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Life Update
Jul. 9th, 2013 07:47 pmI am feeling increasingly anxious about the children which, I realise, is because I have not had any bad news about them for months. It’s been ages since Ruby was diagnosed with Coeliac’s disease and I have this terrible feeling the other shoe is about to drop.
This state of mind could rightly be called paranoid or over-parenting, but all my experience teaches me that every few months there is some kind of health crisis with children. It irrationally annoys me when people say that parents should just be chilled out because children basically just develop on their own. My own experience is that my children have been sick from literally the moment of Pearl’s birth, when she was whisked away to be worked on so she breathed. This was followed by nine days in the hospital while various health professionals trying to get her to feed and fed her through a nasal tube and my dawning realisation that there was something wrong long-term. (Turned out to be hypotonia).
After that I spent months going to various doctors and having them imply that I was an over-protective first time mother until, suddenly, when she was 14 months old, they turned around and agreed that yes, there was something wrong. They leapt straight to worst case scenarios which it turned out not to be. And indeed we’ve never had a satisfactory diagnosis for her real, ongoing hypotonia.
I find it very annoying when people say things like ‘well, they all learn to walk in their own time, don’t they?’ This may be *generally* true but, in my experience, no, they learn to walk after months of physiotherapy, while wearing foot supports and that hard-won ability can be undermined very easily, as when Ruby lost the ability to walk while prostrated by Coeliac’s disease. So Pearl got on her feet at 22 months and Ruby at 22 months, then became unsteady at 24 months, lost the ability, relearned at 28 months. This is not a trouble-free and inevitable trajectory.
Constant watchfulness combined with immediate intervention seems to be the only way to proceed, so right now I am trying to anticipate the next likely blow and also be calm. A state of cat-like wariness, like Marg Simpson’s, is what I must aim for.
This state of mind could rightly be called paranoid or over-parenting, but all my experience teaches me that every few months there is some kind of health crisis with children. It irrationally annoys me when people say that parents should just be chilled out because children basically just develop on their own. My own experience is that my children have been sick from literally the moment of Pearl’s birth, when she was whisked away to be worked on so she breathed. This was followed by nine days in the hospital while various health professionals trying to get her to feed and fed her through a nasal tube and my dawning realisation that there was something wrong long-term. (Turned out to be hypotonia).
After that I spent months going to various doctors and having them imply that I was an over-protective first time mother until, suddenly, when she was 14 months old, they turned around and agreed that yes, there was something wrong. They leapt straight to worst case scenarios which it turned out not to be. And indeed we’ve never had a satisfactory diagnosis for her real, ongoing hypotonia.
I find it very annoying when people say things like ‘well, they all learn to walk in their own time, don’t they?’ This may be *generally* true but, in my experience, no, they learn to walk after months of physiotherapy, while wearing foot supports and that hard-won ability can be undermined very easily, as when Ruby lost the ability to walk while prostrated by Coeliac’s disease. So Pearl got on her feet at 22 months and Ruby at 22 months, then became unsteady at 24 months, lost the ability, relearned at 28 months. This is not a trouble-free and inevitable trajectory.
Constant watchfulness combined with immediate intervention seems to be the only way to proceed, so right now I am trying to anticipate the next likely blow and also be calm. A state of cat-like wariness, like Marg Simpson’s, is what I must aim for.
