Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months

“Yep,” Mike confirmed the other day.  “Lily’s acting like a normal baby.”

He said this after our first sunny fall day in the park.  After Lily and I arrived with her pouting in her stroller because I decided that much as she was demanding it I was simply not up to the task of walking to the park with her in the Ergo.  After yet another night of our power struggle over when she got to wake me up to nurse (as opposed to just waking me up) and how many times.  And after I summarily dumped her in Mike’s arms and walked away to chat with some other adults.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with acting like a normal baby when you are, pretty much, a normal baby.  You get to fuss.  You get to yell at your mother for not holding you enough, not nursing you enough, having the audacity to put you down on the floor so she can, say, put on her sweater for a walk to the park.  And you definitely get to refuse to sleep through the night and not care that the books say by six and a half months you probably should be doing so.

I know there is nothing wrong with all of this.  I know — I think I know, I tell myself I know — that just because Lily can be a little grumpy with me now and then it does not mean that she will come to hate me in thirteen or so years.  She will hate me then regardless of what I do right now.

What I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around, however, is the notion that there is nothing wrong with me responding to her grumpiness with less than perfect equanimity and nurturing sweetness.  There is nothing wrong with telling a baby at one o’clock in the morning that you want to sleep and she should stop crying at you.  Especially if you are offering a tone of voice and a back rub that are a great deal more gentle than the words you are saying because you know she can’t understand them anyhow.

In short, I spent the past several days beating myself up because Lily’s crankiness made me cranky as well.

Something to Complain About (for both of us)

Here is what I learned over the past few days:

First, and perhaps most importantly — if not most frighteningly –  I learned that Lily has just reached that age where she wants to make decisions.  She doesn’t necessarily know she is doing it.  She just realizes that, for instance, it’s much nicer to sleep cradled in Mommy’s arms than on your back on a rather hard co-sleeper mattress.  Or that pureed carrots are fine and all but sometimes a little boob is what a girl wants.

And she’s not afraid to say so.

The problem, of course, is that I am not allowed to say that I need to sleep as well and am not likely to do much of it sitting up with Lily cradled in my arms.  Or that there is actually a limit to the supposedly endless supply of breast milk and, by the way, I’m getting more than a little tired of sweeping her away to the bedroom to hang out on the bed every time I feed her because she is so easily distracted by the dogs walking by or her brother playing his guitar or just about anything that is more interesting than her mother’s boob.  Which, apparently, is interesting only when she can’t have it.

Generally, when confronted with a situation that wasn’t all she had hoped for, Lily takes a Zen attitude.  She presses her little cupid lips together and pudges her already pudgy cheeks out and glares at me out of those blue eyes with the gray ring around the iris.  Then she endures for the thirty or so seconds it takes for her to forget what she was angry about in the first place.

But some time over the past week, something shifted.  Lily has suddenly become — heaven help me — demanding.  Mike is willing to chalk it up to the shots she received on Friday, since the change in her temperament was so sudden.

And here is the second thing I have learned.  Sometimes, when things change suddenly, the obvious reason is the right one.   For example, four shots in the leg, including a flu shot, can no doubt make a person feel pretty lousy for a few days, even if she lacks the language skills to articulate her discomfort.  Add a little rotovirus vaccine that, it turned out when I so diligently researched it after giving it to my child, can cause a bit of constipation.  And then there are the teeth.  Oh, those first teeth.  Stir in a runny nose, and you end up with a girl who has every right to complain.

You’d think this would have occurred to me.  You’d think Lily’s sudden need to be held constantly when she is normally content to play with a shower puff on the hard bathroom floor while I take a shower would clue me in to the fact that she might not be feeling tip top.  You’d think I might figure out that if she is crying furiously the second I put her down for her morning nap she has some reason other than wanting to upset my routine.  You’d think that, at the very least, I could put off taking my shower.

But I wasn’t thinking about the shots.  At least, not for a few days after the crankiness started.  Instead, I was thinking about how great it is to finally learn how to keep from subsuming my own needs to those of my child.

Some of us — and I’m a big one here — are the sorts who feel like we shouldn’t be able to meet our own needs until the needs of everyone around us have been met.  It’s not a parent thing either.  I’m talking about the people like me who can’t enjoy a party they’re throwing unless every single person they invited seems to be having a good time.  Because, after all, it’s my responsibility that someone has taken the time out of her Saturday night that would otherwise be spent alone in front of a rerun of Entourage feeling bad because she doesn’t look like every single woman she sees on the television screen to come to my party.

And then I became a parent and suddenly I have a baby who didn’t ask to come to my party at all.  Yet here she is.  And it’s my job to make sure she enjoys every single second of it.

I recognize that taking this attitude with Jake pretty much ended up making me crazy.  The real kind of crazy where you break down crying for no reason and make your partner miserable and mope around the house jumping at every sound that even remotely resembles a baby’s cry even though your child is at daycare too far away for you to hear his squalls.

My work with Lily has been to recognize my own needs so I don’t get sucked back into that whirlpool of postpartum depression that ended only when I became pregnant again.  If for no other reason than that a convenient pregnancy really isn’t an option this time around.

Mostly, though, if there’s one thing I learned with Jake, it’s that being a parent is not all about doing everything for your child no matter what, about putting your own needs aside indefinitely, and about doing it all with a warm, nurturing halo of saintliness hovering around you at all times.

Being a parent is about learning how to take care of someone else while you continue to take care of yourself.  It’s about letting your child teach you as much as you teach her.  It’s about looking at the world in a new way and opening yourself up to the possibilities of all you cannot control and all the love that exists out there just waiting for you to let go and open up to it.

Which is all just great.  Until I take a shower while my child screams at me for every moment I am not sticking my head out to make sure she is okay and dripping all over the bathroom floor.  Until I spend a weekend talking back to my baby because I am so tired I can’t see straight and it hurts that she holds me responsible for how crappy she’s feeling and I’m terribly, terribly scared that I will end up loving Jake more than Lily because a mother is simply cursed to having a wretched relationship with her daughter, at least until her daughter is 35 or so.  At which point I will be pushing 80.  If I’m lucky.

Hurry Up If You Must — But Hurry Up and Wait

It was the Tylenol that ended our mutual misery.

On top of everything else, Lily, I knew, was having a hard time with her teeth.  Or I thought I knew it.  Maybe, I reasoned, she was grabbing every object within reach and shoving it in her mouth in a frenzy of oral fixated-ness just because that is how she is learning about the world.  Maybe, I thought haughtily, I will avoid the part of parenting where you spend the first year of your child’s life blaming every murmur and cry on her teeth.

So I told myself it wasn’t her teeth.  But, just in case, I gave her a few doses of chamomilla, figuring it couldn’t hurt.

Chamomilla (a homeopathic distillation of chamomile) worked wonders for Jake when he was teething.  Never mind that he was about eighteen months old before I started using it and had already ingested several gallons of Tylenol over the course of his short lifetime.  If it worked for him, surely it would work for Lily.

It didn’t.  Or, at least, not as much as she needed.  Because I’m pretty sure I gave her a dose Monday night when I was alone with the kids while Mike did a work thing.  Jake was being a prince of a good kid, but Lily was having none of it.  She didn’t want to play on the floor while Jake watched Jack’s Big Music Show.  She didn’t find it the least bit amusing to watch him splash in the tub.  She did not thrill to being a big girl sitting at the table in her high chair while he ate his pasta.  And she did not think it was so very special to sit in his bed while we read bedtime books.

Jake and I were in the middle of Outside the Window when Lily had had enough.  And I mean enough.  It is so rare that I get to cuddle with my boy and read bedtime stories — this having become Mike’s provenance since Lily’s birth — that I wasn’t exactly eager to give it up at Lily’s first indication of displeasure.

But when her screams got louder than my reading voice, I felt I had no choice but to pay attention.

I turned to Jake apologetically.  “You’re going to have to finish this yourself,” I said.  “I’ll come back after I feed Lily.”

“I need, I need –”  Jake started flipping through the pages to show me just what he needed.  Being two and a half years old, his needs are many.

“I can’t help you find it,” I said, my voice rising with my impatience and Lily’s cries.  “I’m sorry,” I added in an increasingly common coda to our conversations.  “You know I get impatient when Lily is crying.”

I grabbed her and stood up, trying to not see Jake’s big, sadly softening eyes.  “I promise I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, planning — as I had blindly planned so many things for Lily over the weekend — to nurse her to sleep.

I didn’t.  What I did do was take a good look at her complaining face, see very little of the daughter I know and love in there, and grab the Tylenol.

Fifteen minutes later, Lily wasn’t asleep, but she sure was smiling.  Which meant that — miraculously, effortlessly — so was I.  It’s amazing what a little breast milk and a little Tylenol can do.

We poked our heads into Jake’s room to find him snoring away, Outside the Window still touching his slack hand.  It took me only three or four days to get over the guilt.

Meanwhile, Lily and I sat on a blanket in the living room and played.  I didn’t struggle to find the surges of love I think are appropriate to feel every single moment I look at my child lest I not love her enough.  I didn’t worry that I was boring her or starving her or disappointing her.  She was cheerful and, ergo, so was I.

An hour later, she went peacefully to sleep.  I’d like to say she slept through the night.  But she didn’t.  I’d like to say she has since.  But she hasn’t.  I’d like to say she hasn’t had a moment of crankiness or constipation or refusing to eat in the past week.  Except that wouldn’t be true.

Only I don’t fall apart about it now.  Because that little bit of Tylenol gave me a little bit of space to let it all fall back into place.

Go Ahead and Make Your Plans.  No One Cares (Including Your Child).

Just a moment away from the whirligig of trying to respond to Lily’s crankiness as if she weren’t cranky at all was really all it took to give me the necessary perspective.  It’s like the difference between the first time I rode the bus down Broadway in Manhattan and the three years thereafter when I walked those blocks.  Inside the bus my perspective was cramped, my path was predetermined, and I could shy away from what I still found scary about Manhattan (that is, pretty much everything), having not yet lived there.  It was only when I got off the bus that I let myself be part of the neighborhood and it stopped being a big deal at all.

I was on the same sort of bus with Lily, only on a much scarier street.  I was deciding how our lives should go:  when she should sleep through the night, how much she should eat every day and what and when, when I would breastfeed and when I will wean her, even how long it will be until I put her in daycare full time (though that date was creeping closer and closer as my frustration grew).  I did this all on the bus, not on the ground where I would have the necessary input from the other party involved.

In other words, I was deciding how things should be without consulting Lily.  And if there’s one thing our children teach us it’s that we are not in control.

It’s not just child rearing, either.  As yoga teaches us, expectations inevitably lead to disappointment.  Goals exist only to escape achievement because there’s always some other goal waiting just beyond the one for which we are grasping.  We run toward what we think we want and we miss all the things we love along the way.

And so it was me, not Lily, making me cranky when she didn’t do what I had decided she should do.  I didn’t have to read any baby books to work myself into a panic over her sleeping habits because I knew what they said and had decided it was true, even if Lily disagreed.  Just because I happen to really like our pediatrician as a person, I took her suggestion that we feed Lily more fat without a second thought and then freaked out when she didn’t eat as much as I was convinced she was supposed to.

And I avoided giving her Tylenol because I had decided there were other crazy woman solutions to her needs.  Because I had this vision of being a “good” mother who doesn’t drug her child.  Never mind that Jake has turned out pretty well — happy and not a junkie or anything — despite having ingested his share of Tylenol for teething.  It just wasn’t in my plan for Lily.

It was when I acted before overthinking it that I found my way back to feeling.

That cherry-flavored dropper of Tylenol was between Lily’s lips before I could talk myself out of it.  And, suddenly, I found the wherewithal to tell myself we will take her sleeping a night at a time.  She will eat as much as she’d like, and my job is merely to make it available.  I will stop driving myself crazy wondering if more breast milk equals more ability to combat the nasty day care winter bugs just around the corner.

Really.  It happened that fast — in the hour we spent playing while The Amazing Race played behind her.

I decided, in short, to once again let my child lead me down the path of I Don’t Know.

And I will love the anxiety-inducing, uncertain, out of control deliciousness of it all.

Stepping Outside Your Nut Box

There is one other way I got outside of the craziness that was locking me into more craziness — I took a yoga class for the first time since Lily was born.

I have, of course, practiced plenty of yoga in the past six months, some of it quite satisfying.  But it was always in my home, in my mind, to the same three Krishna Das CD’s I’ve downloaded onto my computer.

What a lovely difference to be back in the yoga studio, sharing space and energy with other students, shutting down my mind because someone else was telling me what poses to practice.  I found myself slowing down, appreciating the poses in new ways, breathing more consciously, and peaceful in an old, familiar, yet not recently experienced peace at the end of class.

I invite you to do the same.  Take a yoga class.  Or a different one from your usual — a different time of day or a different level or style or teacher.  If you don’t do yoga, try running a different route or with a friend or by yourself.  Ride your bike down a different street.  Read a new magazine, if that’s your down time thing.  Shake it up.  Do what you do but do it differently.

It’s all about finding a way to step outside the nut box we all create for ourselves.  From outside, you can see your own expectations and how they block the view of the endless opportunities that we walk right by every day.

Especially when we’re feeling cranky.

I love you, Lily.

Tagged as: cranky baby, flu shot, sleep training, teething, yoga and motherhood