Max vs. Gabe at 2 months

Above you can see Max at 2 months followed by Gabe at the same age. Although they look alike, my boys are two different characters! So far the "Max experience" has been a lot different from when Gabe was born!

First of all, Max was born into a much different environment than Gabe (almost seven years older). When I got pregnant with Gabe at 26, I knew nothing about babies. The only time I'd held one was in my mother-baby nursing rounds. We were the first to get pregnant on either side of the family, so it had been a long time since anyone had dealt with a baby. The younger generation didn't know what we were getting ourselves into, and the older generation didn't remember! I'd done a lot of reading and research about pregnancy and birth, but none about babies. I just knew I'd always wanted to be a mom, and figured I'd somehow automatically know what to do. In fact, I felt supremely confident that I would easily morph into this perfect "Mom" persona at the time of delivery and never really considered that I would really still be the same Amy underneath ... with the same needs and flaws.

My reality check arrived on June 5, 2001. I called him "Gabriel" for about five months before I started calling him "Gabe." I'm not sure how the transition happened -- maybe I felt like we'd gotten to know each other well enough! By contrast I never even intended to call Max "Maximilian," as we named him. I just wanted to give him the longer version perhaps for the elegance of his future wedding invitations, or something like that.

Arriving after a long 40 1/2 weeks gestation and a lengthy labor (by the end of which I was nearly incoherent after being awake for 56 hours), Gabe was a big and boisterous baby of 8 lbs., 9 oz. The nurses and doctor said his umbilical cord was unusually thick. He was brought to my breast and I held him briefly. Then they moved me to another room, and I quickly succumbed to sleep and have little memory of anything until the next day. Looking back I feel sad that I didn't get the chance to connect with him during those first hours. He stayed in the nursery, except for when a kindly black nurse brought him in and held him to my breast during the night. I later had regrets, imagining him in there crying, and wish that I'd assigned my family to take care of him during my quasi-coma. I had signed the form to have him circumcised when I was admitted to the hospital but had started to have second thoughts. If someone had announced that they were taking him for a circumcision the next morning, I would have stopped them. But I didn't even know it was being done till he was back, and I had slept through it all! The next time I dozed they said he was cold stressed and they took him in and "suctioned" him too. At that point I was finally really awake, and pretty irritated! I said, "I'm coming to get him," and I marched down the hall and collected my baby. And THAT was the point when I stepped up to the plate and became Gabe's mom.

My hospital experience with Max was a great improvement. This baby was mine from the time he exited the womb! During the last seven years the hospital had fully implemented their rooming-in policy. Labor/delivery and postpartum occurred in the same room, so Max and I didn't leave that room until he was 2 days old.

Although I'd had some initial painful contractions with Max at 2 a.m. the day before his birth (just like Gabe), with Max I had managed to go back to sleep until the morning, so I was better rested to begin with. From the time I arrived at the hospital in the evening, labor with Max was speedy, and no one hung pit or threatened a c-section if I didn't start progressing. With both babies I went to the hospital in the late evening the day before their birth (though with Gabe I got sent home for a few hours and came back). Max was born just 5 minutes into the next day, at 12:05. Gabe was born a full 17 hours into the next day, at 5:23 p.m.!

As I've previously established, Max was born much earlier, at 38 wks, 1 day gestation. Every ultrasound I had with Max showed him to be developmentally on-the-dot, the exact age he should have been with regard to my last menstrual period, while Gabe was always behind. Judging from my LMP, Gabe's due date should have been May 23rd, while Max's should have been May 19th. (But this only means that I ovulated on time with Max, and late the month I got pregnant with Gabe. Gabe's actual due date was established by early ultrasound at June 1st.) At birth, Max was a lightweight compared to Gabe, at 6 lbs., 15 oz.

When we took Gabe home from the hospital, it was to a different home. At the time we lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the center of Tomball, waiting for our house to be built. It was a second story apartment, and carrying a baby and walking a puppy with a small bladder (Fidget) downstairs proved to be an ordeal! But the worst part of my existence at that time was Gabe's crying. He seemed to be crying ALL the time. I lived at my wit's end. Trying to keep him from wailing all the time, I'd sit up and nurse him for literally hours on end. (At one point I set 3 hours as the max point I could tolerate a single nursing session.) In the beginning I sat with him on my lap in a reclining chair. Once he stopped nursing, I sat there, motionless, knowing that moving an inch to the left or right would start him crying inconsolably again. I wanted desperately to recline my head a little so I could sleep too, but any slight movement would produce more crying. So I tried to calculate how long it would take him to fall into a deeper sleep. Five minutes? Thirty minutes? I sat there, afraid to move, staring at the minutes on the clock, desperately searching for a pattern. None emerged, and I slept little. Sometimes by coincidence he'd suddenly fall asleep while on the changing table, and I would lie down on the floor in the hallway and pass out. Trying to prevent the crying, I completely stopped taking care of myself. I barely managed to use the bathroom and shower, knowing that he was always at the edge of a breakdown.

This was horrible! I became convinced that there was some kind of conspiracy in our society where no one talks about how awful babies are! In Gabe's baby journal I wrote the following entry: "... no one ever told me, 'Hey, sometimes your baby is going to just cry and cry, and there will be nothing you can do about it ... He will turn red and scream as if someone were torturing him. He will scratch his face crazily with his hands and stare at you pleadingly, then blamingly. And you will hold him and stroke him and rock him and feed him and shush him and sing to him and meet every need you can possibly conceive of until you are crying in sheer frustration and sorrow ... and he will continue to cry and cry until he cries himself to sleep as if you weren't there at all.' If someone had said that to me, I would have been better prepared." Early life with Gabe was a living hell. When the OB asked me when I was planning my second, I told her that I was never going to do this again.

I started reading all the baby books I could get my hands on. I read The Baby Whisperer from cover to cover and tried desperately to get Gabe on the schedule prescribed by Traci Hogg. Maybe I should have guessed that it would be virtually impossible to accomplish anything by "whispering" to someone who is screaming back at you ... What was wrong with this baby? Why wouldn't he stop screaming? Why couldn't I put him down? Why wouldn't he sleep without me? How did our species ever survive with babies who could torture their mothers this much?

My answers came in the form of a different sort of "baby book," Our Babies, Ourselves, by Meredith F. Small, who is an ethnobiologist studying how society and culture impact the way we raise our children. As it turns out, our Western childrearing methods are completely different from those used in almost every other society and age in human history! Our babies are essentially the same as all human babies since the age of evolutionary adaptedness. They cry because they are completely helpless, and crying to compel their caregivers to protect them is their only means of protecting themselves. They like to be held all the time because if put down alone, they are subject to danger. The babies of our earliest ancestors could not afford to allow themselves to be set down somewhere alone for any length of time ... I always think of the the cartoon with a caveman and woman looking around saying, "Where is the cave baby?" with wild animals lurking nearby. If this baby allowed himself to be laid down alone, he was surely a goner. Basically, our babies think they ARE cave babies. So, maybe all the crying meant that my baby was healthy and highly adapted! (Just not to the modern age!) Reading Dr. Sears' The Baby Book gave me another more positive label for Gabe, the "high needs child." According to Dr. Sears, the excessive crying stage would end, although this inborn intensity was probably a permanent feature of the baby's temperament. He was right. Gabe is the exact same person as the baby who screamed at me all throughout those early weeks. But later the screaming would give way to strong opinions and willfulness, and an intensely loving, caring and intelligent child who still has a bad temper when he is angry! When asked about his temperament, I began referring to him as a "very vocal self-advocate."

Looking at babies from an evolutionary and biological perspective made it all make sense. Learning about how other cultures care for their babies opened my mind for the journey I had to take. And Dr. Sears helped me apply it to modern times. What I was searching for was called "attachment parenting," and of course I had the advice and support of my crunchy, tie-dye-wearing, extended-breastfeeding pediatrician. It was the only method that would work for us. Soon I was sleeping next to Gabe at night without reservation, breastfeeding while lying in bed, and actually SLEEPING! I totally embraced the AP counterculture and breastfed Gabe till he was four years old. The only part of it I never learned was babywearing. I carried Gabe everywhere but swore that with the next one, I would learn the art of babywearing ...

And in this mindset I welcomed my second child much more gently into the world. He doesn't want to be put down alone either, but I don't expect to put him down. He cries sometimes but I expect him to cry. He sometimes wants to do marathon nursing sessions, but that's okay, because I expect that, and I have a stack of novels to read. The change in expectations, as well as the knowledge that this is temporary, have allowed me to keep my spirits elevated this time. But the biggest gift is Max's temperament.

First of all, Max is by no means a happy-go-lucky baby. He's a fusser for sure. But he is a cake walk compared to Gabe! The greatest blessing is that he is CONSOLABLE. Just because he starts to lose it doesn't mean he is going to cry continuously, unabated, until I lose it too! I know that I will be able to nurse him, or dance him around, or sit him up, or even hand him to someone else off for awhile, and in doing so will be able to reign him in and stop the crying! That knowledge empowers me and allows me some confidence.

Max is not as intense as Gabe. He makes little fussy noises for awhile before he cries, giving me fair warning ... he doesn't cry as hard or as long as Gabe did. What's more, he doesn't seem to want to cry. I can see him fighting it, working hard to reestablish his own emotional equilibrium as I try to console him. Gabe had no interest in being consoled, and even seemed to have a chip on his shoulder, just waiting for some stimulus to set him off! I can actually interpret Max's cries. He has a little noise he makes at night when he is hungry, a whiny cry when accidentally awakened, and a persistent, droning cry when he is too tired at night. I could not ever read Gabe's cries at all. As far as I was able to perceive, all of his cries where the "mad" cry! When Gabe was a baby, I actually thought he must be insane. I kept wondering if a baby could be insane!

Although Max doesn't cry as much as Gabe, I believe he also doesn't smile as much as Gabe did quite early on. So, perhaps he is altogether less intense, for positive or negative (though I noticed with both that they do not really smile when they're happy so much as when they're right on the edge of becoming upset).

Max is not as opinionated as Gabe. Even as a baby, if Gabe wanted one thing, he would not be satisfied with anything else. Max is more willing to keep his options open. One method of consoling him might work just as well as another. He seems to award points for effort. He also seems to trust me in a way that Gabe never did. (Maybe it helps that I can also trust myself.)

I remember reading about the "quiet alert" stage babies (supposedly) had when Gabe was young, and thinking that Gabe had NO quiet alert stage. He was either asleep, crying, or "right on the edge," as Dan would call it -- that short period of excitability before he would start crying! I am amused by Max's pensive glances ... I never saw Gabe make faces like that. Max is occasionally content to sit back and observe.

Since I've been able to watch Gabe grow and change for seven years, yet still staying the same little person I gave birth to, I can't help but speculate about what kind of child Max will be. (Perhaps I should not be classifying and labeling my children, since the labels placed on them might tend to stick ... I just can't help observing ...) I think that Max will be a more quiet and pensive child, more willing to observe and take life as it comes. I think that he will have a good sense of humor but not be as big a comedian as Gabe. I think he will worry less.

I guess we always wonder what we've done to make our children the way they are. I've wondered if my worrying while pregnant with Gabe might have somehow caused his intense temperament. Gabe was conceived just a few days before the 9/11 tragedy, and I have read that initial studies have shown a possible link between conceptions at this time and anxiety disorders in those children ... I also read that pregnant female dust mites, when threatened, produce offspring with large protective helmet-like structures, at great metabolic expense. Usually by the time these biologically overprepared young are born, the danger has long passed. Although we aren't dust mites, maybe there is a similar process for producing overprepared offspring in other species? I remember feeling exaggeratedly out-of-sorts after 9/11. After finding out I was pregnant, I wondered whether the real source of the feeling was hormonal or environmental. (But I didn't have the same feeling during my early pregnancy with Max.) I gained too much weight with Gabe -- 60 lbs. as compared to 35 lbs. with Max, so I wonder if that was a factor in producing such a large baby. I also quit working at 7 1/2 months with Gabe, so maybe my sedentary lifestyle prolonged gestation. With Gabe I had some spotting in the very beginning after exercising, and I was so frightened that I tried to do as little strenuous activity as possible during that pregnancy. I had no spotting with Max.

While 9/11 shortly followed Gabe's conception, I found out I was pregnant with Max during the blackout (power outage) following Hurricane Ike! So my early days of pregnancy with both boys may have been more stressful than most. Unlike Gabe, though, Max was conceived following a miscarriage, so I did spend much of the pregnancy worrying that something would happen!

Well, in the end, I guess the events and situations surrounding the births of my two sons are just interesting details. There are countless factors in both nature and nurture that make us who we are, and we must accept our children for whoever they turn out to be. The fun part is to sit back and watch as their characters unfold.