Two weeks ago, when you hit the six-month mark, I wished you a happy birthday on Facebook. I thought about celebrating with a post about the mammoth accomplishment that has been nursing you. Over the couple of years I've been on Facebook, I've seen posts about all sorts of celebratory things: weight loss, wedding anniversaries, ultrasounds, healthy babies. Every single one of those things is bound to be a struggle for someone reading them - someone's got a friend who is 50 pounds overweight, someone who has recently been divorced, someone who can't carry a baby to term or has a child with health problems. I wouldn't be angry or feel judged by someone who lost weight, but being a mother's not like that.
Being a mother, at least being a new mother (I can only hope this fades somewhat), is like having no skin. Skin is an intermediary for nerves, a big down comforter that strips the experiences of the world down to a manageable level. Skin softens the sensory overload of the world to a tolerable point. But now I find myself walking around with no skin, and even the gentlest, most well-intentioned "touches" from contact with other people burn like fire. Even the most commonplace interactions can suddenly leave me feeling flayed open, internally wide-eyed at the rapid delivery of distress and panic and inadequacy, like having a house dropped on me out of a clear blue conversational sky.
Speaking to me now, at least in an ideal way, would probably be akin to speaking to a wild animal or a mental patient. It's best to make no sudden movements, to speak softly and slowly and roll the weight of every word around before dispensing it. Sometimes, all of a sudden, language seems awash with vast gulfs of meaning, and instead of standing on a secure shoreline with gentle waves, I find myself miles from anything solid, casting about, sucked into the trough between "Is she..." and "Isn't she...." "Is she..." implies hope and future and growth and potential, while "Isn't she..." seems filled with recrimination and criticism and uncertainty. "Is she..." means she will, but "Isn't she..." means she should be by now.
Initially, I was sure this was the fault of other people (and I still make regular vows to myself about the kinds of things I'll say to new mothers), but I think some people are just more firmly anchored, so moored to their secure sense of being right and doing right that there aren't places between the words for them to fall. I realize now it's a testament to my carefully constructed facade, to my years of studying how best to approximate normal, that someone can look at me and see a confident sailor, at the helm of a steady little craft skimming across smooth water instead of a small vessel floundering in dark, rough seas, struggling to find keel, to keep from taking on water.
At one time, I would have been sure this was my curse, comfortable with the sharp irony that my talent was my undoing, but now, I just wonder if maybe, just maybe, they might be right and I might be wrong. Could my understanding of myself possibly be so skewed? There's irony in that as well, I suppose. Perhaps, like the Velveteen Rabbit, after years of being pretend, I've finally been made Real, and somehow I'm the only one who doesn't know it yet.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Six Months!
Woohoo! You've been here six months! Six whole months and it seems like years and years, but in a good way. I look at all we've learned over the past six months, and I don't know who to be more impressed with. Okay, I'm more impressed with you, but only because you didn't have access to the internet. :)
I've learned so much about you. I've been reading Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and he talks about how intimately you know the world as a child, and it struck a chord with me, because I remember knowing my childhood world that way. I knew how many stairs there were down to the basement, what the gas furnace sounded like when it clicked on, how many times Mom would answer the phone on Saturday morning before getting out of bed, the number of tiles on my bedroom ceiling and where the brown water stains were, how long I could run the garden hose before getting caught, where the warped spots were on the ping-pong table in my grandparents' basement, what name to call your uncle to start a fight. I knew the smells of everything: my grandpa's workshirts, the cabinet under the sink, the loft in the garage, my grandmother's lotion, my mother's perfume, the hot plastic smell of our Buick in summer, the burners on the gas stove. (This, by the way, is why you'll someday be annoyed with the "I don't remembers" you get from all adults in your life; you'll not be able to fathom how such a fundamental understanding of our world slipped away from us. I can't either.)
But now, suddenly, I know something so microscopically again: you.
I've learned so much about you. I've been reading Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and he talks about how intimately you know the world as a child, and it struck a chord with me, because I remember knowing my childhood world that way. I knew how many stairs there were down to the basement, what the gas furnace sounded like when it clicked on, how many times Mom would answer the phone on Saturday morning before getting out of bed, the number of tiles on my bedroom ceiling and where the brown water stains were, how long I could run the garden hose before getting caught, where the warped spots were on the ping-pong table in my grandparents' basement, what name to call your uncle to start a fight. I knew the smells of everything: my grandpa's workshirts, the cabinet under the sink, the loft in the garage, my grandmother's lotion, my mother's perfume, the hot plastic smell of our Buick in summer, the burners on the gas stove. (This, by the way, is why you'll someday be annoyed with the "I don't remembers" you get from all adults in your life; you'll not be able to fathom how such a fundamental understanding of our world slipped away from us. I can't either.)
But now, suddenly, I know something so microscopically again: you.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Paper Moon
Parenting is a controlled illusion and an illusion of control. We struggle so much with teenagers because we feel as though we're losing control, but in reality, I realize already, we've never had control. Never, not for one moment of a child's existence. We snap inwardly at parents with unruly children, muttering, "Control your child!" or "He's completely out of control!" Yet actual control is not what we ended up wresting for, but rather a sort of cotton candy control, all puffed and spun and empty.
I'm not sure why we're so surprised, so baffled and wounded, when our elaborately constructed, self-proclaimed authority comes crashing down around our ears. Perhaps it's because we have spent years and years carrying this sense of control around like a talisman against all the uncertainty of the world, comforted by the steady weight of it, only to discover when called upon to use it that it's merely like Dumbo's magic feather. We mistake control for influence because influence is not enough. In reality, I've never had control of you, even when you were in the womb. You've been thwarting my meager attempts at authority, the authority of my body and my mind, since you were two tiny cells. I couldn't dictate when you wriggled, when you pressed outward against my ribs as though you were attempting to blow out a wall and enlarge your inadequate accommodations, when you hiccuped.
Although pregnancy is the large black underscore for loss of control, it's really when the illusion takes root. All things become about shaping the production process, selling the idea of indirect control by molding fixations on the raw materials delivered. Lunch meats with nitrates should be avoided, eat lots of fish to assist with brain development but only certain types and not too often lest the excessive levels of mercury you're bound to ingest lodge in a developing brain, avoid varnishes and stains and aerosols...the lists and concerns go on and on and on. The physical weight of your body was nothing compared to the weighty sense of responsibility I felt at every moment, with every decision. We sell ourselves on the idea of our control over you so that we can then sell you on it as well. Converts, it is well known, make the best evangelists....
I'm not sure why we're so surprised, so baffled and wounded, when our elaborately constructed, self-proclaimed authority comes crashing down around our ears. Perhaps it's because we have spent years and years carrying this sense of control around like a talisman against all the uncertainty of the world, comforted by the steady weight of it, only to discover when called upon to use it that it's merely like Dumbo's magic feather. We mistake control for influence because influence is not enough. In reality, I've never had control of you, even when you were in the womb. You've been thwarting my meager attempts at authority, the authority of my body and my mind, since you were two tiny cells. I couldn't dictate when you wriggled, when you pressed outward against my ribs as though you were attempting to blow out a wall and enlarge your inadequate accommodations, when you hiccuped.
Although pregnancy is the large black underscore for loss of control, it's really when the illusion takes root. All things become about shaping the production process, selling the idea of indirect control by molding fixations on the raw materials delivered. Lunch meats with nitrates should be avoided, eat lots of fish to assist with brain development but only certain types and not too often lest the excessive levels of mercury you're bound to ingest lodge in a developing brain, avoid varnishes and stains and aerosols...the lists and concerns go on and on and on. The physical weight of your body was nothing compared to the weighty sense of responsibility I felt at every moment, with every decision. We sell ourselves on the idea of our control over you so that we can then sell you on it as well. Converts, it is well known, make the best evangelists....
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Mother of the Year
Well, I imagine my nomination got retracted yesterday. What a day! I should preface all this by saying that what you're about to read does not reflect the standards of the house you grew up in. That's probably why I was especially horrified. We have a very sick cat at the moment, one who probably shouldn't have been allowed to get this sick, and so we suddenly have a whole lot of new challenges that I really don't need at the moment! And something horrendous has happened to my stomach in the last six weeks or so, guaranteeing that at least four days a week, I have horrible stomach pain and an urgent need for a bathroom at least four times a day. Yet another challenge that I don't need at the moment....
Anyway, we started home from a long weekend in WV, with bad weather looming, and most of the trip went smoothly. I think you were fed up from a disrupted schedule so you didn't nurse much, and I was clearly fed up from a disrupted schedule because my stomach was killing me. I had to stop about an hour and a half from home to be sick, and you were happy to sit in your car seat and smile cheerfully and encouragingly at me, which helped. Then about 50 miles from home, you were just so hungry you couldn't stand it any more, so I made it to our exit and stopped to nurse.
Fed you in the corner of a truckstop parking lot while my stomach started raging again and the snow was coming down. I didn't think I was going to make it to the bathroom, so I drove across the parking lot with you in my lap, grabbed you and the diaper bag and rushed into the bathroom. In the plus column, it was a single contained bathroom, but in the minus, there was no changing table. None. But I was too sick to wait, so I had no choice but to put your blanket down on the floor and lay you down. On a truckstop bathroom floor. I know, I know.... Take heart - at least when you have children, I'll not be harping about "putting my grandchildren in that filthy blah, blah, blah," but telling you, "Oh, don't worry about that pacifier - I changed you once on the floor of a truckstop bathroom and you didn't get typhoid!" Got you changed, crouched down and at arm's length because my boots were wet and I was shedding clumps of snow all over the tile floor around you, got back in the car and made it the last few miles home, but in retrospect, it might have been a more peaceful evening if we'd just slept in the parking lot for the night and then kept driving west.
Anyway, we started home from a long weekend in WV, with bad weather looming, and most of the trip went smoothly. I think you were fed up from a disrupted schedule so you didn't nurse much, and I was clearly fed up from a disrupted schedule because my stomach was killing me. I had to stop about an hour and a half from home to be sick, and you were happy to sit in your car seat and smile cheerfully and encouragingly at me, which helped. Then about 50 miles from home, you were just so hungry you couldn't stand it any more, so I made it to our exit and stopped to nurse.
Fed you in the corner of a truckstop parking lot while my stomach started raging again and the snow was coming down. I didn't think I was going to make it to the bathroom, so I drove across the parking lot with you in my lap, grabbed you and the diaper bag and rushed into the bathroom. In the plus column, it was a single contained bathroom, but in the minus, there was no changing table. None. But I was too sick to wait, so I had no choice but to put your blanket down on the floor and lay you down. On a truckstop bathroom floor. I know, I know.... Take heart - at least when you have children, I'll not be harping about "putting my grandchildren in that filthy blah, blah, blah," but telling you, "Oh, don't worry about that pacifier - I changed you once on the floor of a truckstop bathroom and you didn't get typhoid!" Got you changed, crouched down and at arm's length because my boots were wet and I was shedding clumps of snow all over the tile floor around you, got back in the car and made it the last few miles home, but in retrospect, it might have been a more peaceful evening if we'd just slept in the parking lot for the night and then kept driving west.
Monday, February 14, 2011
My New Mother, Google
I have no idea how I could have been a mother without being a librarian. We'd still be trying to get you out of the car seat! There was just so much I didn't know and no one I felt comfortable asking. Besides, I have, and I hope you've not inherited it, a deep-seated dislike to being told what to do. I don't like to let anyone tell me what to do. If I'm making a new soup, I'll find three different recipes and combine them. If I've got something to make, I'll shop around for different ideas and come up with my own take. When I was in college, I didn't research and form a viewpoint on a topic. I formed a viewpoint and then found quotes that agreed with me. Terrible, I know, but it's how I do things. And so, I'm most comfortable with tracking down a whole bunch of viewpoints, sifting through them for bits of common sense, threads of common philosophy, and snippets of research, to come up with an approach.
I really should have kept track of my Google history, because my searches over the last five months - actually over the last seventeen months - detail virtually ever question, dilemma, or irrational fear I've had. We could start in the summer of 2009 with searches about planning for pregnancy, appropriate vitamin supplements and folic acid levels. Then we move into basal body temperature tracking, luteal phase information, and sample charts. (This phase was repeated over and over. No matter how confident I was in my math, the months of September, October, November, and December found me lying in bed late at night constantly counting and subtracting days in my head before getting up to double-check the number of days in the various phases of menstruation with a Google search. I had a calendar and a thermometer within arm's reach for weeks!) Then came days of searching for how early pregnancy can be detected, what first trimester symptoms there might be, and how I might recognize them.
Of course, after I confirmed I was pregnant, I searched for cute ways to tell your grandparents, what to expect at neonatal appointments, and a practice with midwives and a history of noninterference. For most of pregnancy, my searches fall into two categories - planning and panicking. I planned and planned. I searched for lists of questions to ask potential midwives, I researched birth costs and induction rates, I read up on the recommended supplements. And then, mostly late at night, I panicked. Sometimes it was because I had symptoms of something, but sometimes it was because of the near lack of symptoms. What are late-term miscarriage rates? Is my baby moving enough? Can my baby be moving too much? Am I gaining enough weight? What can I do if I'm gaining too much? Hours and hours of searching, reading accounts of strange concerns and even stranger side effects.
And then my due date came....
I really should have kept track of my Google history, because my searches over the last five months - actually over the last seventeen months - detail virtually ever question, dilemma, or irrational fear I've had. We could start in the summer of 2009 with searches about planning for pregnancy, appropriate vitamin supplements and folic acid levels. Then we move into basal body temperature tracking, luteal phase information, and sample charts. (This phase was repeated over and over. No matter how confident I was in my math, the months of September, October, November, and December found me lying in bed late at night constantly counting and subtracting days in my head before getting up to double-check the number of days in the various phases of menstruation with a Google search. I had a calendar and a thermometer within arm's reach for weeks!) Then came days of searching for how early pregnancy can be detected, what first trimester symptoms there might be, and how I might recognize them.
Of course, after I confirmed I was pregnant, I searched for cute ways to tell your grandparents, what to expect at neonatal appointments, and a practice with midwives and a history of noninterference. For most of pregnancy, my searches fall into two categories - planning and panicking. I planned and planned. I searched for lists of questions to ask potential midwives, I researched birth costs and induction rates, I read up on the recommended supplements. And then, mostly late at night, I panicked. Sometimes it was because I had symptoms of something, but sometimes it was because of the near lack of symptoms. What are late-term miscarriage rates? Is my baby moving enough? Can my baby be moving too much? Am I gaining enough weight? What can I do if I'm gaining too much? Hours and hours of searching, reading accounts of strange concerns and even stranger side effects.
And then my due date came....
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Flotation Device
You are my sunshine. I never knew how true those words were, just thought of "Sunshine" as another nickname or endearment like Peanut or Baby Girl, but I mean that in the purest, truest sense. You are the light in my days. Your little face in the morning, smiling next to mine as you wake up, sopping wet and starving hungry, but smiling anyway, is like the sun peeping over the trees. When I'm paused in my work, looking around as I think something over, your small self, pink-nested next to me, is like the burst of bright light when the clouds shift away. And when you cuddle up next to me at night, take a few pulls on your pacifier and sniff a small, contented sigh, it's the same peaceful closing of the day that sunset offers. I track your presence as devotedly as any sunflower ever tracked the progress of the sun across the sky.
It feels a bit backwards, to be so dependent on you. I like for you to be happy, of course, but even when you're not, your presence offers a purpose, an anchor, that keeps me from drifting off course during my day. Even when you're red-faced and in full voice, most of the time I'm thinking, "Oh, she's experimenting with the new vocal ranges she's discovered!" I'm a bit frightened about how I'll manage this when the day comes that my decisions will make you displeased, but I think that's how it goes with mothering - I'll know the necessity of that decision in the bigger picture while you'll only sense the frustration of it in the moment. Right now, we bob through our days, treading water together, doing our best to keep our heads above water, and I'm never certain who depends most on whom, but I cling tightly to you and somehow, we manage to stay afloat.
Our society seems, at the moment, to value pushing babies away from us at lightning speed. You're born and we commence immediately to push you toward adulthood - we want you to sleep alone, to sit up, to walk, to feed yourself. Maybe this is because I came to all this later, but I'm contented to savor it. I'm pretty sure you'll be feeding yourself before you start kindergarten. No doubt, you'll be sleeping through the night in your own bed before you start high school. You came into the world with a little map all your own, and I don't think we're at the point where I need to be yanking it from your hands, shouting directions and pushing you to get wherever it is you're going faster. The sun finds its way across the sky, and I'm certain that with less guidance from me than I'd like to believe, you will too.
It feels a bit backwards, to be so dependent on you. I like for you to be happy, of course, but even when you're not, your presence offers a purpose, an anchor, that keeps me from drifting off course during my day. Even when you're red-faced and in full voice, most of the time I'm thinking, "Oh, she's experimenting with the new vocal ranges she's discovered!" I'm a bit frightened about how I'll manage this when the day comes that my decisions will make you displeased, but I think that's how it goes with mothering - I'll know the necessity of that decision in the bigger picture while you'll only sense the frustration of it in the moment. Right now, we bob through our days, treading water together, doing our best to keep our heads above water, and I'm never certain who depends most on whom, but I cling tightly to you and somehow, we manage to stay afloat.
Our society seems, at the moment, to value pushing babies away from us at lightning speed. You're born and we commence immediately to push you toward adulthood - we want you to sleep alone, to sit up, to walk, to feed yourself. Maybe this is because I came to all this later, but I'm contented to savor it. I'm pretty sure you'll be feeding yourself before you start kindergarten. No doubt, you'll be sleeping through the night in your own bed before you start high school. You came into the world with a little map all your own, and I don't think we're at the point where I need to be yanking it from your hands, shouting directions and pushing you to get wherever it is you're going faster. The sun finds its way across the sky, and I'm certain that with less guidance from me than I'd like to believe, you will too.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Pink and Sparkly
The last post about the balancing act that is marriage post-baby makes me feel a little bad. I don't want you to have the wrong idea, but in leaving you this record of your early years, I don't want to give you the impression that motherhood is all smiles. While I worry that you might someday read this and feel as if I didn't love you or think I was terrible, I'd rather that than have you find yourself alone someday reading a glossy, smiling account of everything and thinking, "What's wrong with me?! Why can't I manage this? Mom never had these problems." Um, yes she did, and then some.
Now in case you're reading this before you're really able to understand, I want to explain something. You'll probably know by now how it goes with some things in life. A great number of life experiences have fabulous outcomes after lots and lots of work. When you're young, sometimes it can be hard to separate the two - to understand that the work and the outcome depend on each other, but are sort of separate experiences. Like when you have to clean your room or study for a test or save your allowance for weeks to buy a new toy - the cleaning, studying and saving aren't the fun parts (although if you can learn to make them at least moderately enjoyable, things go more easily), but the neat room, the good grade or the new toy are terrific. You are the end result, not the process, and I can be frustrated, taxed and tried by the process but still madly in love with you. Two completely, totally, entirely different things!
As I've mentioned, physically pregnancy wasn't rough, but emotionally, I had more than a few rocky spots. But we got you here, and, when I have good days, I can recognize that I walk a little taller inside knowing that I was able to get you here under my own willpower, without having to have the extra assistance of medication or surgery. And I can also recognize that I've pushed through the difficulty of nursing to an almost inhuman degree.
Nursing might be where things first began to slip a bit.
Now in case you're reading this before you're really able to understand, I want to explain something. You'll probably know by now how it goes with some things in life. A great number of life experiences have fabulous outcomes after lots and lots of work. When you're young, sometimes it can be hard to separate the two - to understand that the work and the outcome depend on each other, but are sort of separate experiences. Like when you have to clean your room or study for a test or save your allowance for weeks to buy a new toy - the cleaning, studying and saving aren't the fun parts (although if you can learn to make them at least moderately enjoyable, things go more easily), but the neat room, the good grade or the new toy are terrific. You are the end result, not the process, and I can be frustrated, taxed and tried by the process but still madly in love with you. Two completely, totally, entirely different things!
As I've mentioned, physically pregnancy wasn't rough, but emotionally, I had more than a few rocky spots. But we got you here, and, when I have good days, I can recognize that I walk a little taller inside knowing that I was able to get you here under my own willpower, without having to have the extra assistance of medication or surgery. And I can also recognize that I've pushed through the difficulty of nursing to an almost inhuman degree.
Nursing might be where things first began to slip a bit.
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