Sawyer

I have started back to work after having my baby.  I have been gone from my bog all this time mainly because I do not use a computer at home. 

There are a couple of reasons for this.

One is that I am here in front of a computer for 8 hours when I am at work.  Going home and being at a desk in front of one there is just not the way I want to spend my evenings. The other reason is that the computer at home is Jay’s Mac.  Not only am I unfamiliar with macs having worked on a pc for years, but this is Jay’s Mac. Being unfamiliar with Apple is bad enough, but Jay’s Mac is the better half of our livelihood. If something happens to it, well, let’s just say that would not be good.  And there is no way in hell I want to be the one who is sitting in front of Jay’s computer when something goes wrong.  And technology hates me.  It truly does.  The damn thing would probably blow itself up just to spite me.  I stay away from it just in case.

If I get a laptop of my own, maybe you will see a bit more of me in blog posts and on facebook and such, but until then this is more of a 9 to 5 thing, responsibilities permitting.

I miss seeing Jay.  I miss being at home.  I miss having absolutely no schedule whatsoever and being paid for it.  But then I do like having my own space and time to organize my thoughts.  I just don’t like that I have to commute an hour to get here, but c’est la vie.

Most of all I miss the baby.  His name is Sawyer James Musselwhite and he will be 10 weeks old tomorrow. He is perfection in a 10 pound bundle.  I miss being snuggled up with him all day.  The last day of my maternity leave I held him. I held him all day.  I did not put him down from the moment I woke up. I held him while I perused my library books.  We napped together on the couch.  I didn’t even shower until later on in the evening when Jay got done with work for the day because I did not want to put him down in his bassinet. 

I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to take Sawyer to daycare at this age.  Greta and Ezra were well over a year old before they ever went to daycare, so I don’t think I would have handled it very well if Sawyer was going at such a tender age.  I know that daycare providers do their best to take good care of the babies they have and both Greta and Ezra have loved daycare, but Sawyer is just too young. 

Luckily for me, Jaymus, LLC has been able to take on a new employee.  Sure, he is a bit young (ok, 10 weeks is more than a ‘bit’) and his creative input is limited to cooing, gurgling and maybe a bit of crying (though he is really quite copasetic), but so far I understand he is doing a bang up job as “creative commentator.”  Just today he accompanied his boss (aka, Daddy) on a trip to the dentist where I am sure he learned a lot about teeth that will come in handy once he starts growing some (those teeth will also come in handy for biting awful nurses who seem to mistake him for a pin cushion on a regular basis).

Sawyer is adorable and perfect.  He is growing so much and becoming quite the little piglet lately.  He is putting on the baby fat and that little bum has gotten a roll or two on it now.  So have the little thighs.  He has light brown hair and blue eyes.  He has perfect little lips and is starting to make that “O” shape to mimic us when we do it. His coos are the sweetest thing I’ve heard.  He also has Downs Syndrome. 

This is the first time I have ever written that sentence.  It is also the first time I have come close to telling a bunch of people at one time as if it were some sort of announcement.  The reason is not that I am embarrassed by it, although my own mother has wrongly made that assumption. It is also not because I feel responsible, though that is partly true. It is not because I am worried about being blamed for having a baby at 40 and being surprised when there was a problem.

It is because I have the overwhelming feeling that it will very quickly become the first thing associated with him.  And the idea he may be judged lacking mentally and/or physically at first sight saddens me more than anything I can describe.

The day we went to went to the perinatologist to have a second opinion when the screening for Downs came back elevated, they asked if we wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl.  We wanted to find out what we were having as soon as possible and this was the first time someone was going to tell us.  I saw Jay’s face when the tech told us it was a boy and I really hope I never forget what he looked like in that moment.  For those few minutes everything was perfect.  Then the doctor came in and – without the best bedside manner – crushed my hope that he was going to tell us not to worry and that there was very little chance our baby boy had Downs.  That did not happen.  He told us on a scale of 1 to 10 his concerns were an 8.  Apparently, he was right to have those concerns. 

But the thing I remembered the most later when I was calm and rational again was that when I talked to Jay on the way home and when I called my mother later to tell her, the fact that we had just found out we were having a baby boy was a footnote in those conversations.  It was all about Downs Syndrome.  As a matter of fact, I remember specifically that I told my mother at the end of our conversation after I cried and she said all the right things, “By the way, it’s a boy.”  My voice was flat and listless by then. 

While I was pregnant I was talking to a friend of mine who was telling me about a conversation she’d had with another friend of hers.  That friend’s son had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.  During the conversation my friend told me that the sentence, “You don’t understand what it is like to be the mom of an Aspy” actually came out of this woman’s mouth during the conversation. Now maybe I am being a bit sensitive.  After all, I was pregnant and I had been told there was a 20% chance my baby had a syndrome of his own. But still, “mom of an Aspy!”  Really?  Even she was reducing her own son to not only his diagnosis, but a cutesy nickname for it. If his own mother thought of him that way, what would others think?

That is not the way we view our perfect little baby.  And I am determined that no one else will do it, either. He is Sawyer James Musslewhite.  He has brown hair, blue eyes and Downs Syndrome. He has his Daddy’s lips and temperament.  He is not going to live a life hampered by assumptions – whether they be those trying to figure out what he can do or what he cannot. 

He will, however, have expectations.  He will be expected to do his best, the same thing that is expected of his brother.  He will be the best Sawyer James Musselwhite there can possibly be.  Because he is the only Sawyer James Musselwhite there is or ever will be.

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