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Lily and I are having a bit of a love fest these days.  We gaze into each others’ eyes.  We smile and giggle.  I marvel at the double dimples in her elbows and the figure-eight temple dents she inherited from her father.

And then, after forty-five minutes or so of mutual adoration, I whisk her off to daycare and plop her in someone else’s arms.  Getting to do so doesn’t make me love her any more; it just makes it easier to spend forty-five minutes telling her so.

But much as my daily three-hour-break from my baby makes me, if not a better mother, at least a happier one, it is powerless against those “I’m exhausted and you are making my nipples sore” moments.  Which are relatively rare, but still all too common.

I Express Myself

We had one of those moments the other night.  The kind where I see in a flash just what Lily’s adolescence will be like and cry prematurely about the knock-down, drag-out, full-of-fierce-love fights we will have.

It was the end of the July 4th weekend, otherwise known as three days when I didn’t get my daily three-hour break from my baby.  (Maybe, it occurs to me at this point in the story, daycare does make me a better mother.)  Lily, it seemed, was moving in the wrong direction on the feeding frequency scale.  Twenty minutes every two hours, it turns out, is pretty great when you have just given birth and, based on past experience, are anticipating spending about 90% of your “waking” hours feeding your child.  But by the time said child has been hanging around for nearly four months, twenty minutes every two hours seems like an awful lot, even if you do factor in the regular — and, yes, I do appreciate this — five or six hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.

The weekend, however, had been sufficiently busy that for most of it I didn’t feel terribly put-upon for this feeding thing.  Lily had, after all, comfortably snoozed strapped to me in her Ergo through two block parties.  That’s two nights of actual socializing.  Without once having to leave all the fun to soothe a crying baby.  And with a couple of those honest and giddy conversations about breastfeeding thrown in.  It is truly a wonder how quickly one can bond with another woman when sitting on the grass in the dark with one’s boob exposed.

But the weekend caught up to us on Monday, when Lily had not the least bit of interest in her usual two-hour morning nap.  “Where’s the party?” she seemed to be asking me, plainly not considering her mother a one-woman party all on her own.

We staggered into daycare with my eyes rimmed red from the effort not to cry at the prospect that Lily’s two-hour morning naps might be gone forever.

“She didn’t nap much this morning,” I said to her caregivers, hoping for I don’t know what sort of reassurance that it wouldn’t happen again.  Or maybe I was just trying to create the impression that my world does not fall apart just because the time I am spending with my baby isn’t spent with her sleeping in her swing while I do yoga and take a shower.

At any rate, she sure napped in daycare.  A whopping two-hour mid-afternoon nap that apparently had her a bit addled when it came to her evening.

She started off right on course.  That course, these days, meaning a meal every hour or so until she falls asleep around 8:30.

When you feed your baby at 8:15 and she is asleep at 8:35 and your son asks you to read him books in bed, I reckon, most people would, like me, not think twice about handing the sleeping baby to her father and happily trotting upstairs for a little one-on-one with the child whose adorable toddlerhood seems to be slipping away while one is otherwise unavoidably occupied with the baby.

Jake, however, seemed to be a bit knocked off schedule by his busy weekend as well.

I must explain that it is not the least bit unusual for Jake to squirm and flop on the bed like a large and beautiful blue-eyed salmon taking its last gasps on the deck of a fishing boat before succumbing to sleep. (A different slumber for Jake than the metaphorical fish, I know, but I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that I have just relied on a metaphor that involves an animal dying, however imaginary that animal might be.  I am that crazy weird about crying when animals are in distress.  Really.  I’m tearing up right now.)

In fact, it is absolutely the norm for Jake to push his hard, hot little head against my side before rolling over on his back with eyes wide open, to stick his legs in the air and thread his Bubbe blanket between his toes, to mutter to himself (last conversation I overhead was about monsters and Batman), and to otherwise not really seem to grasp the concept of “trying” to go to sleep.

Lately, however, I have begun breaking up the frustration of lying in the dark saying, “Put your foot down,” and “Shhh,” and otherwise “encouraging” Jake to fall asleep by leaving the bed for long periods of time.  “I just have to go to the bathroom,” I’ll say before disappearing for fifteen minutes of ablutions.  “I just have to go downstairs and let the dogs in,” I promise, and then proceed to load the dishwasher and make his lunch before checking back on him twenty minutes later.

Generally this process has succeeded swimmingly.  I get to take care of crucial pre-Mommy-bedtime matters before Mommy’s bedtime has passed.   Jake, meanwhile, gets some much-delayed training in falling asleep without a parent lying next to him.

So I was already more than a little frustrated when my return from abluting found a boy still wide awake and asking to read more books.

Almost as soon as I had declined his invitation, I heard the wail.  It was immediately followed by the sound of the front door slamming shut, an indication that Mike was going to try walking her to sleep.  This used to work.  Then it didn’t.  Then it really backfired when I realized Lily would just recoup the feeding of which she was being robbed at three o’clock in the morning.  “Give me what I so reasonably request when I request it,” she seemed to be saying on the nights when we did otherwise, “or you will soon learn just what ‘unreasonable’ means.”

Still, hormones don’t much care if Daddy has it under control.  Hormones have heard the baby cry.  Hormones twitch and flutter just under your skin like some sort of sci fi tool of warfare on an episode of Fringe.

“Go to sleep,” I muttered at Jake when the twitches worked their way up to my mouth.  To my credit, I tried to apologize for taking it out on him.  “I’m sorry,” I said, starting out pretty well.  “I’m just really frustrated that you won’t go to sleep,” I hissed, pretty much negating the apology.  Then I gave him a kiss and shut up.

Until the front door opened to the seemingly continuing wail of my baby.  “I have to take care of Lily,” I said over my shoulder as I leaped out of bed.

“Nooooooooooooo!” Jake’s voice called after me.

“I’ll come back when I’m done feeding her!” I promised.  As if he hadn’t caught on to the whole, “I’ll be right back” thing when it didn’t involve ceding adult attention to his baby sister, whom he loves quite well as long as he doesn’t have to cede adult attention to her.

A frustrated Mike did the baby football pass-off to me as the baby football glared at me through squinched up eyes as if to say, “What’s taking you so long and do you know at what ungodly hour of the night I am going to punish you for this?”

I unceremoniously hauled her onto my bed and pulled up my shirt.

“I just fed you an hour ago,” I snarled, unhinged by the long weekend myself and by endless evenings of parenting and by simply feeling very, very put-upon.

Lily cried.

“Oh, take it,” I said, shoving my nipple in her face.  As I might have mentioned, one’s body ceases to be a delicate, private thing when it is used as a feeding station.

Lily took a few moments to pant and brew.  A few moments too many.  I pulled my boob away.

“You can’t have it if you’re not going to eat!” I thundered.

I have, I’ll admit, been somewhat deeply scarred by a past lactation consultant who impressed upon me — at a time when I was a new mother for the first time and thus deeply impressionable — that one must never allow the baby to use one as a human pacifier.  That it is not always so easy to tell when the baby is pacifying and when she is actually trying to gain some sustenance is a fact that still has not sunk in adequately.  In other words, given another moment, I have no doubt Lily would have begun to eat.

But, alas, I didn’t give her the chance.  She wailed.  I wailed.  I shoved by nipple into her open wailing mouth.  Not surprisingly, she wailed more.  And I thought to myself, “I will write about this horrible moment and I will be horribly ashamed, but, still, I am shoving my nipple angrily in my wailing child’s mouth.”

And, still, I see this moment, a vivid, colorful shard of memory embedded forever in my mind, to be played back years hence so I can cry and feel like I am not deserving of my child’s love long after she has forgotten it.  Which, considering she is not yet four months old, takes about two minutes.

There followed the unsuccessful attempt to walk her to sleep outside, the return of enough sanity to let her eat (and eat she did, poor girl), the return to poor, long-asleep Jake’s bed, and the sobbing because I had abandoned Jake and been mean to Lily and never mind that they were both peacefully snoozing in a way that assured me they will bear no permanent scars.

Three lovely, reasonably calm evenings have passed since then.  Lily has taken her two-hour morning naps.  I have fed her without complaint whenever she has asked and not accused her of using me as a human pacifier and have handed her off to her caregivers with a deep sense of happiness that this time apart will leave me able to feed her every hour all evening until she falls peacefully asleep and we don’t have another adolescence-is-coming-sooner-than-you-think fight again for at least a week or two.

But, still, over and over I pause to summon up once again the vision of that round, red, squinch-eyed face with my boob stuck in the open, crying mouth.  And I wonder how oh how Lily could love me so much when I could be so very mean.

Deserving Love (Yes, You)

To be honest, I know I wasn’t being mean to Lily.  I was being human.

But, being human, I have a tendency to feel like I was being mean.  To tell myself I was.  To beat myself up for not being perfectly saint-like and more patient than I am — which is, I can say objectively, pretty darned patient.  (”I don’t know how you do it,” Mike says to me in an attempt at comfort, and I know he is being honest, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking I could still be more patient, that there must be someone out there more patient than I.)

Here is a place where feeling and thinking seem to transpose themselves.

Most of the time, I write here about getting past what you “think” and “know,” about not letting your mind get in the way of your heart and your feelings.  Yoga, I believe deeply, is about listening to your heart, no matter what your mind has been telling you.

But where children are involved, it seems, we sometimes have a tendency to get carried away by our emotions, even when we know better.

How many conversations have I had — several of them at the two block parties we attended this weekend alone — about how as parents we really do know what’s best for our children?  We decry the reams of advice in books well-meaning friends and family members give to us.  I tell the story about throwing one right into the recycling bin when it advised me to start sleep-training my four-month-old son.  We commiserate about all the times we second-guessed ourselves and then promise we aren’t planning on doing it again, even as we are, in the back of our minds, already debating some child-rearing choice we have made — sometimes one made so long ago its consequences have long since been buried beneath the memorabilia of daily living.

So we all know it.  I feel pretty sure I mean all.  I’d like to think there isn’t a parent out there who doesn’t know somewhere inside that she will make the right decisions even without books and pediatricians and parents and friends weighing in.

And I know that the parent who ignores these advice-givers and unflinchingly follows her instinct is rare indeed.  And probably lying when she tells you she is able to do so.

Surely much of the reason we second-guess ourselves in favor of the advice of people who aren’t our child’s parent is that we live in a culture where that’s what you’re supposed to do.  I think about the time in high school when I was volunteering at the Los Angeles Zoo and one of the gorillas was preparing to give birth.  A keeper who had just given birth to her own baby, I was told, was spending time at the gorilla enclosure nursing her child, teaching the mama-gorilla-to-be how to handle an infant.  Because, the person telling me explained, the higher the reasoning abilities of an animal the lower its instincts.  Hence, gorillas, like humans, have to be taught how to care for their babies.

I’m not volunteering to test this hypothesis.  I’m just suggesting that somewhere between the Mommy instinct and the self-preservation need to be taught how to do something so important right because who wants one’s child to be the one impacted by a mistake, our emotions get kind of rattled.

I act on instinct when I decide Lily is pacifying rather than feeding.  Or maybe it’s just the advice I’ve been given in the past.  In which case, I wonder if I am right at this moment that Lily is pacifying and not eating.  And I get frustrated that she is putting me through this whole exercise.  And I feel tired and like I want to go to bed and like my children are little vampires sucking the life out of me on this particular evening.

So I snap and I shove my boob in her mouth (last time I’ll conjure up that image, I promise) and I cry about it long after we have spent lots of time adoring each other.

And then I take a deep breath and get to what I think is the point of what I’m saying.  Human beings get frustrated and say things we might later regret.  Regretting doesn’t mean we won’t say similarly stupid things again.  It just means we’ll regret it when we do.

Because, I am constantly reminding myself, the saint-like, never frustrated, never yelling at her children Melanie Wilkes is a fictional character whom you’re not supposed to like much anyhow because unless you are a somewhat mixed-up nine-year-old reading Gone with the Wind for the first time you know that Scarlett O’Hara is a far more interesting and complex and, yes, human character.

And here’s the place where knowing I’m human brings me back to how wise the Universe is:

I am realizing lately that sometimes we need to get angry with our children for taking away our Mommy time.  We need to be unable to emulate selfless Melanie Wilkes even if we are the sort who still find her kind of attractive.

In fact, being angry, selfish, unreasonable, and, yes, mean is the best thing we can do for our children.  Because it forces us to let them be independent.  Which they will do no matter what, but far more successfully if they do it, oh, independently.  If they learn that, yes, their mother and their father are independent beings who do not live to lie in bed helping their son fall asleep or to endlessly nurse a baby.

And, really, what better lesson to teach our kids than that sometimes we do feel bad about what we do and, still, the next day, we are totally besotted by them.  And that we will happily let them love us right back.

Love It, Hate It, Love Everything — Ustrasana (Camel)

I’ve been doing a lot of ustrasana lately as I search for the suppleness of my pre-pregnancy spine.

But now it occurs to me that maybe something more has been going on with my attraction to this asana.  Maybe it’s about opening my heart to the sky, being willing to make myself vulnerable.  And, at the same time, the tightness of breathing in ustrasana, the upside-down-ness that can be more than a little bit scary.

I know how to trust in my yoga poses, so I know how to trust my ustrasana.  It’s not scary to me so much as exhilarating.  Which is the direction in which I’d like to continue moving in my love affair with my children.

Let those difficult, short-tempered, second-guessing yourself and then watching your child love you anyhow times be exhilarating.  Because if you chose to have kids, surely you knew you were in for a wild ride.

Ustrasana Instructions