The few, the proud ... the parents of multiple children

Invoking my "do-not-have-to-summarize-everything-that-has-happened-since-I-last-posted" clause ... NOW!

This post is dedicated to my sistas from another mister, those of you with two or more kiddos. I am humbled before your tired feet and your frazzled mind.

Allow me to explain. Tonight my hubs is going to be home later than usual. Notice I did not say late, just *later*. He will be here long before the kiddo goes to bed.

However, it is now about 20 minutes or so past the time one of us (between the kiddo and I) starts to peer out the front windows, hoping - for very different reasons - that we will soon see our crappy little rundown truck pull up. (The kiddo: "Ahh! Daddy daddy daaaaaaaadyyyyyyy! Mama, it's daddy! He's home!" Me: "Oh thank god.")

And I am already starting to question everything that led up to having a child.

“Any parent who is honest will tell you, you live with that ambivalence. You look at the face of your beautiful, lovely child and you think two things at the exact same time: ‘I love this kid so much that it ‘s changed my whole life. I love other people more because of how much I love her. I love people that died years ago more. My love has traveled time because of how completely I love her and she loves me back. She’s completely given value to life that didn’t exist before and I regret every decision that led to her birth’. That’s how it feels.”

—	Louis C.K.

And she's one.

Today, at 9:42 a.m., my kiddo turned one year old.

The BabyCenter emails I receive weekly have changed from a subject line of, "My Baby This Week" to "My Toddler This Week." That stinks. I think I'll unsubscribe from those emails.

She opened her present of books, a drum and a coat this morning. As expected, once she tore through the tissue paper, climbed over the drum and chewed on the books, she has moved on to pulling magazines down off a shelf she has only recently been able to reach, and trying to pry open the one DVD case we forgot to move out of her reach.

The dog and cat prepared a little something for her special day - from the dog it was/continues to be full facial licking, and from the cat it appears to be a resolve to not run away immediately.

The day has only just begun; we have plans to visit our midwife with homemade brownies in tow and to buy a child bike trailer as a one-year gift to ourselves.

Last night, before falling asleep, I read her birth story...at least, as much as I have written down. It may have happened 365 days ago, but I feel more ownership and more deep pride at her birth than ever before.

Happy birthday to me.

Weird Mother's Day

I feel a bit weird about this coming Mother's Day.  It's always been an awkward day for me.  Also, I don't much care for flowering plants.

This year is the first year that there is visual proof of my momness, so I am pretty sure that this Mother's Day applies to me.  And that's weird.  It makes me feel old.  And soccer mom-ish.  And minivan mom-ish.  And flowery cards with some lame missive inside-ish.

Which is weird because I think being a mom is more like Rosie the Riveter-ish, or Lara Croft-ish.

Anyway, I guess this is all just to say I don't like flowering plants if I can't eat them.  

Rope. End.

I love my kid.  Most of the time.

However, you wouldn't know it today when I yelled at her (maybe more like raised my voice) on my second attempt to get her down for a nap.

And you know what she did?  She kissed me.  Okay, for her it is more like coming at me with her little cute mouth, probably hoping I'll feed her some sort of yummy snack that I have hidden in my pocket because big people always have delicious solid food snackies with them, but it looked like she was coming in for a kiss and so that is what I did.

And then I asked for forgiveness from whom or whatever gave me such a good kid that when something goes wrong I don't know what to do so I act like a damn idiot.

Baby Addiction

Hi, I'm a new mom and I have a baby addiction.

Hi, new mom.

It started out innocently enough - the first few days after she was born I was uncomfortable going anywhere (in my own house) that was far from her, for fear she would start to scream and need to be fed immediately.

It turned into a nervous internal voice waking me up to turn on her little SnuggleNest light to make sure she was a) still breathing; and b) not gagging on her own spit up.

Now, it's gotten to the point where yesterday, when hubster took a nap upstairs with said baby and left me downstairs, I made food, cleaned some stuff up and then had no idea what I should be doing.

For me, this is different than the idea of baby as narcotic (see this great article sent to me by another new mom friend: Katie Roiphe: My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic. This isn't necessarily something pleasurable - it just is.

The article got me thinking. Yeah, I call myself a feminist and have done so for a long time (feminism - the other f word). Yeah, I'm taking a significant chunk of time off from work, more than I have taken since I started working some decade and a half ago. Yeah, my plans after that aren't even firm enough to be called plans, just ideas about what life could be like if this, this and this happened.

So, yeah, a lot of which which I'd based my personal sense of strong and female on in the past has been twisted into a new form of my life. I haven't yet gotten friendly enough with this new life to figure out why it is uniquely female and inherently strong.

Right now, my baby addiction is functional - I need to do things for this baby to make sure it lives and grows and thrives and bonds with me. When I'm not there, I worry I'm losing those chances to build that deep bond and trust that will benefit both me and this child as she grows. I know, and I hope, that soon that addiction will change into something more like the pleasure high from a narcotic.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

Disclaimer: This is going to be a really scattered post. I haven't posted anything in a while and this topic has been bubbling around in my head for a few weeks. Also, over at http://www.glossolaliac.typepad.com/ there is a much more well thought out post about this. Read the article. Share it with your friends. And for god's sake, help a mama out. Any mama.

Thank you to Al Franken for the title.

Or, maybe more appropriately, this post should be called "Why didn't anyone ever tell me, and why isn't it in the books, just how f'ing hard this will be?"

I was scared about what to do, I had/have a rush of hormones flooding through my body as the pregnancy hormones peter out and the breastfeeding/mama hormones rush in to fill the space, breastfeeding is H.A.R.D. and hurt like hell (my nipples were bruised and cracked, dark red and purple for about a week), I'm healing from essentially running a marathon and, in my case, a tear, and, on top of all that, there is this small, squirmy, little being sleeping in the middle of my bed that cries to be fed on my poor boobs, that makes messy diapers and keeps me and my husband up and away from the life we used to know.

That's the stuff nobody tells you.

Really, I'm almost indignant about it. I feel that, if you have ever had a child before, it is your job, nay, your DUTY, to be realistic with all new moms from then on out. None of this "aren't you just LOVING it?" bull shit.

And, for that matter, what's with the baby books that barely even address the "baby blues" or postpartum depression? How about a little reassurance that postpartum depression is the far, far end of the spectrum and that no, you probably aren't going to go that far down the path. But yes, you will have crazy thoughts about what the hell are you doing and why did you get yourself into this.

Acknowledge the difficulty, acknowledge the darkness out loud so that new moms don't go into their own heads and start to get scared about the thoughts in their heads. We can help each other out if we are honest about what the time period immediately after birth is really like for new mamas.

New mamas are truly doing something extraordinary and we owe all of them the straight dope on the post-pregnancy experience.

It's only by talking about it, by bringing light onto an all too common state of mind, that we can make it less scary and lonely for the millions of women who experience it.

The Transition

Maybe this happens for every soon-to-be mama, but it seems to me there has a come a point where my main focus has gone from protecting with ferocity what I see as my news, my excitement, my prerogative, beyond the decision of the type of birth I want to experience to those all-important, myriad choices of what I will actually do once this little person is here.

Now that people don't need to be told I am expecting my first child, now that the evidence of said arrival is, well, evident anytime you see me, my attention has turned to much more daunting preparations. How long will I breastfeed? Am I jiving with this attachment mothering idea? Am I already setting myself, my husband and my baby up for failure because I don't plan on having them (the baby) sleep in my bed or in one of those bed-attaching crib thingies? How can I make my traditional office job fit in around the edges of the work I actually want to be doing for the next half decade or so? If it doesn't, can I leave it without it being called "dropping out?"

Additionally, how can I shield myself and my family from the ever-increasing outside expectations of how this pregnancy and birth experience will be when those same outside forces also happen to be related to me? How do I express what I want, and is it okay to want what I want when everyone else seems to want something different?

A lot of questions for too early on a Saturday morning from one very exasperated yet hopeful mum.