Little I

Ian Fell Into the Pond

2007-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

"I'd drain that pond," said my father-in-law, whose mother's house the husband and I own and live in and try to repair and in many ways endure because it's an old place. A project always in need of doing or cleaning up from. Right now, the backyard is a bit of a wreck.

"I think I'm going to cover it," said the husband. Ian was either in my womb or on my breast. I can't recall because this conversation occurred more than once.

"You could put one of those cage covers over it," I said. "The ones they have at the fish nurseries to keep out raccoons."

The pond in question is stone, about 20 inches deep, a lovely oval thing, about the size of two jacuzzis, with a stone bridge going across it at the narrowest point. Big stones jut up around it on the border; it's quite good masonry. When we first moved in, I wanted to get rid of it because what the hell do I know about maintaining a pond? Fortunately, I've discovered, I have no interest whatsoever in yard work of any kind anyway. The husband and I have also discovered that for whatever reason we don't have to do much to it at all. It's full of mosquito fish (raccoons got all the goldfish we tried to keep in there) and large, lush patches of lily. We just infrequently remove algae with a net and that's it. It's actually a great thing to have, primarily because children like sitting on the bridge, hanging out there, looking over the iron railings. It looks very large to them, like a big, big thing. When I was a child I thought that the hill outside our house was huge and steep. I thought that the lilac bush outside my bedroom window was not huge but MASSIVE. I thought my father's arm muscles were the largest around. I remember going home for the first time in years when I was in my mid-twenties, and the hill was not steep but low and rolling, practically no more than an incline. The lilac bush was merely tall. I didn't need to observe my father's arm muscles because by then I knew my father. There was no substance or remarkable strength to any muscle in his body.

So when Ian fell into the pond, he probably thought he was in an ocean. He couldn't stand because the silt is too thick and the bottom is too slippery and because he's two and fell into his parent's pond and was of course in great shock and does not know how to swim. (We've tried to teach him to make a bubble, but he just drinks a gulp of bathwater and says, "Bubbles.")
I was at my computer, the desk of which faces a giant window and a sliding-glass door that leads into our backyard. I was typing something of absolutely no importance. It was about 5pm.

"Ian! Ian!" I heard the husband yell. I heard a splash and a cry, and I looked out the glass and saw Ian in the pond, head and shoulder above the surface, one arm reaching up. I opened the door and stood on the deck and the husband was holding our saturated son up out of the water. He was bent in an up-side-down "V" over the pond, looking at me, not sure what to do next. Ian was crying. He was also probably cold.

I think I was breathing. I'm not sure. "I'll get a towel," I said, and I did, and I wrapped the child into it and held him, took him in and dried him off. He smelled like pond water. He might have had a mosquito fish in his pants. I've no idea. I rubbed his toes to warm them off and he laughed up at me, his hair wet and slicked over one side of his head, like a comb-over you might see on an old man.

Ian Fell Off The Changing Table

2007-09-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

Wham! 28 pounds of baby boy was on the floor. Then silence, as Ian was immersed in those few seconds between what happened and crying.

Where was I? Across the room, of course, with my back turned, right where I should have been. Duh. Where do you think I was? I had made it a habit to leave him on the changing table, just for 3 or 4 seconds, while I zipped across his room (about ten feet) to his dresser and pulled out a pair of pants for him, or a shirt. I didn't see him fall--I heard the wham and ran over and scooped him up while he howled and howled and I hope somewhere in his mind cursed his mother for being such an idiot.

"It was all my fault, Ian," I said, sitting with him in one of the ancient chairs in our living room. I bent his arms and legs and wiggled his wrists and checked his head, his mouth. Nothing. Not a scratch except for that enormous fear and shock and discovery of gravity that kept him howling for minutes. He could have broken a bone, split his head open. Split his lip and needed stiches and Novocaine injections and antibiotics and then therapy. He'll probably still need therapy. My god.

"I'm so sorry," I told him, his head on my shoulder, his cries moving into low whines. "It was all my fault, and it will never happen again. Never, ever, ever."

He'd been a little fussy when I made my usual move across the room to fetch his clothes, refusing to let me take off his shirt or something. So when I went to his dresser, I was a little annoyed with him. This didn't make me feel any better.

I can't believe how easy it is for something to happen to your child. I realize this realization is coming a little late, since Ian is almost two, but it's shocking how quickly they can hurt themselves and how clearly it is the parent's fault when they do. Yesterday he was gripping the oven door handle and the refrigerator door handle at the same time, a practice neither myself nor the husband have objected to. And why would we? The oven wasn't on, there is no potential for electric shock from either source. Ian is just exploring the kitchen. So we let him. How were we to know that he might want to hang on the oven door, or perhaps use the oven handle to climb the stove? What are we, parents? Human beings? Stupid? Attributing adult levels of judgment to our toddler? Fortunately, as soon as he made the monkey move and started to pull open the oven door, I grabbed him and made him cry for telling him no. So he was still scratch-free but for the wound to his desire.

Things

2007-09-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

My mother has used the same purse for over 30 years. It started out as dark chocolate brown, long rather than wide, with a single buckle strap holding the flap over the purse itself. It contains no inside pockets or zippers. As a teenager, it was one of the few things she owned that didn't embarrass me, not because I liked it but because it was so simple and unremarkable, unlike the JAR of water she carried with her everywhere, often in a plastic Metamucil container that she carried up to eateries in the mall so she could ask the folks behind the counter to take it to their sink and refill it.

But back to the purse. My mother is an environmentalist in nearly every way you can imagine. She doesn't buy things, ever, and reuses to almost an absurd degree (although given the state of our environment, no measures can really be considered absurd). So in her house is the same cookie sheet she's had for the last 30 years, the same towels--despite their bristly texture--the same sheets. Darned socks. Patched underwear. And the same visor--a sort of straw giant thing that extends nearly half a foot out from her forehead; she lines it with strips of cloth to prevent rubbing of the skin. And of course she uses the same purse. It is unevenly striped with wrinkles and cracks and its color is now a pale brown. The shoulder strap deteriorated long ago, so she now carries it under her arm. I asked her a long time ago why she didn't get a new purse.

"I don't really need one," she said. "And I like this one."

I admire my mother very, very much--she is the walk and the talk. She is rich with integrity and character. I didn't always admire her or like her, but I do now because I have thank god matured in many ways. And I was chatting with her today about depression, which she suffers from but treats very successfully; she's also quite knowledgable about how it works--symptoms and the like. I was telling my mother today that I have recently contracted ANOTHER cold that is wiping my ass out and filling my sinuses with what feels like cement.

"I went through a period in my life," she said, "when I got sick a lot. And I remember that I was worrying all the time. Do you worry?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. You do? That's lowering your resistance." She went on to describe the nature of her worries during that period of her life, and in two sentences about herself she stated exactly how I feel all of the time. I cried, but it was a cry of relief, really, because now I have sort of an answer, a source of what's the matter, and I can do something about it. My mother did, after all.

During our conversation, I was looking at my own purse, flopped over the wooden crate we use as a coffee table in the TV room. I've had it about five years. Longer than it is wide, with an adustable shoulder strap. It started out as dark, dark red. It's getting worn; the seams that hold the purse together, that curve around its shape, are getting whitish. It's quite wrinkled, especially in the fold of the flap. About two years ago, the strap started ripping, and I went shopping for a new purse. Nothing worked. The purses in the department store didn't hang against me the right way; I couldn't adjust the length, and they were all bulky and they felt strange and foreign--nothing felt like the place where I wanted to store the things I use all the time. So I took my old purse to a shoe shop and had it repaired and polished. It's doing fine. I can't imagine using anything else.

Flowers

2007-09-14T12:55:00.001-07:00

The other day, walking along the park with Ian, I pointed out flowers for the first time.

"These are flowers, Ian," I said, gently bending a hibiscus into the baby jogger so he could smell it. "It's pink."

He looked up at me. "Fow-ers."

"Right! Flowers. Let's look for them. You'll see them everywhere. Want to smell?" I demonstrated, holding the dogs by their leashes with my other hand and then holding a hibiscus to his nose. He grinned and pressed his lips together and sniffed hard and deep, tilting his head and chest back in a little heave.

"Did you smell them, Ian?"

"Yah."

We started moving again. I pointed out a cluster of rose bushes. "Here's some more flowers, Ian."

"Yah." A dog stopped to pee in a patch of ivy. Ahead of us was a tall butterfly bush about the size of a small tree.

"Fowers! Fowers!" He pointed.

When we finished the walk, I set him up in his booster and gave him some raisins and crackers and went into the backyard. Despite our luck at owning a large lot of land, we're lazy landscapers and the only pickable flowers we have are lilies, bulbs planted everywhere long ago by the husband's grandmother. Lilies grow around this ailing stone well (a non-functional barbecue) and along the side of the house, next to patches of dirt that our cats use as a bathroom and sprouting their way through matted yellow grass and Virginia Creeper that has spread up our fence in a narrow column, getting wider and thicker every day. I clipped three pale pink lillies and brought them inside to Ian, who was dropping his Sesame Street crackers into a plastic cup of milk to see what would happen.

"Look, Ian."

"Fowers!"

I put them in a slim vase with water and put the vase on the kitchen table. Ian reached for them.

"Want to smell the flowers, honey? Want to smell the flowers?"

"Yah! Yah! Fowers!"

I held the vase for him. Big sniff. A smile. "Aahhh," he said. "Fowers."

Dinosaurs

2007-09-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ian doesn't like being kissed, for the most part. Whenever I ask him for a kiss, he usually continues looking at or playing with whatever he happens to be looking at or playing with--a book, coffee-cup sized plastic dinosaur, a fire truck, a wooden puzzle piece--and says, "No, no." At bedtime, when he's in the husband's lap, ready to read some books, and I lean down for a goodnight kiss, he always holds up his arm to my mouth and says, "Arm." (As in, Arm Only, Mommy.) And I go on with whatever it is I'm doing--watching Ian, marveling at how wonderful he is and how much I love him, at how he lately responds to "What's your name?" with "Hap-py." (Seriously. It's kind of beautiful, kind of ironic, kind of ridiculously cute.)

What Ian does like is to make his things kiss, stuffed animal or not--a white monkey and a penguin, a penguin and a bear, a plastic dragon and a toy block, a toy block and a froggie finger puppet. He's coming I think to the end of a phase where he brought me and the husband his things to kiss.

Holding up a white-puppy puppet: "Kiss, kiss."

"You want me to kiss the puppy?"

"Yah. Yah."

"Okay. Mmmwwa!" Big smack on dusty head of puppet.

Holding up a wooden a helicopter puzzle piece: "Kiss, kiss."

"You want me to kiss the helicopter?"

"Yah. Yah."

"Mmmwaa!" Smack on blade of propeller.

The other day, the husband tried to engage Ian in some fun, violent playtime with the plastic dinosaurs. Gnarling sounds, roars, wounds. Brontosaurus knocking Tyrannosaurus off the top of the block tower. Growling. Pretend fighting, pretend tearing of the pretend flesh like on the cover of Ian's National Geographic book, Dinosaurs.

Result: failure. Ian prefers his dinosaurs to kiss, for the flesh-eaters not to prey on the herbivores, for no blood to be drawn. This kind of makes me wonder about "human nature," that bogus term. It makes me wonder about a lot of things. I'm certain an interest in violence is on its way, and it's not as if Ian never gets angry. He throws things, he howls when he might not get his way. But dinosaurs, despite the pictures he's viewed so often in his National Geographic book, are in his mind a peace-loving breed of thing. They kiss a lot. They enjoy hugs. They are conflict free.

Taking a Bath

2007-08-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

Before Ian started walking, one of my favorite times with him was right after his bath. I lifted him from the tub while the water drained away, wrapped him in a towel, and stood up; as I did I watched his face, shadowed just a little from the towel flopped over his hairline. His round, blue eyes were wide open and happy, his mouth slightly open in a smile and his chin and cheeks free of all the food and dirt that had collected there all day. Then I pressed his head dry, his armpits, between his toes, the flesh-lined hollows in his neck. From there we'd read the grammar primers on the wall--these old 8x11 prints that belonged to Chris' mother that I put in some frames. They're fun jokes, since most of them contain grammatical errors in their definitions--of a noun or a verb or an adverb. But they became habit: as soon as I dried Ian off and stood with him again, he pointed to them and said, "Nown!" After we read them, I'd carry him into his room and get him into his pjs so the husband could come in, read to him, and put him to bed. It was all wonderful to me, but I especially liked those brief moments looking at his face as I stood with him in the towel. He looked so content and clean, as every child should feel, and I think he felt very safe. I felt safe; I think I found safety in caring for him so routinely and gingerly. I felt like I was doing something exactly right for him. Sometimes I lingered there a few seconds and pressed my cheek onto the top of his head while he pointed at the beads that hang over our medicine cabinet and said, "Bead. Bead."

Then came the walking. After a few weeks, he started saying, "Walk. Walk." instead of "Bead. Bead." He also started squirming and clearly not feeling content in my arms anymore. So I plunked him from the bath to the bathmat and dried him off while he stood there. Then he walked out of the bathroom and through the house to his room.

I was devastated. I cried. "I guess that's over," I said to the husband when he asked why I was crying.

The new routine continued; he held the edge of the tub while I dried him off. Then he started counting with me as I dried his toes.

"Waahaaan..." he said slowly and with great inflection. "Tooohoooh... Freeheeeh...."

Then he started leaning his head into my chest as I dried him off. I plunked him down, put the towel over his head like a hooded cape, and he leaned over and put his ear to my breastbone, held it there.

"You ready to walk to your room?"

"Yah." And off he went.

We've now developed the Soap Song.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

Me: And I'd wash your little heinie, and I'd make it really shiny.

Ian: Siney.

Me: Oh, I wish I was a little bar of--

Ian: Soap.

About a week ago, when Ian started a bout of diarrhea (now finished, as well as his crib mattress, which we've had to replace), I lifted him from the tub and lowered him to the bathmat. He stared down at his feet, then up at me, and started to cry.

"What's wrong? What's the matter, sugar?" Next night, same thing--so I plunked him and wrapped him and picked him up and dried him off in my lap again.

"Bead! Bead!"

Last night, as I started to lower him to the bathmat, he stuck his legs straight out in front of him, a perfect 90 degree angle of child, so I didn't even plunk. I wrapped him and held him close and didn't let his feet touch the floor.

"Noun! Noun!"

So far in my life, I have been able to articulate very few beliefs. Only one, actually: Things are not supposed to stay the same. Not my body, not my mind, not my perspective, not my relationships, not my child. Not any child.

And I still believe this.

Walking and Will Part II

2007-07-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

It's amazing to me--and I feel a bit ignorant for not seeing this connection before Ian started walking--how walking, how physically being able to move your own body, develops your personality. My god--who knew? Watching this process in a developing child--who knew how much the body and the mind were really connected?

If Ian wants to read a book, he brings it to you. He takes your hand and he places his book of choice INTO your hand. If he wants to get down from his booster seat, he says, Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. If he wants a drink of water, he goes into the kitchen and gets his sippy cup from the table. If he wants a door closed, he closes it. If he wants to go over to the park, he stands at the front door, puts his face to the glass window, and says, Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. Go way. If he wants his vintage Fisher Price telephone to be on top of his parents bed, he puts it there. If he wants a piece of bark to hold (he adores strips of bark that line some of the trails and sidewalks of the park across the street), he goes to pick one up; if he wants to drop one in the creek, he goes to the bridge, holds the bark out, and watches it lay itself on the water's surface. If he wants to sit in a dining room chair, or the lumpy-cushioned clawfoot chair that belonged to the husband's mother, he climbs into it. And if he wants to play while you're chopping onions or checking your email or wiping down the bathroom sink, he comes to find you. And you stop whatever you're doing. You give him the time he wants because time isn't the same as chocolate sauce or another plastic toy. It's much more limited.

With Walking Comes Will

2007-07-20T11:16:00.001-07:00

When I call Ian to follow me, he now walks in rarely the direction I requested but in a direction of his choosing. I call him again, on the way home from the park, say, when he wants to go not across the street towards home but back toward the pool.

"Come on, Ian!" I shout. "Let's go this way! Don't you want to see your Dye-ah?" (his word for Daddy).

And then Ian, his lower back arching forward in that New Walker way, turns to me and drops his arms.

"Go way," he says, pointing to the park.

"We're going this way, sweetie!" I say excitedly. "Come on! Let's go eat!"

Sometimes he'll follow. Often he won't, and I walk over and pick him up.

"Ian," I say. "Let's go this way!" This time we're in the park, on a trail, and he wants to walk into a patch of Poison Oak.

"Go way." He points to the poison, his cheeks bright red with heat. He's been walking behind me for over a quarter mile. His steps, I have observed, are about three to every one of mine. When he gets tired, he sits down on the dirt or the grass or the concrete and lets me pick him up.

"We're going this way, sugar!" I clap. "Come on!"

I try never to say no--that is, I try to save no for important things, like no--you cannot have that candy bar, or no--you cannot play with the knife, or no--you cannot hit me with your plastic mallet. I feel like a baby's world is so often one no after another. I want to avoid them. For as long as I can swing it. Pretty soon of course he'll figure out that "come on" means no, and when I go to pick him up he'll scream and probably noodle himself to try and keep me from picking him up, or run from me if he's mad enough. I realize this. After reading much of Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting, and despite my impressionable nature (I tend often to enthusiastically support whatever I read unless its claims counter mine to an extreme), I really do think that I have to be as patient as possible with his resistance. I want an obedient child, sure, but I don't at all want my child to be an obedient person who doesn't reflect on things.

I especially want him, and all children, to question authority figures. There is nothing wrong with expecting an authority figure to justify his actions. To quote George Carlin: Respect is earned. How does Ian know that he should respect me at all times? I have to show him why this is true. And is it? What if I make a wrong decision, lash out? Parents aren't pillars of strength. What about his teachers? How does he know that he should respect his teachers? What if one of his teachers is unreliable? Assigns silly work with no purpose? Ian needs to question these things. He needs to be given the strength to develop his will.

I have a feeling that a lot of parents might not have time for this. One of the reasons that I can give Ian this space is because I don't work 8 to 5 five days a week and I have a fairly free schedule, especially in the summer. So I have time to be patient. Often, I can afford NOT to be in a hurry.

The problem here, though, is not with the "philosophy" or whatever it is I'm trying to articulate--it's with an economy and a culture that doesn't nurture time and space. Get to work. Get to day care. Get to the store. Get to the dishes. Get to the office. How about getting to your child instead? I hope this can become more possible for all of us.

Ian is Afoot

2007-06-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

On Summer Solstice, Ian started walking. I wasn't present for his first good clomping; when I arrived home from wherever I'd been, the husband said that he was in the hallway talking on the telephone when he saw Ian walk by.

He really does sort of clomp, one tiny step at a time, arms raised with his elbows bent and his shoulders slouched and his wrists droopy and his fingers spread, a blend of tired crossing guard and gay-man stereotype. His grandmother was just here, and she said it was extremely cute. Everything Ian does, though, is extremely cute. He oozes cute, exudes adorable. The night of his first clomp, of his first bonafide move into ambulatory-ness, while I was giving him his before-bed bath, he kept standing up in his little plastic tub.

"Sit down, please, Ian," I said. He didn't; he squatted while looking up at me.

"Sit down in the tub please."

He stood up, gripped the rim of the tub, leaned forward, pressed his lips together tightly, jutted his chin out, and said, "Mmmm."

This meant it was time for a kiss. So I leaned over and kissed his tiny mouth, and he smiled and sat in the tub. Then he stood up for another kiss. "Mmmmm," he said. I gave him another kiss, and he smiled and sat down. I believe there are few things in the world more completely endearing, except for the way he grins and laughs and waves his little arms around as he now walks across the kitchen floor, carries his big plastic truck with one hand as he walks into his room, holds my hand as we walk from the swimming pool to the car. He takes such pleasure in his successes, in moving, in figuring things out for himself, in the way a cup makes a plop of a bubble when you hold it underwater, in the way you can drop a piece of bread into a glass of milk and watch it disintegrate. He is amazing. And if he is, so are we all, having started out so amazed at the world and all it has us to learn and understand.

Mom

2007-06-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

My mother is arriving tonight for a 5-day visit. My mother, whom I think about while I'm at the gym, lifting weights. At my 25 lb. leg extension, she would say, "My goodness, Anna, that's a lot of weight." At my 25 minutes on the elliptical machine, she would say, "Goodness, Anna. That's a long time! You must be in very good shape."

I'm not, really. I'm in average or slightly below, but to my mother I am not in need of losing 15 pounds--I' look fine. Just right. I am not a loser. "You are just the furthest thing from that! I can't believe you'd think such a thing." I am charming, funny, inspirational. No matter what. Why I cannot internalize the compliments she gives is because a) they are from her; and b) I feel like crap about myself and I always have, regardless of what's happening in my life--if I do something well or valiant, say--it doesn't stick. I am becoming more and more aware of the fact that I have never felt good about myself. I don't at all mean to be self-pitying or melodramatic. This is actually and simply true. And I'm beginning to think that it's because of depression and not the result of a character defect, so it's time for a more aggressive treatment of the former.

So. I have never felt good about myself. Well, that really sucks. And I look of course at Ian. Is this the kind of model--because I am one now--I want him to be around? To be witness to? Yikes.

"I'm just afraid..." I said to the husband a few days ago, in the midst of a crying jag, a rush of emotion and panic with which he has become familiar, "that I'm going to fuck him up."

No wonder I would say such a thing. I am a good mother, a very good, patient, attentive, and compassionate mother, but I would say such a thing because my mother fucked me up. She didn't mean to. I am not angry at her anymore (thank god). She did the best she could--I can't really explain how true this is--she really did. But she was depressed and anxiety ridden for most of her life and is just now getting good treatment. So it's time for me to pursue solutions to this problem--this illness? I have a chronic illness?--much more aggressively and with more focus.

Through all my mother's struggles, though, one thing about her has remained constant. Her support. Even when I didn't deserve it. She is loving and kind to her core. At the gym, when I scoff at myself for getting tired, or lessening the load for the calf press, I like to picture her there, being impressed, that small, pleased smile on her face. At my stupendous 20 lb upper back row, she would say, "That sure seems like a lot of weight to me. You must be really strong, Anna."

Rejected Daughter

2007-05-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

"Thank you for calling me back so quickly," says Rejected Daughter.

"Sure," says Therapist of Rejected Daughter.

"I'm okay," says Rejected Daughter, referring to the fact that her father got drunk the day before a scheduled visit and now cannot come to see her or her son or her husband because her father is a very, very sick alcoholic--not because he doesn't love her. This fact registers to Rejected Daughter in some ways: at these times she uses a different title, something like It's Not My Fault or Woman or Mother or I Have a Good Life. But right now she is existing as Rejected Daughter and she seems stuck there. She feels like shit. "I feel like I'm 17. I stuffed myself full of pizza last night to make myself feel better before I realized what I was doing. I don't seem to be taking this very well."

"Well, this is a big deal," says Therapist. "I really didn't expect this to happen."

"I thought it might be a possibility," says Rejected Daughter. "So I don't know why I'm feeling like this."

"It probably has to do with your expectations."

"My expectations?"

"What were they, exactly?"

Rejected Daughter thinks a second--she crosses her legs and really thinks about how she thinks about her father. This is something that not a lot of people should necessarily engage in, but she does it all the time. She cannot help herself, and Therapist certainly does nothing to discourage her in this activity. "I thought that maybe we could have a window where he wasn't drinking, and he could come here and get to know his grandson. He could be such a wonderful grandpa."

Pause. "Who is it you are talking about?" This isn't exactly what Therapist said--she was nicer about it than this, but this is what she meant.

"What do you mean?"

"Your father cannot be a good grandpa," she said. "You had expectations. That's normal. There is nothing wrong with your feelings. But your father cannot do what you are expecting." She paused. Rejected Daughter listens. Rejected Daughter has heard this all her life. Rejected Daughter has told this to herself all her life, at one time or another. Rejected Daughter has had professionals tell her this. "I'm so sorry," says Therapist. "This is just really, really sad."

"I don't understand. I didn't even know I was expecting this." The day before, Rejected Daughter told Sympathetic Husband what a great grandpa her father could be and he looked at her blankly.

"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" she asked him.

"No," says Sympathetic Husband. "Not at all." He is wrong about his impression of her father. So is Therapist. They don't know him like she does. She has known him all her life. Sympathetic Husband has not. They think they know what they are talking about and they do. It's Not My Fault, Mother, and Woman know they do. But Rejected Daughter knows they do not.

"You thought he could come to a place where he wouldn't want to drink," says Therapist. "And you could be a family."

"I guess I did." Jesus.

"I'm so sorry," said Therapist. "This is very sad."

"When will I stop expecting things?"

"It's a process," says Therapist. "Eventually, you'll let it go. We'll work on it."

Rejected Daughter thinks her rootedness in expectation might be because she is a girl and while she was growing up read sentimental young adult novels and existed as an insecure girl. She would rather be an inexpressive doltish boy. Or stronger. Or just someone who didn't relive a bunch of ancient feelings all the time. Rejected Daughter also thinks that being Rejected Daughter is what made her insecure and sentimental in the first place. Rejected Daughter really, really wants to be 37, not a jilted 17. She feels like she has been dumped. She can't believe this, but it's true. She is stuck.

What can Rejected Daughter do? What she's doing now is missing her father. But she is also looking at her son, a cheerful boy who is nearing his nineteenth month of life and enjoys playing peekaboo and dropping bits of food into his plastic cup of milk and then drinking the milk. She can look at him and remember to pay attention to her child. To be involved in her child's life. To if she needs it get some help for whatever might ail her, whether she wants help or not. She can also tell people to pay attention to their kids. She can tell people to pay attention to their children. Hey, she can say to everyone in the universe, all the time, forever. Pay attention to your children. Participate. Love them all.

Retrospect

2007-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Now that Ian is 18 months old, I think sometimes about those first few weeks and months of his life. And I realize that they were harder than they needed to be because of all the baby books I read.

The one that sticks most profoundly in my mind is Tracey Hogg's The Baby Whisperer; she emphasized making the baby adapt to such an extreme degree that I found myself constantly worried about breastfeeding Ian to sleep and breastfeeding too often. Ian would be crying and crying, and Chris and I would try to decide if I should breastfeed or not rather than just give him a damn nipple. I remember actually standing in the middle of our house, listening to Ian cry, thinking, Well, we should just let him cry because we don't want him to get dependent on breastfeeding in order to calm down or fall asleep. And falling asleep--what will happen if he becomes dependent on me to fall asleep when he's bigger and weighs 40 pounds? I don't want to be rocking and carrying a 40 pound boy to sleep every night, do I? And what if he isn't hungry? Even if I'm sure he is, or if I know a breast will soothe him, I don't want to give him one because that might set up bad habits and make my life harder.

I'm sure Hogg meant very well, and maybe for a lot of parents and infants her advice was helpful. But her advice made me worry about the future rather than about fulfilling my son's needs when the former should have been anywhere but the forefront of my mind. I think it's more appropriate to worry about the future of your child after your child is... sentient. What I should have been doing was whatever the fuck worked, not standing in the middle of my house listening to him cry, trying to figure out if he wanted a boob. Of course he wanted a boob. He was three weeks old. Now that he's 18 months, no--he can't play with the knobs on the stove, and he can cry about that if he needs to. No--he can't scoot into the street from the front yard, and he can cry about that if he needs to. He can't poke the dog in the eye, and he can't eat rocks. And when he starts to love candy, he can't eat it all the time. Now they have meaning, now that I'm not exhausted and sleep-deprived. Book advice can take over, I think, too easily when you're insane and hormonal. However, learning how to swaddle from a book saved us. That kind of how-to advice is in a different category, I think, than advice that's hypothetically based, than advice that's grounded in fear.

Back in Shape

2007-05-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

I am indeed trying (this of course depends on your definition of "trying") to get "back in shape," after having a baby. (18 months ago. Ahem.) I now work out at a club 3 times a week and am shooting for 4.

It's a good thing I'm getting back in shape, too, because I'm so out of shape as a result of having a baby, as all mothers are, of course, that I refused the usual protocol when I joined the club and got two free hours with a trainer. "I don't need to be weighed," I said. I really just want to learn how to use weights." The trainer then asked if I wanted the skin fold test. I looked at him, mouth agape. He meant no harm, really. "Let's skip the skin fold."

I am so out of shape from having a baby that I still can't fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes. This causes me much agony, this being so out of shape. It's ironic, isn't it, I might say to myself whenever I hear the phrase "out of shape," that the growth of a human being inside my body and the birthing of said human being leaves me so "out of shape." It takes a pretty lazy, lethargic, weak person, after all, to push a human being out of your body and then recover. It's not like I had to get in shape for that, after all.

I guess I've really got to get back "into shape," since the raising of said human being has left me with less of a shape, with more flesh, with more desire to rest when I have the time and to indulge on bleu cheese and chocolate because I feel that I deserve it; to eat whatever is handy and easy, since my time is more limited. But I guess these decisions--to eat for comfort, to eat prepared food more often--have left me rather out of shape. It takes a pretty weak and lazy person to pick up said human being 30 times a day and love on him whenever he needs it. Mothers. Man. What an out of shape bunch. I wish they would exercise more, between their jobs and their children, so they wouldn't be so out of shape. What's wrong with them? This is real problem, you know? All these out of shape people.

Consumerism

2007-05-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm pushing Ian into the supermarket. He's sitting atop a shopping cart, looking around, feet dangling, chewing lightly on his fingers. I notice a bronze firepit, a small one, right by the door, for only $50. We don't need one--not one like this--but the thing is shiny and inexpensive and very clean, and we have a big backyard that we're just starting to landscape, and I'd like to sort of collect inexpensive yard things for our yard because they look nice and they make me feel secure. It might look very nice in any number of places. And if we don't want it, I can return it.

So I grab the giant, flat box that the thing is in, and I can't fit it into the cart with Ian sitting in the top of it. I turn it and try to fit it in at different angles. I examine the space below--not enough room. I think maybe if Ian leans forward a little I can sort of squench it into the cart, so I turn the box on its side (it's not very heavy) and nudge the back of Ian's head with it, just to give him a little push forward. A nice old man comes rushing over and grabs Ian's shoulders and says to me, "Woah," as if I don't realize that I'm hitting my kid with the box. I know I'm hitting my kid with the box, you idiot! You think I'm unaware? Ian freaks since there's this old man holding his shoulders, standing right in his space, and he starts wailing. I mean really, really wailing. Tears roll. I place the box on top of the cart, flat, as if the cart is a flat surface, smile at the man, and say, "Thank you." I've no idea why I say this. I guess I don't want him to feel bad. It's unclear to him, I think, that Ian is crying not because the box hit him (and it didn't hit him--it just nudged him) but because the old man startled him. I hold Ian and tell him it will be fine and people stare at us, at this wild, stupid consumer of a mother, as they pass by into the store.

"Are you going to be able to fit it in the cart?" the old man calls as he walks into the store.

"No," I call back. I wait for Ian to settle down, grab a cart, and go inside for celery and diapers.

Sickness

2007-04-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

I wonder how babies feel when they're sick. Ian is now 18 months old. He's had fever on and off today, has vomited once, and is generally very unhappy. All he seems to want is water and to lean against me in the recliner, his head turned to one side and resting on that flat, soft plane of skin below my collar bone. He likes to simply be there, listening to I suppose my heartbeat. He clearly finds comfort in this.

When I'm sick, I know what it is (a cold, a stomachache, a cough) and I know it will pass (unless I'm experiencing anxiety and depression and become afraid I'm terminal with something). But what is it like to be sick when you can't process information? Are you afraid? Aware of only the pain and the relief from it? Do you sense your own mortality, as a sick baby? Or do you know it will pass? All I can do is let Ian lie on my chest, stroke his damp, feverish head, offer water, kiss his hands.

What Ian Likes

2007-03-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

To open and close our backyard fence gate while he sits and watches and points and says "Dhyoosh! Dhyoosh!"

To put lids on small plastic containers.

To eat with utensils.

To hurl food on the floor.

To pull his shiny Iowa Hawkeye blanket from the side of his crib and nestle in it as he falls asleep.

To wear pants, once I play with them before putting them on him--I might wear them like a hat, brush them against his face, let him hold them.

To hear the ee cummings poem "Who Are You, Little I" that's framed and hanging over the changing table, over and over again.

To read, hear, and play with books. To turn their pages, pull them off shelves, push them around the floor as he crawls.

To points to pictures of things he recognizes in books and say "Dhyoosh!"

To eat nothing but the following: avocado, saltines, bread and butter, veggie nuggets, cheese, pasta (sometimes), juice, crackers, peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, spinach (if it's buried in macaroni and cheese), quesadillas, and chicken (sometimes).

To be outdoors.

To point to windows and doors and say "Dhyoosh!" and sometimes cry until one of us takes him outside and lets him wander (crawl) around the yard.

To drink from a real glass.

To push his toy dump truck around on the floor.

To shake his shakuray.

To let the dogs eat from his hands.

To throw food on the floor for the dogs to eat.

To crawl upstairs and be helped to "walk" downstairs.

To point to birds and say "Dyoosh!"

To point to trees and say "Tee!" or "Dyoosh!"

To point to the cat and say "Keee!" or "Dyoosh!"

To listen to my latest rendition of Splish Splash while he's in the tub.

To stuff as much veggie nugget as possible into his mouth, cough and gag, and then take all of it out of his mouth.

To press buttons on computer keyboards.

To brush his teeth in the bathtub.

To be held. To be allowed to move however he wants. To nap. To wake up. To snuggle into his crib. To be picked up and taken out of his crib. To laugh.

Reality

2007-03-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

Ian is often glued to me these days. If he's the least bit tired, he will not allow me to put him down; when I sit with him on the floor to play, he sometimes crawls into my lap with such fervor that he seems to want to crawl in my pocket, under my skin. He grabs my hand and presses it against his face; he likes to be rocked and sit in my lap with the side of his face resting on my chest while I stroke his hair; he and and lean his face against my chest while we sit on the couch or in a chair. He follows me around the house and prefers to be in the same room as me; once he realizes he's not in the same room as me, he'll cry and come find me. He's not walking (yes, he's 16 months and not walking, that's what I said), and he insists that I hold BOTH his hands to practice-walk; when I try to let one hand go, he freezes in place and howls until I give in or until he sits down.

You might be expecting me to say that he is a pain in the ass. Nope. I frankly love it. I love his love and his needs; they make me feel strong and important and special, as they should. I love being able to soothe him. I love him. I love having him around and I love having him near me and I love that he loves me. I do not want him to walk, or figure out how to use a fork, or put on his shirt without help, or go to school 8 hours a day, or fall in love, or get married, or go away to college, or fix his own macaroni and cheese, or drive. I want him to want and need me. Forever. So there. I don't want him to grow up. He's cute and sweet and wonderful and curious and smart and I have never known such... um... fulfillment, I suppose, for lack of a better term.

I believe that Ian has always been here. (This is strange and perhaps Hallmarky, I realize, but it is exactly and precisely how I feel.) I see myself as a teenager, miserable and insane, and I feel him with me. I see myself as a child, alone with the television, and I feel him with me. These feelings are not reflective of reality but they are nonetheless reality--as all feelings are. So what makes sense to me, if I simply allow myself to think it, is that as Ian grows up and learns to use a fork and drive a car and navigate the universe, he will still be with me. Even when he isn't. He is my reality, and since he always has been, he always will be.

Family

2007-02-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

I have a cousin about 10 or 12 years younger than me. Let's call him Steven.

When Stephen was a baby at my family's beach cottage in Florida--a dilapidated old place with a life sized screened in porch and about 13 beds, most in the three bedrooms and a few covered with sandy quilts in the dining room that everyone used as couches during the day--he wore only a diaper and tromped around all over the place, calling the name of his older brother and pointing out his successes. He had a sort of square face with thin brown hair, and he loved to eat Hershey's kisses and macaroni and cheese. He loved his cousins. He took walks with us on the beach and helped his brother with fishing gear. He smiled a lot.

I saw him several times when he was a baby, and then there was a lapse of a few years, and then he became a little boy. His mother, my aunt, had this wonderful old 65 Mustang that she was forever in the process of restoring, and when I visited for a few days, she let me drive Stephen around in it. I was 16 and had just gotten a license. The upholstery was torn, everything was scratched up, but the dashboard was intact and the engine roared. It picked up like no car I had ever driven, and Stephen and I "caught air" (as he put it) as I shot us over railroad tracks. We laughed.

Another lapse. Stephen is 18. He's had drug troubles that I don't really know too much about, since everyone has grown up or grown old, and we no longer take summer vacations together. I hear a strange murmur about how Stephen woke his mother up in the middle of the night to confess to her that he was an addict. He spends some time in treatment, then he's better.

He marries young. I see Stephen and his wife at a funeral--the funeral of our aunt, his mother's sister, also my father's sister. I haven't seen him in 10 years. He has a rough, pocked face. He chews tobacco. He is some kind of a personal trainer, and his body is boxy and square but curved with muscles. Stephen strikes me as kind of odd. He does not seem very at ease, and I realize what has happened: he is now self-conscious, aware of how he comes across. He tries, maybe, to appear cool. The air he created around himself as a child has evaporated completely. I cannot believe this is the man that was that child I remember. His wife is some sort of trainer, too--she's as slender as the girls I envied in high school, and she looks like a high school senior.

I haven't seen him since. But when Ian was born, his mother called to congratulate me, and over the last year or so, we have been developing something of a relationship, keeping in touch. A few days ago, she emailed me with an update, as I hadn't heard from her in several months: Steven had been living on the streets for several months as a result of getting into drugs "real bad," and was now in a long-term recovery center. His wife and two daughters were faring well, visiting him frequently, and my aunt had been so worried about him that for months she simply couldn't talk to anyone at all, just tried to help out his family as best she could.

So Stephen, I infer, deserted his family and probably got addicted to crack or crystal meth or heroin. The pull of whatever intoxicants he delved into was too strong for him to overcome. But now he's getting help. The center he's in is religious--god will get you better, being Christian will get you better. And in a way I think this is okay, because he's going to have to live with the burden of having not only deserted his family but doing so at a time of crisis, as his infant daughter (now 1) has a serious heart condition. So maybe a belief in god will help him forgive himself, because damn. He will need to.

And from this great distance, I watch my own son toodle around and giggle as he throws plastic blocks into his bucket, and I wonder what happened to Steven. What got in the way? What depleted his strength? There is addiction. The husband and I realized yesterday that just about every member of my family is an addict of some kind. So there's that, to say the least. But the PERSON I saw, that happy child running along the beach, calling out for his brother, has I think disappeared. Ian holds up one plastic block and fits it into another plastic block. For what will Ian have to forgive himself? I wonder about his growing up. I wonder about what things and events and forces and desires and people and places will most profoundly affect who he is and the decisions he will make. I can't help but think that a whole, whole lot of it will have nothing to do with me. My aunt, for instance, was and is a good mother, a great person--loyal, loving, happy. She has always been there for Stephen; the way I describe her to others is that "she'll do anything for you." She did not fail him in any way. But I also feel like a whole, whole lot of Ian's life WILL have to do with me, with what I do now, with what I do all the time. And so I'm confused. I feel a profound sense of WRONG. If my son turns out to be one who suffers more than others, well--this will be wrong. This won't be fair. This won't be right. And then I think, "that's life." I decide that this is the most uninformative, useless cliche in the world.

Happy Hour

2007-02-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the husband and I were sitting in the living room, watching Ian as he crawled around, pushing his Fisher Price vintage toy telephone with one hand. Ian stopped at the cushioned ottoman we bought on credit about nine months ago when he started to crawl. He pulled himself to standing, a day's worth of floor grunge over his palms.

He pointed to the front window. "Dyah!"

He pointed to the front window. "Dyah!"

He pointed to the husband. "Dyah!"

He pointed to the fireplace. "Uh-dyah!"

He pointed to the fireplace. "Dyah!"

He pointed to the dog. "Ayayayayayayay. Dyah!"

He raised his arms and smacked both hands on the side of his head. "Dodo." No music was on, no TV. No nothing. I looked up.

"So, will we ever stop just... staring at him like this?"

"I don't think you ever do, do you?" said the husband.

Ian lowered himself, put one hand on a board book, and crawled across the rug. "Aaaaah!" he screamed. He loves to scream when he's excited. "Aaaaaaah!"

Here is how Ian gives me a kiss

2007-02-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

He reaches for my face with both hands; he presses his hands against my cheeks and pulls my face to his, or his to mine; he opens his mouth big and wide as if he's about to bite into a watermelon and then places his open mouth against my cheek, or against my chin, or against my forehead. For a second I'm afraid he'll bite me, but he doesn't. He rests his open mouth on the skin of my face for a second, then pulls away and touches my nose with his index finger.

"Nose," I say. "That's my nose."

The Picture

2006-10-29T19:21:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, the husband and Ian were at the playground. They were on a bench, chatting with other infant-parents, and a mother with a cell phone took a picture of Ian in the husband's lap. He gave the mother his email address, and she sent the picture: Ian standing on the bench between his father's knees, laughing; his father holding his son's torso and gazing at the back of his head, grinning; the picture barely blurred, as if the mother were jogging past as she took the shot--so Ian's outstretched arms really do look like they're reaching for something concrete--a child scrambling out of a tunnel, or a vacant infant swing, or a dog loose from its leash.

The picture is on the husband's computer screen as wallpaper, and every time I look at it, I feel the meaning of the photograph. The things that change every single second, that go away. And I want to weep. Ian laughing, unaware that he needs his father to stand, his upper front teeth a tiny white smudge in his mouth; the husband smiling, his frameless glasses not glinting at all in the blur; the park a busy gray haze surrounding them. I tell myself that the seconds we lose get replaced by different seconds, seconds that are just as wondrous as these. Life really is fleeting, the photograph seems to say. If you don't know anything else, know this.

Baby's First Fall

2006-10-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

Ian fell on his face today. He was crawling on the hardwood floor, wearing a long-sleeved onesie and a pair of little baby painter pants, and he splatted forward, face first. He landed on his mouth. I did not see that he had landed on his mouth; I was standing behind him, watching him from my comfortable cushioned chair, and I only heard the padded thood that means my son has hit the floor but not too hard, and that he will probably start to cry and then stop and continue crawling toward that extension cord, toward that shiny penny that no one knows is there, toward that cat bed thick with hairballs large enough to choke a kitten.

Ian started howling, so I lifted myself from the chair and held him tight, held his head against my shoulder, and kissed him. I kissed him again, told him he'd be okay. He still cried. I held him out from me just a little ways, to look him in the eye and say, "What happened, Sweetie? Did you go bonk?" And I saw a tinge of blood on his lower lip.

"Oh," I said. "Oh." I became foggy. The fog cleared. I think I shook my head rapidly, as if I were a cartoon character struck in the skull by a piece of a falling building. "We need to go into the bathroom and see what happened, don't we? My goodness," I said, walking to the bathroom. "My goodness."

There wasn't much blood at all; it wasn't serious in the least. What I did not realize was that when he had fallen forward, he had landed on his mouth, and his new front tooth had cut the flesh on the inside of his upper lip and made it bleed. Just a little. Ian now has a very slightly swollen upper lip, but he is totally fine. He chewed on an icy teething ring for awhile, then ate his salty crackers, and a jar of blueberries and apples, and a yogurt, and some cheese and chicken, and he is now sucking down a bottle with no problem to speak of. He clearly does not hurt. He clearly does not hurt at all. And I do not hurt either. The whole incident was minor. It was actually so minor, such a completely and utterly minor incident, that I don't even know why I'm writing about it at all.

How the World Works

2006-10-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

Ian loves other children. When I take him to the playground, he stares at all of them, studies them, with his head tilted to one side. He is engrossed. And he always smiles and laughs at whatever they do: run, talk, jump. He screams greetings and giggles and goes, "Uhhh! Uhhh!" He gestures wildly, bouncing his arms up and down, clapping his hands. He seems to love them all.

I watch him and I want to cry. I sometimes do. I feel like he is going to have his warm, sweet interested soul ripped out by their inevitable cruelty. They will steal his toys, kick his shins, make fun of his widow's peak. They will bite his fleshy fingers. I am afraid that other children will alter what so far appears to be his extremely good nature, his happy disposition, his jovial curiosity for other human beings.

Sometimes we play this game, Ian and I: he's in his high chair, holding his wooden spoon, and he holds it out to me. I grab it and gently tug, then he tugs, and the spoon goes back and forth between us and he smiles and laughs. He likes the way we play, the way I move his arm or something. And I think, Oh no. Because when some mean little shit tries to steal a toy truck from him, Ian will laugh at first, because he'll think the kid is just playing. He'll think tug-of-war is just an exploration of elbow movement, an exchange of smiles. Then the kid will cackle and snatch the truck right out of Ian's hand and call him a dummy and walk away, and Ian will sit there, stunned. He'll start to cry. He'll be hurt and bewlidered. And what can I do?

Nothing, you say. That's how the world works. He will have to learn how the world works.

Well, I might say, I think the way the world works really sucks, and I think we might want to consider changing it.

Ah, Routines

2006-09-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

Everything I have read or seen or heard about raising children and taking care of infants states that you should adhere to routines, especially for naps and bedtime. We have established a bedtime routine that worked well for awhile but for the past two weeks has flopped, but we're sticking to it and tonight it worked well again. Ian is teething, has a fever, has a cough and a runny nose and is in a bad mood. But he's sleeping. The routine probably helped.

But I fucking hate routines. They are boring. They are for middle-class white people (since I am one of these, I don't know why this bothers me all the time). They scream of decorative objects on shelves that could use a layer of dust and less micro-management. I feel like routines squelch the freedom in all of us, the spontanaeity. (Whenever someone is being treated for depression or alcoholism or any ailment that is even the slightest bit mental, they are treated with a routine. In mental hospitals--or floors, since these don't exist anymore, really--in treatment centers, in all the places that house all the most fucked-up people on earth, a routine is used to bring order and sanity back into focus. To quiet the chaos in the mind.

So it makes sense that infants respond so well to routines (Ian definitely does), and this bias toward them is something I should get over. But still. Routines kill something in me. They squelch the glorious craziness I thrived on (or think I thrived on) for so long--drinking and drugging till 2, eating a greasy breakfast at a diner before passing out at 4. Or having sex with some tight-abbed jock till 4 instead and then passing out as I questioned my actions and probed the ethics of the self I seemed to profoundly lack. Skipping breakfast for 3 cups of coffee, having a large lunch at 2pm, a big dinner at 8. Just because I liked it. Bedtime anywhere from midnight to 3. Naps? Right.

I realize none of this sounds very "great." It also makes me wonder what I mean by "thrive." I think the answer has to do with tone. The tone of my youth is something I miss a lot. The in-your-face recklessness. The total lack of responsibility or awareness of the world that fueled my desire to party. The way I shared a house with my best friend instead of my husband, the way I was satisfied with never writing or writing to an audience of a few friends (some things don't change, I guess, no matter how hard we try), the way I was satisfied with so much less than I am now.

The tone of my youth makes it seem like I was satisfied with all that. But I wasn't. I know I wasn't. That might have been a reason for my tendencies to consume most any substance that came my way. And now I look at Little I, shoving Goldfish crackers into his mouth and enjoying a dance with Mom or Dad to our rendition of "Tea For Two," and I wonder what his youth will be like? Better than mine? Worse? Will routines I set up for him now result in a youth less troubled, one that he won't look back on with ambivalence?

The End

2006-08-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

Breastfeeding your child when he's 9 months old is a very different experience from breastfeeding a pure infant. He's not only aware of what he's doing--sucking on a body part that belongs to his mother--he's curious about the feeding source. He stops mid suckle and puts his hands on either side of the nipple and pushes back, so he can get a good look at it, and then he uses his developing pincer grip to squeeze and mashing the mush of my areola. Most of the time this doesn't hurt--when it does, I tell him emphatically no.

"You can touch it," I say. "But don't pinch. This hurts me, your mommy. Don't pinch." And he cries--he gets his classic pouty face and starts up--but it is clear that he does not yet understand the difference between touching and pinching, no matter how I try to explain it.

My son seldom falls asleep at the breast anymore--when he does, he won't stay asleep well or long; I always move him to his crib--so my beloved Nurse n' Naps have come to an end. The end of a serious era--an era that left me with all kinds of lower back/hip problems as a result of sitting without moving an inch for hours at a time while reading, gazing at my son, watching him dream and breathe and sometimes lunge in for another nurse. Those days are over. My hips still hurt; sometimes my tailbone throbs if I sit for too long.

I tried to Nurse n' Nap Ian yesterday, when he had missed his afternoon nap. I had my book, my book light, an emptied bladder. I had just done stretches that the chiropractor recommended. I changed Ian's diaper and got us comfortable, my hand on the soles of his feet to keep them warm. He started nursing... his mouth wide to keep his gigantic new top front teeth from clamping on Mommy, eyes open, one arm hooked over my breast as if it were an open refrigerator door. His eyes began to close, to roll back in his head. He sighed. I stroked his head, sighed myself, reached for my magazine.

Then he pulled off and looked up at me. "Eeeeeeee. Eeeeeee. Eeeeeee!" he said, smiling, reaching for my chin.

My Name is Ian and I Have a Penis

2006-08-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

It's this wonderful thing terminally within my reach, and it is very fun to squish around and poke at and grab. I do this at most every opportunity, and so far all of these opportunities present themselves when I am getting my diaper changed. You can tell that Mom is happy that I have discovered my penis, because whenever I do, she smiles and says, "That's your penis, Ian. That is a very important part of your body. If I had one, well shit, I'd touch it too."

The only time that Mom and Dad don't seem happy about my touching my penis is after I've taken a poop. Poop doesn't really bother me; I am frankly relieved and happy after I've had one, and when the diaper comes off, my hand just shoots right down there to my penis (just to see how it's doing, I like to check in with it as often as I can, whether there's poop on it or not) and Mom looks very alarmed and says "No, no, no," and wipes my hand as fast as she can. Then she cleans my butt even faster. In fact, it sometimes seems like we're racing, she and I. Racing at the changing table. Who will get to my penis first? Will it be my tired and weary mother, or will it be me, new to the world, wanting to figure out what I'm made of?

I am Really Flabby. Shit.

2006-08-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

My body is bigger than it was before. I look at the width of my hips and the cellulite that has invaded thereabouts and I have to remind myself that my womb was growing in the house of my stomach, not in the house of my ass. Why it is that my hips are fatter? That my legs and arms are thicker? Because childbirth is cruel. It is a cruel, hard, unforgiving thing, and I have come to realize now that Ian is nearly 9 months old and we're thinking about having ANOTHER CHILD that I will probably be heavier than I was before--and it's not as if I was thrilled about "before" anyway--for the next 3 years or so.

And I am not taking this well. I despise seeing photos of myself, whereas before I only minded. I sometimes actually cringe at myself in the mirror. (Isn't this awful? Cringing at yourself? What am I doing? Why waste the energy?) It's also become clear to me why I can find so few shirts that look flattering in any way: once you reach XL, it seems like the number of cute clothing items drops a lot. A whole lot. Tons of things the perfect trim, style, color, and price... in S, M, and even L. The XL section looks like it's been purged of anything attractive--the XL sections definitely take up less space than the other three. Drives me crazy--why don't these stores order more XL clothes? They're constantly having these damned clearance sales because NOT VERY MANY OF US wear size 0, 2, 4, or 6. Ok? Get the fucking picture? Anyone home? Jesus.

I will try to end this brief entry by not writing about how I will do everything I can to learn to accept myself, or that my refusal to accept myself is culturally ingrained and something I must unlearn. I think I am actually wondering if this refusal to accept myself is more hardwired than I might realize. After all, none of the women in my family have been able to accept themselves as they are--certainly not my mother. I think wishing I were different is part of my personality, because things in my world are fine. At this point, though, I'm relieved I have a son because I don't think men go through this sort of thing to the extreme that women do, and I still have some time to fix myself before we have another child, which might very well be a girl. So on with the fixing. On with the self-searching. Bring it. There has to be an answer somewhere.

Finally Figured it Out

2006-07-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

I was telling the husband the other day, when my mood was swinging extremely low, that I felt like my life wasn't going anywhere. I haven't had much time to write (er, um... I haven't carved out the time to write, more like) lately, and I've been taking Ian nearly every day all day because the husband needs to complete work in order to get tenure. And so I've been feeling like Laura Brown in The Hours (the book, not the movie--the movie was bourgeois claptrap). Sort of like I have to get out of here and make something of myself before it's too late, as if raising my son doesn't count toward making something of myself. And of course it does, but not to our culture in a tangible sense since mothers are not given positions of power--there is no evidence that motherhood counts in the private sphere, and not really in the public sphere either; motherhood more often than not interferes with the achievement of capitalist goals, like profit making and productivity. On a personal level, to mothers and families who work their tails off inside and outside the home, of course mothering makes your life matter. But this mattering is not reflected externally in our culture at all. Mattering in this sense means a warm fuzzy from the inside.

There is also the matter of housework that having a child necessitates. We vaccuum three times as often as we did before he joined our family (we have two hairy dogs and two hairy cats); we do laundry three times as often, we do more dishes, we have to have actual food in the house, we have to prepare a decent and healthy meal instead of eating crap from a box, etc., etc. All this seems trivial, but it isn't trivial if you want to have a stable, healthy home for your kid. (I'm not saying things need to be perfect--but they need to be a better; our standards have gone up a bit, and they should have.) We have to do so much more housework than we did before, in fact, that we need to have a ROUTINE regarding the housework. And I find routines regarding housework mindless and dull and uninspiring, and if housework routines are taking up a lot of my time, then of course I feel depressed and oppressed and worthless.

To end on a terribly negative note, which a significant portion of my psyche truly enjoys, I think that until there are at least as many tangible, material payoffs for child-rearing as there are for professional careers, (solvency, stability, a role where you make decisions that affect a community), I will have a lot of trouble feeling like what I am doing matters. This doesn't mean that I don't find raising my child rewarding, wonderful, and miraculous, because I do. Every day, actually--all the time. I feel every nauseating cliche down to my bones. It means that my feeling oppressed and worthless is as much our culture's fault (its disregard for child rearing and pure lip service to putting children first) as it is my own for not being more resilient. And I am frankly relieved to realize this.

My Child is Now Sentient

2006-07-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

Ian is now aware of a lot more than he used to be. I can no longer nurse in front of the TV because he watches it; I cannot hold a plate of food over him while he sleeps in my lap and eat forkfuls at a time because he will wake up and want to eat with me. When we play peek-a-boo he leans his little head around to look for me before I pop up from the side of his crib. He greets me always with a hearty smile, and when he hears me say "Ow!"--if in mid-nurse he squeezes my breast or looks like he might bite it--he gets very agitated, pouts, and starts to whimper. He looks to me for everything, always with love and anticipation and energy. He is wonderful and cute and I adore him.

So why am I so depressed?

Probably because I just came from a visit with the family and the drama that ensued resulted in my wondering what kind of a parent I will be. Will I become my father? Will I become my mother? When I lose emotional control and cry, like I did earlier today after attempting for 3 hours to put Ian down for a nap in his crib rather than let him continue to nap on me indefinitely, does Ian get upset by my upsetness? Can he sense how hard it was for me to be home, wading through unpleasant memories, having one realization after another (as is always the case when I go home; I should probably pay a therapist to be on call) and trying to navigate through current turmoil? The seeds of which might be in his own genetics?

The answer is of course yes. He is a sentient being. He clearly and undeniably reacts to stresses in his environment. The second day I was home he had an all-day meltdown and refused to nurse or eat at all for about 15-16 hours. It wasn't anything that warranted a doctor's visit. My mother, who is doing very well, assured me as he cried in his crib, inconsolable, that he was reacting to a new place and a new routine--he probably missed his daddy and his dogs and his cats and his bath toys. She was right, but that episode, and the rest of the trip, knocked me into awareness of Ian's awareness. And I am of course doubting that I'm up to the task of being so needed and so relied upon.

No one told me this. No one told me that your child will before your very eyes go from a pooping eating sleeping being into a pooping eating sleeping reacting feeling dependent being who needs you like crazy--needing food and sleep is one thing, but now he needs strength and soothing and safety. As my brother put it, I don't want Ian to grow up with a hole inside of him like the ones we had as a result of parental neglect. I knew immediately what he was talking about and I saw myself as a child, walking to kindergarten, walking through the halls of junior high, watching TV, feeling empty and cold and alone as hell.

"I always thought that hole was because of me," I said. We were driving through the city, headed to my mother's house. "I always thought it was because I was deficient in some way. That I suck or something."

"It sounds kind of trite," he said. "But what really happens is you grow up feeling like something is wrong with you. But it's because your parent wasn't there."

Shit.

I think the thing to do now is to accept how I feel. Pressured. Imperfect. Emotional. Ian will watch me become upset by any number of things throughout his life; that doesn't mean I have to stop loving him or that I can't soothe him and kiss him on his soft little head all day long. I just don't want my upsetness to result in any kind of neglect, as it did with my mother and father. So this is what I need to remember, because my world is now Ian's world, too. I hope I don't forget this, as so many of us do.

Suckle Stop Suckle Stop

2006-06-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Little I has been, we suspect, on a nursing strike.

As Dr. Sears defines it, a nursing strike is when your child refuses to breast feed as a result of illness or trauma or a strange mood, and over the last week, Ian has begun to cry during breastfeeding, sometimes refusing, sometimes howling and fussing and pulling off every two seconds for 15 minutes. The strike is the only thing we can think of to be wrong. (Teething--possibly, but he never behaved this way with tooth #1 and 2.) A breastfeeding strike occurs most often to infants about Ian's age (7-8 months), and is what leads a lot of mothers to assume that their infant wants to wean, so a misunderstood breastfeeding strike can result in babies being weaned too early.

What you're supposed to do if your child is striking is to be patient and soothe them (if you haven't adopted this strategy for most everything regarding your child by this time, god help you). Let him hang at the booby-bar, fall asleep on the breast, position his mouth around the nipple as you did when you were first teaching him how to latch, wear him more often--do whatever you can to reacquaint him to the breast. (Ian, the marathoner, the one who can nurse for 60 minutes a pop and then be hungry again in 90 apparently needs to be reacquainted with the breast?) So for the last two days I've done all this, and it seems to be helping me more than him. I wait patiently while he cries and gently reposition him. I tell him it's okay, that I'm here, that it's all right. I tell him I love him and I wait him out. (Won't be the first time.) And I can endure his cries and strangeness a lot better than I could before. (Although I do wonder if I should be encouraging this suckle-stop-suckle-stop-bat-at-booby-cry-look-around -suckle-stop-look-mommy-grin-cry-suckle-suckle-stop-suckle type behavior.)

I wonder if this strikish behavior is more complicated. (Perhaps the husband putting him to bed upset him. Ha! I get my revenge at last as I sit and watch my son inexplicably cry! So there!) I wonder if, when I felt Ian bite my nipple with his fresh hard teeth and yanked him off and said "No! No biting!" and watched him howl and then held him and reoffered the breast, I alienated him, made him start watching himself and being more aware of what he was doing. I wonder if keeping your child from biting your nipple is a way of suddenly imposing maturity and realization that what he is feeding from belongs to someone else and feels pain. I wonder if keeping Ian from biting me has stripped him of some innocence and I wonder if he just doesn't fucking like this new knowledge. I wonder if he'd just as soon not have to know all of that, if he'd just as soon not have to know certain things. Maybe he's getting a sense of all the knowledge that's waiting to fall, that's going to color and harden his soft, breathy skin, widen his scope of what's important, make him wiser and smarter and suffer at the same time. Because some kinds of knowledge make us suffer: an unjust death, a hungry child, a mysterious and impenetrable illness, brutality, benign neglect, a nipple that will no longer suffice, a nipple that nope, you cannot bite because it belongs to someone else. It isn't yours after all.

Sometimes as I watch him cry in my lap and ignore my breasts, so full of comfort and explanation, I hope that he will remain as he is: an ignorant baby. I can nurse forever. Sure. I'll take injections for what seems to be my worsening arthritis. I'll purchase various forms of back support. I'll take more Lecithin, which seems to be quite effective in warding off clogged ducts; I'll keep him little, I'll change his diapers until my fingers grow stiff and wrinkled, I'll do whatever I have to do if he'll just not learn anything about what's out there. I could hold him forever. He's warm and soft as feathers and he loves it when I crawl up his belly with my fingers--he giggles and squeals and then looks up at the ceiling and out the window, still laughing, over my shoulder.

Pissed Again

2006-06-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

The husband has put Little I to sleep 5 times now. Twice a few weeks ago, when I had to be somewhere for the evening, and now for the last 3 nights, while I'm here in the house, listening intently to the baby monitor. He uses a bottle of breast milk, and Ian usually drinks about 5 ounces. (That first night that the husband put him to bed, Ian drank 10, which kind of makes me compare coming off breast feeding to the concept of legalization, which according to "experts" whose names I do not recall would lead to a sharp spike in use at first and then level off. Ian has already leveled off.)

The husband has been doing well putting Ian to bed. The husband has been putting Ian to bed extremely well. The husband has been putting Ian to bed in 45 minutes or less. The husband has been in and out of Ian's room in no more than 45 minutes. The husband says he has a new bedtime goal for the child of 8:00 (rather than 8:30) and seems to look forward to the challenge. Tonight, the husband put Little I in his crib when Ian was still awake and watched while my son who appears to no longer need me turned on his side, rubbed his eyes, got himself comfortable, and fell asleep without a cry. The husband tonight watched Ian fall asleep in his crib while standing lovingly over him. The husband did not watch Ian get afraid to be left alone. The husband tonight watched a content, happy child get himself comfy in his own bed and fall asleep on his own.

I could just vomit.

This is so patently unfair. Not only unfair in the sense that I sit in that chair and sweat like a steaming water balloon and yank the Little I off my nipple if he bites (he now has teeth), and move him from the left breast to the right breast (in that order, every night), and squint at the book I'm trying to read in the dark (with a low-battery booklight), and feel my hips grow stiff, and want to be writing or reading or watching the goddamn Daily Show, and want to be anywhere but there with my little 7 month old son who has done absolutely nothing to warrant me not wanting to be there with him, and watch him take that little sigh-breath that indicates a deep sleep, and put him down only to yank him back up again in order to prevent crying (because I have come to dislike hearing crying very much), and worry to a panic that if he does not go to sleep then he will never get over this cold, cognitively and intellectually mature, or become kind, and because the husband who has neither nursed nor bore a child in his miserable life does none of these, but also personally and somehow universally unfair in the sense that I have assumed I am NEEDED to put my son to sleep, and apparently I am not. Apparently anyone with a bottle and patience can put my son to sleep.

Nursing, then, seems to be more about me than I had previously thought. Nursing appears to be about Ian because the breastmilk is so excellent for him--for his bones, his lungs, his immune system--but it appears that this alleged bonding that results from breast feeding is a culmination of my feelings more than my son's. It appears that he is not as dependent on breasfeeding as I had been thinking he was.

This is good news. At least I'm sure it will be good news once some time has passed. But right now it just pisses me off.

The Process of Drifting

2006-06-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

When writing about being a mother, I feel the need to come off a certain way. My goal is to be honest and "real," to cut through all the bullshit about how mothers are supposed to be, but instead I often feel pressure to make sure readers know that I'm compassionate, sensitive, atuned to my child's needs, liberal, giving, and selfless. Writing about motherhood has made me ten times as concerned about how I come across on the page as a human being, as a mother.

Well, fuck all that. Here's how I've been feeling lately.

In an earlier post I wrote about how trying but wonderful it is to put Ian to sleep every night. Lie. I am so tired of holding that child until he falls asleep I could explode. Two nights ago, for example: Nurse for 20 minutes, then 10, then he's out in my lap, his head on the nursing pillow. Wait 20 minutes (Read with booklight in the dark). Slip one hand under his hip and one hand under his head, but the latter is rather sweaty by this time so the head-hold is always bumpy and awkward and a wake-risk. While noting wake-risk, lift and stand without wobbling. His eyes open with alarm: "YOU'RE NOT GOING TO PUT ME DOWN, ARE YOU?" but then they close again and his head falls into my chest. He is so tired. He has been tired all his life. Carry him to crib and slowly, slowly lift him up over the rail (wake-risk of rail sliding up and down is staggering) and gently, gently put his little hip down on the mattress, to be followed by the most careful placing of his head... But my hips are stiff from sitting for so long, and my back hurts and I didn't spend enough time getting that damn head-hold just right, and he rolls out of my hold onto his stomach and is abruptly wide awake.

I could weep.

The quandary: let him cry or hold him and start the process all over again, which means I'm in here with him for another hour or another 90 minutes? After listening to him cry in various stages of upset for the last 7 months, I have decided that I'd rather stay in here. I mean, he's 7 months old, he has a cold, he's alone in there in the dark in this cage-like thing, he can't move... shit, I'd cry too. Wouldn't you? If you knew that parent-flesh was right outside the door?

That night I don't even want to hear him crying for one second. Some days I can endure it as par for the course, but other days I will allow my hips to stiffen to stone before I'll endure even one minute of crying. So I scoop him back up in my arms before he can register the need to cry and start over.

He nurses, but only for 10 minutes. He pulls off the nipple and starts the drifting process. He appears to be out in 30 minutes, so I perfect the hip and head hold and stand; he's sleeping hard; he's snoring; I place him down and smoothly, serenely remove my hands from beneath him, secure him on the cool, freshly-sheeted mattress. He jerks awake and looks up at me through the blue night-light: "ARE YOU LEAVING ME HERE? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DON'T LEAVE ME HERE! WAAAAHHHH!"

And I must leave the room, for I cannot take it anymore. This pressure. It's absurd, how much he needs me. It's patently absurd. Incomprehensible. I walk into the kitchen crying myself, shaky, totally insane. The husband puts his hand on my shoulder as I sit at the kitchen table.

"Would you go in, please?" I ask.

"I think he's going to go to sleep."

Ian's cries rise and fall, rise and fall. When they rise, they aren't panicked, and when they fall, I hear his voice around his fingers, their nails and knuckles and tips so soothing to his infant soul. "Aaaa-oooo-aaaa-oooo-aaaa-oooo-aaah...." For a few minutes, as my husband and I sit in our kitchen, the darkness looming in through the windows, we listen to our child from across the house. He is so small. It is so dark. "Aaaa-oooo-aaaa-oooo-aaaa-oooo-aaaah..." Then nothing. Silence. We all breathe together.

Need

2006-06-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

Ian has a fever. His first one, around 100 under the arm. His body, sometimes spots on his body, are hot, like bundles of lamp cords with a short. This afternoon, while he was napping on me (next entry will cover this one), he kept crying, wringing himself around, closing his eyes halfway, closing them, burrowing his head into my side, crying out--crash--then it would start all over again. He is having fever dreams. He does not like them, whatever they are.

I am very worried about this fever, about this lack of sleep, about this bad mood--crying for no reason I can detect, not wanting to nurse or eat. I am afraid that this lack of sleep along with this fever will keep his brain from developing properly. When I nursed him to sleep tonight, I was so AFRAID that he wouldn't fall asleep when I put him in his crib. I was tense and uptight. Why? Because I was worried about Ian, sure, but also because I was SICK AS SHIT of nursing him to sleep, and with this fever and his stuffy nose, he pulls off the nipple every two seconds in an attempt to breathe. I hosed out his nose. No change. If he didn't go to sleep, that meant I would have to tend to him, and I get tired of tending to him, dammit. He has not gone to sleep every night for the past 2 weeks. And these children, they need something every two seconds.

But he's sleeping now (probably because of the children's Benadryl that the pediatrician recommended). He's sleeping harder than he has in days and days, and I'm damn glad to be out of there; I'm damn glad to be here, writing, sipping a glass of wine. But I'm more glad that he's asleep. I'm a lot more glad not only because he needed the sleep desperately, what with his eyes puffy and snot rivering from his nose all day, and his bones and muscles growing all the time, every minute of the day, but also because he is a child, and when your child sleeps, everything else is for the moment okay. I want to shout thank you to somebody.

Baby's First Projectile

2006-05-22T17:07:00.000-07:00

A yellow river on our cousin's lawn. A spray of watery bile on the husband's great aunt's sleeve. (She dodged the bulk of it like the cool, elegant mother and grandmother she is.) A change of clothes. A laughing, happy baby--who cares about puke, anyway? Look at all the people and things at this little graduation party.

Then another pint-sized spray onto the lawn--only a splash on the front of the Bjorn. But then it was time to rest, to regroup, to take a nap. So Mom springs up from the table, abandoning her small plate of 7-layer dip, and takes her charge to the front porch, where she nestles into the swing with him for a nurse and a calmdown. No fever. Little I seems fine, happy and sweet and nursing like mad. The husband goes back to mingling and the mother locks the stroller in place and puts her feet up on the plastic rail along the bottom, prepared to rock her offspring to No More Puking, maybe to sleep. We're alone on the porch, surrounded by plants and rose bushes and a cool breeze, and my little puker is happy as he can be.

I start to rock; I'm holding Ian against my shoulder, positioning myself, when the swing does not seem to be righting itself. It seems to be stuck in BACK. I lean forward, try to equalize. This is a swing. A porch swing. It can't be flipping backwards. But then it flipped backwards, and Ian and I hit the house-wall, me with the middle of my back and my head, and Ian with his head.

I look at Ian. Somehow, I am holding him securely and steadily. He starts to cry. I am a pretzel. I can't really move very well. Fortunately, the hostess heard a crash and came around the side of the house.

"Anna! Oh no!" She grabbed Ian--who was crying, of course; I had saved him from getting splattered, but not from a bump on the head--and I worked myself to a standing position, head aching and back smarting.

"Are you all right?"

"I think so," I said. Then Ian threw up on the collar of her white blouse. I apologized and took him, and then he threw up on the collar of my purple tee shirt.

"Okay," I said. "You know, I think it's time to go." I called the husband. We left. I called the pediatrician, who said of course that if he's acting fine and has no fever, it's nothing to worry about--just give him small amounts of breast milk until he can keep things down. So we did. He's fine. My head hurts and I have an egg on my spine. But I'm fine, too.

How I can be so collected and together when my child projectile vomits 3 times in one hour and I topple over on a swing while holding him, yet so volatile and full of "fuck!"s when my computer malfunctions or when I can't find my keys--well, I don't really have an answer to that. It's amazing how a child can calm me down.

Time for Bed

2006-05-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to say something about how-to baby books. How to get your baby on a schedule. How to make having a baby tolerable. How to have a baby and get some sleep. Etcetera, etcetera.

I read a lot of stuff I needed to know. Some of it was helpful. But what sticks in my mind more than anything is me and the husband, dolting idiotically around the house when Ian was about 3 weeks old, trying to figure out how to stop him from crying without nursing him. We didn't want to nurse him because baby books and the pediatrician said that we'd be setting ourselves up for hell later on, trying to rock and nurse a 1 year old to sleep.

But if the payoff is dolting around your house, more exhausted than you've ever imagined being, worrying about the possible hell to come at the same time that you're trying to keep a 3 week old alive, then fuck all that.

I nurse my kid to sleep. He is 6 months old. I nurse him to sleep for a minimum of 45 minutes --sometimes up to 90. And it sometimes drives me crazy. I read in the dark with a booklight and the light sometimes distracts him. He'll pull off, pull on, smile up at me, and some nights I'm mentally begging him to go the hell to sleep so I can go watch The Daily Show (his latest bedtime is immediately following The Daily Show). Why did I do this? I think, waiting, waiting, waiting for him to finish. I'm in here every single night. No break. No breather. I'm in here every single night. I have to plan classes tomorrow, I have to write, I have to wash his bottles for day care tomorrow, I have to get some fucking sleep, for god's sake. But instead I have to be here every single night. This sucks. I'm hot. I'm sweating through my tee shirt. Surely Ian is going to wake up from how hot it is in here.

Then Ian slowly relaxes his suckle and moves his chin, his lips in a closed pucker. He is asleep. He gives a big sigh, a snore through his nose, settles into the nursing pillow. I slowly slip my hands under him--one beneath his head, one beneath his hips, and carry him to his crib. He lies on his side, his cheek rests on the cool, soft sheet. He is asleep, perfectly still, his little hands clasped together as if in prayer. He is the most satisfied and content baby in the universe, and I have not only faciliated this happiness--I have watched it. I have been there the entire time, holding him, stroking his head, singing a lullaby. And I this is where I will be for only a very short time to come.

Solid Food

2006-05-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Ian has discovered food. We have gone from feeding a spitting athlete to feeding an automaton. I stick the plastic spoon in the baby food, his mouth opens. It's like an assembly line.

Sometimes he reaches out and grabs the spoon, whether it holds a mound of food or not. Sometimes he wraps the fingers of one hand around the handle and attempts to put it in his mouth. Misses. Hits his cheek. Sometimes he wraps the fingers of one hand around the handle and then places his other hand on top of the first. Guides spoon to mouth. Got it. Licks spoon. Goes "Ahh--ahhh-ahhhh." Turns spoon sideways. Goes "Ahhh--ahhh-ahhh." Mom takes spoon and refills. Chow time.

While I make his food (pour it from jar into colorful plastic dish), he holds spoon and/or dish and flops them around. He doesn't bang them on his high-chair tray. He flops them around and sometimes he lets the dish go and it hits the floor. The spoon usually winds up in his lap, propped vertically on his thigh, leaning against his belly.

"Where's your spoon?" I ask. He grins. He always grins. He's a damn happy baby, glad to be here.

He no longer gets smeared and covered with food, especially during Asembly Line. He eats just about every bit of the stuff--which tastes awful. I have tried it all, and if it isn't fruit, it tastes like cardboard gone sour. The thought of pureed meat makes me nauseated. Maybe I'm neurotic (um... yes), but I will not feed my baby pureed meat. When he can manage a bite of it, he can have all he wants.

Feeding Ian scares me. Nursing is hard, but it's very predictable. You sit. You nurse. You might read a book while you nurse. You might watch some Law & Order. You might order your husband around. But now who knows? When he's done eating, he isn't sleeping. What do you do with him? He's changing, becoming a boy. You can see it in his face. In the way he reaches for everything and goes "Oooh--oooooh----oooh---oooh." What happens when he can reach everything he wants? What do I do then?

Shakespeare Was Right About That Paradox

2006-05-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

Waiting in line at the Safeway yesterday, I was holding Ian with my right arm, whispering in his ear. This makes him smile. I say things like "Do you want to come over here with Mommy?" Or, "I love you." Or, "Do you see the produce? I bet you want an avocado. Do you want an avocado?" Or, "Hey there Mr. I-Ate-Peas-Today." I zoom completely in on him, as I do all the time, every minute of a greater number of his waking moments, and for the first time in my entire life, I am frequently not aware of whether others are paying attention to me or not.

I pulled my mouth from his ear and kissed his forehead, then noticed the woman standing behind me, with short brown hair, thick arms, and a shopping cart. She was smiling at us.

"They don't tell you, do they?"

"No, they don't." I shook my head.

She smiled at Ian and raised her eyebrows at him. "They try to tell you," she said, "but you just don't know until they're here."

"It's really something," I said. "I just can't believe it."

And I am bonkers. I am obsessed. I tear up just thinking about Ian's innocent, purely joyful smile. At night, as I lie in bed about to read, I hold my book in one hand and then put the book down and stare at the ceiling and say, "I-Bird. Little I-Bird." I look at the husband. "I love him so much," I say.

"Yep," he says, turning a page of The New Yorker.

There are no words for a love like this. It is consuming. The only thing I can compare it to, with its euphoria, its urgency, is the obsessive love I had for various boyfriends when I was a teenager--but the comparison doesn't truly hold because the love I felt for them was grounded in fear as to what might happen: Would we stay together? Would he call me? Would we date long enough for me to actually go the prom? Would I see him that Friday? Would he try to go up my shirt? Did he really, really like me? Would we be together for years? Was he thinking about me? Would I get dumped? I wanted those boyfriends to call me or kiss me or pay attention to me because I felt as if I literally--yes, literally--could not live without them sometimes.

But my love for Ian is the realest thing I've ever felt. It makes me question the value and purpose of adolescent love at all. I have never cared so much about what could happen to another person. I am concerned about Ian's health, his morailty, his intellect. His poop. His heart. His blood. Whether he will scratch himself before I can trim his fingernails again. Whether his drool rash and crusty leg folds will get infected. Whether letting him nurse while I watch TV--he's now 6 months old and distracted by everything--is wise. Whether he will turn out to be an alcoholic like my father, depressed like me.

And this is wonderful--this at times boring and sentimental and pathetic love--but it's also, for me, somewhat dark. I think about death a lot more often now. What will happen if I die--if Ian grows up without a mother? What if he dies? How would I survive? What if the husband dies? What would I do--what would Ian do? Where will I go when I die? Will I be able to watch Ian? To know what happens to him? He was part of my body and therefore my soul (if there is such a thing), so why wouldn't I be eternally connected to him? What if I'm not? What might this mean?

With all these happy thoughts circling through my brain, I was beginning to wonder if I might be getting more depressed--being so preoccupied with death right after giving birth didn't feel healthy. But then, last week, I was having coffee with a friend who has 2 teenagers. She is a fantastic mother: honest with her children, supportive of them, intelligent, fun. She has a type of relationship with her teenagers that I wish I had had with my mother and that I hope I have with Ian. She played with Ian's hands as he reached for the fist-sized stuffed animals that hung from the handle of his car seat and asked how I was doing.

"Okay," I said, eating a bite of brownie. "I'm just exhausted, though."

"I think about what it was like for me," she said, "when the kids were little."

"It's so hard," I said.

She nodded. "And I don't think I've ever thought about death so much."

"You're kidding," I said. I actually reached across the table and touched her hand.

Thank god, first of all, for great mothers; and second of all, for friends who tell you stuff like that. Jesus. What a fucking RELIEF. I still think I'm depressed--some days are better than others, but lately I can feel like I'm hammering away at it every minute I'm awake--but I hope now to become a little more comfortable acknowledging and discussing the cryptic aspects of having a child. To be a little more comfortable in my own fresh, motherly skin.

Things No One Told Me: Part 1 of Infinite

2006-05-02T21:33:00.000-07:00

"Are you feeding him solids yet?" asked my friend in Texas. Ian was nursing, gazing up at me as I held the phone to my ear.

"We were," I said, stroking his head. He was about 4 1/2 months old. "He took them just fine at first, but then stopped."

"What do you mean stopped?"

"He just started spitting and batting at the spoon," I said. "And he really didn't eat hardly anything at all. It just didn't work."

Silence. Then: "Yeah, that's... what they do, though."

"It is?"

"Uh-huh. They really don't get very much of it."

"Oh." Shit. "But I mean, he pressed his lips together and blew out. There was no way to even get the spoon in there."

"That's what they do. That's how they learn to eat."

"Oh." I looked down at Ian. He had closed his eyes. Time for Post-Nurse Nap. "Wow. That sucks."

"Yeah, it does."

"My god," I said. "That just totally sucks."

Love Love Love

2006-04-26T20:51:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged in a while because I love my son so much that it's flattening me. It's turning me into a total slacker-loser-idiot. Everything else is now negligible. My job, my house, my overgrown jungle of a yard, my politics. Earlier tonight, I felt I should talk to him about this.

"I love you so much." It was about 7:45, and the husband was out doing something work-related, and Ian was getting a little loopy with tiredness, sitting in his high chair minus the tray. He held his green monkey in both hands.

"It's amazing how much I love you."

"Nnnn," he said, smiling--an 'nnnn' that was a lead-in to a laugh.

"It's just amazing." I stood at the kitchen sink and moved my head in circles as I spoke.

"Hnn-hnn-hnn-hnn," he said, with a full open-mouthed grin.

"It's a-maye-zing." Head circle.

"Hnn-hnn-hnn." His body started to nod with each laugh.

"It's amaye-zing." Head circle.

"Huh huh huh huh aha aha aha," he laughed, his mouth open wide as an ocean, staring at my head and becoming the happiest human being on earth. We traded for awhile--I said "Amaye-zing" and did the head thing, he laughed. Then he got the hiccups.

"Boy." I leaned back into the kitchen sink at looked at him. "I've never loved anyone like this before. No way."

He looked up at me and drooled, grinning, so tired. So incredibly tired, as he always is at the end of the day, wanting to sleep but unable to understand how, so I sniffled and wiped my cheeks of tears (these serious talks always get me) and carried him into his room. I took off his drool-bib, zipped him up in a sleeper, and let him nurse until he figured it out.

Parenthood

2006-04-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

When I was about 24, I was living in Austin, Texas, working as a waitress and partying all the time and saving money. It was a gorgeous spring day--sunny and warm and full of Austin energy, the kind that makes you feel like it's absolutely fine not to do anything of consequence or importance, because everything is hunky dory, terrific, happy, free, rich with life. I was walking either to my therapy session or to a boyfriend's house, through the southish part of the city, past a few Mexican diner-restaurants, a few gas stations, colorful coffeeshops. I turned from a busy main thoroughfare onto a less busy main thoroughfare, my cutoffs snug and comfortable, my bare shoulders a zig-zag of unorganized tan lines from swimsuits and tank tops, my hair up in a high ponytail. Then something happened to me that had happened a zillion times before: a man drove by, alone in a car, and whistled. He also hollered, but I could not understand what he said.

In the past, my reactions to this particular form of (harrassment) (admiration) (treatment) was usually one of indifference, annoyance, or pleasure. This time, my skin turned to fire and I stopped walking to stare at his rear bumper and the license plate as they shrunk in the distance. I clenched my fists and let my mouth hang slightly open and swallowed a lump of pure fury.

Why had he done that? What was his purpose? He could have wanted me to wave (why?). He could have wanted me to give him the finger (why?). He could have wanted me to smile with gratitude (why?). What he could not possibly have wanted, however, was a response that would have resulted in, say, a date or a fuck. It was a busy street; he was driving fast and had no intention of stopping--even if I had waved and flashed my breasts and begged him to pick me up. So his purpose, then, was nothing tangible or physical. His purpose was perhaps to express his approval of my looks, or to startle me, or to make me angry.

In other words, I did not know what his purpose was, really, because what he had done had nothing to do with me. It had nothing to do with my looks or my personality or the way I walked or anything. There was no reason in the world to feel flattered by such things--no reason at all. Had I been 30 pounds heavier, he probably would have done the same thing (how well could he really see me, anyway?); had I been shorter, wearing baggy jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, he probably would have done the same thing. He was expressing something that had to with how he felt, not with how I was or who I was.

And fuck that. Fuck him! I thought, walking on. What a bunch of crap. Do men who do this stop to realize that they're catcalling to a person? A human being? Who the fuck did that man think he was, calling at me like that in this public place to express something that I had nothing to do with? Demeaning me in this way, just because he felt like it. I decided that public catcalling was an act of ultimate self-centeredness. I recalled some other times men had catcalled in one form or another. In college, walking out of a 7-11 with my boyfriend, when a man yelled "Why don't you tell her to put a bra on them titties?" (and my boyfriend had laughed at my outrage). In the cafe where I worked, walking in from outside on a chilly day, when a customer looked at my chest and then at my co-worker who was standing beside me and said, "She's cold." In Iowa City, walking along the side of the interstate at age 12 in an attempt to run away from home, when truck after truck honked its approval. None of it was about me. None of it had ever been about me. It was about them. It was about their desire to express... something.

To say that this incident in Austin profoundly changed and informed my perspective of men would be an understatement; this incident still resonates in all kinds of ways. It marked the end of one world-view and the beginning of another. I write about it now not to lead into a comment on the fact that I have a male child and that I am concerned about how he will view women; I write about it now because my parents know nothing about this incident. The people who raised me, who loved me devotedly despite their faults, whom I have also always loved, know not one thing about the significance of that moment--and there are dozens more that were profoundly important to me as a person that my parents know nothing about. Much of my life is not something I have always shared with them.

And for Ian, there will be at least as many profoundly important moments that I will know nothing about. That's how it works. And in many cases that is of course how it should be. But I look at him now, tiny, happy, loving every minute of being awake, looking always so lovingly at his parents, needing us, needing me, and I get tears in my eyes and worry about the future, and I hold him to my shoulder as he breathes in the hollows of my neck and rests his hands on my collar bones, and I wonder how in the world I will ever survive the formation of the him that I will never know.

World News

2006-04-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

I am upset about my son's future wife. I may not like her. She might be stupid. She might be an innatentive mother to my grandchildren, to his children.

I am upset about my son's future girlfriend. She might break his heart. Girls do that, just like boys do, and if she breaks his heart I will leave her maimed and I will go to prison for it.

I am upset about my son's future friends. What if they are skanky? What if they use drugs? What if they abuse women?

I am upset about the world my child has entered. Yeseterday, I was driving Little I home from someplace, listening to the news. There is serious speculation that our insane administration might invade Iran (with what forces they think they can successfully do this, I have no idea)--and what concerns me is that apparently they have the power to do so even after all this dumbfounding evidence that they went to war with Iraq on false pretenses. (It takes approximately no time whatsoever to learn that Bush was intent on invading Iraq years before he took office at all--are his supporters total morons or what?) What disturbs me about this is the apathy of our citizenry--if Bush orders us to war again, will we support this? Allow this to happen again? What can we do about it? Won't a military general or two or thirty say NO, or something? Take whatever constitutional measures are available to prevent this administration from ruining our country in every way imaginable?

The next news story was a report on the Zacarias Moussaoui trial--the reporter gave a synopsis of the cockpit tape as Flight 93 went down. It was horrifying. My son was in the backseat, pulling on the cloth bugs that hang from his carseat handle, exercising his voice: Aahahahahahahahahahaha. And I'm driving along, about to cry, hearing about these people who were asking not to be hurt or killed by people who killed them in the name of fucking RELIGION. Well, I hate religion. Suppose they had been Christian terrorists who prayed to Jesus as they crashed the plane (although we tend to cut people's health care and let them die slow neglectful deaths instead)--I suppose Jesus would forgive them. But I am not a Christian, and I am not Jesus. I do not forgive them. And these were Muslim terrorists, and as they crashed the plane, they prayed to Allah, and I don't know what Allah would do because I don't know enough about Islam to speculate, but I assume Allah would not be pleased with their actions. Who do these people think they are? That they have the right to do something like this, that they actually know god? Not only that there IS one, but that they know what god wants? What kind of a world allows people like this to be cultivated? What kind of a world allows horrors like this to occur? What kind of people are instrumental to these horrors?

I don't know what kind of people--but I know there are millions of them, of every ethnic and religious variety--and they are sharing this world with my son, my Little I, who has recently started to reach for things he wants with both hands; to stare at his hands for minutes at a time, rotating his wrist to study his fingers from different angles; to use the feeding time for solid food as a way to practice going BBBBBBBB very rapidly with his lips pressed together; to make stomping motions with his right foot while he lies in his crib, a move that I have dubbed the cowboy stomp; to laugh uproariously when I point to the ceiling fan and ask, "What's that, Ian? What's that?"; to prop himself up on his elbows and drool a clear thick stream onto the comforter; to grin wide and huge when I toss him--gently and carefully--into the air. How will I protect him? Or can I change this world from a place of violence and ignorance to a place of peace and knowledge and patience, where no one wrongfully dies, where no one starves to death, where no one is allowed to live without love, comfort, and hope, where no one suffers from more than a broken heart?

You're Blogging About Nursing and Your Failure as a Mother AGAIN?

2006-04-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right. You might ask--Isn't there anything else going on besides nursing and your state of mind, for fuck's sake?

No. There isn't.

So I take Little I--now nearly 5 months old--to Day Care this morning, and I arrive about an hour late. His caregiver asks about my lateness, and I tell her that there are only 2 bottles for him today--not 3, which is how many Ian needs to get through even a short Day Without Boobs.

"So I fed him really well, and I don't want him to stay as long," I say. Ian slept marvelously last night, from 7:30-5:30, so I was up at midnight, just sort of hanging out, for an hour or so, and then again at 4, sitting in the kitchen, pumping. I need at least 7 or 8 hours of no nursing to generate one bottle because my child is a Voracious Fucking Kid.

"Why don't you try formula?" she asks. One of the 3-year old boys she watches sits behind her in a yellow and green plastic high chair, sucking Cheerios from his fingers.

I shrug and lean against her washing machine, on which rests a variety of diaper bags and other kid paraphernaila that remain utterly organized. Everything in her house is orgainzed and spotless. "I just feel like... well, why have I been trying so hard to nurse... going through all this, if I'm just going to give him formula?"

She shakes her head. She's in her 50s, a small woman with long red hair. Today she wore jeans, a sweater, and cozy lined bedroom slippers. "You wouldn't stop breast feeding--just supplement."

"I know. I don't know."

"Stop beating yourself up," she says. "Just buy some of those powder packages and toss one or two in with his stuff. If he needs it, I'll use it; if he doesn't, I won't."

The shocking simplicity of it all. Stop beating yourself up. Why does the whole breast-feeding movement--god bless it of course--have to be so polarized? Why does the whole breast-feeding movement leave virtually no room for women to feel more okay about supplementing? Why am I so suggestible when it comes to anything "natural," or "liberal"?

Stop beating yourself up. I have written probably ad nauseum about my tendency to criticize and judge everything I do or don't do. Self-criticism is unfortunately what helps to define me as a woman in this culture; self-criticism is a result of some traumatic childhood incidents that I continue to process and understand in unhealthy ways; self-criticism is part of my personality. But Christ. Despite all this therapy--all this self-talk--it seems like I don't really get any better. I am 35 years old, about to turn 36. Why don't all of us women and mothers and people turn to the overly critical self that we've given the upper hand to, as we might to a mean parent or a shit of an ex-lover whose meanness or insensitivity we're unaware of until one day something happens, and we see that parent or that lover through the eyes of a stranger, an adult, a good person, a wise person, and say

Enough, already.

Stop beating yourself up.

It is my mind after all, my psyche, my self-worth. It doesn't belong to anyone else. And I'm growing tired of feeling like I can't control the way I think about myself, and I'm tired of feeling unhappy. My soul is my soul. My life is my life. My body is my body. My butt is my butt. My moles are my moles. My anger is my anger. My grief is my grief. My truimphs are my truimphs and my failures are my failures.

Enough, already. The sun is finally out after a gray and rainy spring. Today I will walk outside to laugh and play and tickle my son's feet on blades of grass that have grown too tall.

Things are Changing

2006-03-29T20:30:00.000-08:00

Ian now gets distracted while nursing. This is apparantly normal for his age (about 4 1/2 months)--new objects and sounds are absorbing his attention, so he is not the same eater he was just a short time ago.

The thing is--this is not normal for ME. He suckles, then pulls off and looks up at me and smiles, gazes happily, tries to bat at my chin. Then he suckles for a few seconds, pulls off and looks up at me and smiles, gazes happily, tries to bat at my chin. Then he suckles, pulls off, tries to bat at my chin, and smiles. He eats as if he is attending a reception, snacking and pausing for conversation.

As he should, of course. He's already growing up. But I'm not quite ready for this maturity. He sometimes sleeps now for 8 or 10 hours at a stretch, and I wake up two or three times during his extended slumbers. I pee, brush my teeth, pump a boob, and then lie in bed, trying to get comfortable, staring at the monitor, waiting to be needed. Then I wake up two hours later and perform the same ritual, lying awake for awhile, thinking about whether he has spun himself in a circle in his crib, drooled all over his sleep sack, shat in his new size 3 diaper. I picture his his round smiles of joy when he sees me and the husband for the first time in the morning, or his eyes, which grow larger and larger each day, or his laughter--the laughter that rolls from his belly when I lean into his face with a fool grin on my face and tickle his ribs before swaying back again, moving further away.

Ode to Chicago

2006-03-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

I went to Chicago and nursed on my friend's couch.
I went to Chicago and nursed on my friend's couch.
I went to Chicago and took a stroll around Andersonville, and then I nursed on my friend's couch.
I went to Chicago and nursed on my friend's bed.
I went to Chicago and nursed on my friend's bed.
I went to Chicago and took a stroll through the Lincoln Park Zoo, and then I nursed on my friend's bed.

I went to Chicago and spent time with old and dear friends while nursing on my friend's couch and on my friend's bed.

Yes, that's the story. I went to Chicago and did not go downtown, did not walk up Michigan Avenue, did not go out to eat (although I consumed some killer Indian take-out), did not go to a cool bar or to a show. I nursed. As soon as the plane landed, Ian morphed into a fucking pirahna. My breasts never became full in 5 entire days because he nursed and nursed and nursed as if he were starving.

He needed comfort, of course. A new environment and all those routines interrupted--he needed to nurse to soothe himself. Of course. And I love him like a madwoman, and I feel sad that he needed to calm his nerves so much. However--nursing him to the extent that I had to was a major drag, and I'm not going to feel guilty about saying it, although I already do feel guilty about saying it.

Here's what I hoped for: wrap up the baby and take him everywhere. To the Art Institute, to Michigan Avenue, to a bar for just a little Happy Hour glass of wine. Toss the baby into the Bjorn and hop on the L to wherever, to do everything I wanted to do. I love Chicago. I would be a cool and carefree mother, toting her happy little son around like he was a cooing content appendage. That's how good I am at this. That's how comfortable I am being a mother. I can take him anywhere.

Here's what happened: I got 3 hours of sleep the first night because Little I grunts like a wrestler all night long, and I never really recovered from the sleep loss, so I was dragging and listless and exhausted every day. The husband was attending a conference, which prompted the trip in the first place, but I was furious at him for attending the conference instead of taking the child, and this anger took up a lot of my energy as well.

"Are you going to be mad at me this entire trip?"

"Most likely."

We took a ton of stuff and stuffed our stuff into our bags without leaving any extra room AT ALL in order to have less stuff, to "make things easier," so we were an extraordinarily unwieldy and cumbersome family unit. (I brought four hardback books to read and didn't crack a one of them.) And I was tired, tired, tired--way to tired to do all I had hoped for, and way too uncomfortable nursing in public to nurse in public, and anyway--fuck all this "it's ok to nurse in public" rhetoric, because I don't like to nurse in public because I am a prude and there's nothing anyone can do about it, and nursing wears my sorry non-motherly ass out. I'd rather nurse at home or the equivalent to home (which my friend's couch certainly was), so I can coo back at my son's ahhs of relief and sighs of contentment and grunts of lust and laugh when he pulls off and milk is spurting up from my nipple as if from a blowhole. I'm all for public breast-feeding, but I choose not to. I feel like it's a private thing, even though I know that my feelings have more to do with cultural hogwash I have internalized all my life. But I'm not going to nurse in public unless I have to.

On the plane I was uncomfortable, sitting on the aisle with my saggy boob hanging out and Ian smiling into it as he suckled. In the airport, I was uncomfortable, sitting between two couples who pretended not to notice me. I did not enjoy it, but if my son is hungry, of course we can all damn my inhibitions. But I'm not going to like damning my inhibitions. It's going to be unpleasant for me. I'd rather not. My inhibitions have been with me a long, long time. They are comfortable. They are easy. Whipping out a pale breast and sitting there while my son sucks on it like mad is not.

What made Chicago wonderful, however, was the friends. The old friends that have known me far too long, who love my child because he is mine, whose children I love because they are theirs. We all come together now and things are different. The way they warmed to my son and to me, with all my glaring defects of character hanging out for everyone to see, was tremendous. I'll have to start a new blog about the evolution of friendship.

Stuff I Can't Do Anymore Part I

2006-03-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

I'm making coffee and I spill the wet grounds all over the stove.

"Fuck!" I yell. Ian sits in his vibrating chair on the kitchen floor with his dolly.

I'm reaching for a washcloth to wipe his butt and there aren't any in the bin.

"Shit!" I yell. Ian kicks on the changing table, reaching for the ceiling, or grabbing at the head of a "Lovey" I've attached to the rail.

I load Ian, his diaper bag, his bottles, a few toys, and his stroller into the car. I'm taking him to daycare. I start the car and realize I've forgotten my purse.

"God dammit!" I run into the house and leave him there, batting at the stuffed orange bugs we've attached to his carseat handle.

It's 1:30 a.m., and I hear "Aaaah-ooooh-eeee" in the baby monitor, soon to become squawking, soon to become crying.

"Mother hell," I rasp, getting out of bed. Of course, when I reach Ian, I am all smiles--and they aren't fake. I'm genuinely glad--thrilled, elated, ecstatic, filled with love--to see him, whenever I see him. I don't carry my frustrations into the expressions I share with him. I make every effort not to do this.

But last week, after I poured cake batter into a pan without adding water to the batter first and then yelled "Mother fucker," the husband said I might not want to lose it like that anymore.

"Ian watches you, you know," he said. "He'll think that's how you're supposed to behave."

I brought his concern to the therapist.

"He has a point," she said.

"I know," I said. "I know he does." The husband is so stable. It's enough to make me insane.

"Swearing is a tough one," she said.

"I'm not really worried about the swearing," I said. "I'm more worried about the behavior."

"You're not worried about the swearing?"

I shook my head. "He'll hear it everywhere. I'd rather he get to know what those words mean at home."

She looked at me. "What are you going to do when he starts asking what those words mean?"

I looked at her. Damn. "I don't know."

She clasped her hands to her stomach, which lets me know she's about to go somewhere important. "What do you think is going on with you when you get so emotional?"

I thought about it, envisioning myself at the kitchen counter, in the car, at my desk... wherever.
My gut grew warm. "I just get so angry," I said. "I get so mad."

"At what?"

I shrugged. "They're really small things," I said. "Like with the cake batter--I poured it back into the bowl, added the water, and then poured it back into the pan. It wasn't a big deal at all."

"So what's going on?"

What's going on is a number of things, the first being how good it feels to express anger. When I was a teenager, immersed in the world of therapy-lingo and ritual, I was told to let go of my emotions, to "get them out"--whatever they were. For my sibling, that meant screaming like hell while watching a basketball game; for me, that meant screaming and crying when my hair wouldn't properly curl, overturning a table when my mother tried to discipline me, or calling the poor woman a horrible name. It was healthy to "let it out," to "vent." Better to do that then let anger fester and grow into disfunction.

Grow into disfunction? Not sure how I arrived at that interpretation, but that's how these philosophies have morphed their way into my adult way-of-being. When I was younger, I apparently didn't think that screaming for blood during a sports match or hurling a curling iron across the room or counted as disfucntional. Those actions felt good. I was freeing myself of burdensome weights, quieting the screaming girl-anger that had seethed into my brain; extinguished the wrath that at times made my stomach burn and my heart pound in my skull. And if I said awful things, that was okay--I could apologize later on, which meant I was a big person with a character strong enough to expose her weaknesses and harness them into humility. I was emotionally mature, healthier than someone who kept everything "bottled up."

"Crap!" I slam my hand on the kitchen counter. Tomato sauce has sloshed out of the can onto the linoleum. Ian is watching, 4 months old, one hand shoving the other one in his mouth.

"I don't know," I tell the therapist. I'm trying, really--but the knot in my gut is too tight. "I just get so mad. I can't really pinpoint much else."

"I think we're talking about your tendency to be self-critical."

I blink and sit up straighter.

"Does that sound accurate?"

"Yeah," I say. "Right. I'm mad at myself for doing such stupid things."

"What does Ian do when you get emotional like that?"

"Do?"

"Next time," she said, "try to look at him and see what he does. I bet he notices."

"God--fuck!" I yell, smoke coming from the toaster, smoke alarm beeping. I look across the kitchen at Ian. His hand is not in his mouth anymore. His eyes are wide open, his almost-hairless eyebrows up in little arches, his lips parted. He doesn't look afraid or sad. Well, maybe just a little afraid--but mostly he looks like he wants to know what's going on, what's just happened to change the environment, to so quickly and with such power alter the feelings that define the space outside of our bodies.

And when he's old enough, how do I explain? "Mommy has self-esteem problems, honey," I might say. "She expresses them by swearing and losing control about small things that don't really matter in the slightest." I am sincere, totally sincere. "Don't you do the same thing. You make sure you feel good about yourself all the time because you're wonderful. Don't have the same problems Mommy has. That will make your life a lot more difficult than it needs to be."

"We need to come up with ways for you to change this," says the therapist.

"Yes," I say.

"Let's start planning a strategy."

"Yes," I say again. "God, yes."

Truths About Day Care

2006-03-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Here's what I used to think about Day Care, more or less:

1. Parents who took their kids there weren't trying hard enough: they could work less, bite the bullet, figure out a way for somebody to stay home.

2. It wasn't good for kids--they need their parents, they need a secure environment at home before they're thrust out into the social world like that.

3. It was a cold and flu breeding ground; kids shouldn't be there.

Here's what I think about Day Care now, more or less:

1. Parents who take their kids there are trying like hell to support their families in a country that espouses these Puritan and/or family values while offering very little subsidized or socialized child care and very little family leave. In this culture--one that's arguably hostile toward parents who want to take care of their kids and work--parents do what they can, and if they can manage to work full-time, pay for day care, parent, and behave like nice people, I am both proud and envious. (And Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who I have never agreed with about much but whose advice I have at times respected over the years, whose arguments against Day Care are convincing if you don't think seriously about them and if you feel most comfortable and productive and good about yourself when you live your life from a warm, cozy, judgmental chair--well, Dr. Laura can go fuck herself. I have never heard such righteous and anti-family rhetoric from anyone else in my entire life. I can't believe I ever believed a word she said. I am full of shit sometimes.)

2a. "My kids have been home from Day Care for the last two weeks," said my friend in Texas. "It's vacation."

"How's it going?"

"They need Day Care," she said. "They need to run around and play with other kids. It's a lot better for them than being at home with their tired, working parents, who look at them and go, 'Want to read another book?'"

2b. "Day Care is great for my granddaughter," said my aunt last week. "She's learned to play with other kids, to share, to have fun. She just loves it."

2c. Ian adores people. He looks at their faces and grins--he reaches for them--he looks at them and laughs or says "Aaah-ooooooh, oooyyyyy, eeeeeee." Day Care is a terrific place for him. He will thrive there. If he was a child with a different temperament, or a hyper-sensitive child, or a child with some kind of mental disorder, Day Care might not be good for him at all--but many parents whose child Day Care might not be good for don't have much of a choice because we are too busy condemning and sentencing mothers (not fathers; rarely ever fathers) for leaving their children alone and unattended than demanding that our government do more to provide all its children with good care and all its parents with good education.

3. When the husband and I toured the day care we now take Ian to on a part-time basis, the caregiver--a woman in her 50s with five grown children who has been running day care from her home for over 20 years, told us that Ian might start getting sick.

"But you know," she said, holding her glasses in one hand, her calendar in the other. "If he doesn't get sick now, his first year of kindergarten will be a nightmare. He'll bring home every little bug."

Let's hope that we teach Ian not to bring home other things that are a lot more harmful--like world-views that incorporate a lot of empty morality and very little about the world.

Snot

2006-03-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

"Do you use a nasal aspirator?" I asked my friend in Texas, the experienced mother. She is now pregnant with her third child.

"It made them howl," she said. "I just used a Q-tip." My friend often rejects baby props and medical advice that simply doesn't work for her or her children. Then she doesn't worry about the fact that she rejected them. I love my friend.

"Did it work?"

"Worked fine."

So I tried a Q-tip, but in order to get the cotton to adhere to enough mucous, I would have had to stick it further up Ian's nostril than anyone would advise. I was only able to get tiny bit from one side--a clump about the size of a store bought bread-crumb. And when I gave Ian the tit, he still made these awful, slurping, sticky sounds as he tried to breathe through his nose. Colds are hard.

"Do you use a nasal aspirator?" I asked my friend who had a baby one week before I did. She is extraordinarily successful with routines--she has facilitated her daughter's falling asleep on her own, in her crib, for naps. Throughout the day. Most every day. And for bedtime. At night. Most every night.

"Yeah," she said.

"My friend uses a Q-tip, but that isn't working," I said. "And I can't get the nose hose to get much out."

"Are you using drops?"

"Saline."

"What I did was put a few drops in one nostril, hold it closed, and then aspirate the other one."

"Could you repeat that?"

"Put a few drops in one nostril."

"Okay."

"Then hold that same nostril closed."

"Oh."

"Then suck out the other one."

"I see."

"I got a whole bunch out."

That morning, at 3, when Ian's cold woke him up, I tried aspirating one nostril at a time. Between his screams, I extracted long ribbons of pale yellow, globs and globs of goo. When I thought I had suctioned out enough to fill a small pond, I gave him the tit again--his struggles to breathe persisted. I let him finish anyway, listening to gums of germs slop their way through his airways over the hiss of the steam vaporizer, over the smell of Vicks Vapor Rub. He was eating--what was the big deal anyway? What was my problem? I was clearly more bothered by it than he was.

He pulled off and snuggled into the nursing pillow, gently smacking his lips. I propped him on my shoulder for a burp; he fell right to sleep. I laid him in his crib, and he woke up with a hard snort and a cough and a stunted sneeze. As he lay there kicking, rubbing his eyes, crying, and trying to sniffle, I aspirated his nose again. Out came a runny pellet the size of a grain of rice. He passed out. I thought I might cry.

"Have you taught your son to blow his nose?" I asked the father of a 20-month old.

"When we put the Kleenex to his nose and say, 'Blow,' guess what he does."

"What?"

The father blew out through his mouth.

"Bummer," I said.

"Isn't that cute, though?" he said, laughing. "God, that's so cute."

God, I Love My Son

2006-02-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

The love has made me weep. It did that first week or two or three, when I felt like someone was unraveling my guts every hour or two--that hormone swoon that leaves you fiercely warm and then just as afraid. I'd look at his diapered body and his torso, failing completely to control his jerking limbs, his neck--already so strong!--arching his head up to the ceiling of any room we were in. He looked at that ceiling with trepidation, his eyes wide and puffed and scared curious. "He's so beautiful," I'd say, sniffling, holding his face to my cheek, despising myself for not only using but being such a cliche.

But the cliches are accurate. Aren't cliches, like stereotypes, grounded in truth? Some of them total bullshit but also applicable to a large number of people and behaviors?

Right after he was born, those first few weeks, I practiced skin-to-skin contact with him, my shirt off as I sat up in bed and held him as he fed (or as he didn't feed, as he just existed in that post-womb state, soft and contorted in the face, his skin chapped with air, trying to move his bowels or arching toward the ceiling fan). I tried to take him in as much as I could, to revel in him, because I was so fucking emotional and depressed and anxious and freaked out. I relied again and again on Dr. Sears: "Use your baby as therapy." The best advice I've ever received in my life.

On his first night home, he slept most of the afternoon and drifted in and out in the evening, nursing every 1 or 2 hours. Then he was pretty consistently awake from about midnight to 5 . The husband and I were shocked, stunned into panic when over the course of that 5 hours we realized that this was what it was like. Those New Baby cards that joke about sleeplessness seemed infuriating, because the sleeplessness was too monumental for humor to be effective. We were startled. We were disoriented. I felt once again insane, like when I took a shower in the hospital and held onto the wall and cried, sad and happy, crazy and perfectly normal, bereft and overjoyed, squinting up at the square of sunlight that shone in on the beige tiles.

That first night, at about 3:30 a.m., when Ian had been slurping colostrum on and off since dusk, fussing and passing out and waking up, the husband finally swept him away into another room. "You have got to get some sleep," he said to me. He brought Ian back in at 6:30, Ian's body snapped up in a yellow terry-cloth jumper and his tiny head covered in a blue BABY knit hat. I sat up in Vicoden haze, wincing at the pain in my abdomen.

"Is he dead?" His body looked so limp, as if someone had picked him up off a road somewhere. His head was tilted to one side in the husband's palm and one arm was straight out, moving like a plank as the husband held him out toward me.

The husband didn't even react to my bizarre question--just shook his head slowly, put Ian between us, and collapsed onto his side of the bed. I don't remember what happened next, if I sat up and made coffee, or tried to nurse, or sobbed. I just remember the husband's tiredness and my worry. Was he okay? Would he be okay? This is our life now? A night is a long, long time.

Ian has recently turned 3 months old. He has laughed four times, straight from his belly, rambunctious and comfortable. He wakes up from naps in mid-cry, as if someone is pulling a nipple away from his mouth as he begs for another suckle. When we put him in his vibrating chair, he kicks his legs and grins. I ask him, "Where you going? Where you headed, Little Marcher? Little Marching Boy?" On my shoulder in the mornings, he holds his head up and grips my shoulder and keeps his eyes open wide, his blond eyebrows arching practically to his hairline, where he has my widow's peak. His development into this person who is my son is the slowest thing on earth, but it has happened fast. So fast that when I rock him and feel his nose against my skin, his breaths warm and high in my ear, I close my eyes and let it take me because this is only temporary. This time in my life that finally, finally contains some truth will disappear except for what I am able to remember.

Together

2006-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

For the last 23 years, I have experienced anxiety and discomfort during the fall and winter months. The anxiety begins when day starts turning to night, and if it turns dark very early, around 4 or 5:00, I usually feel quite unsettled and even sometimes panicky unless I'm distracted in particular ways--teaching a class, drinking a martini, eating nachos, having an engaging conversation, successfully shopping.

Unfortunately, creative distractions don't do much to help; neither does holding or feeding or playing with my son.

Damn.

I only articulated the specificity of my late-day discomfort recently, when I learned that this is often the "fussy period" for millions of infants. For them, some theories go, the distress comes from having to switch modes--from activity to relaxation, more or less. They get restless and unnerved by feeling tired--they don't know how to just be, to lie comfortably on a play mat or a crib mattress and gingerly bat toys around or coo mildly into the dusk.

For me, the late-day discomfort that I like to assuage with martinis is in some ways just as mysterious. My therapist said that when things in a household aren't going well, when the family is disfunctional (especially before children are about 5 years old), children sense imbalance, sadness, fear, lonliness. "It's an emotional sense," she said. So my long-standing anxiety stems from things I was too tiny to remember, and it has evolved into this thing that is now a part of who I am.

When I try to analyze the anxiety, I get rushes of childhood images and color: the paneled wall of the TV room, the color of the cornfield in our backyard when it's almost too dark to see sihouettes, the gray shades pulled down over the windows in the old farmhouse, the swirls of the rose-colored rug. And I wonder if the anxiety stems from the absence of people in all these images. My family did have dinner together every single night, around a table, and even though our life together was strained with sickness and distance and anger, I feel no anxiety when I see us sitting around that table. Whether we were finishing our food in silence or calling each other bitch and mother fucker or swallowing our nightly vitamin pills.

This tells me a lot. This tells me everything. I should not now need to say but will anyway that I think togetherness is the key to creating memories that soothe instead of memories that leave you staring out a dirty window into beautiful twilight, wondering why you're troubled and wondering where the emptiness comes from.

Luv That Nipple

2006-02-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

When Ian nurses now, he kicks his top leg like a bull about to charge or a Rockette warming up. Then he'll become completely still, his arm up and back as if he's about to crack a whip and his mouth frozen. He's finally reached that Perfect Spurt. He closes his eyes and starts quietly suckling, curls his arm into his side and his leg into my chest. Then he takes suckling breathers: he pulls his lips back and gives a loopy grin, my nipple still firmly in place, pressed between the roof of his mouth and his tongue. Then he suckles a bit more, pulls his mouth gently away, and settles down for a nap, his chin resting on my areola as his lower lip moves back and forth over the nipple in his mind.

How It Works

2006-02-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

I-Bird is now sleeping successfully in his crib, in another room, in the dark, away from us. We turn the monitor down low, so we're only awakened by cries that mean Feed me, and we're sleeping more soundly as a result.

I wish.

Here's what's happened now that we've implemented this new system: since I nurse him in his room--in the "nursery"--there is no longer any reason for the husband to get up at night. The old system was as follows: Ian cries; husband takes him from his cosleeper to the "nursery" and changes him; husband brings him back to me in bed; I nurse him; I put him back down. But since all the action occurs in the nursery now, both of us do not need to get up during the night. Only one of us does, and that one of us is of course me, because I have breasts. So I am now doing for the most part all of the nighttime parenting.

And I resent this. A lot. I resent it so much that I don't even feel guilty or crappy for resenting this. I am at times boiling with resentment. I know that if the husband could nurse Ian, he would; and if it made any sense for him to be getting up along with me, he would do so. But it doesn't.

And the more tired I am, the greater the resentment becomes. The more times I get up to tend to the child and leave the husband lying there snoozing away in the soothing dark, the angrier I am. And the husband tends to lose patience with this resentment: "I can't help that I don't have breasts, Anna." Or "Why do you think I'm against you all the time? I can't help that I don't have breasts." Or "It's not my fault that I get more sleep than you." At least he's been qualifying any declaration of tiredness with "I mean, I know I'm not as tired as you are, but..."

This resentment--anger, really; it's quite powerful--has been with me a long, long time, in reaction to various situations. Sometimes it has been justified, as in 3rd grade when I got up for Show and Tell and explained to everyone that girls could do anything boys could do and the whole class booed me and the teacher told me to sit down. Or as in college when during a very general conversation about women's issues, a man actually told me that a woman who wore a short skirt and/or no underwear deserved to be raped. Or as in blah when blah during blah did blah. Or as in blah when blah. Or as in blah.

But I am not currently being wronged by some ignorant teacher or some uninformed children or some college prick. I am feeling wronged because I am breast-feeding, and since I am breast-feeding, at times I do everything. That's how it is. That's how it works. And I feel especially wronged in the middle of the night when I'm exhausted and I leave the husband contentedly sleeping while I get up and perform my duties.

Of course I blame my personality and general shoulder-chip for my malcontentedness, but mostly I think I blame the stilted messages I got from the Women's Movement during the 70s. Never, not once, growing up with a feminist mother and slogans everywhere and principles here and equality there did I hear anyone characterize motherhood as anything other than a burden, a way to keep women submissive and unhappy and chained to the home. And breast-feeding makes this skewed and culturally biased perspective easy to not only buy into but internalize.

So what to do? Scowl a lot? Snap at the husband? Try to make him feel guilty? Complain a lot? Sure. Of course. We all need to purge our frustrations. But none of that really helps. Purging impulsively makes the resentment even worse and my pity-pot much more full of crap. (When you're moved to act by resentment, you tend to do things that you think make you feel better but actually don't. The more it feels like you're making yourself feel better, the more you're totally screwing yourself up.)

The way to get over this resentment is to counter it with positivity, I suppose--with the love I feel for Ian when after nursing him in the rocker at 3am I prop him up on my shoulder, his cheeks two perfect, chubbed circles at my chin and his mouth an open pucker. Or when after chomping on my tit, ravenous after no food for 6 hours, he sighs with relief and squeezes my tee shirt into folds with his hands and mmms himself deeper into the nursing pillow. Or when I sniff his soft clean head before placing his heavy little body gently back onto his mattress.

Maybe these moments would overtake the resentment if I paid more attention to them, if I let them soak into me for all their temporary worth. I think the thing to do here is to not act from resentment--when I feel that familiar adolescent pang, that sinsiter desire to blame someone for something that isn't anybody's fault, I have to simply not act on it. At all. Maybe zooming in on love for my son, on the beauty and transience of the most difficult moments, will help me grow up.

Mouth

2006-02-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

Ian likes to lie under his mobile, kick his sleeper-feet, and coo to Beethoven redone in Sing-Song Baby. After a few minutes Ian re-discovers his fingers and we hear these loud, sloppy, suction- slurps that echo from his room, which is at the front of our house, all the way through the back of our house, where we might be watching TV or working at our desks. His deep and booming slurps are a jovial sound of someone who loves his flesh, who loves flesh in general, and who cannot care who knows it.

The saliva is at times too much for him; it bubbles from his lips and drips down his chin and coats his shirt collars and his hands and his fingers. His hands are always cold because they are always wet. Whenever one of us goes to pat his mouth and chin dry, he grins. Maybe he loves the attention, maybe he loves getting his skin dry, or maybe he loves the feel of parent-fingers through soft terry cloth.

One night when the husband was sleeping in the other room and I was "on," since the husband had to work the following day, Ian was cultivating a grunt-fest, which I ignored because it usually doesn't mean anything is wrong. But after a few hours of no sleep, I checked him out, and his entire head was in a thick puddle of drool, a perfect shaded period on the fitted co-sleeper sheet. I changed the sheet and nursed him in order to make myself feel better.

If he had his way, he would sleep on a mattress of warm, parent flesh, enabling him to hear the muted thunk-thunk of a heart whenever he wanted to. If he had his way, he would inhale his fingers until his tongue muscle was sore, he would suck on his rubber telephone until it actually rang, he would chew on his knuckles until the bones were made soft. And if he could, he would stand up and yell, "I have found my tongue and discovered my saliva and these fingers are mine and god damn do they taste good."

Tired and Neurotic

2006-02-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

I now know the meaning of tired. I never experienced true tiredness before. My life has changed.

The husband and I returned to work last week: no more he-spells-me-in-the-morning for my few extra hours, no more I-spell-him. Ian is now sometimes sleeeping up to 6-7 hours, which means that some of you might be asking, why is Anna so tired since her child sleeps so damn much? Isn't she one of the lucky parents?

Lucky parent: yes. Lucky person: not really. I was hoping and counting on Ian's existence as a means to change my neuroses. I think I was thinking that they would just sort of go away--that I wouldn't be what the husband calls a "Freak Sleeper" after the baby arrived. I thought being a mother would make me sort out my priorities, that I would no longer have time or energy to experience insomnia or fitful nights or defeating self-criticism.

And I was right: I don't have time for any of those things anymore. I now seem to make time for them. Ian's sleeping, for example, is comparable to the noises of a steam engine: grunt, kick, groan, sigh, grunt, grunt, grunt. Push the poop out, oof it through that GI tract. Or sigh and slurp to the sight of that nipple pumping in y your mind. He sleeps in our room, so it keeps me awake a lot of the time. The husband has of course adapted to the situation and become a harder sleeper--he only wakes (most of the time) when Ian needs to be fed or changed.

I am apparently non-adaptable. A child? A miracle? Sorry--not quite enough. I am in fact a lighter sleeper now, I think. Ian might be snoozing away, and I'm lying there freaking out because I haven't gotten any sleep and I don't know when I'll ever get some ever again but loving my child like nothing else on earth. It's very confusing.

We're going to move him into his nursery--to a crib--this weekend, and I'm terribly disappointed in myself. I had images of snuggling with Ian in my bed and sleeping like a big family of cherubs until he was at least a year old. Well, too bad. Mom's got the fits and not even the weight of a child can make them go away. And I worry about him, all alone in the dark, wondering where the hell he is, kicking bubbles out of his butt all by himself, waking to the sight of a ceiling and not to the smell of his parents.

And of course he'll be fine--babies sleep by themselves ALL THE TIME. They GET USED TO IT. He will not be traumatized by such an action. Seems that I will be, though, and this certainly makes it clear that the weight of a child has also done nothing to alleviate my tendency toward the dramatic.

Damn. It's a good thing he's so fucking cute.

Clothing Makes the Man

2006-01-24T21:29:00.000-08:00

Why dress a baby? Ian poops several times a day, so removing layers and then redressing him is a lot of trouble; he won't remember anything until he's at least 3, so he'll never know he spent the first 3 years of his life in pajamas with giant, convenient zippers and easy snaps; he grows out of everything in a matter of weeks, so buying new clothes becomes costly, even if you do frequent Ross Dress for Less; and putting on so many different items--diaper, onesie, pants, shirt or diaper, shirt, pants, sweater, socks, or diaper, long-sleeved onesie, pants, hat, socks, jacket--seems like too much bother when you can plunge him into a soft fleecey jumper thing and seal him right up and be done with it all.

The husband agreed with me on this wholeheartedly, so for the first two months of his life, Ian wore pajamas all the time--giant one-pieces with feet in them and long sleeves. The other day, though, I started thinking about all the clothes we got as gifts and hand-me-downs that were just sitting there in drawers, being wasted. I was also thinking about all the newborns I've seen who are in fact dressed--by their tired parents. I was also thinking that keeping him in pjs might be somehow disrespectful in the same way that you can sort of shrug at a baby and think, oh, he doesn't care that his hair's dirty, he's just a baby; or, he doesn't care that you sometimes cry back at him when he cries, he's just a baby; or, he doesn't care that he has smelly ears, he's just a baby; or, he doesn't care that he didn't get a walk in the park today, he's just a baby.

And what do people think of us, if we never dress him? Do they look at the husband and I and say, Wow, those people are still leaving that child in pajamas--what's up with them? And I started feeling a little guilty about taking him out in public in pjs--I don't go out in public in pjs. I don't know anyone who does. So why should Ian? Why don't I just get over all this it's-too-much-trouble bullshit and accept the fact that everything is going to be trouble from now on and put some fucking clothes on my son? Why do I have to make such a federal case out of everything?

So I dressed him for the first time, in a striped onsie and a pair of miniature painter pants and a teeny weeny sweatshirt with a hood. I pulled little white socks on his feet. He cooed the whole time, as he tends to do when he's on the changing table (his favorite place) as he looks up at me, his smile a huge, perfect half-moon, happy as anyone on earth. He was not at all upset by the way the waistband felt against his eternally bloated belly. He didn't mind the clothes at all. It turned out to be fun.

That's correct: fun. A concept that in my mind was not something one associated with children or babies at all. I thought everything would be a pain in the ass and that life with child would be one grand suffering. But everything is not a pain in the ass, and the suffering is often alleviated by this unbelievable love that makes you want to weep with joy. Many things are a pain in the ass, like sleeplessness, shit stains on the changing table, smelly laundry hampers, a bathtub in a tight space that makes you contort your back if you want a baby with a super-clean butt. But dressing my for the most part quite-content son is not a pain in the ass at all. When I studied him in his clothes, I realized why we might want to dress him, at least once in a while: Ian suddenly became more of person. He was no longer a living fuzzy bedtime toy: he was a living little boy, who was wearing a pair of painter pants, and he was looking up at me, his mouth moving in and out of Os with the excitement of the coming day.

Naps

2006-01-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

Ian dislikes napping. Yesterday and for most days this week, he has refused to nap unless he is in his stroller, being perhaps frantically pushed by his power-walking mother; in his swing, when he doesn't cry like hell in order to be lifted from it; in mine or the husband's lap, when he is not writhing like a worm and crying because of gas, overtiredness, hunger, diaper rash, a knock on the head from one of his mother's thumbnails that she cannot trim often enough, a sleeper that is too small for him, or a diaper filled with peanut-butter poop that he can apparently now produce without a sound.

What must it be like when the only way you can communicate or ask for anything or voice your annoyance or pain is to cry about it? He couldn't possible know he has the potential to talk--couldn't possibly sense the way his tongue might bend against the roof of his mouth or the slat of gum where his teeth will grow. I want to make it more complex because it's so beautiful and touching to do so, but I think he probably just... cries.

This lack of napping had the husband and I worried yesterday. Very worried. Newborns are supposed to get A LOT of sleep to provide a means and setting for their brain functions to develop, and when after 4 hours of intermittent and fitful napping he stayed awake and miserable for 9 hours, I suggested to the husband that we establish a napping routine. This was not informative to him, as our napping and bedtime routines thus far consist of 1) nursing--if it's nighttime, nursing in a dark room with the TV volume low as we watch Season 3 of Northern Exposure, or Grizzly Man, that documentary by Werner Herzog, or Dead Flowers, that overrated film with Bill Murray; 2) letting Ian fall asleep on me and passing him to the husband; and 3) nursing him some more if he doesn't stay asleep.

All the baby literature we've read stresses, in a variety of forms, routines and structure. I am all for routines and structure, but I am such a suggestible and insecure person that the theories of every single author we've read stay with me and make me doubt every move I make in one way or another.

"Will something happen to him if he doesn't get enough sleep?" I asked the husband, as I marched around the living room, holding Little I against my shoulder and shushing softly to imitate the sounds he might have heard in the womb. (Yeah, right. I'm sure "shhhhhhh, shhhhh," sounds EXACTLY like all the blood and water pumping throughout my body). He is now a heavy nugget with bright, alert eyes, even when they're drooping with tiredness.

"Maybe A.D.D.," he said.

"Oh my god." I called my friend in Texas, who is an amazing, non-complaining, devoted mother of two, soon to be three.

"I don't think he gets enough naps," I said. "Like just now, he seemed tired," I said, "so he crashed for ten minutes and he seems fine now."

"Ten minutes isn't very long," she said.

"I know."

"He needs to be getting 14 hours of sleep in 24 hours."

"I think he's getting that," I said. Just not this week. "He's not a good napper."

"My friends have told me that it's one or the other," she said. "Either he takes great naps and doesn't sleep well through the night, or he sleeps at night and doesn't take good naps."

"He sleeps pretty well through the night."

"My kids were just the opposite," she said. "So stop complaining."

Just now, Ian drained both my breasts and fell asleep after nursing, his body nestled between the nursing pillow and my chest. He did not wake up 3 minutes later--an unusual occurrance this week. But I had to get up and let in one of our barking dogs, so I frogged Ian--propped him upright, with his head on my breastbone, and held his chest and torso against me, his legs out around my ribs. He opened his eyes and gazed into my shoulder, then promptly closed them and continued sleeping, his arms limp and floppy at his sides--again, unique behavior this week--so after I let the dog inside I put him in his swing, since I had to pee and couldn't sit down again. (It is at times unfortunate that we as adults have to move.) I put the swing on the slowest setting, went to pee, and watched him when I returned.

To the hum and muted clicks of the motor, Ian slept. He pressed his eyelids tight together, lifted his arms abruptly as if in a panic, grimaced, opened his mouth, and went from a low, uncomfortable moan to an aggressive cry but never opened his eyes. I knelt down and whispered "shhhhhhhh" into his ear and he drifted off again, never having completely woken up to begin with. This minor fit repeated itself every ten minutes or so, his arms jerking straight up and out like a toy soldier's, knocking the tray on his swing. His cries were plaintive and frightened, as if he were dreaming of being chased, of his body falling through space, of an invisible force pulling a nipple from his mouth, of the prospect of eternally staying awake when he didn't at all want to be. Of being powerless.

What does sleep mean for a baby? Sometimes he cries; sometimes he smiles; sometimes he laughs; and sometimes he's so quiet I forget about myself completely and gaze at his tiny eyelids, his lashes the color of wheat and growing every second.

Just So Everyone Can See What An Ass He Is

2006-01-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

"You amaze me," said the husband, as we were catching the last two minutes of the stupidest Law and Order: Criminal Intent I have ever seen.

"What?" I had just finished reading 'My 17 Year Old Soul' to him.

"You took a post about Ian's vaccinations and made it totally about yourself."

"Thanks." Ian was nursing, having just finished pooping all over himself and getting a quick sponge bath. It is so hard to be a baby.

"You spent the first paragraph on him and then immediately turned his pain into some deep comment about yourself."

I glared at him.

"Your ability to turn any event into a comment on your own individual psychology is astounding."

"I'm blogging that."

"Uh-oh."

My 17 Year Old Soul

2006-01-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

Little I got his first round of vaccinations yesterday. Four adult-sized needles filled with whooping cough, polio, a variety of bacteria, diptheria, tetanus. Two big shots in one thigh, two shots in the other. At first he cried so hard he turned fuschia and couldn't breathe, then he gasped for air and howled. By then the nurse was finished and I picked him up and held him good. Poor kid. It's certainly better than polio, but he doesn't know this.

I thought I might cry, watching him suffer like that, but I didn't. I cried later that day, thinking about how red he was and how betrayed he must have felt, smiling and cooing up at the nurse who he thought was his friend before she stuck him. (The fact that he's incapable of judging character at this point--that he seems to love everyone who smiles at him regardless of how I feel about them--is the subject of another post.) Can he feel betrayal at 9 weeks old? Or does he just feel pain?

I found myself wanting to not only tell friends that he had gotten his first round of vaccinations, but to emphasize how horrid it was for me to watch him suffer. I've felt this before--a need to tell someone how were something to happen to Ian, I would never recover; a need to make sure somebody knows how at times I feel like I truly cannot bear to see or hear him cry. I often feel that I must make known the extent and extreme of my love for Ian. It's as if it isn't enough for me to simply feel such intense love for him--I have to make sure people know what intense love I have for him, too.

This led to an argument a few weeks ago with the husband, who felt manipulated by my saying, "I hate to hear him cry," all day long, when we were routinely attempting to get him to sleep somewhere other than our laps. He said he thought I was being passive-aggressive, looking for something from him--accolades for being such a devoted mother. He also thought I was implying that he does not love Little I as much as I do.

Well, the husband didn't feel Ian's limbs pressing against his innards for over nine months, nor does he feed him with fluids of his flesh ten times a day; nor does he nurse him for an hour or more at 3 am every night; nor does he attach plastic flanges to his breasts and get milked like a cow in order to store his food so Little I will not wind up stupid or imprisoned as a result of eating formula instead of breastmilk. The husband's love is limited by his gender, which limits his actions. So no, god dammit, he could not possibly love Little I the way I do. So there! Ha!

However, he does have a point. More than once--much more--I've been overwhelmed by the need to be praised and highly regarded for the degree of my devotion. This need is somewhat comparable to my wanting to tell someone when I do a good deed--donate money to charity, bring food to a sick friend, give a woman walking with her child down the side of a busy street a ride home. I don't think this rather pathetic desire comes solely from the fact that mothers in the U.S. are largely unrewarded and unsupported--I think it comes from the unfortunate desire I've always had deep in my 17 year old soul to be acknowledged and considered REALLY wonderful by other people. I've never been able to feel like a good person, know it, forget about it, and live my life. I've always needed other people.

Damn. So motherhood doesn't alleviate certain shortcomings. I was hoping it might be some sort of saintly cure-all for these kinds of things, as if having a child would make me better, more solid, less insecure, or something.

But now I'm wondering if I need to rethink all this: what if needing the validation of others is simply who I am? Since I've had these longings and desires for the last 32 years, I might consider this a possibility--I could perhaps accept this rather than condemn myself for it. It's not as if needing other people is such a terrible thing--it doesn't have to mean I'm weak or wierd. (Although I am kind of wierd.)

And maybe everyone in the world should spend a lot more time appreciating mothers, looking at them as they hug their children and telling them that they're terrific, that their natures and abilities and instincts are sublime. That they should totally accept themselves in the same way so many of them totally accept their kids.

Sleep

2006-01-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Sleeping is very difficult for most babies; it often is for mine. Apparently, when Little I goes from one state of wakefulness to another--light sleep to deep, or alert awake to light sleep--he gets unnerved because he doesn't know what to do. When I'm tired, I go to sleep: I lie down on the couch or on my bed with a book or a magazine and drift pretty quickly into a 10 minute drooly-nap, or I go to bed for the night and sleep hard and long. It's very different for Ian; when he becomes tired, he does not know that all he has to do is lie back, close his eyes and relax. So sometimes he cries. Sometimes he shoots into an intense fit of crying. (We have learned that an explosive cry generally means he's tired; we have also learned that if Ian is not in our arms, which is not often, he will probably cry for anywhere from 5-15 minutes before he falls asleep.)

I've been trying to understand what Ian must feel like in these eerie sleepy times, and the only thing I can compare them to are those few times in my life where I've fallen asleep during daylight, at say 4 pm, and awakened at 6 pm, after it's turned dark, and I sit up and think I've been asleep all night. I quickly pull off the covers or flip my legs around and get off the couch and I think it's 3 am or midnight or 10 pm or that it's a lot later than it is, that I've been asleep for two days or something, and I panic until I see a clock and realize what's going on and what day it is. Basically, I wake up in a state of fear. I look at Ian now and wonder if he isn't experiencing something like that whenever he wakes up. I think he probably is.

And of course when he sleeps, he most often falls asleep in one place and wakes up in another place, which would leave anyone extremely disoriented, whether you knew day from night or not. (And the poor kid is disoriented enough: according to something I read yesterday, he isn't even yet aware that the fingers he's sucking on are part of his body.) So this means that sleep is scary for Ian. It is not a source of comfort. You could even say that all this waking and sleeping is somewhat traumatic.

I've also been thinking about how I slept as a young child and what that was like, how I was put to bed and when I woke up and how I felt. I recall getting to sleep pretty smoothly, and I did have a routine of sorts that I recall: one of my parents tucked me in and sung me a lullaby. Their voices weren't awful. My mother's was high and airy, but when she dropped her pitch you could feel the vibration in her chest; my father's was a lot like his speaking voice--strong but not at all tense. I remember one of them sitting on the edge of my bed, singing, kissing me goodnight, and leaving the room. I think I fell asleep most of the time. I never wandered into their room to sleep with them or with one of them after they separated. When I couldn't sleep, I lay there until I could. I never, ever slept in my parent's bed. I guess I didn't need to, didn't want to--maybe because I knew that they were unhappy, and maybe because my father snores like an locomotive in need of repair. His snores are a big part of my memories--wall-shaking, loud, scraping snorts of breath that when they woke me caused me to tiptoe through the hallway and close his bedroom door, terrified I would wake him up.

I remember being terrified more often than I'd care to, and I don't know why this was--my father certainly never hit me and didn't often yell at me; waking him was no cause for fear. The size of the house we lived in was to me very large--a two-story, quaky, drafty farmhouse that seemed cavernous and dark. I think the possibilities the house presented--all the space between the shadows of walls and furniture, the dead silence between the creaks of the floor, the groans of the front stairway--scared me, but what most scared me was the way I felt because my family was so damned screwed up. I slept and waked beneath a scratchy blanket that had belonged to my grandmother and adjacent to a giant lilac bush outside my window that scraped against my screen. I knew where I was, but I didn't know anything about where I was or why things were the way they were. I felt distant from my family and from the house I lived in, and when I woke up in the night to slip down the hallway to the bathroom, I felt lonely. I felt like there were invisible barriers between me and my surroundings. I felt isolated.

Logical or not, that's how I felt--and I look at Ian now and I see him walking into our bedroom if he's afraid of something or if he can't sleep; I want him to feel as much a part of his house and his family as if he's a finger on his own hand. I have such high hopes for doing everything right. I never thought sleep was so important. Sleeping, eating, pooping. God. They're everything. They're largely everything he is right now; they are what defines him and shapes his personality and his mood and his soul. He is in a sense all body, all visceral. All human in the most primitive sense.

2006-01-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

"I've been thinking a lot lately," I said to the husband. "And I've made a tentative decision."

"Oh yeah?" he said, flicking the channel from Comedy Central to CNN. Little I was sleeping on a giant pillow, his head curled into the husband's chest. When he sleeps on his side like that, in one of those zipper jumpers, he looks a lot like Mr. Magoo. Cutest damn thing.

"It's very tentative, but I think I do want to have another child."

"Really?" he muted the drone and looked at me.

"Tentative, tentative--but yeah."

"We should probably do it as soon as possible."

"I know." Ian's arms jerked up, as they often do while he's sleeping. He grunted like a miniature bear and let out a long sigh. "But this time I'd like you to get pregnant and do all the nursing."

"No problem," he said.

"It shouldn't really be that big a deal," I said. "So let's try it that way."

Poor Kid 1

2006-01-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Last night, the husband and I noticed a mild smell coming from Little I. A little like body odor, except just a bit more rank.

"It smells like butt," the husband said.

"No it doesn't," said our friend, who was over for New Year's Eve soup. We were sitting in the living room, Little I in my lap. The soup was on the stove.

"It doesn't," I said.

"I suppose it couldn't anyway," said the husband, "considering how we wash his ass 13 times a day."

"His head isn't dirty," I said, sniffing him. "I think it's coming from his ears."

"Do you wash them?" asked our friend, sipping the champagne she brought over.

"We have never washed his ears," said the husband.

"I have," I said.

"You have?" asked the husband.

"Several times with those giant Q-tips. Just on the outside." I looked at our friend. "We don't wash him as often as we used to."

"We used to give him a bath every day," said the husband, "until he started hating getting out of the tub and crying for an hour afterward."

"Now it's about every 3 days or so," I said. Another whiff drifted up. "I smell it again."

"What does he do to get dirty, anyway?" asked the husband. Ian cooed and looked into the front window.

This afternoon, as the husband and I are watching the BBC miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring Alec Guiness, I again notice Ian's smell.

"His ears don't look dirty," I say. "We'll give him a good bath tonight." I kiss his head. "Stinky Boy." He has just nursed, just been changed. He's sitting on a pillow on my lap, facing outward, his warm back against my chest. He likes that. He likes to look at things and shadows in the room. But he's beginning to get restless, so I turn him to face me so we can play Bonka, a simple game whereby I bounce him on my knees while chanting, "Bonka, bonka, bonka."

This was when I notice the sizable crease in his neck--a healthy, chubby crease, most of the time, but I notice it because it's red and seems to be filled with something.

"Oh my god," I say. The husband pauses Tinker, Tailor and I turn Ian on his side. "Look at this." I tilt his head to open the crease, which Ian does not appreciate. The crease is indeed quite red, and deep in the fold is this chewy-looking gray stuff.

"Oh no," says the husband. "There's the smell."

"Oh my god," I say again. "It's spit up." I pass Ian to the husband and get up for a warm washcloth.

When I return, we check his other creases and find a little more gray stuff in the fold that connects his chin and his neck. The husband has to gently part each fold and hold it open while I wash it out. Little I doesn't scream--so far, he's not a screamer--but he does cry. It can be very difficult to hold a baby in the position you want. You'd never know this until you try to hold a baby in a position you want, and then you realize how hard it is, how hard the whole thing is.

"He's not liking this," says the husband.

"No," I say. It took me a few times to dry him off. Then at the husband's suggestion, I coated the sore spots with Desitin.

"God, we're awful," I said. "We're disgusting. Poor kid."

"It's not necessarily spit up," the husband said. "It could just be accumulated residue."

"We'll give him a good bath tonight." Then I put a hat on him, and we told him we were sorry, and we carried him out on the porch, where he became distracted by the rhythm of the rain on the front steps.

Hunger

2005-12-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

I have come to accept that the only consistently reliable way to calm Little I is by nursing him. Most of the time he does eat--you can hear him chug and gulp and swallow, and I can see that he's opening his jaws wider to take in the milk. Sometimes he nurses only for comfort: his chin moves only slightly up and down, quickly and rythmically--three chugs and a rest, three chugs and a rest--and he's completely quiet.

Tracey Hogg, who wrote The Baby Whisperer, does not think babies should generally nurse for comfort because it starts bad habits. You want your 12 month old nursing for comfort--your 18 month old?--what kinds of practices do you want to set in place?--and it also drains the mother and inconveniences the parents. Other books express similiar concerns, as did a nurse in Ian's pediatrician's office. "I would do whatever works now," she said, when I called to ask if grunting was a sign of heart failure, "but down the road, you should probably find other ways to get him to sleep, or you might be setting yourself up for a tough time."

After the nurse confirmed the dangers nursing a child for comfort--of more or less eating for comfort--I was so worried about it that I thought Little I might wind up in prison or a mental ward if I didn't find another way to put him to sleep or to soothe his 7-week old soul. I also thought I was a weak and ineffective mother for tossing him a tit too easily, for nurturing Ian's heinous habit of eating for pleasure.

But what a lot of bullshit, really, because who doesn't eat for comfort? Where are these people from, who say that you shouldn't use food to lift your spirits, to ease pain? When I was being treated for builimia, me and other patients tried to buy into the idea that food for comfort was not only detrimental to our psychological development--that it stunted us--but that it was generally self-destructive. We also thought of ourselves as weak-willed and spiritually bereft for relying on food to make us feel good, to release tension.

First of all, the body and the soul are not separate entities, as so many recovery programs imply: if you're hungry, you sure as shit can't be happy. If you're hungry, you can't sit in a classroom and solidly comprehend intellectual material or contentedly play with other children, or take a walk in your stroller without crying, or focus sharply on any task at hand. Second of all, if you're uncomfortable, out of sorts, immersed in a totally new and shocking environment (like a baby), then of course you'll want to eat even if you're not really hungry--going through the motions will simply make you feel like you're grounded. It will make you feel safe.

So while I don't think driving around your home town, eating your second hamburger in five minutes and polishing off a pounder bag of Doritos is a healthy way to alleviate your insecurities, I do think that, after watching my son for the past 7 weeks, eating for comfort is
part of human nature, and if someone is suffering from obesity or bulimia or whatever, their problem is a lot more complicated than weakness of character or will.

I also suspect--and I say suspect because I could be wrong here, but I doubt it--that this don't-use-food concept has been espoused largely by people who have never been chronically hungry, who grew up with plenty to eat. Lucky them, I say, and lucky Ian, who will get fed whenever he asks. And lucky me and other bulimics and even lucky obese people of the Western World--to have so much food in our lives that we have the luxury of skipping a meal, of throwing one up, of wearing our way too many in layers and layers of abundance.

Voracious Fucking Kid

2005-12-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

Aside from labor, birth, and newborn care, nursing is the other element of infant-rearing for which I was utterly unprepared. I don't know what I thought it would be like to nurse--but doing it well, whenever Little I is hungry--changes the meaning of "giving" to something much, much greater than I anticipated. Nursing, like everything else having to do with birth and babies, is visceral and intense.

Last week at a playdate, I was holding Ian in my lap and describing him to other mothers (their children are all 18 months old--the husband, baby and I were just along for the stimulation and exposure). I told them that as Ian nurses, he grunts and groans with pleasure, wheezes and whistles with effort. He's as loud as pipe factory. Sometimes he sounds like he needs medical attention. My concerns about nursing in a public place, in fact, derive not from nervousness about exposing my breast (who cares), but from concern that passersby will think that my son is a strange, perverted hedonist.

"Sometimes," I continued, kissing his head and repositioning his feet against my belly, "he stops right in the middle and licks my nipple, runs his lips around it, and writhes in ecstasy."

The mothers did not startle or appear to be grossed out. They smiled.

"How wonderful," said one.

"That's great," said another. "That you have that with him."

Apparently they did not think--as I did--that Ian was destined toward sexual weirdness or a crippling Oedipal complex. I in turn realized that writhing in ecstasy while sucking your mother's breast is not only normal but indicative of a strong bond, and I suppose it's meant to be a sensual one. I was glad to learn of this through other mothers, and I'm relieved to find that my discomfort with Ian's unrestrained pleasure stems from my own long-standing ignorance about breast-feeding and babies, as well as my inclination toward prudery. I'm certainly not ignorant to the bliss we can all feel from sustenance--I'm just not used to seeing it expressed. So now, watching him nurse makes me feel less disturbed and more strong and capable. Like a good mother.

Nursing, however, is incredibly taxing. On days when Ian has growth spurts, and even on days when he does not, my body and mind are often heavy with exhaustion. I knew he would eat a lot--I had read all about nursing, about how to position the baby and when to nurse and how to care for your nipples and where to go for consultation and support--but I never thought nursing would be tiring. All you do is sit there, right? All I do is sit on my couch with my nursing pillow and my nursing stool and my bottle of water and my remote control and watch Ian eat. I guess it's tiring because nursing does use up a lot of calories, a concrete energy drain, and my body is constantly and consistently generating and producing milk.

But some of the exhaustion certainly comes from the psychological impact. Nursing is a helluva lot of pressure. He needs to eat, and I stop whatever I'm doing or thinking or feeling and tend to him. If he's hungry for the 15th time in 22 hours and I'm too tired to sit upright, tough. My child is hungry. If 20 minutes after a 50-minute feeding Ian is hungry again, tough. My child is hungry. If my nipples are tender and the muscles in my neck are smarting with days of stiffness, tough. My child is hungry. If I am aching in my core to get the hell away from this amazing baby for just a few minutes, just for a little break, tough. My child is hungry. His hunger--above all his other needs, which are infintessimal--is a life-sized trump card. And mothers get trumped more than anyone else in the entire world. This is who mothers are. This is what mothers do.

And I never knew. Never even suspected the magnitude of it all. And if I never knew, then there are a whole lot of other people who don't know, either. I really hope this blog can change some of that.

Getting Schooled

2005-12-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

After all the research I did during pregnancy—a handful or two of books, excessive listening to mothers and doctors and midwives and nurses, consultations with lactation specialists, and the like—I was unprepared for only three things: labor, nursing, and newborn care. (I am working on a labor narrative; it will be posted on Little Pokie in the next few weeks.) Despite my efforts, motherhood is kicking my sorry ass.

So that’s what this blog will be about—my motherly sorry ass being kicked as it has never been before. Sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, and worries about repressed potential are no match for C-Section pain and hormonal crying stupors while you nurse your starving son from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on his first night home from the hospital, or when you hold your son and weep with shock at his beauty and his smallness and his ability to consume you. His power is infinite.

And after watching the Little I cry inconsolably for an hour or so—his Cupid’s mouth open wide, miniature tongue vibrating with the force of each scream, arms spread eagle in distress—the love and contentment I feel as he finally heaves into sleep as I hold him sturdy on my shoulder is astonishing. I have never felt anything so contentedly sublime. The weight of my sleeping son. The weight of a consoled human being.

My ass is definitively kicked.

Welcome the Boy Ian

2005-11-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

Ian (Eye-an). Born November 13, 2005, at 10:45 p.m. Weighed 9 lbs., 14.8 oz. 22 inches long. Eyes wide with wonder and head mashed with discomfort. Took to my breast immediately. Likes to lift his head and crane his neck and make an "O" with his mouth and although the husband and I know it isn't purposeful, he likes to smile often. Has many hangnails and a thin sheaf of blond hair and so far dark blue eyes that enjoy focusing on breasts and ceilings and shadows of backyard trees on the nearest wall.

Does not cry much at all. Fusses instead. Loves to be held held held and fed fed fed. He now bends his arms through sleeves when we dress him. If he's up on one shoulder, he likes to stick out his butt and flex his lower back muscles, just as he did when he was in my womb. (His butt then was located just below my right breast; I cupped it and patted it every day.)

We call him Ian, I-Bird, I-Dog. But our favorite is definitely the title of this blog: Little I. More to come very soon. All kinds of adventures have begun.