Baby Farm

I’ve discovered a baby farm. Not producing babies, but growing them, and nurturing their new parents before both are released to the world outside.

My discovery began when I had twins, born a little early at 36 weeks and one day on 16 June 2010. I had twins and I am a twin. Retribution. I would learn first-hand what my mother did for my sister and I all those years ago. I approached motherhood with some trepidation as well as excitement, as my mother had had little support back then in the 70s, and her succinct description of the experience bringing up twins in those early months was ‘torture.’ I could see her point. I love my sleep. I was afraid of being deeply and lengthily sleep deprived.

Following a long but almost pain-free labour thanks to an epidural, I found myself separated from my twins while they were looked after in the intensive care nursery, to get a bit warmer, grow a bit bigger, and learn how to suck. This was the first unexpected occurrence after their birth. The second was that after two days, Steve and I were told that the babies weren’t yet ready to be discharged when I would be, after three days. Indeed, they would not be discharged until they had put on more weight (amount not specified) and could feed with a bottle rather than a tube reaching down through their nostrils to their little stomaches.

Our babies were placed down the right-hand end of the intensive care nursery. Babies were arranged in the nursery from most premature to least premature, like ours. The most premature babies needed sophisticated machines that monitored their every tiny breath, many requiring operations to nudge them in to independent life. Our babies were laid in their own little heated cribs and were also monitored by machines as well as staff, but their support was relatively straightforward. Their lives were not at risk, however they needed to be kept warm while they grew big enough to regulate their own temperatures, and they needed to be fed with formula while they gradually practised the sucking action that babies learn inside their mothers if they are born full-term. The idea was that their feeds could be supplemented with my colostrom, produced in the first few days before breast milk is established, and then with my breast milk, and I would spend as much feeding time as I could with them to encourage them to attach and feed on my breast. It would be a slow process.

I could go down to the nursery whenever I liked, and the midwives encouraged me to follow the babies’ own paces in discovering the breast, attaching and sucking. Time with them while they explored this new experience would help promote my colostrom and milk production.

From the first night after they were born, a midwife gave me a tiny syringe and showed me how to ‘express’ colostrom and collect it to feed the babies. After squeezing my breast in the way I had been shown for 45 minutes, I produced 0.8ml from both breasts. I was encouraged to keep expressing every 3 hours, day and night if I could manage it, and deliver the colostrom to the nursery to be added to the formula they were fed. It was tiring work.

The right-hand end of the nursery seemed to be staffed largely by twenty-year-old women. In some shifts, it would fall to one midwife to look after both of our babies; in others, each baby would be looked after by a different midwife each. With all the beeping machines and the midwives constantly running around to keep the feeds (often three-hourly) and nappy changes to schedule, it was not a calm place. The young midwives seemed to rule it with an iron fist. ‘Don’t look at other babies’ said one when Steve wandered over to another crib. Fair enough. As a more experienced midwife said, you wouldn’t go and look at other people’s grannies in hospital. Why should babies be any different?

One middle-aged midwife impressed me with her compassion. She talked to the babies and called those in her care ‘angel-child.’ But I found some of the younger midwives to be rather brusque. I arrived once to find a tissue covering the face of one of my babies and asked the young midwife looking after her why. She replied with irritation that it had been beside her face to catch the regurgitated milk but had blown over, adding in response to my concern that the baby might suffocate that she was being monitored by a machine and was not going to suffocate. The same midwife, when I asked another time whether I could pick up my baby, responded sarcastically ‘you’ll have to pick her up if you want to feed her.’

The intensive care nursery at the hospital was filling up fast, and more room needed to be created for high-need babies. On the second day after the twins were born, the day before I was discharged, Steve and I were asked whether we would like our babies to be transferred to another hospital’s Special Care Nursery, which looks after babies like ours that just need to grow a bit more and learn how to suck. This hospital is closer to our home and just down the road from my parent’s house, so we agreed. I travelled there with the twins in an ambulance, an almost surreal experience on a sunny day after being inside for so long. The baby farm there couldn’t have been more different.

Soon after their arrival, little cards appeared on our babies’ cribs saying ‘welcome Lara and Rhea to the Special Care Nursery.’  This baby farm was a quiet one, with no beeping machines. The midwives seemed more mature and professional, while also being caring of the babies and providing a supportive, helpful and knowledgeable resource for us parents. The midwives suggested a routine for feeding the babies and expressing milk to enable them to be fed with my milk when I wasn’t there while at the same time helping build up my supply.

Initially, I was staying in the nursery for all but a few hours in the evening and night, when I would eat and sleep at my parent’s house, waking at 4am to be back at the nursery for the 5am feed. After a few days, back at my home now, one of the midwives suggested a routine whereby I left the nursery in the early evening, returned for the 8pm and 11pm feeds, missed two feeds while I slept at home and returned again to the nursery by 8am. I filled the fridge in the parent’s lounge room with food provided by mum, napped during the day on a reclining chair in a little room off the main one that the midwives had prepared just for us, and snatched a few minutes of sunlight and exercise in the sun while my babies slept and grew.

‘You have expressed exactly the amount of milk that your babies need’ said Liz, one of the midwives, on the day of my arrival – 12 ml each. By this stage Rhea, the smaller twin, was able to suck from my breast, but the effort would tire her out for the rest of the day and she would be fed by her tube for her remaining feeds. Lara would contemplate the breast like a character from a Leunig cartoon, until suddenly, four days after her arrival at the new hospital, she took to it and caught up to her sister in the course of just one feed. Still, their tube feeds were only gradually being replaced by breast feeds, so I was able to feed them individually, alternating one baby each feed. And after each feed I would express my milk for fifteen minutes in the breastfeeding room, using an electric breast pump, and the pressure of the milk in my breasts would be alleviated. I could only miss one feed – at 2am – any more and it would be too painful.

It was in the breastfeeding room that I met other mothers and heard their stories – impressive stories of courage and resilience. One mother was only in her early twenties and had three stepchildren at home, as well as her own two year old. Her husband was a little older and her stepchildren’s mother ‘wasn’t very maternal’ so had relinquished them to their father. Another new mother told me about the birth of her baby, born two months early in dramatic circumstances involving an emergency flight to hospital in another city for an operation. Some mothers were having trouble producing milk despite desperate attempts to persevere. One woman coincidentally had also had identical twin girls born the day before mine, hers at this hospital and at 36 weeks and two days to my 36 weeks and one at the first hospital. A camaraderie developed between us all while we sat and let the machines pump.

Julia was another of the mothers there whose baby had been transferred to this hospital just like our babies had been. She had another child, and also looked after one of her sister’s seven children one day a week. She was chatting to a friend on her iphone. ‘Rose says to say hello,’ she said to me afterwards. Who the hell was Rose? I searched my memory frantically, then I remembered – it was another mother of twins who I had met in the Intensive Care Nursery at the other hospital. Julia explained that she had gone to school with Rose. Rose, like some of the other women I had met at the first hospital, had been visiting her very sick baby daily for weeks, living in the old nurses’ quarters as she came from a nearby country town. At least I live here, I thought.

So the days slipped by, and those women I had got to know left with their babies one by one. Julia’s baby was big enough now and could feed from a bottle. ‘He’s a bit whiffy’ remarked one of the midwives to her on the day he was to be discharged. Julia didn’t see this as a bathing issue. ‘Yes, not surprising, he takes after his father’, she replied.

The midwives taught Steve and I how to bath our babies, how to drip saline solution into their noses when they were snuffly, how to feed them at the same time using my breastfeeding pillow. They answered our many questions as we progressed as new parents and our babies sucked more and more (‘Congratulations Lara and Rhea, they drank their first bottles on 24 June’).

By the time Rhea and Lara were also ready to leave, two weeks after they had arrived, we had our first female Prime Minister. At the other end of the spectrum, our babies were now ready to enter the wider world.