Confidence

Before Bug-a-Boo was born, I was so looking forward to having a baby and bringing him home. During labor and delivery, things didn’t quite go as I had planned and imagined which should have been no big surprise, but really took this control freak by storm. By the time he was born, my confidence was pretty well shot. When they released us from the hospital, I thought they must be crazy to let me take him – I was totally exhausted physically and emotionally and felt utterly inept in caring for this tiny life entrusted to me. My wonderful mother stayed with me the first two weeks to help out. Hubby was out of town, so I don’t know what I would have done without her.

After two weeks, I felt recovered enough to travel, so my mom and hubby’s mom drove Bug-a-Boo and I out to join hubby. My confidence had grown some, but still I feared what would happen when my experienced mother left and this precious soul was totally dependant on me. Hubby reassured me that we would do just fine, and the moms returned home. I realized that I could do this, and my confidence began to build. One week later baby boy was throwing up horribly. My confidence began to shake. I was doing everything I knew possible, but nothing seemed to help. I contacted the pediatrician who said to give it a day or two and call back if things hadn’t improved. I thought there was improvement, so I didn’t call back, but then things got worse again, and I knew something was wrong. It was now early in the weekend, so the first appointment we could get was first thing Monday morning. That night it was so bad we called the on-call doctor who actually told us that we must still be getting used to what a baby is like – they spit up, they cry. “He’s just being a brat. Deal with it,” he told us. Shake, shake – there goes more confidence. Monday I told the pediatrician about a medical condition mentioned in a magazine that I thought described my son. She assured me that what I was talking about was possible, but rare – she had never diagnosed a case of it. (She was a pretty young doctor.) Again, she suggested some things, all of which I had already tried, and said we would give it another 24 hours. Shake, shake – more confidence gone. Maybe I was just a nervous, stereo-typical first-time parent overreacting. She then did the physical exam “but it won’t reveal anything – it never does.” When looking at his stomach she saw something unusual that she hadn’t seen since her residency. All of a sudden her tune totally changed. What she saw was a “textbook symptom” of the very condition I had read about in the magazine. While we waited, she called the children’s hospital and made us an appointment. We were so blessed that hubby’s work had taken him to the same city where there was a nationally renowned children’s hospital. There they confirmed the diagnosis that I, as a new mommy, had feared, but already made days before. Wow – that put back much of my confidence that had been shaken. The good news was that while the condition would be fatal if undiagnosed, we had caught it in plenty of time, and it was correctable by surgery. So less than a month after we had brought my son home from the hospital, we were in a new hospital. The surgery was described as “textbook”, and we were soon released. Somehow this horrifying experience gave me confidence in my parenting skills. After all, I had known in my gut that he had pyloric stenosis long before the doctors did. So this time when we came home from the hospital, I had more confidence that I could do this parenting thing.

Time went on and Bug-a-Boo’s life since then has been pretty normal. There are plenty of times that I begin to question my parenting skills, and my confidence again begins to shake. I suppose that’s not entirely bad, as my confidence should not be so much in hubby’s and my ability to raise this child, as in God and His leading us. Still, every time we go in for a check-up, I am armed with my list of questions. At Bug-a-Boo’s latest check-up, the doctor looked in his mouth and mentioned that teeth numbers 5 & 6 on top (not counting molars) were about to break through. “Really?” I asked. I knew he was teething, but I thought tooth 4 on the bottom was where he was having the most trouble. That’s where I’d been putting the Oral-Gel. “Well, that one may be working on coming in too, but you can see that it’s not as close as these two on top. You can see the whiteness of the them just below the surface even more.” Shake-shake – there goes my confidence again. I left feeling like a rather incompetent parent, not able to even correctly dispense Oral-Gel. Here’s the thing though, the teeth the doctor was talking about have just begun to break the surface the last two days (one tiny hole of each tooth each day), but not until after tooth #4 on the bottom had entirely come in, and tooth #5 on the bottom is showing signs of not being far behind. In other words, my confidence was shaken, but I was right. I was putting the Oral-Gel in the right spot. Bug-a-Boo just happens to be getting a lot of teeth at once. The ones the doctor mentioned were indeed on their way, but the one I thought would come in first did. I remain confident in the medical community and the training they have received, but this most recent instance reminded me that I can also have confidence in my own mommy instincts as well.