Tag Archives: parenting

The Dark Days

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These days, whenever I go out in public with Lucy, at least a small handful of people will stop us to make some variation of the comment : “She’s such a happy baby.” I smile, nod, and encourage her to give her chubby-fisted clumsy little wave that melts hearts across America like silly putty on a warm night (take my word on this one, you do not want to find out for yourself how melty silly putty can get. Your kid’s sheets will never be the same).

Or maybe it’s just my heart she does this too, but in any case, it’s cute. I mean, seriously cute. There is something  magnetic about a baby at around eight months of age.  It’s as if they are right at the cusp of being able to move around on their own and explore the world, but there is this brief window of time where they can’t quite do it yet, so they must instead draw the world to them with their sparkly eyes, crooked barely-there tooth grins, and utter delight at having found small, meaningful ways of communicating with the natives of this planet. You will wave to Lucy and she will wave back, grinning with pleasure at her success, then she’ll catch a glimpse of her fist in her periphereal vision and turn her hand towards her face, looking at it all wide eyed and shocked as if she’s thinking, did I do that? Is that thing mine? Her world is so absolutely chalk full of wonder at this age, and people will literally cross the street to peak into the restaurant window and soak up just a little bit of that wonder.

It’s not unique to Lucy, I know this because the exact thing happened with our son at this age. Still, every time someone calls her “a happy baby,” I savor it for a moment before tucking it away in my mind as a little bit of hope and healing.

Back in The Dark Days, it was hard to believe this day would every come. Lucy was our second baby, and all of our friend’s second babies were flexible, mellow little creatures who fit somewhat seamlessly into their parent’s already busy toddler-centric lives. I remember clearly this moment early in my pregnancy when we were over at our friends Lisa and Shasta’s house.  Cari, Lisa and I were all in the kid’s bedroom playing with the toddlers when Shasta got home and came into the room and said: “How long has the baby been sitting alone in the other room?” We all looked at her blankly for a moment, like, what baby?

Those who know me best know that I actually have a streak of deeply-rooted pessimism, and in that moment I did not think: Our second baby will be just like that.  No, quite on the contrary, I thought: no way will we have it that easy. I just had this hunch that because Lucy was our second baby, but my first pregnancy, there would be some critical piece of genetic information she would miss about the need to fit flexibly into our already chaotic lives.

Sure enough, after seven ridiculous days of early labor and regular contractions, Lucy arrived with a bang. She flew out, catching everyone but me by surprise. I knew full well I planned to push her out with that one big push after waiting half an hour for the midwife to make her way to our hospital room. I just didn’t realize this wasn’t clear to everyone else, and that there were some critical instructions- like the role of little pushes- the midwife hadn’t had a chance to share yet.

We knew there was meconium in her amniotic fluid, so we waited anxiously for those first few seconds before she cried as the NICU team hovered in the back of the room, prepared to whisk her away. Then, she let out this incredible, blood curdling scream, and she basically just didn’t stop.

For the next three or four months, she screamed. She screamed that first night in the hospital while all the other tiny newborns curled limply against their mother’s chests. She screamed on the short ride home, and she screamed that first night home. She screamed so loudly that at the apex of a particularly vigorous yell, the little nightlight in our bedroom suddenly turned into a spotlight. Unbeknownst to us it had a special feature designed to light your way to safety when the fire alarm goes off, and Lucy circa one day old, barrel chested with big, strong lungs, was louder than a fire alarm.

Sometime before the nightlight kicked it up to full alert, but after I had already kicked Cari out of the bedroom for the infanticidal gleam I sensed in her eye, Lucy and I lay side by side in the middle of the bed, staring at each other. She, clearly confused and in pain, and me, at an absolute loss for what to do. Then, she reached out her small little hand to grab mine and looked at me imploringly, as if to ask, will you help me? 

From that moment it was Lucy and I against the world, and boy did it feel like the world was against us. All of Cari’s attempts to point out that something wasn’t right and babies don’t normally scream for six or seven hours at a time, fell on deaf ears. All I heard was her saying that something is wrong with the baby you birthed, because mine didn’t scream like that.

We hadn’t expected the screaming, but what we really hadn’t expected was the sudden emergence of this “mine” and “yours” divide. When Logan was born, he was ours, ours ours, and we were fiercely proud of his equal attachment to both of us. But when Lucy was born, Cari felt acutely the difference in her instantaneous, hormone-drenched bond to Logan, and her feelings towards Lucy, whose screaming remained unfazed by Cari’s best efforts at bouncing, shushing, rocking, humming, pleading. This infuriated me wildly. She was perfect and there was Nothing Wrong With Her. She was fierce and strong and healthy, and so so screamed a lot, what’s wrong with that? Babies cry. We hadn’t wanted a passive, compliant little girl, anyway, right? We wanted her to be able to find her voice, and boy had she.

Our neighbor, who works for CPS, came over to check on us on several occasions, and I thought, how strange is that? Doesn’t she know that babies cry? Wherever we took her, people made comments like “Oh, my, she’s awfully upset, isn’t she?” or, “My goodness what a set of lungs she has!” I would give them a thin lipped smile-grimace that dared them to keep up their commentary.

And then one day, about three weeks in, she stopped. She stopped screaming, she stopped eating every ten minutes, and she actually slept. She napped for three or four hours. She stayed asleep as I took her to Logan’s soccer class, and she stayed asleep as we took him to dinner afterwards. She was this sleepy, peaceful little newborn, and we did what any reasonable parent would have done in our situation. We called Kaiser. “Something is wrong with our baby,” we told the advice nurse. “She is sleeping for three or four hours at a time, and she is waking only to eat and then going back to sleep. She hasn’t cried more than ten minutes all day.”

“Does she have a fever, diarrhea, or vomiting?” they asked us. “Is she limp, unresponsive, pale?”

“No, no, no, but you don’t understand. Something is wrong with her. This is not like her!” At some point during that conversation, as I listened to the advice nurse struggle to understand exactly what the problem was since we were reporting that our baby was acting exactly like a sleep newborn should, I realized that we had a situation on our hands. And the situation was not that Cari was trying to say something was wrong with Lucy because she didn’t love her, the situation was the something was wrong with Lucy.

The medical definition of Colic is the rule of threes: a healthy, well-fed infant who cries more than three hours a day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks. I read this, looked over at my healthy, round cheeked, red-faced, screaming little girl and thought: Three hours a day? Three days a week? That’s nothing! What is this nonsense? Lucy cries at least twice that much…. And then I finally reached the end of denial.

Now that I was ready to accept we had a problem, I moved full force into Solving It. I spent hours reading about the causes, cures, and prognosis of colic, and frankly, the research sucks. Over and over again, I read that by definition colic means they don’t know what is wrong with the baby, and they don’t know what will help it. All they know is that eventually it ends. In the area of what it might mean for long term outcomes, health, maternal-child relationships, or the big T (temperament), I found basically nothing.

That was the big one for me, temperament. We put a lot of stock in it. When Logan was born this wonderful, soothing nurse who was a temperament specialist came and evaluated Logan and shared with us this story about how babies are born into the world the way that they will be in it, and how she saw triplets born, one curious and alert, one screaming, and one sleepy and reluctant to come out. Then she saw them three years later for a follow up and they entered the room that same way: one curious and calm, one screaming and tantrumming, one dragging along behind the others, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

Now, this was very helpful for us when our son came into the world wide eyed, contemplative, and curious. It gave us lots of hope and warm feelings about our future while we struggled through the crawling parade of sleepless nights. Never mind that he quickly turned into a delightful holy tornado of constant motion as a toddler, her message stayed with us none the less. You get what you get, when it comes to temperament, and you know what you got right out of the gate.

To be perfectly, brutally honest, it looked like what we got with Lucy was an absolutely gorgeous, healthy, amazing little girl who was going to give us hell for the rest of our days. Cari said Lucy’s motto was “protest first” because she protested any change as soon as it happened. She screamed when you put her down and when you picked her up. She screamed when you didn’t fed her, and she even took her mouth off the boob to scream between pretty much every swallow when you did. If it was between the hours of 3 pm and 10 pm, she was screaming. Often, when I looked at her, the lyrics: “she came in like a wrecking ball” played unbidden in my mind, although I wouldn’t admit this to anyone, especially Cari, until much, much later.

Each night while Cari got Logan ready for bed, I walked Lucy up and down our street in the Ergo, one hand on her butt and one against the back of her neck, doing a walking/bouncing/swaying combo while alternately shushing and ohm-ing, glaring defensively at anybody who passed, daring them to make some comment about the strength of her scream. I barely saw our son in those early months because I was so desperate to help our daughter stop screaming. I went from putting Logan to bed every night of his life to sneaking in for quick hug and a kiss after Cari had put him to bed, the desperate wail of Lucy pulling me quickly back out again.

After Cari went back to work, the sense of Lucy and I against the world only intensified. I was learning to differentiate her cries, and the one we heard from 3 to 10 pm was clearly not frustration, hunger, or exhaustion- it was pain. Something was hurting her, and I was on a mission to find it. Each day, as the clock inched closer to three, my dread would grow, knowing the Dark Hours were almost upon us. I would try desperately to get her to sleep so we could miss at least an hour of it, laying her in her swing, turned up on high, my hands resting on her belly and against her check, my thumb holding in the pacifier, trying to apply a constant pressure yet not fall over as the swing rocked dutifully back and forth. When she finally gave up her screaming and dropping into sleep, I would inch away, carefully avoiding any squeaky spots in the hardwood, tiptoeing a wide arc around the swing and holding my finger to my lips to silently shush the dogs, my eyes sending death threats towards them if they so much as jangled their collars. That was the first time I felt truly crazy, silently shushing our dogs as if they could understand me, telecommunicating to them that I was willing to rehome them or worse if they woke the sleeping baby. We were in a full on war here with this unknown enemy named colic, and I would take no prisoners.

Then, in those few stolen quiet moments, I would begin to research. Most of my reading pointed towards tummy troubles, which seemed supported by the fact that she while nursing Lucy would swallow milk, scream, swallow milk, scream. Some people said Colic was related to acid reflux, others said gas, oversupply of milk, overactive let down, too much foremilk, or allergies to foods in the nursing mother’s diet. The common theme was that something was wrong with my milk, something was wrong with me. I was poisoning my baby. I decided on a full force approach to what was quickly reaching a state of emergency. To get her to fall asleep at night, we would give her a triple-hitter of prescription antacid medication, gas drops, and homemade potent gripe water. Then, I would nurse Lucy to sleep, keeping her in an upright position to prevent reflux, but while also leaning back to prevent overactive letdown, without switching sides to prevent too much foremilk, all while standing up and rhythmically bouncing in the laundry room with the drier running as background noise, because otherwise she wouldn’t nurse or sleep at all. After an hour of two of this, it worked like a charm (mostly). There was nothing to it. Really, I’m being serious. Compared to the diet stuff, it was a piece of cake.

With the help of my trusty internet research, a poll of other moms at our Kaiser group, and a trial and error process that involved removing any foods that I’d eaten in the hours (or days) leading up to a particularly bad screaming episode, I developed a successful elimination diet: No fruits, vegetables, dairy, dairy bi-products, spices or seasonings, hummus, beans, flax seed, soy, quinoa, and caffeine. For those of you keeping score, that pretty much leaves unseasoned meat, unhealthy bread, rice, and almond or coconut milk. This isn’t exactly an inspiring diet to survive on yourself, let alone grow another person on, but any variation from it would result in an epic screaming session that would leave me wracked with guilt for the pain I’d caused my baby. This was the second, the third, the fourteenth time I felt crazy.

It’s hard to say, with a little distance from the situation, if she was really sensitive to all of those things, or if I just wound up eliminating all of the foods I regularly ate one by one because she cried after I ate them. But, regardless, it gave me enough of a sense of control over the situation to survive, and eventually, gradually, it passed. The crying stretches shortened, the volume turned down. The shenanigans needed to survive each bed time lessened, and finally, with great fear and trepidation, I began to eat again.

Just as the kind temperament nurse had been the voice of Logan’s babyhood that helped us survive his seven sleepless months, I gained a new voice for Lucy’s babyhood. One day while walking through the library with Lucy, a beautiful elderly Native American woman approached me and said: “I’ve been watching your baby, I hope you don’t mind, and I couldn’t help but notice how incredibly alert she is. She is so aware of the world around her. She will be a genius. The weight of guiding that genius will be your burden to bear as her mother, but it will be worth it.”

It has absolutely been worth it. As the months tick by Lucy’s colic becomes a smaller and smaller portion of her life. People have been calling her a happy baby for more months now than they marveled at the incredible pitch of her siren-cry. But “happy” is not the full story, nor should it be. She is still strong willed, opinionated, funny, social, smart, and observant. She is sensitive to her environment and quick to offer her thoughts on any changes in it. Right now, she has set all of that will and determination on learning how to crawl. She will get on all fours, rock studiously, flail her limbs in various directions, and then push back to sitting and clap, delighted at her incredible progress. We are too.

 

 

The Man

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Yesterday, while trying to get the kids ready for school, I quickly exhausted the parenting techniques in my therapist arsenal and resorted to the age-old standbys: bribery and pleading. The bribery, this time in the form of a gummy bear, worked to help speed my three year old through the usually unsurmountable task of Putting Your Clothes On, but stalled out at that critical moment between Getting Into Your Carseat and actually assuming a position in which one can be buckled. Exasperated, I pleaded: “Logan, Mommy is going to be late to her meeting and get in trouble, you don’t want Mommy to get in trouble, do you?”

This was unexpectedly effective. He sat down, looked up at me with those curious blue eyes, and asked: “What will the man say, Mommy?”

Now, late or not, this was simply not a moment I could let pass by without comment. “The man won’t say anything, honey, because Mommy’s boss is a woman. Her name is Erica. And Mommy is a boss too, and Mommy is also a woman… lots of bosses are women.”

The Man has been popping up in our conversations with a baffling frequency these days. Given that Logan is the son of two feminist moms raising him in the progressive Bay Area where most of our friends fit the same description, we didn’t expect The Man’s appearance to be so early and so, well, stereotypical.

But society will have it’s ways of creeping up on you.

It started with a hilarious yet somewhat unsettling comment right after he began preschool: “I’m the man so I’m going to drive.”

It’s only progressed from there. While I was parking earlier this week, I muttered something about how I wasn’t going to make it into the spot and he piped up from the backseat with: “Do you need The Man to do it for you?” Another time, we got lost and he helpfully suggested: “Let’s ask The Man for help!” Any time he sees an empty construction site, he asks: “Why is The Man not doing Construction today?” Ditto for garbage trucks, tractors, etc.

When Logan was tiny, and by this I basically mean one or two and not three, so “tiny” is being used extremely relatively here, he had this incredible gender neutrality of which we were quite proud. He used “he” and “she” interchangably, and loved in absolutely equal proportions garbage trucks and necklaces, dolls and cars, the color pink and using his tools on everything. He was sweet, loving, cuddly, and sensitive while also rough and tumble, fearless, and confident. We were, admittedly, a little smug that we were raising him as a boy who could tap into and appreciate all the varied aspects of himself and his personality without the limits imposed by society.

Enter, The Man. With his ominous appearance, he is forcing us to face a few things sooner than we would have preferred. Things like how we will be only two voices that shape our son’s understanding of the world, and all the rest will be largely out of our control. Things like the incredible responsibility of raising Logan to be a wonderful man, when this is an area in which we have very little expertise.

The hard thing, the part we haven’t quite figured out yet, is how to balance our desire to foster his emerging male identity while also teaching our values on the subject. We want him to know that men and women drive, that men and women are bosses and construction workers. That I can park the car and figure out directions by myself, without asking for help, but that if I did need help it would be fine to ask for it, but I could ask a man or a woman, because both are helpful and know about these things. And furthermore, that not everyone identifies as a man or a woman, and that there are people in between, or who are born men but really are women, and visa versa, and that you don’t have to be defined by your gender, or that this definition may change and shift throughout one’s life, but that even if your own definition doesn’t shift, society’s certainly still has a lot of work left to do. Whew! See what I mean, it’s a complete rabbit hole, really. And he’s three, so there’s that.

Amazingly, the best tool we’ve found for the conversation so far is a Bernstein Bear book called “He Bear, She Bear” that my sister sent us from when her kids were little. I almost tossed it out as soon as I unwrapped it because I assumed it was ripe with gender stereotypes based on the title, the fact it was written in 1973, and the cover picture of a “she bear” in pink bows and a “he bear” in a blue shirt. But you know what? It’s actually pretty perfect for where he is at this exact moment.

It reads: “I see her, she sees me, we see that we are he and she. Every single bear we see is a he bear or a she (we add in “or a they”), every single bear we see, has lots of things to do and be. We could drive a dump truck, drive a crane, bulldoze roads, drive a train. We could fix a clock, paint a door, build a house, have a store… Be a doctor, make folks well, teach kids how to add and spell. Knit a sock, sew a dress, paint a picture, what a mess…. We’ll jump and dig and build and fly. There’s nothing that we cannot try. We can do all these things, you see, Whether we are he or she!”

It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a start. Plus, there’s something about the fact that it was written in 1973 that I find oddly comforting. It reminds me that we’re not the first parents to try and raise children who will not be narrowly defined by the gender roles society sets out for them. Also, that any conversation is better than no conversation, because they are learning all the time anyway, and we better go ahead and throw our voice into the mix.

Then, last night, as I was putting Logan to bed after a particularly rough evening featuring the usual threenager line-up of yelling, tears, and hitting, Logan wrapped his arms around my neck and said: “I love you even when you’re mad and even when you’re sad. You’re a good boy, Mommy, and a big girl. But you can’t sit on my lap, or lean on me, because we might fall into the street together and that would be really, really ouchy!”

This made me think three things. One, that we must be doing something right, because here we have in front of us this incredible, sensitive, loving little human being who knows that we love him no matter what he is feeling or doing, but also understands that we should be thoughtful of the impact these things might have on others. Second, that there’s still clearly time for teaching on gender, because let’s face it, his thoughts aren’t quite fully formulated yet. And third, that we might finally, finally, be making some headway on teaching him to be aware of his body so that he does’t crush his baby sister, but hey, that one’s a topic for another day…

In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have in front of us, and we try to teach him to do the same.

 

 

So You’re Having a… Person

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I have this vivid memory of our next door neighbor Tom coming over last year to pick up some extra baby clothes. Both of our wives were pregnant with our sons, due in a month or so and just a week apart. I was passing on a stack of newborn clothes we’d received with clever little “I love my daddy” taglines and football helmets, irrelevant for our family both on the daddy and the football front.

“Are you guys feeling ready?” I asked.

He shook his head, “Niema’s always talking about getting this for the baby, and buying that for the baby. I keep trying to tell her we’re only having a baby for a year, but we’re going to have a kid for the next 17 years. We should pace ourselves.”

I nodded sagely, because I could tell that was what was expected of me in this moment as the fellow non-pregnant parent, presumably unimpacted by the hormones that had presumably taken over our spouses.

“I know,” I replied, holding up the onesie, “They’ll probably only fit in these newborn clothes for a minute.”

But still, as I handed over the unimaginably small clothes, I couldn’t help but feel he was missing the point. We were having babies. Teensy tiny little miracles who would not only require a host of baby clothes and contraptions, but would also change our lives in inexplicable ways. One day we would both go into hospital (it turned out it would in fact be the exact same day), and come out parents, responsible for keeping alive and loving the helpless little creatures who would fit into these doll-sized clothes. Yes, he was definitely missing the point. We were about to become the parents of baby boys, and this was a really, really big deal.

I understood that our baby wouldn’t be in newborn clothes for very long. What I clearly missed, as evidenced by the bins and bins of unworn or barely worn 0-3 and 3-6 month clothes now stacked in our garage, is how quickly he would also outgrow all the rest. That he would wear those 0-3 month clothes for, at the most, three months, and, more likely, a few short weeks. Even more, that three months would still be three months, even in Life After Baby.

From the starting line of pregnancy, when you are preparing and training and waiting with equal parts terror and excitement for that gun to fire so you can fly across the line and enter Parenthood, it feels like an eternity will pass between each stage: hospital, birth, going home from the hospital, first bath, first smile, and so on.

In many ways, it is an eternity. Breathe in, breathe out. Put one foot in front of the other. Spend endless moments and hours and days staring at the incredible little being in our arms, figuring out how to survive sleepless nights, perfecting your diaper change, and mastering the ever changing task of keeping everybody in your little family fed.

Then, with unimaginable speed you start barreling towards the larger milestones. Your baby sits, stands, takes his first step, says his first word, and all of a sudden he is a person. His baby cheeks give way to defined facial features. One moment he is a helpless, mewling little bean, and the next he is clinging to your leg with mischief in his eyes demanding “up?” “out?” “uuuuuuppppppp!!!”, clearly now capable of complex thoughts like “if she hasn’t done what I told her to do by now she must not have understood me, let’s try it a little louder and clearer!”

Incredible. I mean, it’s really, really incredible. Sure, your life changes quite a bit when you first have a baby. You’re suddenly responsible for keeping someone else alive and fed. The art of cinema will have evolved several times before you see another movie. You’ll be in such a constant state of exhaustion that you’ll do things like finally manage to make yourself a cup of tea but completely forget to put in any water.

But what they don’t tell you, what they can’t possibly tell you, is that the changes just keep right on coming. You’ll probably never get the hang of anything again, besides getting the hang of letting go of needing things to stay the same. What you knew yesterday is out the door because today is a whole new ballgame. Yesterday morning my son woke up in exclusive need of snuggles and cuddles to the point where I made all of our lunches and a crockpot dinner with a 23 pound toddler balanced on my hip, asking “this?” “that?” “bite?” and grabbing everything I touched. The day before that, he was moving so fast in the other direction that I couldn’t even find him until I searched the house high and low and finally located him hiding in the dog bed, playing with the TV remote and trying to eat the bed’s stuffing (toxic no doubt). This morning as I write, he’s decided that if I am going to get up at 5 am to better myself then so is he. He’s currently yelling “shit!” from his crib, which I can only hope is a hybrid version of his two current favorite words: “sit” and “this.”

To those who know me well enough to understant that I absolutely, unequivocally love my son and love raising him, I like to compare parenting to a lobster slowly boiling in hot water. The universe raises the stakes and challenges, along with the incredible joy and rewards, incrementally every single day so that you don’t ever quite notice how hot it’s getting in here. It sneaks up on you, so that one day you are suddenly looking back and realizing that two years ago you were spending your days sleeping in, taking spontaneous day trips, watching TV, and training for half marathons (oh alright, you were also mostly spending them working, but that hasn’t changed, has it?). Now you are spending them doing eighty five thousand more things than you ever did before, most of which include wiping snot and cleaning up behind a tornado who takes everything out of every cupboard in the house, but also includes teaching someone how to blow kisses, singing in public even though you always hated your voice, and soaking up the unparalleled feeling of two chubby little arms wrapped around your neck. And the thing about parenting is, you can look back on those “before” days and think at exactly the same time and in equal proportions: “I had no idea how lucky I was”, and, “I had no idea how lucky I was going to get.”