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’
I had a heady moment of deja vu this morning.
There I was, crouched over my son in his car seat, using my knee to push his arching body back into place as I struggled to buckle him in and heard a gutteral voice that sounded suspiciously like my own hissing, “You sit down NOW! Do you want me to take away The Backyardigans tonight??!!” just loudly enough to be heard over his wails.
The only difference between this episode and the spate we suffered about a year ago was the specter of his little sister staring at us from her seat.
That and, as I got behind the wheel of the car and slowly cooled myself down, the realization that all this ruckus could have been avoided if only I’d granted Jake his not as unreasonable as it sounds request to start the car.
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!”
Actually, I don’t really know that it’s H1N1 with whom we’ve tangoed over the past week. But I’ve been told that right now anything that looks like flu must be of the swine variety.
Like most of the H1N1 lore I’ve been hearing, there’s no telling how accurate this information I’m spreading around is. But no one is going to confuse this site with the CDC’s and, besides, H1N1 makes for a timely and eye-catching title.
So, full disclosure: No bodily fluids, no soaring temperatures, no stories about persevering despite record-breaking dehydration here. Just trying times and trying to be mindful. And yoga.
Nursing my daughter in the back seat of the Honda as we left town for the weekend — me kneeling over her with a hand braced against the window as if to wave (or perhaps hold out a big STOP!) at passersby — probably should have been a good clue that I would be facing some unique challenges on our travels.
You’d think I would have chosen this moment to consider the other adjustments my children would demand of me while we visited my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia. You’d think I would have pondered how a seven-month-old might respond to a new setting, new faces, and the absence of the hound dogs with whom she is so fascinated. (No worries on the last front, as Pete and George made their houndness roundly accessible to her.)
I am sorry to report, however, that the only thought running through my mind as I leaned over Lily’s car seat while we idled at a traffic light was how glad I was that no one was waiting at the bus shelter at which my position required me to stare as if looking forward to a chat with whoever was sitting there ogling me.
Continue reading ‘New Places, New Faces, New Records for Lack of Sleep’
“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’
It is more than likely that I will spend pretty much the rest of my life debating whether Lily is such a patient, generous soul because I was in yoga practicing vasisthasana right up to the day before she was born or because, as the second child, she is doomed to my “been there, done that” approach to parenthood.
This is not, all joking aside, to say that I in any way fail to appreciate what a special human being she is. Or that I love her any less than I love Jake. Or, for that matter, that, when I’m being honest with myself, I give her any less attention than I gave Jake during his infancy.
It’s just that, now that I’m doing it for the second time, I’m a whole lot smarter about choosing what kind of attention I give her.
I mean, really, could six-month-old Jake truly not stand to be left alone to entertain himself for just a few minutes? Probably, but I would have pulled my hair out before continuing to wash it had he screamed the way Lily has on occasion when I have taken a shower that did not fall during her nap time. To my credit, I carefully open the shower door every few minutes to show her we are in the same room. Though I’m pretty sure the message is lost the second I close the door again.
So, too, Mike asked me the other day how we knew Jake needed his bottles warmed. Did I ever offer him the room temp bottle I so handily pull out of the diaper bag for Lily now that she is far too interested in new surroundings to nurse anywhere other than in a hermetically sealed room? I am embarrassed for myself, but I have a strong suspicion that all those times we plopped a cold bottle in a cup of hot coffee at rest stops and counted ourselves clever for this less than adequate bottle warming solution may not have been strictly necessary.
The other night, however, I gained some much needed reassurance that I am not squelching the needs of my second born simply because I’m too lazy to expend all the needless energy I wasted on my first.
On this night, I found myself queasily reduced to a little sleep training. And, I discovered, I was far more sympathetic to Lily’s cries than I ever was to Jake’s.
Continue reading ‘Not Everything Is Easier the Second Time Around’
There are times — many, many times in the life of a mother of two children under three — when you know that whatever it is that is making you cry is a normal part of parenthood. The incident that has driven you to tears of despair is, you could easily tell yourself, a positive sign that your child is developing properly. No other parent has ever cried in similar circumstances, you may even lie to yourself, so buck up.
But you will cry anyhow, and you will feel good and sorry for yourself as you do it.
By all rights, my latest bout of tears should not have been induced by the simple fact of Lily awakening twice in one night. Because who would cry over something most other mothers of infants I know take as a fact of life? And what sort of ingrate would not be able to take a few days out of the five-and-a-half months of her daughter’s life when she loses a little more than a little sleep?
By all rights, in other words, I should instead have been crying when I was sitting on the dirty floor of a Target bathroom at eight o’clock last night, my baby strapped to me in the Ergo, the toilet paper dispenser empty, and my son’s brand-new Big Boy underpants, shall we say, soiled.
But I didn’t cry then. In that moment, I could find quite a lot of humor in just watching myself. It’s in the middle of the night that my outlook on life is more than a little bit less inclined toward laughter.
Continue reading ‘Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)’
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.
