Birth: The Effects of a Complicated Start in Life #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter B post in the #AtoZChallenge. I’m doing this challenge on healing past hurts. Today, I want to go far into my past: I want to talk about the effects of a complicated birth.

As regular readers know, I was born prematurely and spent the first three months of my life in hospital. Of course, I have no conscious memories of this time, but that doesn’t mean my complicated start in life didn’t have an impact. There is evidence that many people who were born prematurely or otherwise had a difficult start to life, experience attachment problems into adulthood. Now of course I didn’t have the most positive childhood either and there is no way of knowing whether I would still have attachment issues had my parents been well-attuned to me. Of course, this is also a difficult question, since my parents experienced their own trauma having me prematurely.

The thing remains though, a child who was born prematurely, spends time in a clinical setting that they should’ve spent literally inside their mother’s body. There are attempts to lessen the burden this has on children (and parents). For example, kangarooing, in which a baby experiences skin-to-skin contact with their parents, is encouraged as soon as it is possible. However, for preemies and other NICU graduates who are now adults, this may not have been the case. Many older NICU graduates hardly saw or heard their parents for the first few weeks to months of their life. My parents, thankfully, lived in the same city I was in the neonatal unit in, so they were able to visit often.

One thing that haunts me though, and I’ve mentioned this several times, is the effect my being medically complex from birth on left on my parents’ attachment to me. Like I said, whether I would’ve experienced attachment issues had my parents not mistreated me as a child, is a difficult question because one of the reasons they treated me so poorly is their difficulty coping with my being disabled. My father quite literally asked the doctor whether it’d make sense to keep me alive after I’d had a brain bleed a few weeks after birth.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that when you look up “birth trauma” online, what comes up most frequently is not the effects a child’s own start in life could’ve had on them, but the effects of complicated childbirth on parents. And like I said, one goes hand-in-hand with the other.

Zodiac, Etc.: Astrology for Personal Growth #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. For my letter Z post in the #AtoZChallenge, I’m writing about astrology. This may be seen as cheating once again, as astrology is about as far removed from science as can be, but then again my topic is personal growth and some people do believe in astrology and use it for self-development. I realize I already wrote a bit about the topic for my letter T post in 2020, which also covered tarot. Like you may’ve noticed during this year’s #AtoZChallenge if not the one in 2020, I believe firmly in picking what works for you and leaving the rest whether it’s science-based or not. Like, I personally do find the Enneagram helpful and I occasionally do visit astrology forums online too. I just wanted to make clear that I’m not claiming there’s any evidence behind it.

So what is astrology? Astrology is the belief that the position of the stars and the celestial bodies they form in space have an influence on people and the natural world. The Zodiac sign, or sun sign, is the celestial body closest to the sun at the time of an event (usually a person’s birth). Mine is Cancer. There are other signs that are important in astrology too, such as the person’s moon sign.

What does someone’s Zodiac sign say about their personality? Honestly, nothing. I mean, I did a quick Google search for personality traits of people with the Zodiac sign Cancer and, though the first two hits (I was too lazy to look any further) included somewhat similar traits, they are incredibly broad and I no doubt would be able to find different descriptions if I weren’t so lazy. For example, Cancers are supposed to be caring, creative and intuitive. They also supposedly value long-lasting relationships. Well, doesn’t everyone? Oh, and we care about traditional values. Not me! But maybe that’s because I was born prematurely and should really have been a Libra. Just kidding.

Born

Posted on by Astrid

Last Friday, the prompt for Five Minute Friday was “born”. I assume many writers, being Christian, will have written about the moment of their salvation. Even though or maybe because I consider myself a progressive believer, I didn’t have such a moment. I was saved 2000 years ago. Rather, something else came to mind. Here goes.

I am still not done reading the book Preemie Voices by Saroj Saigal. It is a collection of letters from people born very prematurely between 1977 and 1982, which was published in 2014. One of the letters I did read, however, spoke to me.

In it, the woman said she was born three times. Once, when she was actually born. Then, when she was supposed to be born, so her due date. For me, this would be September 29, 1986. I was actually born on June 27.

Then there was her moment of rebirth in a spiritual kind of way, but dit didn’t have to do with any organized religion. Rather, she considered the day she was diagnosed as autistic to be her day of rebirth.

I am also autistic. For me, the day of my diagnosis was March 16, 2007. It wasn’t some type of epiphany moment though. My support coordinator at the time called the physician who’d assessed me because she hadn’t heard anything about the results of my diagnosis after my assessment was complete. Neither had I. She was told I had been diagnosed with autism and the report had been sent to my GP. How blunt!

I didn’t even dare write about it on my blog till some days later. It was so weird. Because I was diagnosed three or four more times, I never quite considered this day to be of any significance. Sometimes I wish I had such a moment of rebirth.