My daughter was born in 2019. She was always an easy baby, compared to our inconsolable first-born. The newborn sleep was still not perfect the second time around, but in a lot of ways, I could already tell that she was going to be a different child than her brother, right from the start. When she was about 5 months old, my husband went out of town one weekend for work. I kept the baby up for a little bit after putting her older brother down to sleep, and we hung out in the darkening living room, enjoying some 1:1 girl time after dark. The sun had set and I noticed that she was looking out the window, and I wondered if she was looking at the lights outside? Curiously, I rotated her to face the darker end of the room, to see whether she would turn her head back towards the light coming through the window. When she did not, I was a bit surprised, and continued to turn her body this way and that, only to realize that actually her head seemed to only turn to face always the same side of her body, and then back to midline. She almost never looked towards her right shoulder, past the midline. Over the course of the next few days, I confirmed this observation again and again by watching her closely, and was stricken with a deep sense of guilt.
--How could I have not noticed this before? I felt ashamed of my previous oblivion, and was Googling madly to see what it meant that my precious daughter could not rotate her head in both directions. When my husband came back from his trip, he tried to assuage my fears. "I am pretty sure I have seen her turn her head to the right before," he said. He was as certain that I was being paranoid, as I was sure that I was not. I made an appointment with our pediatrician, but began gently stretching her neck while I waited for the still-a-week-away appointment. By the time I saw a doctor from our pediatrician's office, her neck already seemed better. The doctor encouraged me to continue to stretch her neck, and said that often the newborns will just get better with this over time. I was not convinced that she would get better "on her own", because over the next week, I saw the pain and resistance in her eyes whenever I would try to stretch her neck the way the doctor had shown me, so I made an appointment with a newborn masseuse (technically, it was a body worker who worked with adults, but who also came highly recommended by local moms for treating infant torticollis), who was able to restore her full range of motion in three miraculous visits -- or so, I thought. When she left the masseuse's practice after three visits, N seemed visibly limber and free, able to rotate her head to the right while laying on her tummy, and showed only a small bit of tenseness/discomfort when I would massage her back or shoulder. I felt so happy to have found her the antidote to her illness (or so I thought). Fast-forward to 7 months, my daughter was still not sitting up, and could only occasionally roll over in her bed, and almost always rolled in one direction only. The doctor had remarked at 6 months that she seemed to be generally on track with her development, and did not seem concerned about her torticollis. At 7 months, however, N was unable to place any weight on her left hand or be able to push her head off of the ground more than 2 or 3 inches, and I was getting quite worried. I brought her back in to the pediatrician's office to make sure there was nothing wrong with her left shoulder (as in, was there a shoulder sprain?), and this time, a different pediatrician did a thorough examination and advised me to take her to PT. This pediatrician noted that my daughter was unable to place any amount of weight on her feet, which developmentally typically happens around 4 months. She said that N appears to have a slightly weaker muscle tone on the left side of her body, but regardless, PT would be able to address the vast majority of these cases and bring her function into the normal range. I immediately contacted an early-intervention agency in our area and waited for our intake appointment, scheduled to take place in February 2020. The wait was excruciating, because I did not know whether she would ever walk, if she could not bear any weight on her feet? Finally, the day came for our intake appointment for early-intervention services. The specialists at the early-intervention intake appointment assessed N in the areas of gross-motor, fine-motor, and speech development using a set of detailed rubrics, behavioral observation, and interview with both parents. They determined that N qualified for state-subsidized intervention services. In order to qualify for these services, she needed to be either 1.5 standard deviations below the mean in that particular assessment area, or delayed more than 25% of her age in months in that area. Across the board, they noted that her torticollis had caused delays in her gross-motor development, her use of her right hand (both gross- and fine-motor development), and in her cognitive development (since she only looked left and so seldom used her right side of her body, she could not really explore her environment, feed herself, or "self-advocate" in ways that were appropriate for a 7-month-old). We set up therapy immediately, with weekly PT sessions to address gross-motor delays and monthly OT sessions to address fine-motor delays (including challenges in self-feeding). By the time N started therapy, she had already completely plateaued in development for 2 or 3 months -- an eternity, considering she was only 8.5 months old. I write about this now, because I want to say that when all of this happened, initially I felt so many negative emotions. I grieved for the assessment results -- that she truly was so delayed in her development and that the future seemed uncertain for her. Simultaneously, I felt also an immense sense of relief, that my mother instincts were not false, and I was not being paranoid at all. I felt angry that the pediatrician's office had missed several flags along the way, and that it took my own insistent advocacy to get her the help that she needed. But, over time, all of those negative emotions have faded. I look back and feel only immense gratitude -- that I trusted my instincts, that we were able to access such a wonderful organization in our area, that we were able to continue virtual services seamlessly during COVID shutdown, and that my daughter has responded so well to a variety of interventions. I also feel so incredibly hopeful for the person that my daughter has turned out to be thus far. Over the course of 6 months, she has made a tremendous amount of weekly progress, smashing every goal they are setting for her. Her journey with the PT and OT has shown me that she is both curious and resilient. She is too young for me to know exactly how she will fare in formal school setting, but what I can say is that she affirms for me (as her brother did, in different contexts) that we are each far more than the raw talents we were born with. N has had to work very hard at every skill: rolling over, sitting up, crawling, walking, climbing, pulling toys apart, feeding herself, and manipulating small objects. Every skill, every step of the way, she has practiced and focused and beamed with pride when she is able to do something all by herself, and then she would rush to do it again and again, thereby showing incremental progress day after day. She has taught me more about joy than I could have imagined, and she has a sense of humor, a spunk, and a can-do attitude that are all of her own. Looking back, the greatest lesson I have taken away from this second-time-around parenting experience thus far is to see our children for who they are, not just who we wish they were. They come to us with different gifts and also different challenges. Those challenges don't need to define their achievement, but it is our job as parents to see our children for their needs (as well as strengths), in order to help them be and feel successful on their own terms.
0 Comments
|
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
All
Archives
July 2021
|