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I go back to work, officially, on Tuesday. And I’m so ready, even though I’m just going in long enough to give my 2 weeks’ notice. But getting out of the house every day, for 8 hours, just sounds wonderful. I know I’ve been overly confined due to my health and the weather; if I’d been feeling better and had access to a car, I wouldn’t have felt quite so much like I was in mommy jail the last 6 weeks.

It’s also Matt’s chance to practice his daddy skills solo, so that after we move to Austin, he will be ready if not rarin’ to go in that department. Heh. And since he’ll not be recovering from a c-section, he can load up the baby and go to town if he chooses, so hopefully he won’t be trading his dayjob for daddy prison.

I’m hoping my boss won’t hate me for giving my notice; I didn’t want to do it. But every day that Matt isn’t working we’ll be bleeding money, unless we win the lottery (which, deep down, I’m still kind of hoping for…sigh). So there’s no choice there. Back to Texas with us, in search of a livable situation.

It’s strange to be going back, but that’s a really complicated topic that deserves its own post, later.

I did want to take a moment to praise Matt’s superior parenting skillz. We’ve had trouble with Nathan staying up longer and longer late at night, getting tireder and tireder, despite feedings and rocking and many diaper changes. He wasn’t gassy, but just couldn’t stay asleep when he went down. Last night, after I gave up, Matt brought him into bed with us…which I had tried before, but apparently not done correctly. Because Nathan’s been sleeping ever since, with a few breaks to play and eat; he’s asleep now. Poor little thing must have been deprived and is making it up. As for me, it was heaven to sleep in with him most of the day. I’d forgotten what that felt like. Obviously, we’re doing the right thing having Matt stay home.

Nathan is changing so much, already; his eyes follow me intently, and he smiles a gummy smile when he sees certain things; the lights and shadows on the wall, the stuffed animals hanging above his changing table. His hands clasp each other like Mr. Burns’s and his arms are surprisingly strong as they flail about. He loves his little floor mat/baby gym thingy, and will kick and stare up at it for as much as 2o minutes. He can hold his head up more.

He has a new sound, a sort of half-cry, half-talking noise that he uses to get your attention; imagine just opening your mouth and going “Ahhh, uhh, eehhh, aaah” without moving your lips or tongue. Sometimes he almost laughs.

He’s a quiet baby, actually; he fusses, but hardly ever lets out a real cry–and even then he doesn’t really holler, just one cry, a pause, then maybe another.

He’s such a pretty baby; he has eyes like a character in a Chuck Jones cartoon–like Cindy Lou Who in the Grinch–huge, slightly almond-shaped, long lashes. He flirts at you with them when he wants you to pick him up.

My favorite thing is to hold him up in front of the mirror over our dresser, and see the two of us in the reflection; it’s kind of shocking and wonderful, to see myself with him, obviously his mama; he really does belong to me. How strange. I really am allowed to keep him, to teach him however I want, to take pride in him. To shape his personality, at least a little. What a huge thing that is. I can’t really get my mind around it.

Most days now are “good” days. Days when I don’t have any reason to cry or feel the depression that is still close to the surface. Days when I’m too busy to think about it. But I have to feel my way carefully when I start thinking about the future, or just about trying to move on in my life, about what I will and won’t be able to tell people about this time in my life. Because powerful emotions can still come at me and knock me down.

Like I’ve posted before, it’s tempting to throw myself into planning another birth, a re-do. But that’s pretty shaky comfort, and not just for the ethical reasons. What I find when I look up things like VBACs is that the cards might still be stacked against me if I tried; not only was I wounded when I had my c-section, but that scar will make a lot of doctors and midwives reluctant to give me much leeway on a natural birth. Any little thing that goes wrong, back to the surgery. It might make a homebirth (which is what I would want) impossible, or possible but illegal and therefore risky. And thinking about that double blow brings on the tears. Again. Once again, I have no good choices. It is crystal clear to me now that only a small minority of pregnant women in this country do have any good choices or much autonomy about their births…and that’s only if absolutely nothing goes wrong.

Why does this lack of control matter? Why do we care so much about how we give birth, if, as the doctors scold us, the babies come out ok and we don’t die either? Why don’t we just all suck it up and schedule our inductions and epidurals and c-sections and enjoy all this modern technology that is there to protect us?

I can’t articulate it exactly, I can’t explain this deep need I share with so many women, to have a natural birth, to go through the whole experience of giving life in a way that creates good memories, not sad ones. To at least not have had the experience taken away from me, the way mine was. Nathan’s birth is something I don’t feel even belongs to me; it happened to me, but the moment he entered the world isn’t something I really experienced. I didn’t see him except briefly, didn’t get to hold him for so long. I was drugged and distant, and after that, in pain and only able to take care of him because I knew I should. I don’t think I felt much love or attachment to him for many days. I was in shock, physically and mentally, and I was just going through the motions. There must be a way to make a c-section birth better than that, to overcome the shock and pain and help the mother bond with her baby, but the people charged with taking care of us didn’t have time for or interest in that. We survived; that’s all. They gave us the bare minimum (and in some ways, not even that) and sent us on our way.

And it’s not enough. I know hospitals need to make money, I know they’re not charities, but not creating room for humanity and compassion for your patients, any of your patients, hurts them. It has to slow their recovery. In my case, it certainly had something to do with slowing mine, with my depression that I’m still grappling with, with, I’m sad to say, a little distance I sometimes still feel from my son. I know that part will go away as he and I get to know each other, but right now I can’t help that the sadness and anger I feel about his birth makes it harder for me to rejoice in him sometimes, to appreciate how beautiful and special he is. None of it is his fault, but I want to be happy when I think about the day he was born, and I can’t, and that makes me angry–because how will I explain that to him? I don’t want him to feel guilty about it or something stupid like that. But I can’t just lie and make it all a happy tale.

Because of the system we have, the HMOs and the malpractice insurers and the overworked, stressed staffs being pressured by investors, to give birth in this country is to go into battle, and the odds are ususally against you. You are not entering a place where you will welcomed and cared for and guided through a difficult passage; you’re processed into a system that is either indifferent or actively hostile to your emotional needs, and not even that good at meeting your physical ones. So long as no one dies, so long as there’s no lawsuit, your birth is a success, even if you stagger away scarred and bleeding and dealing with massive depression and pain. There is no billing code for a patient’s feeling bewildered or violated. It’s a system that keeps good doctors and nurses from doing their jobs, and forces them into an adversarial role with their patients for fear of lawsuits or just getting in trouble for not processing enough patients fast enough. It’s a broken system, or one that is breaking down. I just read an article about OB-GYNs deciding to drop the obstetrics, because the malpractice fears were so intense and insurance premiums so high. Who will deliver their patients’ babies now?

I don’t know how we find our way out of this insanity. Being a practical person, it seems abundantly clear to me that we need national healthcare, plus some kind of reform of malpractice laws,* plus a lot else, to make healthcare work. It doesn’t work in a strict marketplace, because all the incentive is on the side of not insuring or treating those who most need it. More and more of us are uninsured or poorly insured. Or lose our insurance once we do get ill. It just isn’t working.

Guess I’ve wandered off topic, but I needed to get that all down. Off I go to bed, until Nathan needs his next bottle and dry diaper.

*One of my theories about malpractice lawsuits is that lack of national healthcare is part of the reason juries give such high awards. After all, someone permanently disabled is going to need lifelong medical care, and their family is going to have to find some way to pay for it, even with Social Security and Medicaid. If I were on a jury, I would want a big enough settlement to be sure the victims could have their treatment however long they lived. But if we had national healthcare, that would be less of a factor–it would be more about lost wages and pain and suffering, that sort of thing.

There are maybe 18 gazillion books on “how to get your child to sleep” at your local bookstore. At least 18 gazillion. And I don’t know how many of them are crap and how many are good. And Nathan doesn’t actually have a sleep problem at this point anyway…all I really wanted to know is, how much is he *supposed* to be sleeping and do I need to worry about scheduling his sleep at some point?

So I just picked up the first book I saw that didn’t look too dictatorial or too wishy-washy on the subject. Because while I don’t believe every child works on the same schedule, I have also figured out that parent’s natural intuition mostly doesn’t exist. It’s all trial and error, and I don’t really know what all Nathan’s various grunts, moods, squirmings and squallings mean.

I ended up with Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Weissbluth, and while I have only read the section on newborns, so far it’s making sense. I didn’t know, because no one told me, that newborns generally only need to be awake for 2 hours at a time. When I started paying attention, I realized that yep, Nathan gets tired after about two hours awake. Though he may only go down for a 30 minute nap before getting up. Or a four-hour one. He’s still working on the whole consistency thing.

But just knowing that much was a tremendous help at getting through the long nights with him. When it’s 3:30 and I can barely keep my eyes open while he’s kicking and gurgling with glee, I know he’ll at least get a little sleepy in the next 120 minutes. It’s still hard, but there is some relief in sight.

I also like the Weissbluth idea that “sleep begats sleep” versus the conventional wisdom that keeping babies up late makes them sleep longer. We’d tried that and it hadn’t worked–Nathan is a determined sleeper and short of torturing him with noise or something, we can’t keep him awake if he doesn’t want to be. But if actually letting him sleep as much as he wants is a good thing, that is much easier on us.

There’s a lot of incredibly detailed info in this book, charts and graphs and warnings about the effects of sleep deprivation (as if I needed reminding about that) but overall, it seems to have a fairly calm and respectful take on the whole issue. He doesn’t get hyper about the idea that you can let your child cry a little (not until they throw up or some nonsense like that). Nathan actually starts making a lot of talking, grumbling noises before he gets to a cry and yes, lots of mornings I don’t respond until I’m sure he’s awake…because sometimes he does grumble himself back to sleep.

He’s not a co-sleeping baby at all, I think, because of his grumbling, and also, he doesn’t seek out lots of cuddling while he sleeps; when we’ve tried sleeping him in our bed, it seems to keep him more awake. I’m thinking we’ll be moving his crib out of our room in our next abode and getting a baby monitor; it might actually help him sleep better. It won’t hurt us any, either. Maybe he’s like the two of us and just prefers a little solitude, now and then.

He’s going to outgrow his co-sleeper crib before he’s a year old though, in length if not in depth, and I’m wondering what we’ll do then. Maybe we can borrow a crib until he’s big enough for his own bed. Though at the rate he’s growing, maybe we can just move him straight in. He’s such a little Hulk-boy, he looks like he’s ready to start kindergarten tomorrow sometimes.

Christmas got lost this year, except for a few cards and gifts. It came too soon after the baby and the drama and the exhaustion. I watched The Grinch and most of It’s a Wonderful Life because I was watching TV anyway. But I have hardly heard a single Christmas carol. I didn’t send a single card, not even e-cards.

Last night we went downtown so Matt and his buddy Paul could see King Kong, and so Nathan and I could hang out in Union Square for several hours. We shopped and lounged in B&N’s coffee shop till they kicked us out at 10. Then we tried to go to Starbucks, but it was playing some sort of obnoxious Brazilian holiday music that made Nathan cry. So we ended up at McDonalds, where the muzak was less intrusive. It was all just an excuse for Mommy to get out of the house. But I had forgotten how loud New York can be, since I suppose I’m used to it. I was appalled at the screeching of the trains and the high volume Elvis music at the B&N, and I felt bad for Nathan being surrounded by all that. Your perspective on what is acceptable volume changes when you have a baby to think about. By the time we got him home, I was as tired of the whole thing as he was. He’s slept a lot today after all that excitement.

But in all that pre-holiday bustle downtown, there was no particularly Christmasy feel to things for me. I don’t have the energy for it. Next year, when we have our own place and Nathan will be able to enjoy things like trees and presents, it might be different. This year, it’s just an extra day off. It makes me a little sad, because I like Christmas; I like trees with motley ornaments and colored lights, I like making cookies, I like wrapping gifts and driving around looking at lights. I like a lot of the carols, and Christmas is the only time I ever miss church, because hearing those songs sung by a choir still gives me shivers. But this year, it’s not to be.

So tomorrow we’ll roast some chickens and make a cake, and that’ll pretty much be it for 05. I hope all ya’ll have a festive holiday of your choice, and get good gifts. Eat some Christmas cookies for me. Next year, I’ll just have to make up for lost time in that department.

How did you know that I ran out of formula today? And how did you arrange for a free sample can to be on my doorstep minutes before I headed out to the store? Do you have little cameras in my kitchen? It’s creeping me out!

But if you’re going to spy on me anyway…next time, could you send me the low-iron kind? And tell my local drugstore to carry the powdered stuff as well as the pre-made cans and bottles…that shit is expensive.

Thanks!

Love, emjaybee

Baby no sleepy. Well, not for me anyway. I’d been holding him all day off and on, he’d hardly napped, and he was stuffed full of formula already, to no avail. Baths wake him up, same as putting him in his crib does. I was out of options, and my arms were ready to fall off, so I woke up poor sick Matthew and said “you take him.”

And then went and took a shower. And laughed bitterly thinking about a comment a mother of a two year old recently made to me: “Have you gotten to the point where you’re holding the baby and you’re wondering ‘Oh God, what the hell was I thinking?’” Well, yes. Yes I have.

Not that I’m going to drop him off at the closest orphanage or anything. Matt was able to get him to sleep, and this morning all is well so far. Maybe he and I were just tired after too many hours together. But at that moment I was strongly convinced that only rich people with several nannies should have children; the rest of us should just say the hell with it, it’s too much work. And even nannies get to go home and put their feet up in peace eventually. Lucky bitches.

I have only recently been able to go back to reading the parenting/pregnancy forums that took up so much of my time before Nathan came. For obvious reasons. The whole topic of pregnancy and labor was just way too painful to read about, especially about women who had had easier births. Which is a lot of them, and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, when I do go over there now, I feel this longing to belong, to be like those other mothers, by trying again but this time doing it “right” and having a vaginal natural birth. Which is a temptation I am not giving into…the question of another kid is not resolved, but if we did do it, it wouldn’t be for that reason. I mean, Jesus, it’s not like we didn’t go through a wringer this time; risking a remotely similar experience isn’t something I take lightly. And then there’s the logistics, you know, the money and time. The second kid is often the one that puts you on welfare, if you’re not careful, if your finances aren’t in the best shape.

And besides, Nathan isn’t a trophy. By which I mean, he isn’t a prize I got for going through birth, he is the goal. Not the birth itself. To fixate on having a “do-over” out of some macho pride or desire to fit in is to treat him and a hypothetical second kid as if they aren’t important in themselves.

It’s weird to feel this way, because normally I’m not at all competitive. I just don’t care whether I measure up to other people’s standards most of the time, because I’m happy with how I measure up to my own. But I guess my own standards in this area have taken a beating. I really really do believe in natural childbirth, in breastfeeding, in more respect for laboring and birthing women from the medical establishment. It’s not a spiritual thing so much as a psychological one; I still believe encouragement and the right setting and coaching can make a lot of difference in whether a woman needs a c-section or is able to give birth vaginally, and in the ease with which she can do so. I just can’t point to my own experience as proof of that, and I suppose that’s what hurts. My own experience, for whatever reasons, fell outside those ideals. I can’t be sure that even in a better setting I would have been able to have a vaginal birth, because I don’t know exactly what went wrong this time. So my belief in natural childbirth ends up being much more faith-based, I guess, than I would like.

I don’t like failing at the goals I set for myself. I tend to lie awake and think, now if I did it again, this is what I would do to try to make sure it went better. Knowing that even if I did, the outcome still wouldn’t be entirely in my control. Though I’m pretty sure I could at least end up at a less crappy hospital.

And it’s not like giving birth is the only thing I plan on doing with my life, is it? How much time and effort do I want to spend on this process…what else can I be doing with my brain besides obsessing on the state of my womb? I think a lot of women have this same problem; birth is so Big and Dramatic, and you get so much attention, and there’s all this excitement and anticipation around it. It makes you interesting to other people, to be pregnant. And when you’re not pregnant anymore, that attention goes away, gets transferred to the baby. And you miss it. I think a lot of second pregnancies which are “unplanned,” might happen for that reason. I mean, it’s not like having one baby makes you forget how to use birth control, is it?

Nathan is, so far, not a very difficult baby, as babies go, and maybe that’s part of it; I don’t have to spend all my energy taking care of him, so it’s easier for me to believe I could do this again, but better. I could get into the club, pass the test, demonstrate my womanhood, whatever the fuck it is that I think having a “successful” natural childbirth means. That’s just messed up, and I don’t want my brain making decisions that way.

Maybe this feeling is so widespread because we women in general aren’t expected to test ourselves physically, to be competitive, except in this one arena, this arena no man can compete with us in. Men have sports or commerce or politics or art, but we have childbirth, and child-rearing, and we pour all our frustrated competitiveness into it because we’re allowed to, we’re not made to feel unfeminine for caring about how good a mother we are from conception on. Magazines and tv shows and books feed into this, they’re aimed at us, constantly warning us of dangers that might keep us from our goal; what to eat or not to eat, what dangers threaten your fetus or child, what you should be doing to further their potential. It’s very seductive, in its own way, if you’re a woman, if you’re used to being ignored or considered less important, being put in the background. Suddenly you’re the most powerful person in the world, you can make or break another human being just by picking the right books to read to them.

I’m calling crap on it, though. All of that shit. I’m not going to let myself stew in those obsessions or define myself that way. I am more than that, whether the shitty women’s magazine industry knows it or not. Nathan needs me to be a whole person, and not to make him the center of my world and the focus of all my ambitions.

To be honest, I’m still deciding what I want to be when I grow up. I was hoping that motherhood would be some help in clarifying that for me. I’m not sure yet if it has.

What’s on the Ceiling? #1

Originally uploaded by deanpence.

courtesy of Uncle Dean’s camera.

An insidious result of being a (temporary) at home parent is that I’m caring more about cleaning the house. The Donna Reed effect. I find myself waiting for Nathan to take a nap so I can, oooh, wash the dishes! The fact that I am actually kind of excited to do so disturbs my feminist heart, which heretofore had been resolute about cleaning up only after myself and not obsessing about it. But when you’re home all day, and it’s effing cold, and you only have a few 2-hour blocks of free time if you’re lucky so leaving the house is difficult, you get a little twitchy at being surrounded by your own filth. Or else you drink, I guess. But we’re out of beer, so that’s not an option.

On the other hand, personal hygiene tends to take a hit; you suddenly have to work to remember things like brushing your teeth. I have found that I can, once I clean the kitchen, manage to wash my hair every day. But a full on shower is more complicated, which is why I leaned over to Matt on the couch last night and said “I hate to admit it, but I haven’t showered in two days.” He was horrified and immediately made me go rectify the situation.

Like him, I never understood how anyone could forget to bathe, though I’ve heard other new parents say it. But what happens is, you want to take a shower, but you need another person there to watch the baby while you do. And by the time Other People get home from work, you’re zoned out from your day and doing well to remember to make up the baby’s bottles for the night. And since your days do have a kind of sameness to them, it’s easy to lose track.

All of which sounds horrible, and it kind of is, but I tell Matt and myself, this is the hardest bit here. The baby is brand new and wakes a lot, and can’t move or entertain himself. The weather is awful and getting him out of the house a real pain. I’m not yet up to hauling his stroller up the subway steps so I can’t go into town, and there are no nearby coffee shops to take him to and hang out. But by spring, we’ll be moved, we’ll have our car, we can leave the house, and he’ll be able to get more out of the world and less reliant on just us for his entertainment. So I have to hold on till then, not letting myself feel claustrophobic or freaked out. So far I’m doing ok. And I go back to work in 2 weeks, which will make it Matt’s turn to sit home trying not to freak out. But he’s not still recovering from birth, so maybe he will do better at getting out than I do.

Right now, we go every day down to the drugstore so Mom can get a diet coke and something sweet and whatever else we need. It’s a real pain to suit him up and put him in his stroller, plus get out my big coat and scarf and hat and all that crap. But it’s mandatory that I leave the house at least once a day. It reminds me that the rest of the world still exists, however cold and unwelcoming it might be.