Not Ready

A loves to look through her baby photos these days. She's got some sense of her growing body now, and some understanding that she used to be a little baby. When she sees photos of herself as a baby, she says really adorable things, like:

Ohhhh, look at how cute I was!

or

Look, Daddy is holding me. He loved me so much when I was a baby.

I have been a huge fan of family photos since I was tiny, too, and I'm so happy to share this lineage with her. I'm also setting her up with an amazing album that she will be able to enjoy as she grows. I have them organized by each month of her life. Photography and album organization is my main hobby these days, and just about the only thing I have extra energy for.

Last night she wanted to look through the Five Months Old folder. When she was five months old, she was just starting to taste solid food, she was sitting up, and she just had a dusting of hair. Her big blue eyes were very expressive. She was small for her age, because of her heart condition, I think. She was just creeping up on 12 pounds.

This was also the month she had open heart surgery.

I did take some photos of her right out of surgery, for documentation more than anything else. There are a few photos of her as she was recovering in the hospital and some of her stitches. There are even a couple of photos of her dad and I with the shocked expression on our faces as we left our baby with the anesthesiologists. I shudder to recall this experience at all. Even though my daughter is fine now, I'm still traumatized by it. The scars are on her body, but I carry my own unseen wounds.

Many parents in this situation will post these kinds of photos for awareness, or for other reasons, but I feel extremely private about it. I don't even like these images in my own mind, and I certainly don't want to share them with the world. I don't even really want to share them with my daughter.

She doesn't even know she has a heart defect. She doesn't know that her chest looks different from other kids. She's not aware of her scars or of how traumatizing this experience was. Maybe deep in her tissues, she does, but she will never remember it consciously. I don't want to keep her from her own history, but I'm just not prepared to explain it to her. I don't know how she would contextualize those pretty harsh photos. I don't know what kinds of things seeing them would plant in her impressionable mind. Someday I will share them with her if she wants to see it, but not just yet.

I don't want to set her up for life believing she's different, or compromised, or not as strong as her peers. I want her to use her experiences as strengths and never be bogged down by her limitations, especially emotionally. I want her to be informed, and therefore armed, for all the challenges she will meet in her life.

I'm just not sure that sharing these photos with her at three years old will accomplish that. I'm 100% for full disclosure, but to do that I need to be ready, and she needs to be able to understand. We have a little ways to go. I am keeping those photos in that folder, but for now, they're tucked away in a subfolder called Surgery. If she happens to be wandering through and I'm not looking, she at least won't accidentally stumble upon something that she, or I, can't handle.