I started graduate school (again-long story) and have started a new blog to talk about my research, interests, and learning. It’s called Ms. Michelann. It’s going to deal a lot with feminism, internalized misogyny, gender spectrum, and whatever else I end up doing a lot of research on. Check it out!
|
||||
|
Perhaps I should have taken this as a clue that there is no promised land where we are totally okay with difficult feelings, but I didn’t. At some point I had absorbed the idea that if I was truly enlightened or healthy or whatever I would be totally serene and centered when dealing with the physical and mental exhaustion that comes from all the joy and rage and terror and happiness that babies bring. I didn’t give myself a break and listen to what my trusted friends and mentors told me; parenting is hard, go easy on yourself. Instead, my inner critic kept saying things like, “If your were healthy you wouldn’t be so scared. You wouldn’t get so angry.” So I took already difficult emotions and piled judgement and censure on top. I don’t mean to pathologize myself particularly. We all enter parenthood singularly unprepared for its demands. I don’t care how old or young you are, or what gender. Parenthood is the ultimate humbler, and I think the more together your shit, the further you have to fall. We all start off totally incompetent and inexperienced. If it was a job we were interviewing for, we would not get hired. However, my daughter has recently forced me to recognize that everyone tries to get away from bad feelings, including little kids who hopefully haven’t been on the planet long enough to have trauma-induced behavioral patterns. She is learning to recognize and verbalize her feelings. It’s an amazing thing to see – if she is having a totally non verbal tantrum, and I can help her verbalize her feelings, the intensity of the feelings instantly decreases. As soon as she says, “I’m sad!” the emotion starts to dwindle. When another kid knocks her down or takes a toy, she tells them what she wants and how she feels about it – she doesn’t automatically run to an adult to mete out judgement and punishment, because that’s not how her parents and her school deal with it. I’m very proud of all these things. But what is remarkable to me is how hard it is for her to get out of her lizard brain and activate her verbal centers. I mean, here is a kid with an amazing sense of self. She is loved and loving, spunky, and resilient. Hopefully we have done well (so far) in setting boundaries without shaming her and damaging her self image. Not that we are without daily screw ups, but I have yet to see her really internalize a bad feeling about herself. She gets angry or sad when she doesn’t get her way, but not ashamed. Shamed children tend to look hunched over, or frozen, or have a glazed look in their eyes. I’ve watched it happen to other kids and it’s not pretty. The funny thing is I had this unconscious assumption that her strong self meant that she would exhibit my idealized zen monk-like ability to tolerate her emotions. As it turns out, my fairly healthy and normal three year old really dislikes being sad or angry or scared, too. Go figure. A couple months ago when she would cry about something (usually something I wouldn’t let her have or had to take away from her – no, you can’t play with the screwdriver, or splash in the toilet bowl, or sit on the dog) she would tearfully say. “I don’t want to be sad! I want to be happy!” Because being sad is really uncomfortable. It’s not a learned thing, and it’s not a product of our weird society. It’s just hard. She has yet to understand that all feelings are transitory – every moment looms very large in her experience. Her latest cry is, “I want my feelings back!” I’m not sure how to interpret this, but I have an idea. Feelings like sadness or anger are usually brought on by an external event – often another person. I can imagine that when something makes her suddenly sad or scared she feels like her good feelings had been taken away from her. A few months ago our dog Persephone grabbed a piece of bread out of her hand. She spent the next 30 minutes screaming, “Give me back my bread Sephy! Give it back!” I guess Persephone took her good feelings away when she stole the bread. The harder thing is to teach her that emotional pain is temporary and usually not physically dangerous. It doesn’t make it feel better in the moment, but it helps to tolerate the feeling until it passes. Her sense of the passage of time is still very different from mine, so this is a challenge. Who am I kidding? I have a really hard time remembering the same thing, and I have almost 40 years on her. Anyway, the thing that my daughter has taught me is that everyone dislikes feeling sad, scared, or angry most of the time. Occasionally sadness is cathartic and feels like a huge relief, but I think it’s rare. There is a part of our brain that can’t distinguish between physical danger and psychological danger, and that part can get very loud (much like a three year old) when we are upset. Everyone retreats to that non-verbal, lizard brain place when the feelings become overwhelming, and that is where it becomes difficult to remember that this feeling isn’t forever, it’s just right now. So watching my daughter struggle with what is is to be human has helped me realize that there is nothing wrong with my struggle. And anyone who tells you that you are having uncomfortable feelings because there is something wrong with you, instead of because life is just that way, is full of it. Okay, so I’ve had two different but connected experiences lately. Some women I know are pregnant for the first time, or just had babies, and I desperately want to give them unsolicited advice. I know, everyone gives unsolicited advice to pregnant and new moms. But mine is so good! Mine isn’t all intrusive and fucked up like all that other advice, really! Except I think I just weird people out. Just like I was weirded out when people told me seriously random shit about their horrific childbirth experience, or post-partum healing, or whatever. When it’s your first time, all you want to do is stick your fingers in your ears and go, “LALALALALALALA!” And honestly, that might be the smartest thing. Everyone’s experience of pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and new parenthood is totally different. And the advice-givers are more interested in validating their decisions or sharing their trauma than helping. Hmm. That might apply to me as well. The other thing is I keep daydreaming about getting pregnant again. It would have to be an immaculate conception because David will move to Mexico to be a dive instructor before he gets me pregnant and signs on for another 1.5 years of Crazy Alternate Wife. I think some of it has to do with wanting to get another shot at doing it right. Which is nuts for more reasons than I can count. Also, my hormones (a.k.a. Continuation of the Species Chemicals) tell me there is nothing more beautiful and desirable than getting pregnant right before a fucker of a hot summer. Because they lie and they hate me. So I give you, “Stuff I wish I’d know/done/ignored before and after birth” in the hopes that I will no longer feel the need to brain dump on unsuspecting pregnant women or beg my husband to knock me up again. I’ll let you know how that works out. Pregnancy stuff I think you need/should know/do
Birth
Parenthood
Wow, that was fun! Lillian turned a year old a few weeks ago. I have been seriously slow in getting this post written. To be fair, I was teaching my first class, grading a truckload of papers, throwing a rather large party, and hosting my parents. Then I fell over and died. It was actually pretty fun, though exhausting. Did I mention I love teaching? I really, really love teaching. I’m pretty much focusing everything right now on trying to find more teaching gigs, though it may take a while. I’m also looking at starting a PhD. For realz. Back to the baby stuff. The party was a big success and Lillian looooooved the extended attention from her maternal grandparents. Lucky for me, she didn’t start walking till a couple weeks later, so she was more easily contained during the madness. Here are some adorable pictures:  Trying her new rocking elephant with Grandma Nancy  Feeding Mama  Opening presents.
Tiffany made amazing coconut cupcakes with mango filling. David and his friend Chris made excellent fajitas. The babies made a mess. A good time was had by all. You can see lots more pictures here. The last month has been baby-birthdaypalooza. All the babies in our playgroup are turning one and having parties. This weekend we have two! That first birthday party is a crazy gauntlet! It’s not like the babies will remember it, but I personally felt like I needed to get in touch with all the people who thought I’d fallen off the earth in the last year. Next year her party will probably be more about Lillian and less about us. All the parties have been different, but fun. We’ve eaten a lot of cupcakes. It’s been cool hanging with all the parents and babies and realizing we’ve all made it through the first year more or less intact. Since then Lillian has started walking, which is crazy. She is so coordinated, and so very mobile. She has also decided that high chairs are for punks, so my days of long lunches with friends seem to be over. She has also decided that nursing is boring and stupid and she likes her straw cup full of whole milk way more. She’s not totally weaned, but we’re getting close. It’s all happening a little fast for me! Slow down, kid.
I think I’m having an identity crisis. How fucking cliché is that? I get so bent out of shape when I feel like I “fail” at mothering (or housewifing). Failure can be not getting the baby to nap, not getting the laundry folded and put away, not making a good dinner, making a good dinner but not making it from scratch, not paying enough undivided attention to Lillian, not running enough errands, running too many errands, and the list goes on. And on. Does it seem a little crazy? Uh, yeah. I take parenting criticism waaay to personally. This is crazy, because I’m REALLY GOOD at taking criticism usually. I’ve been a musician, a grad student, and an entrepreneur. All of those things are like taking criticism for a living. You listen, take what works, discard the rest. Not internalize it and use it to define your value as a mother! Argh! I was all into being an entrepreneur before I had Lillian, and now I don’t know what I’m into, or what I’m good at. But solely defining myself by my expertise (or lack thereof) as a mother is not good for my psyche. Granted, the last few days have been spectacularly crappy, but I’m tired of getting exhausted and emotional. Lillian and David and I have all had a bad stomach flu for the last several days, each of us in different but nasty stages at the same time. If I had a sneak preview of this particular type of experience before I got pregnant I would have run screaming the other way. It’s not as bad as the first six weeks postpartum, but it’s running a close second. I guess if I try to get back to my Buddhist roots, not having an identity is ideal. Letting go of labels is a good thing, right? But the problem is I’ve taken on UberMother as my identity and I’m not her. I’m just a new mother who fucks up just about the same amount as every other new mother. So every moment I’m not UberMother I feel like a big FAIL. Which is silly. Being older has some advantages and disadvantages. Having some wisdom, flexibility, and adaptability are good things. I think I generally make good decisions for Lillian because I don’t take the party line on parenting and I don’t react the opposite direction. I look at what’s going on and adapt as necessary. I’m aware enough of my own emotions to not let them cloud my decision making process as much as I would have when I was younger. But being at a stage in my life when I feel like I have my shit basically together, and then suddenly not knowing which end is up is a little trying, especially nine moths out. Maybe it would have been easier if I was younger? Or maybe not. Maybe this shit is just hard. I’m not going to write a whole lot about it since it’s all about the pictures. We had two Halloween events – a Weds. play date and a barbecue at our house on Halloween Sunday. The first helped us figure out how much dressing and photography the babies would tolerate for the second, so we got really good pictures the second time. The party was a blast, everyone seemed to have a good time, including the babies. There was some excellent food which I neglected to take pictures of. You know where my priorities lie these days. I am, however, eating some dairy now with no ill effects and very slowly easing into the soy. This makes mama happy. Enough about me. Pictures!  Tinkerbell!  Such happy, well behaved babies!  Whoops.  Yes, I dressed my child up like a fairy and put her on a pumpkin. Sue me.
 Chaos eventually ensues.  Yes, I dressed like a fairy too. I know.
 No, I'm not teething. Why do you ask? Lillian turned seven months old on Saturday. That last month just disappeared. But major stuff happened during it. We got our first cold. Then we got it again. Yuck! Two sick parents and a sick baby = not so fun. But we staggered by like always. I’m starting to mend other than my useless lungs which insist on pretending they have asthma despite the metric ton of steroidal inhaler I’ve pumped into them. Man I hope Lillian does not have my asthma, because yuck. At least it’s way easier to treat these days. More fun stuff: crawling! Really crawling. Not almost/slightly/scooting/army crawling – the real deal. Don’t believe me? Bam! [flickr video=5023498671 secret=8880833235 w=400 h=225] Every day she’s getting better and faster at it. It took her about a week to make the mental connection: see object – go get object (insert object in mouth/bang against other objects). Now she’s got it and is booking it around the house. She’s also pulling herself up to standing on stuff, and grabbing stuff out of baskets (laundry, toys). She says Mama a lot these days. Or more accurately, “MAMAMAMAMAMA” – especially when she’s upset. I think she’s supposed to be too young to associate the sound with me yet, but tell me that when she’s shouting across the house at me. I thought she was teething for the last week. She had a big swollen lump on her top gum, but it kept not showing up. After a spectacularly fussy day on Saturday, I felt around her gums again and there it was, all pointy and hard. That brings our grand total of visible teeth to three. For whatever reason, ’tis the season for dead rodents to be left around the house by well-meaning terriers. They considerately leave them where Lillian is most likely to be playing, necessitating a lot of disinfecting and vacuuming. Loki is very competitive with the baby, and has limited tolerance for her hi-jinks, especially when they involve crawling on top of him and pulling his ears. This might be revenge? A peace offering? Mostly it’s just really icky. Lillian is just an awesome kid. Even when she’s got this icky cold, she’s really funny and active and curious. I can’t wait for all of us to be healthy again. The weather has turned in Texas and it’s finally starting to feel like Fall. We’re going to spend more time outside and take advantage of the cooler temperatures.  The Princess surveys her subjects.
I’ve thought a lot about the nature of perfectionism – my perfectionism in particular – and how it is totally screwing me as a parent. Perfectionism has pervaded most my life. I’ve always felt that I’m either “not enough” or “too much” and neither of those options are acceptable. For example, I’ve felt like my body is too much by nature of being on the roundish side. That it takes up too much space, that it’s not attractive enough, firm enough; it’s not enough and too much at the same time. This perception makes it hard to be comfortable with my body, and it makes it harder to take good care of it because I never reach my own standards. I really wish I could exercise every day. It makes me feel better mentally, physically, and emotionally. But it just doesn’t work out that way all the time. Sometimes I have to make it to an appointment. Sometimes it’s just too dang hot to take the baby outside for a walk. Sometimes I want that extra hour of sleep after being up 5 times during the night. I realize that I’ve faulted myself for not exercising “enough” even though all the above reasons are valid. That every day I don’t exercise is a FAIL. What if I stopped looking for enough and started going for “the best I can do right now”? Wouldn’t that be wild? Especially when I was a singer, I clung to my perfectionism like a barnacle. I thought it gave me an edge; without it I wouldn’t be any good. But it really just caused me a lot of pain and wasted energy. When I’d listen to a recording of myself I’d invariably decide it was crap because it had audible flaws. Especially I’d felt like it was a good performance before I heard the recording. There was no good enough, only perfection or failure. And since perfection isn’t attainable, guess how I felt most of the time? I realize that I’ve applied these same standards to parenting. If I can’t get Lillian to nap enough (what the hell is enough?) during the day, I’ve failed. If I don’t narrate my whole day to her, sing her songs, dance with her, read her books, and otherwise force her brain to develop I’ve failed. If she has a bad night, I’ll review everything I did the day before and find some reason it’s my fault. This is totally insane. There is no perfection. It’s an ideal that changes from moment to moment. And trying to apply it to taking care of my child is bad for me and probably not great for her. So my new mantra is “I’m not perfect.” This probably seems uninspiring, but I really used to get my panties in a twist about not being perfect. Now I’m trying to take comfort and refuge in it. It’s okay that I didn’t do yoga today because I’m not perfect. It’s okay that the dinner I made the other night was kind of crappy because I’m not perfect. Instead of thinking “FAIL!” I’m just thinking “I’m not perfect.” It’s pretty relaxing to realized that I can ditch that checklist of things I think I’m supposed to do every day on Lillian’s and my behalf and just get what I can done. And some of what I want, too.  Cara, Lillian, Nimue, Lola, Leighton, Isabel, Stella, and Charlie at Cristina's playgroup It’s all about playgroup. When I was going to prenatal yoga several times a week towards the end of my pregnancy, a few of the other regulars and I started to get to know each other. In prenatal yoga you check in at the beginning of class, and instead of just saying you have a sore back, you can bitch about your husband, talk about your latest ultrasound, or ask the group if they know any cures for nausea or edema or whatever. It’s very bonding, and it really helped me not lose my mind, during the last trimester especially. Just as we were starting to make some social plans outside of class we all started having our babies. A few weeks later we reconnected on Facebook and tentatively began to talk about some of the struggles we were having with our drastically new lives. When I was about 5 weeks postpartum we had our first meetup at Izzos Tacos. I remember mostly being in a sleep-deprived haze. We were all deep in the trenches at that point and just kind of getting by. Some of us were getting out and about, and some were hiding at home shaking (that would be me). Soon after that I hosted my first playgroup, and we each started inviting other new mamas we knew into our informal group (Tiffany, for example, is my bellydance pregnancy buddy and she drags her butt from north to south Austin weekly to playgroup). At some point we realized that Facebook wasn’t going to work for our ongoing chats because we couldn’t easily invite new mamas in, so I set up a group on BigTent.com and we were in business! So from those early days of posting our woes on Facebook in the middle of the night to now – we have 15 mamas and babies in our group and at least one playdate a week, usually more. We go swimming, go to movies, go to yoga, and mostly just hang out, bitch, and eat. We have a ton of forums on our website and we lean on each other to give advice, commiserate, celebrate, and just plain keep us company at all hours. The first year of mamahood is wicked isolating, and I totally would have lost my shit by now if I didn’t have these fine ladies to talk to. Lillian seems to enjoy our activities, and it’s fun to watch all the babies develop and change, and see their individual personalities emerging. I also feel this group is an incredible gift to the new mamas who are joining – it’s so hard in the beginning and it seems like the more we understand we’re not alone, the easier and more fun it gets. Inviting a stressed-out mama to join our group feels like a huge mitzvah to me. Please enjoy some photos of our babies and mamas:  The early days: Lillian, Charley, Isabel and Cara at my house  Cristina and Stella working on tummy time  Tiffany and Cara at Cristina's playdate  Tori and Nimue  Daddies Mike and Sean with Nico and Cara at Heather's Potluck  Babies: Isabel, Lillian Lola, Atticus, Stella, and Cara Mamas: Jamie, Susan's feet, Addie, Cristina, and Tiffany at Susan's weekend Playgroup  Lillian and my feet attending playgroup at Andria's  Heather with Charley and Arely with Nico
Lillian’s pediatrician is so fired. I’m making an appointment with a new doctor this week. Lillian had slipped slightly on the weight chart. I pointed out that not only is she very active and strong, she is also good and chunky – she’s just small. The pediatrician admitted she looked great, but kept referring back to the chart. Then she told us to start giving her rice cereal once a day – she’s barely four months old – and that would increase her caloric intake. Apparently I’m supposed to make my kid chunkier than she needs to be so that she fits a number. I have a friend who takes her baby to another doctor in the same practice. Her kid was born four days before mine and weighs 4 lbs more than Lillian, yet her doctor also suggested rice cereal at four months. So if my baby is underweight and her baby is not, why are we getting the same advice? This sounds like a blanket policy they created that is enforced however the particular pediatrician feels like, and has nothing to do with the needs of the individual child. A sidebar to this conversation – I suspect that Lillian may be small boned, which means she could weigh less and have more body fat. Which means she’ll never look quite right on a chart. I had the same problem the other direction. When I was 17 I decided to basically stop eating partly so I could meet the maximum weight for my height on Weight Watchers – 113 lbs. I didn’t start eating like a normal person again until I hit 117 lbs, started getting dizzy a lot, and saw a doctor told me I had no body fat and needed better nutrition. Did I mention I hate charts (and most doctors)? Anyway, I told her everything I’d read said that the AAP recommends breastmilk exclusively till 6 months, and that cereal doesn’t increase calories, it decreases them (it’s far more filling and less nutritious). She told me my information was outdated and insisted we start solids or we’d have to come back in for a weighing. For the record, I was right about the AAP. I’m not sure why pediatricians are pushing solids at four months when the research shows otherwise. I want a pediatrician who 1) Can give me valid scientific data on why I’m supposed to do something that is widely recommended against and 2) Who values my opinion and common sense over a freaking chart that by the way, was created in the 50s based on formula-fed babies. I called my lactation consultant after Lillian’s appointment to check out some of this stuff and she said as long as Lillian had gained a pound a month (she’s gained more) she didn’t have an issue. Have I mentioned I love my lactation consultant? I was proud of myself for arguing with the doctor instead of just taking everything she said as writ. She’s dogmatic and rigid, and I’ve decided that does not work for my family. I’ve also decided that we blew the digestive issues WAY out of proportion, partly due to her approach. I’m going to start adding soy and dairy back into my diet in moderation. That’s a story for another time. All about poop! |
||||
|
Copyright © 2023 Non-Linear with Miss Michelann - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||
