Preemie by Kasey Mathews.

I love birth stories.  Many a pregnant days were spent lying on the couch, sobbing along to A Baby Story on TLC and I eagerly anticipate the stories of friends and family whenever new babies are welcomed to the world.  Recently I read my friend's account of her fourth birth which was a home water birth.  She had a friend document the entire experience in pictures which made for a very tasteful, emotional tale itself.  My friend has experienced a wide range of experiences in her four births and I was deeply happy that this last birth was the culmination of her taking control of her body and achieving her dream birth.  She and her son are healthy and within weeks she was back to posting pictures of homemade bread on her Facebook page.

Sadly, it seems to me that my friend's story has become the exception rather than the norm.  It seems as though I am hearing more of births where medical intervention is necessary and in which babies are being born earlier than hoped for or suffering post-birth complications that delay the happiness of families returning home with their new babies in arms.  My own birth story did not have the beginning or middle that I had hoped for, but I certainly got my happy ending: a beautiful, healthy baby girl whom I was able to hold and nurse and care for nearly immediately and whom we were able to bring home just two days later.  I am someone who firmly believes that medical assistance can be necessary and I am grateful that so many of us have that available if needed.  I just wish I didn't hear about such interventions being needed so often and I wish more moms were able to have their own happy birth stories.

In Preemie we read about Kasey Mathew's birth story.  Unfortunately, her story falls on the side of unhappy which you can plainly gather from the title.  My love of birth stories and tales of motherhood lead me to grab Kasey Mathews's Preemie off the library shelf anyway.  The cover shows a radiant, beautiful blonde girl on a wooden swing which I hoped was a sign that Mathews's story had a happy ending.

Kasey Mathews's Preemie chronicles her daughter Andie's birth and life.  Andie was born at 25 weeks. She weighed 1 pound, 11 ounces and was less than a foot long.  During a time when she should have found herself still pregnant and enjoying her last weeks alone with her two year old son, Mathews instead finds herself needing to deal with her reality and desperately wanting to run away from it.  

Mathews's honesty is both refreshing and painful.  She finds herself rejecting her daughter, abhorred by her daughter's appearance and not wanting anything to do with the myriad of medical decisions and instructions that need to be made and heard.  It was, at times, terribly upsetting to read.  At other times, Mathews made me tearful because I could so strongly feel her emotions and love for her little girl.  Mathews's life became horribly unstable and you feel that up and down swing throughout this story.

I applaud Mathews for her honesty.  I do not think it is easy to be honest about motherhood.  It seems that mothers are very quick to judge one another.  To some extent, I believe this is natural and not necessarily done from a place of superiority or disapproval.  Often mothers are simply observing how another mom handles a situation and we reflexively think about how we would have handled it.  But other judgments are more harsh and critical and likely unfounded.  How can we truly judge the actions of another without having walked in their shoes?  At one point early on in Preemie, I found myself chiding Mathews for her hurtful words and the manner in which she was shunning her daughter.  I feared how her daughter might feel one day when she read those same sharp words.  But I nearly immediately turned that in to chiding myself, for whom am I to so harshly judge the actions and feelings of a mother who has just delivered a 25 week old baby?  Mathews had dreams and plans for her little baby and now they hung in some uncertain limbo.  Mathews hangs there too, unable to move forward or backward and struggling to be present in her daughter's life.  

Through surgeries, treatments and scares, we follow Mathews and her family on their difficult journey.  Page 101 seemed to be a turning point for Mathews.  I felt as though that was when she began to find her voice again and to come back down from her drifting.  As she begins to explore alternative and holistic treatments and to form her own supplemental healing plan for Andie, we see Mathews's strength and fiery personality return and Mathews morphs in to an outstanding advocate for her daughter.  

Preemie was a good, easy read and Mathews did a fine job of blending deep emotion with raw humor.  She makes no apologies for her honesty and I got the feeling that she was only saying aloud what others are likely thinking and feeling.  And the ending is indeed a happy one. Whereas we all hope to never encounter a situation such as this, I find comfort in stories like these.  The message that we are stronger than we know and that we can survive is always welcome here.