But What Does it Mean?

One of my mom friends, in my cool Thursday group, has a baby who likes to pull hair. Of course they all exhibit some form of deviant behavior that in anyone over, say, 40 pounds would merit a time out or time inside, depending on their age, but this particular baby really has a thing for hair. Like a research scientist with a very short attention span, little Isaac repeatedly and determinedly approaches fellow babies, yanks their hair and gets reprimanded for it, literally thousands of times a day. Honestly, babies in their experimental/exploratory phase would give the rumored goldfish 8-second attention span a run for its money… The thing is, Izzy’s mom gets very, very embarrassed by her progeny’s behavior, and keeps apologizing to us for it. We all, of course (maybe relieved that at least it isn’t our kid with the hair fetish) keep telling her not to worry and that it’s perfectly normal, etc, etc. And we really do mean it. But it doesn’t stop Izzy’s mom from worrying. One day, she blurted out:

‘But I’m worried he’s going to be a bully!’

To which Jennifer good-naturedly (and entirely truthfully) replied, ‘Hon, he’s just curious about stuff. Believe me, at one year old, nothing about this is intentionally malicious.’

‘I know, I know’ said Izzy’s mom; ‘I’m just worried.’

Indeed.

One memorable day, fairly early on in his short life, it took Todd and I a combined two hours and forty minutes (we know; we kept records) to put Jack to bed. Near the end of our tether and towards the end of this Herculean resistance to bed-going, Todd turned to me with gritted teeth and said:

‘If he keeps this up, he’s got boarding school in his future.’

And I knew exactly what he meant. Despite an intellectual understanding that a malevolent God wasn’t punishing us with a bad child, it sure as heck seemed like we were raising Satan’s spawn. And it felt very, very intentional. However, as months passed and sweet behaviors emerged to co-exist with the less desirable ones, we realized it was probably unfair to blame a creature who at the time didn’t even have head control.

In many ways, raising a pre-verbal child is a lot like watching the commentary on wildlife films (bear with me here…). For example, when David Attenborough says: ‘And now the wild mantaze initiates the dance of the seven bears, which is a precursor to the mating ritual’, I always want to say ‘how do you know???’ I mean, they can’t tell you! We watch the human equivalent of the mantaze rolling around on the floor, grunting and pointing at things, and suddenly it’s like a Jewish minyan: Ten men, 15 opinions on what it means, now and through college. And because little people often act much like psychotic dwarves with ADD, it’s all too easy to read evil portents into today’s aberrant behavior. The ironic thing is that by the time you’ve finished frantically googling your offspring’s ‘symptoms’, looking for a ‘diagnosis’, the phase has passed, in any event. So, unless you plan on developing an unhealthy relationship with the mood-stabilizers at your local Wal-Mart, know that your old zaidy and bubby probably had it right: Relax, it’s just a phase, both Izzy and Jack will grow up to be just fine, and Izzy’s mom and I could probably use some matzoball soup in the meantime.

Fuck that Cherry, Bitch!

Jack positively inhales food. I don’t know where it goes, as he’s the scrawniest little shrimp in our Thursday group - a puny, 20-pound weakling in a land of giant 30-pounders – but he wolfs down vast quantities of anything, anytime, anywhere. And he’ll do whatever it takes to get it. In fact, I love watching him pimp himself out, sidling up with a gappy-toothed smile to any mom trying to feed her hapless infant: Jack will be upon her in no time, both fists plunged into the proffered Tupperware, quite literally stuffing himself. Lately, however, his palate is becoming more discerning. While the quantities remain the same, he has taken to rejecting previously enjoyed food with the heartless discernment of a gourmet food critic. He sits in lofty splendor perched on his high chair, grimly flinging cherries out of his way, all the better to stuff down the cubed string cheese. Or, he moves his mouth away from my advancing spoon with all the imperial demeanor of an eastern princling. ‘Our of my way, wench!’ I imagine him saying. Or, in modern parlance: ‘Fuck that cherry, bitch!’

Mother: The One Who Makes It All Happen

My own mother, who is a family practitioner, told me lately this gut-wrenching story about a patient of hers: An elderly couple, together for many decades, were living through his late-stage Alzheimer’s. His disease had robbed him of most of his mental capacities, yet still he retained an essential gentleness and courtly consideration of others (he always stood up when a lady was present, for example). Heartbreakingly, he had almost no memory of who his wife was to him, except this: ‘Oh, she’s the one who makes it all happen’.

The more I think about this story (and I can never think about it without crying, for, I think, obvious reasons), the more I am convinced of several similarities between our situations. For Jack, as for this man, one woman is at the fulcrum of daily existence, and as both have no concept of time in the usual way, this minute, this hour, this day is all there is to life. When the central woman in the case leaves the room, for each there must be bewilderment: ‘Where did she go? When is she coming back? Has she left me forever?’ The woman wields all food, toileting, amusement and comfort. Such power! Such all-purposefulness!

And so, at the end of life as at the beginning, man is encompassed by the all-sufficiency of woman. Is it any wonder so many of them, to this day, feel so threatened by our awesomeness? Other women have written – though very few will talk about it – of the power and accomplishment they feel in giving birth and raising children. To paraphrase one author: ‘Now I know what God felt when he created the Earth, for I, too, have said Fiat Lux!’ I joked in the playground the other day (when one mother was asking me if I worked or what – God, I hate that question) that Jack was my current full-time project, my very own Sistine Chapel. He is. He is my masterpiece. I don’t mean (I really don’t mean) that I have created him in my image, or that I have more than very marginal control over how he will ultimately be as a person. (It’s very dull, actually, to think of reproducing as duplicating, in whole or in part - oh, he has his mother’s eyes and his father’s talent at math!) What I do mean is something far more magical: I have brought forth a life completely independently of my own, a being I will one day look at in wonderment and think: ‘Where did he come from?’ He came, indeed, from nothing… silence, darkness swirling. Bang! Collision! Sparks flying… Life emerging….

Sometimes, being a mother is the closest we’ll get to being God in this lifetime….

You're Another Mom, And So.....?

God, I hate scrapbooking. And those calendar things where you’re supposed to record, oh, I don’t know, baby’s first human-colored pooh or something. Plus, no birthday parties (at least until they can say ‘birthday party’). But I’m afraid my dislike of the Inner Girly has been losing me friends…. It’s a funny thing, when all your business cards can say is: ‘A Mother’, and you’re touting for pals at the local playground – so many of the usual warning signs or come hither looks are missing. In fact, it’s a laborious process of trial and error until you find Your Gang, and the immediate postpartum brain freeze can inhibit your decision-making process considerably. In the beginning, you cling like Saran Wrap to any human-ish person with a similar-sized bundle of joy. After a while, though, the baby minutiae invariably dies down and then you must live through the sick-making moment of discovering that you Have Absolutely Nothing in Common. The warning signs were there, like rumbles of thunder in the distance: Saving and keepsaking the umbilical stump was one (should probably have run for the hills then and there); the stacks and stacks of non-humorous Christian literature was another, but the calendar that recorded Baby’s Firsts every single day was, I think, the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. Like your college sweetheart, the moment of parting from one of your first mom friends is inevitable. And exactly like breaking up with a high school boyf, it’s as heartwrenchingly painful and as completely necessary.

‘Whatever it Takes’ and Other Lies we Tell Each Other

I go to a great parenting group every Thursday. Run by a fast-talkin’, hard-chargin’, no-nonsense woman and mother of three; I love it. No one among my friends and family is that interested in which brand of organic carrot (pureed) to buy, and neither am I, to be honest – but it’s nice to have a venue where someone would be, if you wanted to debate the point. We’re a motley crew, though similar in more ways than we would probably care to admit to, being middle class, part-time working or full time SAHM, living in or around Berkeley.

Our Berkeleyness conspires against us, however, particularly when the issue of sleep comes up. Now, in most parts of America there is seen (however incorrectly) to be a direct correlation between the age at which your child sleeps through the night and the quality of your parenting: In other words, you are seen to be doing a good job the younger your child ‘sleeps though’, to use the parlance. In Berkeley, the opposite is true: the older your child when s/he begins to sleep at night, the more devoted and loving a parent you is (‘responding to your child’s every cry’, see above essays). While I (theoretically) see the appeal of running up and down stairs at all hours of the night to tend lovingly to my non-sleeping infant, I saw the appeal of actually sleeping at night a good deal more. And so we sleep trained Jack. For those of you not quite au fait with the vernacular, this basically means we let him cry at night so that he would learn to go back to sleep and not wake us up. See the gathering storm clouds above? The troops are being raised, the battle lines drawn…

The point of all of this, of course, is that I discussed it in group. And I got the mother’s equivalent of Could Have Done Better on a performance appraisal: ‘Whatever works, Victoria, whatever works’, said to sighs of support. I think you might have to be a woman to appreciate the subtlety of a put down, which is, ostensibly, not. Women, of course, are arch preservers of group coherence, and will typically evade dissent to preserve harmony, but the particular feel of this new retort was something I had yet to encounter. I think it’s especially hard to be a mother in our historical and cultural time where there are no rules, only equally valid choices (or so it is made to appear…). And if you put that sociological tail spin on top of our female bias towards connection you end up with a smooth-sounding ‘whatever works’. Only of course you don’t actually talk. And you don’t share. And you don’t really connect with anyone.

And so, despite my own occasional reversion to ‘whatever works’ whenever some other mother has infringed my own particular code of mother-rightness, I’ve made it my own personal crusade not to. Not to lie. Not to conceal the truth of my own experiences just to make another mother feel happier about hers. God that sounds so self-righteous! But actually, when I find myself just speaking honestly about a particularly difficult (or particularly lovely) aspect of Jack or my motherhood, I rarely offend or find offence.

So, yeah, the sleep-training thing: Jack cried for an hour and forty minutes the first time we tried it, before he feel asleep. It was awful. It was harder than labor. But now we all sleep and I am not insane any more. And that was how that was for us.

Why Work is Easier

1. You are never confronted with a co-worker’s dirty diaper, with the pooh so liberally smeared, you think you’ll never be clean again…

2. People don’t assume ‘work’ entails lying on a couch, eating bon-bons and watching soap operas for eight hours (as in that hoary old chestnut: ‘do you work or stay home?’)

3. Your boss and co-workers don’t whine at you all day long (at least not while clinging on to your legs, they don’t)

4. People you work with understand the literal meanings of the following words and phrases: ‘later’, ‘just a minute’ and ‘shortly’.

5. You can pooh and pee all by yourself, with no little being scampering into the bathroom after you, all the way up to the toilet, fingers poised to immerse themselves in the toilet bowl as soon as you have vacated the seat.

6. You can go home.

7. You can quit.

Can you eat Cheerios at your Wedding?

Well, hiring a doula didn’t work out as a permanent solution to the childcare problem (and a good thing, too, at $20 an hour!) We did, however, find a kind and competent student babysitter at less money, who could do more hours (six) a week. Since Jack turned eight months old, lovely Lesley has been coming to our home twice a week and we (I) couldn’t be happier. The only drawback is that I don’t leave the house to write (which is my self-allotted activity during my off hours), meaning that I listen with half an ear to their interactions as I plug away on the upstairs computer. Mostly, what I hear is Lesley’s huge expenditure of effort as she tries to meet Jack’s inexhaustible pit of needs. That, and her repeated offerings of ‘cheerios, cheerios!’ which she seems to feed him throughout her time here. He does indeed love his cheerios; they are the gateway drug which I place temptingly on any spoonful of new food, in a cunning ploy to expand his culinary repertoire. So ubiquitous, in fact, are cheerios that I wonder sometimes if we will be serving them at Jack’s wedding breakfast (cake and cheerios, anyone?). Then I remember that I felt that way about the swing he slept in for the longest time, the wrap he napped in forever and the car seat he detested on sight. And I have a new understanding of that phrase embedded in mother lore: ‘this too shall pass.’ Or, as my friend Sej would have it: ‘Our main job is not to kill them, the rest will take care of itself’.

Sometimes, though, I still think I should bulk order those cheerios now, just to be prepared…

Looking the part (but not really feeling it)

There are some drawbacks to losing the pregnancy weight quickly, and nearly always going out having taken some elemental care in your appearance (please don’t hate me): You don’t get the sympathy vote. When I was seven weeks or so postpartum, in the middle of the hell, we interviewed a bunch of doulas in a desperate bid to secure some childcare. One of the first we saw was full of interesting and irrelevant drivel (I particularly loved: ‘there are some parts of Africa where the mothers are so in tune with their babies that they don’t have diapers, the moms just know when they’re going to poo’). Anyway, she took one look at me and said ‘you look fine!’ with a distinct undertone of ‘what the hell do you need me for?’ Now, I needed a doula because I was going insane, and if I didn’t get some help prontissimo, Todd was going to come home from work one day and find the baby in a ‘Going Free’ box on the sidewalk. However, I didn’t look (too) awful, hence I must be fine and all must be dandy in the Carlisle household.

It’s probably the only time I’ve ever felt sympathy for celebrities, who seem invariably to look perfectly put together in the weeks preceding any drugs-bust-going-to-rehab-hell scandals.

Crying.,Or, Your Boss Doesn’t Hold onto Your Leg Whining While you Cook

Over the decades of babycare manuals, while the crying has remained constant, the multiplicity of meanings attached to it has expanded. And, from the quaint explanation of yesteryear (‘they need to stretch their lungs’) to the stern warnings of today’s baby gurus (‘every cry is a communication’) you can be damn sure of one thing: We are biologically programmed to respond. No matter if you get carpal tunnel from rocking that baby in front of a white noise machine, or wear your car out from driving around at the Witching Hour –you’re gonna do what it takes! And why? Because you know that every cry means something (no matter if we can’t figure it out, or haven’t agreed on what it is) and because allowing an unmet need to exist in your child’s fragile infancy is tantamount to child abuse.

Having survived one colicky (read: inconsolable) infant, however, I have some radical advice to offer you: Sometimes biology really isn’t destiny. Sometimes babies cry because it’s what they do; ‘birds fly and babies cry’. Of course, when he cried I would still leap to respond, ticking off the options (nurse/burp/change/rock) until, bleary-eyed, I would stare mutinously at the still-screaming infant, muttering ‘whaddya want, kid? Some late 19^th century French poetry? A crash course in Advanced Algebra? WHAT??’ But sometimes I just couldn’t respond, not because I was too exhausted (though I was that, too) but because I literally couldn’t. Jack, you see, cried every time we lowered his little baby bottom into the car seat. Cried fit to bust, as if we had stuck pins and needles all over his little self. At the beginning we tried everything (because you must - ‘every cry is a communication’ - unless you want to raise a psychopath), from playing white noise to wrapping him in a T-shirt that smelt of me, to nursing him just before we went everywhere, but to no avail. Four months on and he was still going strong, but by that time, I just turned the radio on loudly and ignored it. I mean, seriously, what was I supposed to do, stop driving anywhere?

The baby books don’t talk about that.

Eventually, of course, he grew out of it. At five months, he merely fussed every time we put him in the car seat, nearly a year on he quite likes it as long as the trips are short and I play some groovy tunes. Occasionally we’re so freaked out by the sound of silence in the back seat that I turn around and rub his little head, just to check that he’s still alive.

Now we have different problems, though. Now we have a tiny leg-hugger who hangs all over me while I move, lumpenly, around the kitchen doing craven, selfish things like fix us both lunch rather than read ‘Brown Bear’ for the 8 millionth time that day. I’ll bet your boss doesn’t do that to you, though – hold onto your leg and whine about where your unfinished report is (much as he might like to).

Stupid Reasons to Have a Second Child

At a mere five and a half months post partum it is, of course, pure rhetorical insanity to even be contemplating a second child at all… but as is the way of life for us Type As, the issue of potentially condemning Jack to only childdom (or not) does occasionally rear it’s head. Beyond mere biological urges (or residual birth hormones), I do actually have a list of reasons for having a second child, though these are mostly inane, as follows:

1. What if Jack dies in another, terrible September 11^th type incident and his father and I are left bereft – both of children and of someone to take care of us in old age (OK, this reason is terrible on so many levels….)
2. Jack wasn’t my Number One Favorite Boys Name, and I’d like to have another child to name him something proper and terribly English. Bring on Tobias and Alexander….
3. If I got pregnant again, I might have twins – it does run in the family – and then I would be able to get a full time nanny for a whole year and no one could say I was an awful mother as I would clearly need the extra help. Plus, now I could officially have a big-ish family and would never have to undergo a third pregnancy at all, bonus!
4. Having more than one child would justify my stay-at-home mother existence (at least to outsiders, who have no idea how much work my one, high needs child requires.) Yes, this reason smacks even more than all the others of pure Status Anxiety, but let’s face it, so many of us give in to what others think of us, so much of the time, why not just be brazen about it?!

These are all terrible, aren’t they?

But you know what is even worse – I don’t think my list of reasons to have even one child would look all that convincing…. Like the arguments pro vegetarianism; they’re completely compelling, and the arguments against basically all boil down to a two-year-old’s belligerence: ‘But I like it!’

Bad news….

Not Relating

1. Actually, I DO still want to have sex with his father
2. Nope, still wanting to look nice and damn proud of myself for fitting into pre-pregnancy clothes 10 days after the birth (breastfeeding/stress combo)
3. Still want to hang out with his father and go out for dinner, too (still a dream at this point, however….)
4. The infant years are not the best (at least, I hope not, or I’m in for real trouble…)

Divine

Sitting on the sofa listening to music (my choice and not another’s) with his baby body wrapped up sling-style next to mine, smelling his little head smell and knowing with incandescent certainty that the Goddess has blessed me….

Half an hour late he woke up

Things Not To Say to a New Parent (quoted verbatim)

“Hey, I see you’re home from the hospital, can I borrow a lemon from your garden?”

“We’d love to see you when you’re back in England, but we can’t leave the cat, so you’ll have to come travel to us”

“Aren’t you spoiling (your six week old baby) by picking him up all the time?”

“I’m totally exhausted… it’s a good thing I have three week-long foreign holidays planned in the next three months” (abbr.)

“You sure have a screamer there!”

“Why don’t you just put him down?”

Perspective

On the one hand, I think about the years ahead and know that this difficult child who won’t be put down (think, screaming) will be a delight and the joy of my days, an intelligent and sensitive violin player (or Oxford scholar, I’m not picky); then, the fear grabs me and I think about the acres of non-verbal time ahead of me (still no e-mail…), and then the toddler years where, again, this intelligent and sensitive child will display these fine qualities by twisting me around his little finger… It’s best not to think about the fear. Best to deal with the week/day/hour ahead. Best also to pin my hopes on the (illusory?) promises of the baby books (and more importantly other parents) who tell me that this will be better at three months.

I bet you he still won’t be cleaning my car at that age, though.

Crossing the Great Divide

The cliché is true: The world divides into two kinds of people - those who have children and those who don’t. This is true no matter if your baby is one day, two weeks, six weeks and four days (aka today) or any other age. This is not true of being pregnant: Pregnancy is still a time where, although you are physically encumbered and psychically constrained, you can still identify primarily as yourself. Having a baby requires you to relate to the world primarily through your baby. Time changes: As the mother of an infant, time is a slog of wet cement to wade through, with days, hours and even minutes dictated entirely by the mood of another: ‘Now we are having a good day (less crying) now we are having a bad day (more crying); for these ten minutes we are quiet’. An hour, two… then three passes by and the fear comes again… Will he wake and want feeding/burping/how will I know if he is happy? /what is the best way to parent him? How could the 8 hours of intermittent crying/burping/feeding we endured last Friday in reality have lasted a hundred years?

Why does time collapse and expand in such an hallucinogenic way when you are living with an infant?

Fallacy of Infant Communication (or, You Will Learn His Cries…)

Life would be easier if he could e-mail me. Or just a text, even. Then I would know what to do and he would be happier and we would all rest better. At the moment, it’s done primarily through guesswork… And I’m trusted alone with this child!

Introducing Mothing in the Making

Welcome to my blog! If you're reading this, you probably know who I am - stay-at-home mother of one (J) - you also probably know that J is now two, and hence not really a baby any more. (The toddler posts are coming later; I'm updating the blog periodically with the baby year(s), so you can expect the toddler blogs in a month or so.) In the meantime, enjoy the meander down Baby Lane. Interested to hear your thoughts and opinions.

Mother in the Making