When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.
My family calls me Declan. But most people call me E.C. I think it comes from my dad. It's an Irish convention. You usually call the first child by the initials.
Hours after I gave birth to my first child, my husband cradled all five pounds of our boy and said, gently, 'Hi, Sweetpea.' Not 'Buddy' or 'Little Man.' Sweetpea. The word filled me with unanticipated comfort.
I'd long wanted to write about that moment when a woman steps off the career track to have her first child. For me, that was a scary time.
When my first child was born in 1962, I wrote a letter to my grandfather telling him how happy I was but how concerned; concerned because there were so many visions which were not very good.
My mother came from a generation that did not want nannies. She had her first child at 24 and her last - me - at 42.
Your whole life is changed with that first child. Your social behaviors are all turned upside down, you're sleep deprived, but eight months in, my son had this seizure, and it just woke me up to the idea that, oh, no, this can end. And it can end in a way that will destroy you forever.
From what I hear, it's a normal thing to feel guilty as a mother, especially when trying to fill the needs of a newborn along with maintaining what you had with your first child.
When I had my first child, I didn't write for a year, and I felt when I tried to start again I might actually not be able to do it anymore. I really could not do it well, and I felt out of sorts with it.
In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.
