A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
The triple crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent, as I have just now decided, is a marathon consisting of what at this moment strike me as the most frustrating parenting moments:
1) Staying home with a sick child. For a week.
2) Staying home with a child who is finally well on a snow day.
3) Dealing with an eleven-and-a-half-month-old who has decided she can feed herself and is wrong.
Continue reading ‘The Triple Crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent’
Today is Lily’s first day of full-time daycare.
Just writing it is making me cry again. (As is wandering past my bedroom and the empty bed on which she is not napping and knowing that I will not have that unspeakably joyful moment of my day when she first wakes up from her nap and grins at me and I lie next to her pulling her still-sleepy body against me and kiss every part of it I can find.)
It is, I know, time.
I have been spending months injecting little veins of longing to return to the things I have put on hold in my life into the warmth of our mornings together, like the marbles of fat that add richness to those pieces of red meat I have eschewed for the majority of my life. Maybe that’s why it’s not taking — because I don’t eat red meat the bits of fat that are my longing just aren’t sticking in my gullet. Instead, they hover out there as a concept that I don’t feel right now. Time for my own life? Pshaw. Who needs it?
And yet I soldier on in a direction I know in my core is right even if my surface emotions — the ones that made me start wailing when I put away a carton of formula this morning in a house empty of her — can’t bring themselves to agree.
I dress her before breakfast. I pack up lunches for both her and Jake. I unload on Jake’s teacher in a babble of still-postpartum hormones how I am freaking out about her starting full time. (”You have to do it,” she says kindly.) Even when Jake begins to scream and grab onto my leg, even as I walk stoically down the hall away from him abandoning my older child as I prepare to abandon my younger one, I stay on plan.
I drop Lily off with a smile spread across her pudgy cheeks. When it is time for me to leave, she looks at me for a moment as if she is going to cry, then turns around and gives a shriek of pleasure to the line of doll people her teacher has set up for her and never looks back. I have to turn off the radio on the drive home because my mind is feeling cluttered and unhinged. “Just make it home,” I tell myself. “Write about this. Start that legal project you’ve been putting off. Go to a yoga class.”
Now I’m home and I’m writing. And — I can see the humor in this, like a mediocre romantic comedy — I am still running from my desk to grab a box of tissues, the muscles in my jaw pulling the corners of my mouth into a clown frown as I cry in a hyena-like warble and whine to no one in particular, “I miss my baby!”
Next to my side of the bed there is a large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards. On the other side of that large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards there is room to open the drawers on the left side of my dresser. In between there is space for my discarded shoes and socks to breathe without having to tussle with Mike’s.
What is not on my side of the bed any longer is the co-sleeper.
For those unfamiliar with this piece of modern baby-raising apparatus, the co-sleeper is a not particularly attractive crib-like thing that attaches to the side of the bed. The idea is to more or less sleep with your baby while theoretically eliminating the risk of inadvertently crushing her. (Couldn’t one still throw a sleep-heavy, errant arm on top of the innocent sleeping child? I wonder. Best, I suppose, not to contemplate the possibility, as I’m not a limbs-flinging sort of sleeper anyhow.)
Given my love of the middle road, the co-sleeper is the perfect invention, a detente in the polarized sleeping-with-baby debate, a way to hush Lily back to sleep in the middle of the night without ever having to leave the cocoon of my down duvet wrapped around me in the hours since kicking Mike out of bed for snoring.
Just as Lily has grown up with the scent and sound of me sleeping a foot away, I have come to love the feel of her within arm’s reach. I have become certain that there is nothing better upon awakening than propping up on an elbow to watch my angel sleep. Except, perhaps, that moment when her eyes pop open and she greets me with a big, sunny morning grin.
Only now the co-sleeper is gone, the victim of increasing baby mass and the fact that I have been dying to get to those dresser drawers for eight months now and just can’t wait any longer.
And in that once longed-for space is a big empty hole. Sort of like the one in my heart.
Continue reading ‘The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On’
“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.
Continue reading ‘Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months’
Today was the end-of-the-school year potluck in Jake’s preschool class. Same summer-ish excitement that I recall from the end of my somewhat-older-than-two-and-a-half-years-old school years. Same excuse to eat ice cream instead of lunch. Same sense of happy displacement at having parents on the playground in the middle of the day.
Plus, as a mother, a little something more: Brwaaaah! My baby’s growing up! sadness.
I am not, I’m proud to say, overwhelmed by the sadness. In fact, it’s sitting comfortably beside a more solid sense of excitement. Jake’s moving into a new classroom! Jake’s nearly potty trained! Jake pontificated this morning on the progress of the garbage trucks as we stood on the front porch with Lily watching them make their way down the block!
“I think it’s across the street,” he said thoughtfully as we watched one turn around. “I see two lights,” he added, as if by way of explanation.
“Those red tail lights?” I asked, actually interested.
“Yes, the red tail lights,” he confirmed as if teaching me an important lesson about garbage trucks.
It thrills me, then, to watch my boy grow up, even though it makes me sad to know that these hefty thoughts of his will cease to be so all-consuming cute when they come out of an older mouth.
At the same time, it makes me sad to see the graduation bags in one of the preschool classrooms and to realize how quickly the time will arrive when Jake is the recipient of one, although I’m feeling pretty happy about his progression to an older class.
And then I have my comforting moments when I know that he can be growing up without being quite so grown up.
Like at the potluck today when he took Wendell’s ice cream.
Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)’
We got our first, “Are we there yet?” in the car on Wednesday.
Mike and I both grinned at each other like kids taking their first bite of a Quarter Pounder — thrilled but also queasily aware that we shouldn’t be.
The great, grin-inducing thing about Jake’s “are we there yet?” is that it lacked even the hint of a whine. It wasn’t a poorly coded way of telling us he would rather be just about anywhere than in a car with us heading away from home for a long weekend with his extended family to celebrate his grandmother’s eightieth birthday. No, Jake meant exactly what he said — he wanted to know if we had arrived in this curious place he had been promised.
“Is that Grandma’s birthday?” he asked, pointing out the window at one of the countless tourist traps lining the main road in Cherokee. It displayed Southwestern Native American blankets even though we were in North Carolina passing through a land trust belonging to the Cherokee tribe, whose members, to my knowledge, have never resided in the Southwest, except perhaps once they retire.
“Not yet,” I said. “If you close your eyes, when you open them we’ll be there.”
Fat chance of getting him to nap, I knew. But I didn’t much mind. I was off on a mini-vacation (if anything that involves bringing your two children under the age of three qualifies as a vacation of any magnitude). My husband was characteristically cheerful at the prospect of spending time with his family. And, perhaps most importantly, I was pain-free for the first time in days.
Amazing how good not being in pain can feel when you’ve recently been reminded of the alternative.
Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part One: Internal Version)’
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 thought — mistakenly, as it turned out — that it was pretty momentous to be witnessing Lily’s first props-assisted rollover yesterday.
We were about midway through our hour-long drop-off at daycare. I was pretending not to notice the time I was supposed to be using for myself slipping away as I clung to my girl. After all, I couldn’t be expected to just put her down while the infant caregiver was busy feeding one of Lily’s classmates. And when Veronica set up a play mat to allow me to do just that, well, in my experience Lily doesn’t like play mats, so I was really doing everyone a favor by hanging out to rescue her when she complained about being stuck like a helpless little turtle on her back, unable to look away from the looming forms of stuffed horses and pigs with black and white checks on their bellies hanging overhead.
This particular play mat, however, had one thing our rejected-by-both-babies one at home does not: a small, crescent-shaped pillow sewn into it. Designed, I knew, even though Jake was never much of a tummy time guy, for helping infants appreciate tummy time by giving them a little lift. Imagine, if you will, lying sprawled face down in a sea of whimsical shapes you neither recognize nor find particularly attractive while trying to lift a head that feels as if it is saddled with a thick, granite helmet. You get a lift or two for a second or two and then crash nose-first back into the whimsy.
Now consider the benefits of a little crescent pillow that supports your chest and creates a gentle slope of your spine, allowing far easier head support. Not that it doesn’t crash to the ground frequently, but at least you have time to appreciate the view before it does.
Quickly surmising that Lily was horrified by the animals Veronica helpfully hunted down and I obediently attached to the overhead arches of the play mat — something about her crying at the sight of them — I decided we should try out that pillow thing. In the past week Lily’s been giving the lying on her tummy and lifting her chest and head routine a try, so I figured she’d be happy for a little prop to help her along.
She expressed a moment of initial surprise as Veronica and I arranged her.
“What do you think?” I chirped in a voice meant to suggest she should think this was just the best darned thing in the world.
She responded by rolling onto her back.
This was not the first time Lily has tried to roll over. She’s tried more than a few times. But has always been stymied by the bottom arm getting in the way, a common baby complaint.
This time, however, the pillow provided just enough clearance for her arm to magically move right through and — ta da! — she was on her back, crashed into one of the arches of the play mat and not particularly happy about it.
Still, it was an auspicious moment to recount to Mike half an hour later when I had rocked her to sleep so I could finally put her down and leave.
My big, euphoric bubble deflated more than a little bit, however, when I arrived to pick her up. Lily, I was informed, had rolled over on flat ground that afternoon, a far more monumental achievement than doing so with props. And, of course, she achieved this milestone when I wasn’t around to witness it.
Continue reading ‘Full of Firsts — And Not a Parent in Sight’
It’s been a big week for growing up in the Jake-and-Lily household. And, not surprisingly, I have mixed feelings about it.
First, Lily received glowing reviews of her first afternoon in daycare yesterday and spent last night and this morning grinning and babbling at me. Plainly, she approves. Or so I am telling myself as I shift anxiously in my seat pretending I’m totally okay with leaving her for her second day. (Has the novelty worn off? Will she be able to successfully communicate her dislike of the play mat on which I fear she will be left when the caregivers necessarily have to tend to other babies than mine? Just how much does she cry when set off by those other kids who, with several months on her, really ought to be old enough to control their emotions?)
Then — perhaps as a reaction to the news that his baby sister is now attending the same “school” he used to go to — Jake announced this morning that he wished to sit on the potty. And peed in it.
