My Birth
For some reason I was ready to go into the world earlier than usual. I had grown quite well and apparently both me and my mother's body agreed. The birth was easy and I was doing fine, my weight was ok, I was breathing normally, but still, as the hospital in Dieburg I was born in was a rather small one (it was closed a few years ago) the doctors decided to bring me to the next larger hospital in Darmstadt, just in case.
My mother said she can still remember one doctor saying: “But shouldn't we just keep him here?” and another arguing: “We should bring him to Darmstadt just for one night, just to be safe.”
Well, it didn't end up being just one night. I was placed in an incubator, a sort of heated plexiglass box, fed through tubes, got blood drawn from my heels every day, and my parents were only allowed to visit for a limited period each day. When my mother was breastfeeding me for “too long” the nurse would get angry at her and tell her that I needed some rest, that this was “too exhausting for me”. My mum told her that she was confident that I knew how much milk I needed and when I had enough.
The doctors were saying that the rule was that infants stay in the incubator until their regular birth date. Which was still seven weeks ahead.
My mother was rightfully furious. This was 90s pediatric medicine at its best, and like almost all the rest of medicine, it didn't give a lot of significance to the internal experience of patients. It was treating them like delicate machines.
I don't remember this period of my life, but I guess that at least my mother's trauma of this experience has also imprinted on me. It must have been hard for her not to be able to simply do what her instincts told her to do.
It took her 17 days of fighting to finally get me out of the hospital.
The doctors were bitter even then: “This is fully within your responsibility!”
And my mother was still furious: “Of course this is within my responsibility! This is my child!”
She then took me home and tried to make up for everything we had missed. She allowed me to fall asleep on her chest whenever I wanted. So did my father. I was so used to this that I refused to fall asleep when I wasn't lying on either my mother's or my father's chest.
I often wondered whether these 17 days alone prepared me for being ok with being alone later in my life, but now I'm thinking that maybe this experience also contributed to my anxiety of separation (which is getting much better).
Maybe it also contributed to my appreciation of physical touch, of skin to skin contact with another human being. I don't experience this very often, and I think this is because intuitively I know that whenever I do this, I imprint on this human, and knowing this means that I have to choose wisely.
Or, flipped the other way around, I intuitively know that I don't enjoy physical touch as much if I can't allow myself to imprint on this human.
I'm still not far in the interpretation of these events. Maybe eventually I'll remember more and understand more.