The first night of Niece's life, she aspirated some spit up. Her breathing became really fast and she was taken to Bergan Mercy's NICU.
But Niece was still the healthiest, fattest little one there. She was about 8 pounds, if I remember right. Sister and I visited her everyday.
One day, Sister and I were in the NICU and we were in a small side room, trying to spend some quality time with Niece.
"Secretary, can I tell you something and you promise not to be mad at me?"
My heart sunk into my stomach. What now? "Sure, of course."
"Ummm…well…I was so depressed during my pregnancy and everything, and I couldn't take any anti-depressants for it, so I smoked some pot."
"And?"
"And they drug-tested Niece, and found THC in her meconium stool." This, as I learned, was the stool that a baby builds up during the pregnancy. It's the very first poopy diaper.
"So what does that mean?"
"They're going to take her away when she leaves the hospital."
I don't remember what was said after that, just that I was extremely worried about it. Niece stayed in the NICU for a few weeks and then was finally released…into the care of a foster parent.
And that was the beginning.
During the hearings to determine whether or not Niece would come home, it came out in court that Sister had mentioned while at the hospital that she once taped a pacifier into a friend's baby's mouth in order to let the baby calm down and go to sleep. As any parent knows, this is a very bad thing. Particularly because of SIDS. To me, that was more damning than knowing Sister had smoked pot while pregnant.
Finally, Niece came home. I came to see her whenever I could. Which was pretty much all the time I wasn't at work or wasn't at home pacifying my husband.
One day, I came over and Niece was asleep in the bedroom. I crept in just to have a look at her, more like a lingering gaze. When I walked in and saw that a pacifier was taped into her mouth, I immediately removed it, picked up the baby, and then went into the front room of the house.
"What the f*ck do you think you're doing? Tapin a pacifier onto her face? Are you out of your f*ckin mind? What if she had spit up? What about SIDS?"
Sister and Mom promised me it wouldn't happen again. To me, it seemed more like they were promising themselves to be more careful and not get caught next time.
Time went on and Niece got older. She sat up and stayed that way for the first time at 5 months. It was in the living room of my house and she was wearing a pink onezie. I was babysitting her. A lot. I loved it.
I took Niece over to a friend's house one day. She gasped when she way how thin Niece was. Mind you, Niece still had the fat little arms and legs that babies have. But when she stretched out, she had the concave abdomen of a much older child, and you could see her ribs. Knowing next to nothing about what babies should look like, I just thought she was athletic. My God, she kicked a lot. But my friend's words stuck with me.
I look back now and it makes sense why Niece was always so bloody hungry at mealtimes that my mom started calling her Little Bird because of the way she'd grab at that approaching spoon. Then when I saw how much Ex had to feed his little girl, what was normal, I realized that my Niece was not being fed enough. More guilt to pile onto my guilt bonfire; guilt for not acting sooner.
Time went on and on, faster and faster. I'd bring Niece with me to my therapy sessions because I was just so excited about her and bonded with her, and my therapist observed that she was not a very alert child. She seemed slow and didn't smile much at all. My therapist has 4 or 5 children, so she knows what is normal for a child, and Niece seemed abnormal.
Niece was around 18 months old when her father decided to show back up in her life. I was already noticing that Niece was spending a lot of time in her playpen, even though she was crawling and walking, was often grubbier than grubby, and that the house was filthy. It gave me shivers to think of her crawling and walking around in that mess. She was being yelled at a lot, because she was exploring, as babies are wont to do. When I think back to these memories, I really could just ball up and cry to think about how she was treated when I wasn't there to protect her.
Every time I came to the house, Niece would perk up in her playpen, which she was in almost every time that I arrived there, and she would stretch her arms out to me. "She-uh! She-uh!"
When SD came back, she didn't know him from Adam. She still, to this day, thinks of my dad as her father and she calls him Daddy. No matter how people have tried to dissuade her from doing so, she persists. I think that's very telling.
SD seemed to try and straighten up, but he was soon back to his old self, only worse. He wasn't bathing and worst of all, was caling Niece by a new pet name…Headache.
"Come here Headache, time to change your dirty a*s."
He did it in front of me once and I told him that if I ever heard him call her that name again, I'd knock him a*s over teakettle. And I'm not kidding. I really said it. Actually, I said something worse.
SD did the best he could to ignore Niece. He tried to avoid her as much as possible. Meanwhile, Sister went through another failed back surgery which required her to stay in bed almost all the time. Parenting duties shifted to my geriatric, unhappy parents. Corporal punishment was used liberally. When Niece was in trouble for anything, she ran and hid under the kitchen table among the chairs.
Time for a new chapter.
No comments:
Post a Comment