Second of three parts
Later, Mariah Saari would wonder if it was the full moon, the plate of pineapple she consumed or the vigorous vacuuming of her car that put her into labor. She woke up on June 2 feeling strange. Her due date was five days away.
"You're in labor," said Sherri Saari, the aunt who had raised her after her mother died in a car crash.
"Naah," Mariah responded. They went to the hospital anyway. It soon became clear the baby was on its way. "F--k my life!" and "Kill me now!" Mariah shouted, shaking with pain from her contractions. Mariah asked for an epidural, and got one. Afterwards, her blood pressure and the baby's dipped dangerously low. The nurses told her to lay on her side, and placed an oxygen mask on her face.
Just then Wendi Manumalo, her visiting nurse, arrived.
Mariah, 20, had been couch-surfing, jobless and using meth when she found out she was pregnant: a bundle of what public health experts call "risk factors" for mother and baby. Around the halfway mark of her pregnancy, she had enrolled in a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership through Providence Alaska Medical Center, which was meant to offer her a guide to pregnancy and the first two years of her baby's life in hopes that both mother and child would benefit. The approach, which sends nurses into the homes of poor young expectant mothers, is widely considered to be a public health success story nationally. In Alaska, the program Mariah had enrolled in had just doubled its staff, with a goal of reaching 200 families in Anchorage and the Mat-Su area.
June 2: 'What does my hair color have to do with being a mother?'
Over the past four months Wendi, an experienced labor and delivery nurse who had once been a single teenage mother herself, had become a steadying presence in Mariah's life. The two met weekly, with Wendi functioning as part health care provider and part social worker. Since they'd started working together, Mariah had found employment, bought a car and started making plans to move off Sherri's couch.
Wendi breezed into the hospital room in nurse scrubs, aglow and grinning.Though she is a trained labor and delivery nurse studying to be a midwife, she was not there to deliver Mariah's baby. Nurse visitors like Wendi often develop close bonds with their clients, and she wanted to be there to support Mariah through the birth.
As the epidural took effect, Mariah laid in the hospital bed chatting, covered in a blue blanket and wringing the neck of a Beanie Baby someone had produced. She ate a red popsicle.
"I hope my baby doesn't have her dad's resting bitch face," she said laughing.
The father himself had appeared at the hospital briefly.
"I don't even know how he got here," Mariah said. "I assume he skateboarded."
She thought a moment.
"I'm glad he's here, really glad he's here."
Much becalmed, Mariah chatted with Wendi about clamming and halibut fishing in Cook Inlet as a child. The time she caught an octopus and used part of its tentacle as bait. About splashing in Goose Lake on a recent hot day in her full pregnant glory. A stranger had asked if she was pregnant and she couldn't resist her favorite trick, replying "no" to watch the reaction.
Read Part 1: The making of a mother
At a park recently Mariah had overheard a woman linking her multi-colored hair to a prediction that she'd be a bad mother. Mariah hated being underestimated.
"What does my hair color have to do with being a mother?" she scowled from the hospital bed.
What the woman didn't know was that Mariah wanted to be a good mother more than she'd wanted anything in her life.
Wendi reached up to brush Mariah's bangs off her face.
"I'm gonna miss being pregnant," Mariah sighed.
'It's so hard to believe you're real'
Mariah only pushed for 10 minutes. Around 9 p.m., Stefanie Annalynn Saari came out, tiny, perfect and squalling, the dusky lavender shade of a human just entering the world for the first time. The doctors set her on Mariah's chest, who looked at her in awe as she turned pink.
"Can she breathe?" Mariah asked. "I feel like she can't breathe."
The nurse assured her Stefanie was fine. For a long moment, Mariah cradled her daughter as a crowd of nurses and doctors stitched her up and her mom coordinated a swelling crowd of visitors on the phone.
"It's so hard to believe you're real," Mariah told her daughter.
The hardest part is over, somebody told her.
"It's only beginning!" the doctor said.
Stefanie was taken to a warming table to be weighed, held by the nurses like a precious loaf of bread.
Soon, the baby's father came in. Nobody noticed him at first. Sherri was too busy holding the baby and taking pictures. Finally, Mariah intervened from the hospital bed.
"Do you have to work today?" she asked the father. "Would you like to hold her?"
Mariah handed his daughter over to him. He tilted his head and smiled.
The room began to fill with visitors. Mariah's old high school boyfriend from Kenai arrived and presented her with flowers. People took turns holding and murmuring over Stefanie. Mariah laid in the hospital bed looking dazed. Finally someone placed her baby back in her arms.
Mariah announced the birth on Facebook: "My baby girl!!! Stefanie Annalynn Saari. I'm so in love! She weighed 6 pounds 1 ounce! I pushed her out in 3 contractions took about 20 minutes haha sooo worth it. I can have visitors tomorrow. Text me if you wanna come," she wrote.
On Stefanie's second day of life, a crisis emerged. An investigator from the Office of Children's Services showed up in Mariah's hospital room. Mariah, it turned out, had taken a single Oxycontin pill in the early stages of labor, to dull the pain. A friend had given it to her, she said. It showed up in a drug screen that hospitals give to new moms, triggering a visit from OCS. Later, Mariah would say that it was a stupid thing to do and she regretted it.
Wendi told the OCS investigator about the work she and Mariah had been doing together.
"I described what Mariah had been doing these last months to prepare to become a mother, and how comfortable I am with her being a mother," Wendi said later.
Mariah was grateful.
"Wendi stuck up for me," she said later. "She didn't have to do it, and I didn't ask her to. But she did. And now OCS is not on my ass anymore."
June 23: 'I want to get everything for us.'
Mariah and Sherri smoked cigarettes on the landing outside Sherri's apartment. In a peasant skirt and tank top with hair dyed freshly purple, Mariah didn't look like she'd ever been pregnant, though Stefanie had been born just a few weeks earlier.
Mariah was just visiting the apartment. She and her daughter had moved into a rented room in Muldoon.
Inside, Stefanie was asleep in a bassinet, wearing a pink zebra outfit and tiny polka dot shoes, dressed up for Wendi's visit. Wendi cooed over her. She keeps extra close watch on her mothers during the delicate first weeks, when postpartum depression can creep in and when the crucial bonds between parent and child are being established.
Mariah was deep in the murky days of fresh motherhood. She'd been experiencing mom firsts: She'd taken the baby to Sourdough Mining Co. for dinner and hadn't eaten a bite of her meal because Stefanie was fussing. She also freaked out when Stefanie was 5 days old and didn't dirty a diaper for 18 hours.
They talked about the way babies learn that their mothers will respond to their needs. Attachment and trust are two of the foundations of healthy childhood and one of the things Wendi tries hardest to impart on mothers.
"I love that you notice what she uses to self-soothe herself. You are very responsive," Wendi told Mariah. "You're teaching her how to trust."
"Oh, I didn't even realize that," Mariah said.
Mariah had stopped breastfeeding Stefanie after three days. She was worried the baby was starving and that her diet of fast-food wasn't healthy enough for the milk to help Stefanie. That wasn't the case, but Wendi didn't say anything about it. She had already learned Mariah responded best to encouragement, and hated to feel judged. She focused on all the good things Mariah was trying to do.
Mariah announced she was going to her doctor to get a work release so she could take on more hours at her job. Stefanie had lit a fire in her to make money, she said.
"I can't live off six hours (of work) a week," she told Wendi. "I'm not going to live off ATAP my whole life. I want to get a place for us. I want to get everything for us." (ATAP is the Alaska Temporary Assistance Program.)
Being able to provide was a constant worry for Mariah. She was used to being broke herself, but it was different now that she had a child. A particular worry on this day: What if Stefanie someday developed the same crowded teeth Mariah and her brother shared? At the dentist recently Mariah had learned her teeth could fall out by the time she was 40, she said. The only thing to fix it was braces, which were out of reach financially.
"It's too late for me but I want to be able to afford braces for Stefanie when she needs them," she said.
Things were a little better with the baby's father. Mariah said they hated each others' guts before the baby was born — ugly words were said in Facebook posts — but after Stefanie arrived, she had decided to forgive. He'd been over to see his daughter a few times. Though he had a child in Arizona, he seemed not to know how to take care of babies. Mariah noticed he didn't know how to prepare a bottle.
Mariah was brash and brave as usual, teasing Wendi. But there were cracks in her armor. Being alone in the rented room in Muldoon with a newborn was hard, she admitted. On Facebook, she had posted pictures of Stefanie dressed up in matching ensembles and testimonies about how much better staying up all night with her baby was than partying.
But one day, she wrote what sounded like a cry for help: "My heart sank just now. Its in my tummy now and all i wanna do is cry.. sometimes i just dont want to life…" She quickly clarified that everything was fine, the baby was just a little fussy and she was stressed out.
"Probably shouldn't have even posted this," Mariah wrote.
At the end of the visit, Wendi weighed squirming Stefanie while Mariah filled out her goals worksheet: "Go back to work. Save up for a place."
June 30: 'It was time for me to make a step'
The next visit happened at Mariah and Stefanie's new place: A cramped room at a former assisted-living home in Muldoon that has been transformed into a rooming house for unwed mothers. The place, everyone agreed, was a little creepy, with angel statues, soft-focus paintings of flowers and seafoam green exterior walls.
Mariah was getting a great deal on rent from the proprietor, who considered renting rooms below market rate to young unwed mothers missionary work. She had liked the idea of living with just women and their babies. But it turned out the owner was renting to men too. A large man lived on the other side of a paper-thin wall.
Wendi and Mariah sat on fake leather couches in a common room.
"I've never even sat on these couches before," Mariah said. She and Stefanie usually stuck to their room.
Just two weeks after Stefanie was born, Mariah had gone back to work full-time. Now she had three clients at her job caring for people with autism, a complicated schedule that involved a lot of driving and the heartbreak of leaving her baby, less than a month old, for up to nine hours a day.
On her first day back at work she'd had what she called "minibreakdown" about Stefanie spending so much time with Sherri.
"She's going to love you more than me!" Mariah told her.
But, as usual, Mariah had gone straight to the research, Googling until she found a study that posited children of working mothers ended up being better adjusted and more productive members of society.
In a month, Mariah had gone from barely working to a full-time job, an infant and her own place, however modest. For the first time in a long time, she was sleeping in an actual bed of her own.
"I was tired of sleeping on couches," she said. "I'd been sleeping on couches for six months. All my stuff was in boxes."
Mariah hadn't really had a choice about moving out. When relations with the baby's father fizzled, his apartment was no longer an option. And Mariah's little dog Salazar was becoming an issue at Sherri's apartment. The landlord had threatened her with eviction.
"It was time for me to make a step," she sighed. "This is a step."
The rooming house was temporary, she said. If she could save her first paycheck or two she could afford an apartment -- with her own kitchen, a living room, a separate bedroom. That was the plan. It was unclear how she planned to pay for rent at the rooming house.
Wendi measured the baby and assured Mariah that Stefanie was growing as she should be.
'A lot of stuff happened'
They talked a little about the whirlwind of life that had transpired in the past year; how Mariah had moved to Anchorage to get away from a boyfriend who hit her. How she and her best friend had moved into an apartment together but had been kicked out after it turned into a party crashing house. How she had tried meth, and, in the midst of all this, learned she was pregnant. The fear she had carried secretly through her pregnancy about the early drug use.
"A lot of stuff happened to me," Mariah said. "Mostly bad and it was mostly my fault."
She looked at Stefanie, who was just beginning to focus her eyes intently on her mom's face.
"I wish I could be more on my feet for her."
Coming tomorrow: On the verge of eviction, Mariah tries to stabilize her life for her daughter's sake.