Grabapple.net

I had forgotten how dead quiet this apartment can get without a baby in it…or a tired parent holding a sleeping baby and watching Law and Order at 3 am. Matt and Nathan made it to Texas successfully and are now in the excellent care of his folks. I called to check in and heard Nathan fussing in the background, and was stabbed with a little guilt. But just a little. I am enjoying the quiet, the prospect of sleep, and an apartment that’s cleaner and less cluttered than its been in about 5 months, when I got too pregnant to care about such things.

Nathan apparently was sweet and quiet in his baby Snugli the whole trip. But Matt got interrogated by various busybody women who couldn’t believe I would let him take the baby somewhere without me. So either I’m a horrible mother who hasn’t bonded with her baby, or they’ve got some messed-up ideas about what mothers and fathers can do. I mean, if I was breastfeeding, it wouldn’t work, but I’m not. One stewardess apparently questioned Matt intensively before she would let him on the plane…he said he got the feeling she thought he might have just stolen the baby. What the fuck’s up with that? I mean, it’s funny…but it’s pretty damn insulting to my husband.

He also had a few women chastise him for not holding the baby’s head up enough during the flight.* Now I’m absolutely sure that I probably did an equal amount of mis-handling of Nathan when I flew with him, but I guess I got a pass since I’m the mom.

I’m tempted to be sad here, to second-guess myself as Bad Mother Who Sent Away Her Baby, to spend the next week or so hanging my head and feeling guilt and remorse. But I’m not going to do that. I will take my break and go back to Nathan a bit refreshed (it’s amazing that packing up an entire apartment and cleaning it feels like less work than a baby, isn’t it?). I’m going to say goodbye to the city and my nice co-workers and all that the last four years have been about, and enjoy the chance to do it. No one wants to begrudge me happiness but myself…or if they do, I’m going to ignore ‘em.

I did have to take a sleeping pill though. I’m just not used to regular bedtimes anymore.

*You cannot possibly hold a newborn’s head up correctly all the time. They tend to lose control just when you’re trying to move them and jerk forwards or back before you can grab them. I mean, you have to try, but you’re going to miss at least once or twice. Fortunately, it’s not fatal, or even damaging, provided you don’t let them take a header onto the floor.

Matt and Nathan fly out tomorrow. Nathan is sleeping more and better…and eating a little less, since he’s up less. Swaddling at nightime really seems to help. We also noticed how often he fell asleep on his changing pad…so we just put it in his bed. (Because tempting as it seems at 4 am, it just wasn’t a good idea to let him sleep on top of 5-foot dresser). It’s curved and padded and holds him in place, which he really seems to like.

I will miss them both, but I have so much to do, and it will be good to know that they’re in such capable hands as those of my in-laws. I hope Nathan is ok away from me so long. I think he will be. I’m glad for once that he’s on formula, or he wouldn’t have this option.

I joined the ICAN (International Cesarean Action Network) email list, an excellent resource for unhappy c-sectioners and potential VBAC-ers. Reading it does sort of dampen one’s enthusiasm for trying this again, though. There’s a lot of women who have had a rough time getting a good birth out there. And a surprising number willing to try unassisted births to get them (no midwife) which, no. No no no that is not a viable option. I’m not going to put myself at that kind of risk. There are some really well-informed types who have stories of successful battles with their docs and hospitals over procedures, ones who armored themselves by memorizing their legal and patient rights chapter and verse from state law, who fearlessly signed AMA (against medical advice) forms to get their own way, who were prepared in a way that I find dizzying and impressive.

And sad. Who wants their birth to be a battle? You want to be taken care of, mothered, in labor; you don’t want to have to do anything but focus and concentrate on what your body’s doing. But nowadays it seems you have to divide your energies to prevent being run over. No wonder so few women are able to do it. And I really question whether I’ll ever want to fight in that way. I guess if I got pregnant accidentally, I would, but whether I would choose to put myself in that fight…I don’t know. Nathan would be perfectly fine as an only child, after all. He won’t suffer without a sibling. Especially if his mother will be better off mentally as a result.

I have a few years to decide before it’s too late to choose to get pregnant again. A lot could change. But then, we have so much other life stuff to focus on that I know the deadline will approach faster than I think it will.

Yeah, that’s all I care about. 6 hours! Of course, I had to stay up till 3am* with him first, and he was cranky about it too, because he hadn’t slept much all day. But in desperation, we tried the swaddle/rocking back and forth hard like…well…like Rain Man. But I didn’t keep repeating “Definitely Wapner.”

And he passed out and slept hard. Angels sang, the heavens opened, I don’t feel like Utter Death today. Huzzah.

Of course, the proof of any method is whether you can repeat it. I have no idea, so I don’t quite dare to hope we’ve gotten over the hump. Hell, I’ll just take my good night for now and be grateful.

*While we were up, I finally did see the beginning of Desperately Seeking Susan. And the question remains; why is anybody impressed by Rosanna Arquette? I mean, I don’t get her appeal at all. And was this the last time Madonna was good on film? Of course, she had hardly any lines and skimped around in her underwear most of the movie.

So I went to my midwives’ for my final visit, and to get back on the old birth control, important to do before I switch jobs and lose my insurance for a while (which I am determined not to panic about. Stupid lack of healthcare country. Anyway).

I met with the Head Midwife, I’ll call her Alice, the one who tried to send me in two days early to be induced, totally freaking me out because I wasn’t ready. Not that it ended up mattering that I did wait the extra two days..but anyway. She is aware of my feelings about what happened, and about the hospital her clinic uses. But she says to me, well, you should write letters! It’s important to try to change the system! Sadly, our hospital is the best in Brooklyn, so you would have been screwed anyway!

OK, well obviously this is what she has to tell herself to sleep at night after sending her hapless clients off to the meat grinder that is New York Methodist, but..the fuck? Does she really think my letters are going to make this place change its ways, especially if she keeps roping in clients to send their way? Why should they? I am going to make my complaints, but I am realistic about its effects. The only things that make giant institutions change is changes in the law or a loss of business. And I have heard quite different reports about the treatment you can get at other Brooklyn hospitals, so I think she’s probably full of shit when it comes to that, also.

I didn’t agree with her or go along with the smiling, but neither did I leap up and call her on her bs, because I judged that the denial was deep. Also, it’s hard to berate someone while being examined; you don’t want them to make any sudden moves. I just shrugged and said “huh” a lot, which she didn’t know how to take. Finally she says to me “Next time, you should definitely do a VBAC, and you might want to consider a homebirth!” Really? Why the fuck didn’t you recommend that before? If you’d done your job, you’d have realized what kind of birth I wanted and that maybe you should have told me I wasn’t likely to get it unless I homebirthed! Jesus! If you had said anything of the kind, I might have tried it.

And oh, by the way, you do know that VBAC’s can be hard to get, especially with homebirths? That it can be hard to find attendants that your insurance will cover…or even if you decided to pay them out of pocket, because of insurance liability, right? The fact of the matter is, I will have a harder time birthing naturally if I birth again than if I hadn’t had to have a c-section, not because my body can’t but because many hospitals and doctors are still afraid to try it. And no chirpy little assertions about how much you believe in VBAC are going to change that.

So, whatever. I will have a letter ready to go to her clinic too, though again, I’m realistic about it’s results. The thing is, I know she knows..and the other midwives know…that something stinks here in their being attached to this hospital. I suddenly understand why they didn’t ask me more questions about my birth plan, or what kind of birth I wanted, just said “Good!” brightly whenever I mentioned my doula or whatever. I understand why they didn’t tell me about what their kind of induction is like before I had to have one. Why they had trouble meeting my eyes sometimes when I talked about why I wanted to birth naturally. I often wondered why they seemed somewhat more detached than I expected about my birth–but now I think they just didn’t want to make promises. They know they’re not any better than the most callous, c-section-happy OB/Gyn, in the long run, and they’re uncomfortable with it. Why become a midwife if you don’t want to promote natural birth? They’ve sold out their ideals, and they’re putting a pretty name on what is no better, in its way, then the twilight sleep births my mom had to endure.

She also proceeded to tell me it was unlikely that my hemorrhage was caused by retained placenta because the placenta gets examined. But she had no other explanation, leading me to wonder 1) are the examiners never wrong? and 2) does this mean I had some other kind of injury that caused it? She implied that my flying home so soon was a factor, in classic Blame the Victim fashion. Fuck you lady. I felt like shit long before I flew, and the feeling only started to go away after I hemorrhaged. Clearly, something was wrong. I can’t prove it, because whatever it was was flushed out. But…fuck you, lady. No really. Fuck you.

I’m sending Matt and Nathan home early to stay with his folks for a few weeks while I finish up the packing here. It’s just too much, the non-sleeping and the stress all in one horrible package. Matt needs a break, and I have to keep working as much as I can, so I can’t do it for him. We’re zombies.

We’re trying the Happiest Baby on the Block methods* to help Nathan sleep, but have run into a few obstacles. One, finding a blanket big enough to swaddle him–he’s a bruiser. I sewed, sloppily, two receiving blankets together in desperation, and they do fine width wise, except we can’t swaddle his legs–he’s 27 inches long now–so I may try cutting up an old sheet into a large square tonight and using that instead. Because last night we had to use safety pins (which make me nervous) or duct tape to hold the swaddle together. And even then, I didn’t notice a huge increase in the amount of sleeping he did. The one improvement is that we didn’t take him out of his crib except once; we had been getting up and going out to the couch with him, which is a habit we want to break. Still…between 3 and 6 am was still Nonsleeping Yet Cranky Baby Weeping Parent Nightmare Theater. And while I’m grateful that he seems to relax and sleep nicely as soon as the sun comes up, it sure doesn’t make it possible to do any of the critical life stuff that we have to do, like work or pay bills.

Also, he gets a bit overheated, even when just swaddled in his diaper. We don’t control our radiator’s temp, unless you count getting up to crack a window, so our room can either be a bit cold or way hot. One more strike against urban living. Stupid non central heating.

White noise we can kind of do, except as we found out from his pediatrician today, he still isn’t hearing out of his right ear**, so we’ll have to be sure his left ear is near the noise source. And that the noise isn’t so annoying it keeps us up too…we tried radio static last night, which worked for a while, but was a little hard to get used to. We tried our fan also, but it’s not quite loud enough.

Vibration/swinging: we don’t have his swing here, so once our arms give out, that’s it. Apparently some babies need to swing and listen to white noise all night to sleep, which we can’t do for him. That might be what he needs.

He hates pacifiers and can only drink so much formula, so sucking is no-go. He’s not a fan of finger-sucking either. At least not my fingers.

He doesn’t seem to care much about being on his side, although I did try letting him sleep that way with a pillow behind him ( I know, it’s verboten, but he wasn’t going to go over on his belly). It may or may not have helped, I’m not sure. I was pretty punchy at the time.

I called in sick to work today, further pissing off my boss, so Matt could sleep this afternoon and let me sleep tonight. He’s asleep now, so Nathan is sleeping on a makeshift pallet in the living room floor…his face is nowhere near being buried in pillows, so I don’t care if anyone disapproves. He’s asleep. I would rejoice, except I am skeptical of his ability to do the same thing 6 hours from now when we need it most.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then we need a village of insomniacs. Lacking that, the best we can do is go home to our parents and say “Help, for the love of all that is holy. Just take him for a few hours so I can sleep, before I go completely psychotic.”

My new philosophy is, a parent alone is a parent in trouble. At least at this stage. It’s amazing that anybody gets through this without hurting themselves or their kids, really. It’s just fucking brutal.

*Swaddle, white noise, vibration, sucking, being put to sleep on his side if he needs it.

**They keep telling us this is normal, but I can’t say I’m happy about it. Poor little guy.

It’s my second day back at work. I’m a mess. Not work-wise, because I could edit these books in my sleep, but every other way. I hurt, because I haven’t slept. I’m sad at quitting my job, though it’s a relief to have finally given my notice, I was dreading it so much. It seems impossible that I will have the energy to go home and pick up the baby tonight and maybe play with him and get him to sleep at some point so Matt isn’t stuck doing it 24-7. I barely watched him at all last night, and I feel guilty and I miss my naps when I was at home, which were apparently the only thing between me and the tired weepiness. I’m not eating well, because it takes energy to get food and eat it and I’d rather just fantasize about winning the lottery, hiring 6 nannies, and sleeping for a week or three. Or taking him to a nice orphanage so they can find him a mommy who can handle this with the grace and patience I seem to be lacking.*

Ugh, the whining. Ugh. I hate whiny me.

On the upside, I’ve already had 3 nibbles on new tenants for our apartment, thus fending off the Wrath of the Landlady, which, whatever lady. It’s New York, if you can’t rent this apartment, you are just lazy. Because I have seen much rattier holes go for more. As rat holes go, ours is a decent deal.

Have to leave now, go home and clean up a bit before Prospect #1 cruises by to check out our digs. Then, I don’t know. I’ll eat something. I don’t know if I’ll sleep. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t sleep. Or what Matt will do. or how Nathan will cope with his two sad cranky parents.

Ugh.

*yes, kidding. Duh. There is no such mommy.

Baby appears to be well, but also, still super wakeful. Cheerfully so, in direct opposition to his parents, who are surly with missed sleep. We had to spell each other last night as each of us got frustrated or angry with ourselves and our little day-sleeper. He loves sucking but doesn’t really have any enthusiasm for pacifiers, but you can only stuff so much formula into a kid in an attempt to get him asleep before he erps it all over you. So I had to keep my hand near his mouth and resort to semi-forced pacifier-ing to get him to comfort himself to sleep enough…ergh. He finally did drop off. Who says pacifiers are evil? I would freaking love for him to love them and be able to comfort himself with them. I would welcome any non-food-related behavior that would reliably get him to sleep. He is trying to suck on his hands, but he doesn’t have the arm control yet, so he keeps losing his grip after a few frantic sucks. Baths wake him up, music relaxes him but not to sleep. Rocking is great, until you want to put him down. Bah.

His grandma suggests a heating pad to warm his bed. I am ready to try that, also, some kind of white noise, and maybe I can try swaddling again; he didn’t seem to need it before, but now I don’t know. Maybe he’s bopping himself in the head and waking himself up. Trouble is finding a receiving blanket large enough to stay swaddled; but I had another parent tell me they used duct tape for that problem, and you know, I’m up for that too.

His bouncy seat and swing is in Texas; he wasn’t a huge fan of them two weeks ago, but maybe when we get back he will be.

We know this gets better; we know we’re on the downhill side of the first 3 mos, danke Gott. And he’s not a screamer; sometimes when he’s awake you can lay him down on the sofa propped up safely and let him gurgle and talk to the wall and his stuffed animals while you catch a few zz’s curled up next to him. But it’s not much of a nap.

Still, I find myself pretty much unable to sleep more than 6-7 hours at a stretch unless I’m drugged, even when grandmas have taken him for the night. Part of me is always listening for baby noises no matter what.

The title says it all…v. little sleep last night here in the Grabapple household, at least until the Children’s Tylenol kicked in. We go to the pediatrician tomorrow; hopefully it will be, as he thinks just a virus. Though that’s bad enough when your baby is crying and looking at you with round scared angry eyes; “I feel awful. Why aren’t you fixing this, Mom?”

Babies get sick, all the time, but it’s been kind of scary since we’re both pretty clueless about what to do. We didn’t pick up on the fact that he’d been having a worse and worse time sleeping this week; we just thought we were in the process of adjusting his schedule. Now I think he was waking up because he wasn’t feeling so hot.

No fever so far, but he’s having some trouble keeping formula down, so the dr. told us to feed it to him half-strength but more often. I hope tonight is a lot better than last night, because I was so wound up and worried that even after we got him to sleep, I had a hard time letting go and falling asleep myself. I was convinced that I’d doomed him to years of chronic ear infections because I’d not always fed him at a 45 degree angle; apparently you have to do that with formula, or it might back up in their throat and end up infecting their ears. Something I didn’t know until we were frantically scanning the baby book for his symptoms. I still don’t know for sure that’s not what it is. Fingers crossed.