I had a hour of heaven in front of the television last night.
Normally, I don’t think of anything having to do with watching television as particularly heavenly, unless it involves putting my pregnant feet up for an hour of total rest before picking up my son from preschool. Those days, however, are no longer with me, and watching t.v. with an infant in my lap is neither satisfying nor a particularly good idea, as it seems to disturb her sleep, both while the t.v. is on and for pretty much the whole night afterward.
But I do like snuggling up with Jake to watch an hour of Sesame Street, as long as I enthusiastically yell out the numbers flashing on the screen in an effort to make it a learning experience. Plus, it’s not really an hour, since many of the segments provoke a bored/demanding, “Watch Sesame Street, please” from Jake, which translates roughly as, “TiVo has destroyed my attention span.”
And so, last night, when Mike resorted to Sesame Street as a way to free himself to cook dinner, I decided I needed to be near my son as much as I needed to feed my newborn daughter, and I committed what the lacatation consultant I saw when Jake was an infant deemed one of the Seven Deadly Sins — breastfeeding with the t.v. on.
Not that the television stayed off for the first four months of Jake’s life, during which I was using an evil supplemental nursing system that involved a collection of tubes, bottles, formula, and the patience of a saint. There’s only so long you can spend an hour and a half per feeding staring silently at the wall because your baby isn’t any more interested in gazing up into your eyes as he nurses than you are in gauging, ad nauseum, whether he is swallowing properly. But I don’t think I broke down for at least six weeks or so. And I know I wasn’t watching anything quite as stimulating as Sesame Street.
Lily certainly didn’t complain or seem to register any difference in her dining experience. And when she finished and remained wide-eyed I figured that was just a nice little bit of alert time that I’m trying to shift to my waking hours anyhow. So I propped the moses basket toward what seemed to be a particularly fascinating lamp and invited Jake to sit in my lap.
Oh, how my world became complete when he accepted my invitation.
Jake, you see, has adjusted rather stunningly well to the new baby. Sure, there are tantrums and Ignore Mommy moments. But the clinging to Mommy and screaming as she tries to feed the baby that I had been dreading has never materialized. Instead, Jake has neatly shifted his expectations of primary caregiving to his father.
And, in the process, broken my heart even more neatly than if he were making my life impossible by being less cooperative.
How lovely, then, to feel the solid toddler-ness of him in my lap, to be able to reach around once again to kiss his firm toddler cheeks, to wrap my arms all the way around his chest and squeeze as he puts his thumb in his mouth and moves in closer.
Lily tolerated all of this not-holding her for the rest of Sesame Street and a bit of Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies, but I sensed something was shifting by the time Mike had dinner on the table. Indeed, although I placed her in the sling and invited her to sit with us, the tectonic plates were already in motion, and the earthquake was about to commence.
Yep. Mommy didn’t get to eat much of her dinner. I forgot about those days. And now they’re back.
Consequences or Not?
Some time around 3:30 last night, I decided Lily’s newfound inability to sleep anywhere but on my chest had something to do with her rather too stimulating evening of Sesame Street. It is, after all, a couple of years ahead of her learning curve.
I felt certain this could be the only explanation for her sudden deviation from the one-night pattern I had established the night before. Feed the baby. Watch the baby wake up two minutes later asking for a finger pacifier. Hold the baby on chest so as to desperately try to squeeze something resembling sleep into the night. Gently shift baby to bed next to me, where many experts will tell you she should not sleep but plenty of babies the world over do. In my expert opinion, anything that allows me to get some rest is healthy for my baby.
But last night, Lily complied only up to the last step. Ease her onto the bed on her back and turn gratefully onto my side with a nice, cool pillow bunched under my cheek, and within moments I would hear the “thwick, thwick, slurp” of her hand moving in the general vicinity of her mouth. This alone might not keep me up for too long, despite its astoundingly high annoyance factor. Except that it is inevitably followed by a chirp of frustration. Then a bark of indignation. And then a full fledged expression of disbelief that I would dare move her from her comfortable perch.
I am ashamed to admit that when she gets mad at me like that, I am offended.
Maybe it’s that I have been in toddler mode for a while, where being offended and speaking firmly are necessary evolutionary tools, an automatic and irresistible setting of boundaries. The problem, of course, is that they have no place in a newborn’s world. So speaking firmly to her really doesn’t do much good, unless you count making me feel a little bit better. Which it does, so no regrets.
Instead, I spent much of the night sleeping on my aching back with pillows all around for a little bit of support, feeling my finger go all prune-like in her mouth, trying to feed her every few hours, and freaking out when she refused to eat.
With the result that I awakened to a familiar panic attack as I tried to figure out what I could do differently, how I could get sleep, when I would ever share a bed with my husband again, much less share uninterrupted sleep with him.
And here’s what I realized.
First, everyone loses sleep when they have a newborn. It’s a whole lot easier to talk about it in the light of day with deep purple circles under your eyes than it is to tolerate when it’s happening. But it does happen to everyone. And, frankly, if having Lily sleep on top of me with my pinky finger in her mouth is what it takes to get some rest, then that’s what I’m going to do. And count myself lucky that I have a way of getting any rest at all.
Second, the times Lily refuses to eat are not signs that one of Jake’s head butts has destroyed some of her brain functioning or that she is purposely being stubborn just to bother me. It is a sign that she is not hungry. She does not care how many people say she should be eating every two to three hours. She does not care that I have awakened myself to help her achieve this goal. She does not care that I am lying in bed at seven in the morning freaking out because she hasn’t eaten for five and a half hours. When she is hungry she will eat. And I, in the meantime, should try to imagine actually letting her feed on demand at night, as I’m supposed to have decided I’d do, and marvel at the possibility that I might have the opportunity for six straight hours of sleep. True, they are spent on my back with an infant sleeping on me. But there are worse prices to pay.
Finally, I had to admit as I lay there panicking that, if it were not for the panic, I might be able to step back and say that I really have it pretty easy so far. Knock wood.
So why not leave it at that? Because, my anxiety addled mind says, all of Lily’s actions simply must be consequences of my own actions.
Has parenthood taught me nothing?
Consequences, Anxiety, and Letting Go When Everything Is Tangled Up
It’s hard to let go.
Yeah, I’ve said it and written it before. But when you are feeling anxious from a combination of postpartum hormones, having your entire world with your beloved toddler turned upside down by the sudden fruits of that odd decision to have another child, and being pretty much under lockdown until the baby, the weather, and the end of flu season conspire to allow you to take your new bundle of joy out into the world, it’s really hard. How-am-I-getting-through-this, dragging your feet at the one-day-at-a-time concept hard.
Because even if I am blessed to have a baby with few complaints (today), who is giving me time to sit down next to her writing on my laptop, I still have to comfort myself with promises about how long it all lasts, when it turns fun, how all the work is worth it.
The thing is, it will get better as it gets better (“It’s not so bad,” I said when Jake was an infant. “It’s just that it keeps getting better.”) and the two-month mark, the six-month mark, the day when she is two years old and will sing us songs while strumming her toy guitar as Jake does will come pretty much no matter what I do. She will have cranky days, as will Jake, as will Mike, as will I. We will have beautiful days. And not a whole lot of it will depend on what I do.
Except for letting go. For taking a moment to be in the moment next to a beautiful sleeping girl who is back in her moses basket despite my certainty this morning that that phase was past and she would now insist on being held constantly. For dealing with how to keep her upstairs in relative calm and quiet when Jake arrives home from school when he arrives home instead of fretting about it now when it is calm and quiet in the living room.
And for remembering the blessing of my baby girl, my family, and me as a YogaMama who will not lose her Me if only she stops trying so hard to hold onto it.
On the Go Meditation
“Can you find the time to meditate?” asks everyone who knows me and knows how hard it is for me to have to forgo the asana practice that generally keeps me sane and in the moment.
How I wish.
It is beyond me how I don’t have time to just sit and be right now, since Lily can often be found sleeping in her moses basket — during the day, anyhow. But I don’t. And if I did, I imagine I’d be distracted by the fact that I should be spending time with her.
So, instead, I try to meditate when I am trying to nap or trying to survive and about to have a panic attack. Not that these are normal circumstances, but it occurs to me that many of us have moments during the day when a little bit of on the go meditation will go a long way toward keeping us sane.
So here it is: a quick on-the-go meditation. I’ll admit it’s much easier to master when you also have an established (or sort of established) regular meditation practice. Having one will help you drop into a meditative state more quickly. But even if you don’t have a regular meditation practice, just closing your eyes and trying to move in that direction helps the most anxious, frustrating, sleep-deprived moments. And you don’t need an infant for those.