. For a moment, exhausted maternal rage boils up inside me, and the urge to speak my mind is almost too much to resist. But, then I remember the team of nurses who hovered by this baby's bedside all night to keep him alive. I remember the nurse who pumped oxygen into his lungs by hand for thirty minutes straight. I remember the nurse who skipped her lunch breaks to stay by my baby's side, because he was so fragile, you couldn't turn your back on him for a second. I remember these things, and I smile at the nurse who is mopping up his milk-soaked blankets and I hold up a cooler full of freshly pumped breast milk and I tell her there's plenty more where that came from, there's no use crying over spilled milk.

Even if I secretly kind of want to cry over the spilled milk.

I spend the remainder of my time at the hospital hustling between the NICU on the 2nd floor, and the PICN (Pediatric Intermediate Care Nursery [I think]) on the 1st floor, where my stronger baby lives, and the hospital pumping room. The highlight of my time at the hospital, aside from holding my babies, is the cafeteria. They give discounts to nursing mothers with babies in the NICU, and boy howdy, do I take advantage. Pumping around the clock gives me the appetite of a grizzly bear, and nothing makes me happier than sidling up to the dinner line. And yesterday, I breezed into the cafeteria to find the whole thing remodeled, with stations of wonderful new food, fresh bread and ice cream and salad bars, and it literally felt like Christmas morning. It really did. I almost cried.

By the time I catch the shuttle home, I'm already the kind of exhausted that makes you sit on the bench and stare blankly into space. But my night is far from over. The big kids are waiting for me, and their exuberant screams of "MOMMY!!!!!!" make me forget, for a moment, how difficult they are to put to bed. Bed time routines are out the window, as every night is different here in this crazy window of time in our lives, and basically all I can do to get them to bed on time is hope for the best. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the 2 year old screams for an hour, and puts her shoes on and stands in front of me in her night gown, tears streaming down her cubby cheeks while I sit helplessly at the pump. She wants to be taken down to the kitchen for a snack, but she just had a snack, and it's bed time. She wants a bottle of milk, but she's too big for that. She wants, she wants, she wants. Eventually, she tires herself out crying, and my husband gets her to bed. 

By the time I unhook myself from my last pump of the day, I feel like a dead person. I am drained, physically, emotionally, mentally. I feel like all four of my children stand before me with open pillow cases, and I dole myself out to them, one by one, like Halloween candy. I know, in the back of my mind, that this won't get any easier, not really. Eventually, both babies will be released from the hospital, and then I'll have all four children in my tiny apartment. I'll still go to bed at night feeling like a dead person, but hopefully our circumstances will settle down enough to carve out a new normal, a routine, a thing we can call life. For now, I will keep trying, day by day.