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’
“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’
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.
Shabbat starts in ten minutes.
In ten minutes, Jake will sing and dance. He will yell, “Shabbat, shalom, hey!” He will smile and mug and everyone there will tell me what fun he has in Shabbat. He may even sit in another parent’s lap with one of his friends.
He will not sit in my lap because I will not be there. I will be home with my daughter who seems to have developed a weird aversion to going to sleep at the times she normally does.
For example, much as she may have been fretting and telling me she was ready for her usual 9:30 a.m. nap this morning, after happily nursing herself to sleep her eyes popped open the moment I tried to shift us off the couch. We tried nursing again. She pacified without eating and once again those eyes popped wide open the moment I tried to move. She is at this very moment very much awake in her swing and not looking particularly primed to fall asleep.
Which makes me moan even more about missing Shabbat because there is no way I can get dressed and to Jake’s school with his wide awake sister in the six minutes remaining.
Instead, I must sit here writing about how I want to go to Shabbat.
What’s the most natural thing in the world? Breastfeeding? The naked human body? Worms and cockroaches and creepy crawlies? A little flatulence after a satisfying dinner of rice and beans?
Any one of them. Except for breastfeeding.
This declaration, I know, sounds a bit aggressive, wounded perhaps, certainly not in keeping with the spirit of someone who believes that everything can be cured by yoga. Everything, it turns out in my own personal experience, except breastfeeding.
Because no matter how many people might tell you otherwise, it is not the most natural thing in the world. At least for those of us whose children would end up wolf food were it not for utterly unnatural things like the medication I take to induce lactation. A medication whose dosage I am slowly reducing, slowly reducing my milk supply along with it.
I am also, not incidentally, watching my sanity level slowly reduce as well as I fruitlessly wish I just knew for sure when I should stop.
When I was pregnant with Jake I received a mysterious “congratulations, new mom!” package in the mail from a company whose name looked vaguely familiar to me. Nestled inside the box were two shiny blue and white cans of Similac formula.
I was appalled. Outraged. And yet too lazy to pack them up and send them back to the evil perpetrators of formula-fed babies.
Instead, I dumped them in the trash and wrote a satisfying letter to Similac declaring exactly what I had done with their offering and self-righteously berating them for encouraging pregnant women to formula feed. Though I don’t remember the details, I feel certain the letter contained plenty of unrealistic declarations about how my baby would be exclusively breastfed and lots of the semi-informed political stuff I picked up in law school from women who were, like me, a long way from having babies about how the formula manufacturers were dumping their product in developing nations so as to maintain their profit margins at the expense of the health of underprivileged infants.
A week ago, when my pediatrician handed me a can of Enfamil, I knew better.
Because, it turned out, Jake drank the equivalent of those two cans of Similac and many, many, many, MANY more. Yep, for all my high mindedness about breastfeeding, my son drank formula. Lots of it. And my twelve-day-old daughter has had a taste of it as well.
Continue reading ‘Feeding My Child without Starving My Soul’
I finished my taxes yesterday as Jake napped on the couch and the last hour of Waitress unwound on TiVo.
I say this not to brag but to point out that I am now ready to give birth.
I have repeated it many times over the past several weeks: “No, I’m not ready. I haven’t done my taxes yet.” (To put into context what might appear to be a distressing obsession with finishing my taxes nearly two months ahead of time, contemplate my due date of March 8 and count forward from there to April 15. Then think about doing taxes while you have a five-week-old in the house.)
I have said this half-jokingly, but with a deadly half-seriousness. Really, how can there be a woman who’s ever given birth who still has the lack of tact to ask a near stranger who apparently can be insulted at will by dint of her prominent belly, “Boy, you must be ready to have that baby!”
I don’t pretend to know what it is about a pregnancy that makes your personal life public — “Is it a boy or a girl?” ask people who will never, ever see this baby, whatever its sex; “Are you ready?” as if they will personally run down to Charlotte to do a Trader Joe’s run for me if I say I’m not; and, the new evolution from the strangers touching your belly without asking to the query whether it, um, would bother me if someone I’ve never met before does so. Like it’s so much less personally invasive if they ask first.
Since, as I say, I don’t begin to know why people do these things to a very pregnant woman who would really, really feel much happier if someone just occasionally said, “You look great!” instead of “You look HUGE!” this is not the subject I mean to tackle here. Just a much-needed tangent.
Rather, the fact that I really did not feel ready to give birth until finishing my taxes — and several work projects — seems to me to open up a realm of inquiry interestingly at odds with my failure thus far to pack a bag for the hospital or wash the infant clothes that have been put away for the past two years.
On the one hand, I figure this lack of preparation makes me an experienced mother and, therefore, someone who understands how little control I have. No planning months in advance for a baby that will come when it comes no matter how many miles I walk or Evening Primrose supplements I down, no desire to complain about the discomforts that naturally accompany having a baby head smushed in your pelvis for several weeks straight, no need to control when this child will make its appearance.
On the other hand, I have to admit that refusing to have a baby until my taxes are done smacks of a certain amount of falsely pretending to be in control. As if the baby will graciously wait so I don’t have to apply for an extension from the IRS between rounds of breastfeeding.
Continue reading ‘My Taxes Are Done, So I Guess I’m Ready to Have a Baby Now’
I guess I’ve been thinking more lately about how to feed my children healthily (without instilling in them my own seriously warped food issues) because everyone has. You know, that peanutbutter thing.
Then, on Friday, I read an op ed piece in the New York Times entitled The Maggots in Your Mushrooms. Suddenly, it all became clear.
I am, it turns out, far more grossed out by unrefrigerated processed cheese goo than by the specter of spider eggs in my cereal (as long as they haven’t hatched yet) or a little e. coli coating my organic spinach (as long as it didn’t come from the rear end of a plant worker but rather from a rodent crossing the spinach patch unhindered by pesticides). (And, yes, I wash even my pre-washed spinach, so it’s not that I’m happy to actually eat e. coli — see Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy? for my recounting of what happened when Jake did, in fact, do just that.)
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household where if there was a little (or a lot of) mold on the cheese, you just cut off the moldy parts and gave them to the dogs before putting the rest on a plate with some crackers for human consumption. Where my sister and I spent many a morning holding a questionable carton of milk under the other’s nose and saying, “Does this smell all right to you?” and then agreeably pouring it on our cereal if the other sensed nothing too dangerously off-putting. To this day, I’ve got to wonder what surprises my refrigerator would hold if we didn’t have a compost bin and a policy of feeding our hounds any leftovers more than four days old as both a health measure and, honestly, because it ends up saving us money on dog food.
But really, I think it has to do with yoga, of course, and with the kind of life I would like my children to find as they navigate their way through a world that still offers more unavoidable toxins than choices.
Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.
Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all. But because Jake has shown an interest in it. At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to do to raise him is follow his cues, and making his very pregnant mommy sit down on the floor to check the diaper he says needs changing many, many, many more times a day than a very, very pregnant mommy should have to do. (It’s not the getting down on the floor that’s the problem, of course. It’s the getting up off the floor again — which requires the help of the tub, a sink, the washing machine, and any other solid, immovable object I can use to hoist myself vertical-ward.)
What I find most interesting — and even of possible interest to those of you who have absolutely no interest in the subject of potty training — is that it’s turning out to be the greatest lesson in surrendering control Jake’s given me yet.
Potty training does not, for example, involve utter and crushing-depression-inducing exhaustion like the sleep thing. It does not wrap me up in a deluge of hormones so great that often the only choice I had was curling up on the green armchair in a puddle of my own failure as a mother, the way breastfeeding did. And the whole toddler tantrum experience — I sure like to turn the incidents into stories that become more amusing to me as I write about them, but Mike reminded me the other day just how trying they are when he said, “It’s hard for me to read about Jake’s tantrums. I just want to let them go once they’re over. You need to process them.”
Yep, processing is what I do, and the potty training process, while still a challenge, is proving to be a bit of an adventure as well. I have no preconceived notions of how it will go — possibly because Jake’s is the first diaper I ever changed and so perhaps I was, until a couple of years ago, completely uninitiated in the scatological functions of young children. It is not too exhausting (other than the hauling myself up off the floor part) because it generally does not take place while I am trying to sleep. And hormones, well, they’re all about the next baby at this point.
Instead, I can remind myself to take a step back, stop wondering why two kids in Jake’s class are potty trained but he’s not (okay, I do attribute it to them having older brothers), and let Jake lead me through the changes that will take place in his life no matter how I might try to bend them to my will. Which, in this case, is not even so much as an impulse.
A few episodes to illustrate:
Continue reading ‘The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions’
I just finished reading my first Michael Pollan book, In Defense of Food. Which is somewhat strange, because I have been a big Michael Pollan fan for some time now.
Mostly, I have depended on Mike to give me the information I need to tell people I’m a big Michael Pollan fan. He does the heavy lifting — actually reading the books — and I decide I like what I hear and don’t really need to read any of it myself: eat organic (or natural), eat local, don’t eat too much meat (or any, in my case, and all non-meat-eaters like to be patted on the back every so often). After discussing why we’re going to make weekly visits to the farmer’s market or why Mike has gone to the trouble of assembling that huge compost heap in the yard, I smugly eye The Omnivore’s Dilemma, whisper, “I’ll be reading you next,” and then abandon it to gather dust on the stacked bookcases containing the other treasures Mike brought with him to the marriage that always seem so much more appealing when I’m not actually in need of something to read.
But a few months ago, I put In Defense of Food on my bedside stand in the stack of waiting-to-be-read books I love to make my way through. And a week ago, I actually picked it up and started reading.
Almost immediately, I began worrying about what I’m feeding my son.
This is a problem. Because, as Mike will gladly confirm, I am the very last person who needs more reasons to worry about food.
Continue reading ‘Darn You, Michael Pollan! What Am I Supposed to Feed My Child Now?’
