Parenting – Page 22

Cars

I’ve been terrified of driving or being in a car that is being driven ever since I left NYC a decade ago. It is the craziest, most nihilistic shit that we all get into these rocketing deathmobiles every day and fly around like it’s nothing, and nobody seems bothered by it at all. Meanwhile, people around here get their semi-automatic out of the bunker if a Girl Scout they don’t know rings their doorbell. Every time I drive, I am constantly imagining the car next to me merging into mine at 90 mph on the interstate; I’m forever bracing for the impact, imagining the wrenching crunch of it, the swirling chaos and the still silence after.

And that was before I had an infant.

I bought a Honda Civic about six years ago, a very modest, sturdy, reasonably safe little car, and I planned to own it for the rest of my life. I’ve never had any desire to have a giant vehicle — in part, because it seems especially environmentally unfriendly, and also because I find them unwieldy to drive and impossible to park. If I have to have a car at all, I want the least amount of car available, really.

But now that I have Edith, it has quickly become clear that I cannot drive her around in this thing when everyone else is (a) out of their goddamned minds and (b) driving a tank. If I have a collision with any car in Texas, my Civic will crumple like an eggshell, so now I need to participate in the suburban vehicular brinkmanship and obtain a giant fuckoff SUV to protect my child from morons.

Meanwhile, although I have driven Edith by myself before, whenever possible I ask my mother to drive, and I sit in the back with Edith so that I can hold her hand, and stroke her hair, and hold her blanket up when the sun slants in and touches some unprotected part of her skin. I don’t know what I think I can do should we get into an accident, but I guess I have some idea that I’d have time to unbuckle my seat belt and launch my body between the incoming vehicle and her, and I don’t know, absorb the collision Superman-style with my…abs? Look, it’s not necessarily logical, but I can at least deal with the sun part.

Pool Again

I took Edith to the pool again today, but this time, we brought a pool floatie thingie that is like a lounge chair with a sunshade over it for infants. More than anything, Edith currently craves mobility without effort, so being hauled back and forth in this thing like a queen on a litter was exactly her idea of a good time, and she made up her mind that she likes the pool. She also sat on my lap for awhile while submerged in the shallow end and she enjoyed that, and then I walked her through the splash pad and let her stick her hand in the spray, and she liked that. She is a very good-natured baby generally, and if she’s not actively having fun, she’ll usually at least hang out and be chill about things. I appreciate her so much.

My appreciation for every aspect of her is so great, in fact, that it genuinely surprises me that when we’re out and about, every person who sees her is not compelled to come up and say, “My, that’s a fine baby right there! I’ve seen many a baby, but that one is truly top notch!” Probably they are too intimidated by her excellence.

Snoozing a Baby

You wouldn’t think you could use a baby as a snooze alarm, but I actually find mine makes a pretty good one. Every morning, Edith wakes up anywhere between 6am and 8:30am, usually closer to the former. When she wakes up, I pick her up out of her basinet and pop her into bed next to me. At this point, she is usually vocally complaining, but she isn’t fully awake enough yet to be full out crying. I put a pacifier in her mouth and rub her tummy and then I sort of drift in and out of sleep and wait to see what happens.

Some mornings, she complains for ten minutes or so and then falls asleep for an hour or even two! Other (most) mornings, she spits out her pacifier and complains, then I put it back in and she thrashes around quietly for two minutes, then spits out her pacifier and complains again, and we repeat this pattern somewhat infinitely, exactly as if I were hitting a snooze alarm, until either I give up, or she escalates to wailing. Other mornings, she is not down for any of this, and belts into full out screaming as soon as I start the process, which means she’s fucking hungry and I best get the hell up with a quickness.

It’s always something new and is very unpredictable. It also isn’t restful at all, and if anything just makes me more exhausted and yet I feel compelled to do it every morning anyway, because in my half-conscious state, it seems like a good idea, which is what makes it identical to hitting the snooze button.

Sitting

Edith wants badly to be able to sit, and is constantly working her abs trying to haul herself upright. She no longer enjoys being in a supine or prone position and will start to whine if I leave her too long, and escalate to wailing if my assistance is not forthcoming. What she prefers is for me to hold her propped in a sitting position, which requires both of my hands, and so results in my staring at the back of her head for as long as she wants to sit there, attending to her own business, which can be an hour. Sometimes I tire of this, and put her in her bounce chair or donut.

Regular readers of this blog will know I love to torment myself with an expert opinion, so I have of course consulted the baby books about the benchmarks she should be hitting at this point in her development, and they all say that I should not prop her into a position she can’t hold on her own, and I certainly should not let her sit in a bounce chair or donut if at all possible, because she needs to be incentivized through frustration to develop the muscles necessary to support herself in a sitting position.

At first, I panicked a bit about this, but then I realized…what the FUCK are they TALKING about? There’s no epidemic of 25-year-olds who cannot sit independently because their parents propped them up when they were babies. Everybody learns how to goddamned sit, this is not something I need to be worrying about at all.

In other news, Edith collapsed onto her forearm during tummy time today and sucked on it so hard for so long that she gave herself a hickey. This behavior is not referenced in any of the books, so I’ve decided it means she is especially advanced.

Period

A couple of people suggested after this post that I might be about to get my period back. Indeed, I have! I enjoyed spending a year without it, and I am not best pleased to see it again. I seem to be having some delayed PMS today because Edith is driving me up the wall. She is sleeping really well at night now, but I cannot get her to fall asleep for naps at all during the day. She gets cranky and exhausted and clearly needs to fall asleep, but she fights against it with every fiber of her being while I rock my arms off and shush myself blue in the face. After heroic tenacity on my part, her eyelids will finally start to droop…and then “bramafaaaaa,” she fights awake again, victorious, to continue whining in my ear. At the moment, I have parked her in her donut because I just cannot deal with her anymore, and she’s just sitting there waggling her feet around, wide-eyed. I mean, I guess that’s fine and all, but the longer she goes without napping the more impossible she’s likely to be later. She is just exactly like me; if only she were scrolling on her phone and overeating while fighting her true needs this hard, the resemblance would be uncanny.

Thank god my mother gets back tonight. I’m looking forward to her reappearance a lot more than my period’s.

Privacy and Coolness

I’ve been working on a theory that moms are universally embarrassing because they have no privacy, and that privacy is a necessary condition to coolness.

I began thinking about this when I found myself doing an exceedingly embarrassing YouTube workout, in which a cheesy white girl does aerobic “dances” to up-tempo pop songs from the early 2000s (mostly by Black musicians), while Edith grinned at me from her swing. I am not going to link to this workout because I’m sure the lady involved is a nice person who means well, but I will say that at one point, she does the “swim” to an Outkast song, so that should give you a good idea of the level of white nonsense we’re talking about here.

Now, I have never been an especially cool person, but these songs were the backdrop to the years of my life during which I was arguably relatively interesting. At the very least, I was cool enough at the time to publicly pretend I hated these songs while I secretly included them on my running playlist. As I thought about all the ostensibly interesting things I had been doing while these songs were popular (performing alternative comedy on small stages in Chicago, solo backpacking across rural Asia, etc.), it occurred to me that it took a mere three months after giving birth before I became the sort of mom who would do a workout video like this in her living room. A mom with a body like a jumbo muffin and boobs that, while they were never exactly buoyant at the best of times, now need to be fitted for shoes. A mom who spends all day babbling repetitive cliches like “home again, home again, jiggity jig!” and “num num good milk!” and “rub a-dub-dub, it’s bath time for babies!”

I expected a decline of some sort, but I did not expect the transformation to be so fast and so complete.

I had come to this pass because I now have to find ways to work out (a) with Edith right there with me, and (b) in a short enough period of time that Edith will sit still for the duration. This has led to me to doing YouTube workouts in my living room, and to googling lists like “Best 20 minute YouTube workouts” which was how I found this derpy cheerleader (and YES, I know there are plenty of perfectly respectable YT workouts, do not recommend them to me in the comments, that’s not the point of this post). After my workout, I carried Edith into the bathroom with me and parked her in her bounce chair while I showered. She stared at me saucer-eyed through the glass while I did so, and I spent the shower singing and making faces at her in an attempt to keep her distracted enough so that she wouldn’t start crying until I had rinsed off and was able to deal with her again. Edith will usually let me work out (she thinks I am dancing for her and laughs at me throughout, which is somewhat less than motivating) but she typically loses her patience when I need to hose off afterwards. I used to be able to keep her in a good mood longer by dancing around for her while I got undressed and toweled off, but at some point I realized that I was essentially performing a striptease for my infant, so now we are all business.

Anyway, it occurred to me that since having Edith, I have not been able to so much as take a shit without an audience, and that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t do anything embarrassing before I had Edith as that I did embarrassing things in private. And I think this is why moms are embarrassing — they do not have the ability to hide their more shameful moments from other people, and so they quickly abandon any attempt at maintaining a mystique of any sort, because what even is the point. It’s not quite the same for dads (not to say that dads don’t also become embarrassing; they do, but not in the exact same way). Little children follow their dads around as well, but they do not absolutely plaster themselves to their fathers like paint the way they do to their mothers. Moms are furniture from day one, and human furniture simply cannot be cool. This started in the hospital when, after a lifetime of never so much as checking the mail without a bra, I suddenly found myself whipping out my droopy tits every two hours without any self-consciousness or being even slightly aware of my surroundings, my body having become 100% utilitarian overnight. It’s nobody’s fault, but if you have a baby, you’re not going to transcend it, and so you might as well not even try.

Rain Storm

It’s overcast and a bit cooler out today, so I took Edith for a longer walk down to the bigger park. Unlike our little park, this park is usually pretty hopping with kids, and today was no exception. There were maybe seven kids playing at the playground with their moms and/or nannies supervising, two with infants, and the landscapers were also out working, and there were joggers, and ladies walking dogs, and so forth. The last time I took Edith to this park, she wasn’t really aware of any of the activity around her, but this time she was fascinated by the other children and watched them for a long time, which was cool to see.

While she gaped at the big kids, I attempted to make eye contact with the moms/nannies, aiming “I’m approachable!” grins their way like a creeper, but they weren’t into it. I am not an initiator. My entire life, I have never approached anyone first; I wait for other people to come to me. I’m not really sure why. I’ve always been like this and have never made any serious effort to change it. People close to me say it’s because I’m standoffish, and I guess, but also I think I have this deep fear of bothering other people and I’d rather just stay by myself than run the risk of being a nuisance. The result of this is that all of my friends are approachers (except for friends I made through those friends).

There are exceptions. I have occasionally made friends through issuing persistent invitations to something minor, like a drink after an improv class, and then, when those were continuously rejected, by essentially inviting myself along to things that I had not actually been asked to until my presence was just sort of accepted as inevitable. But that was when I was extremely desperate for companionship and also only after the initial introductions had been made.

Anyway, I didn’t approach any of these mom/nannies, but I did consider it, and maybe I will next time. The nice thing about children is it gives you a natural opening. All I would have to say is “how old is she?” And then they would have to answer, and boom, we’d be having a conversation whether they wanted to or not.

After awhile it began to sprinkle, which was refreshing. This was Edith’s first time being in the rain, but she did not react to it, so I’m not sure she knew it was happening. Shortly after this, we started home, but we hadn’t gotten very far before the sky completely opened up. At first, I figured we’d keep going, but it was really coming down, so we turned back for the picnic shelter at the park. Edith by this point was quite wet up to the waist from rain blowing into her buggy, but again, she didn’t really seem aware of it. When we got to the picnic shelter, all the kids, moms/nannies, landscapers, and a random jogger were congregated under it, and so of course the second we joined them, Edith began to wail. I felt everyone there simultaneously decide they hated us, but fortunately I had brought a bottle.

By the time Edith was done with that, the rain had let up, and I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to talk to anyone, so we headed home. This ate up most of the morning and also exhausted Edith who is currently asleep and letting me write this, so a successful outing all around.

Sleep Regression

I should have predicted this would happen — as soon as I crowed about my ability to manage the sleep situation around here, Edith stopped sleeping. Apparently this is a known phenomenon called a “sleep regression” wherein a baby looses its hard-won ability to sleep for long periods the second it starts to master a new skill because babies are nightmares (or I guess daymares. Wake…mares? What works here, god, I’m so tired).

I’ve overall been amazed at how predictably consistent human development is. The books accurately predict every single thing that Edith will do down to the minute. This is humbling — we humans are all the same, we are basically robots. They said that around this time, she will begin to learn how to roll, and then she will want to practice rolling all the time, and then she will revert to her newborn sleep schedule of ~3 hour shifts through the night.

Bang on! This is exactly what has happened!

Edith is rolling around like a tiny tumbleweed, and whereas I used to be able to basically bore her to sleep at night using blackout curtains and a noise machine, she does not need a light source to practice rolling, so she cannonballs around in her basinet all night, and, being awake, is not about to miss a meal.

The really unfortunate part about all this is that I have lost my ability to fall asleep immediately when I have the chance, so every time she gets up, I’m wide awake for another hour after I get her down again, just thinking about what I will do the next day, which I am then too tired to do because I spent all night awake thinking about it.

Last night, I tried to cheat the system by not feeding her when she woke up (which the books say you can try, and she doesn’t actually need to eat this frequently through the night anymore; she wasn’t doing it for about a month; stop looking at me like that, she’s not really hungry!), but instead just rocking her back to sleep in the dark. It seemed to work for a minute. I put her back in her basinet, and she began to suck on her fists. She sucked on them very loudly for 30 minutes while I stewed next to her, teeth gritted. Then, she seemed to realize she wasn’t getting served, and belted a scream unto the night the fury of which was only matched previously by one time I accidentally dropped her head back onto her play mat from a very short distance (she was fine! Stop looking at me like that!).

As accurate as the books are about what babies will put you through, their advice on how to mitigate the more exasperating effects of this behavior are worthless, as if they had never so much as seen a human baby. For one thing, all the books say that from very early, you should work on putting a newborn down “drowsy but awake” so they learn how to go to sleep independently and don’t need to fall asleep on you. If you’ve spent even so much as a second around a newborn, you know how completely moronic this advice is. You might as well expect your newborn to stand up independently at bedtime, execute a darling little Von Trapp routine, curtsey, and whisk herself off to bed. All that happens if you attempt to put a baby down “drowsy but awake” is that the baby entertains herself just long enough for you to fall asleep and start dreaming, and then screams until you wake up and pick her up again. You can both do this infinitely throughout the night if you’d like to!

Edith blessedly (and I’m really knocking on wood here) is pretty good about transferring from my arms to her basinet. When she was littler, I had to put her down like I was reenacting a scene from The Hurt Locker, but now if she wakes up when I set her down, she typically just gives me a withering look like I’m a server who spilled her wine on the table and then goes back to sleep.

Or she did. Until this sleep regression. I put her down five times in a row at the beginning of last night’s marathon of torment, and every time, she popped back awake, curled up like a pillbug, and started ricocheting back and forth. She has this little shout she does when she’s ready to be awake and I’m trying to put her to sleep. It’s a single proclamation and it sounds a lot like “Hey!” “Hey, I’m awake here!” “Hey, play with me!” “Hey, it’s morning I bet!” “Hey, bitch, entertain me!”

I love it so much, even though I should hate it. Which, it occurs to me, could be the official slogan of motherhood.

Bottle

Today, Edith suddenly figured out how to remove and reinsert her bottle. She can’t quite manage it on her own yet, but she learned how to pull the bottle away from her mouth, and then how to nudge it back toward her mouth while making guppy faces toward it to indicate where she wanted it to go.

I was thrilled at her brilliance! “You’re so smart, Edith!” I crowed! I was pretty sure this was early, developmentally speaking. She also figured out how to roll from her back to her tummy today. She was killing it, knocking down milestones left and right!

Then, Edith removed and reinserted her bottle approximately 500 more times, all requiring my help and both of my hands.

My delight in this new achievement swiftly waned. I would actually be fine with a stupid child.

On Sleep

I’ve always needed more than the average amount of sleep. I get tired very easily and usually, if I miss an hour or two of sleep, I feel like other people do when they pull an all-nighter. When I get moderately tired, I feel it more than most people — I feel deeply nauseous and poundingly groggy as if I have a severe hangover. This has always been frustrating to me and has felt unfair — especially when I was younger, I simply could not keep up with everyone else. I particularly remember when I went to Italy on a study abroad program the summer after my freshman year. We had classes every morning at eight, but of course all stayed out partying all night every night. The other students kept this routine for the full five weeks and did not seem to be at all bothered. I tried to do the same, but I could not manage it. I had to bow out hours before the others at night, and even so, I was so exhausted in class that I couldn’t keep from falling asleep in my chair and listing sideways with my head pointed down toward the floor. The professor — who could not stand me because of this behavior — would habitually wake me up right before I fell out of my chair.

I was at one point diagnosed with a sleep disorder called UARS, but I don’t really think that’s my issue, and I’ve never been retested. The CPAP machine made no difference.

Because of this, I was pretty worried about having a baby. I was afraid I would lose my mind, or fall asleep so deeply that the baby couldn’t wake me, or just be too tired to care for her properly. None of that happened, although in the first month after her birth, I don’t think I could have gotten through it if my Mom hadn’t been here to look after her to let me take five hour naps sometimes. After that, though, I got used to Edith’s very regular cycle of three hour phases through the night and I felt almost functional on that schedule, and now she usually sleeps for a five hour stretch, a three hour stretch, and then sometimes another hour or so, plus feeding and getting her back to sleep takes around 40 minutes now (whereas it used to take more like 90), and I sleep for probably around seven hours per night. I feel remarkably alert for someone who normally needs stimulants to power through on less than nine hours.

Of course, I’m not working right now, and so I don’t have to do anything cognitively complex during the day. When I think about doing my job while feeling like I feel right now, I want to curl up into a ball and cry. Surely Edith will be sleeping better at six months when I go back? How do other women do it? Most American women have to go back to work in under a month. I can’t fathom it.

Anyway, I have never understood people who say things like, “if I have to pick between sleep or x, I’m going to do x.” To me, these are like people who say, “I forgot to eat today.” It just does not compute with my experience of having a human body. So I have been shocked to find that having an infant has turned me into one of those people.

These days I typically have to pick between going for a run and taking a nap, and I often choose running, because it energizes me more than the bit of extra sleep would (which just makes me feel groggy). In particular, sunshine and getting out of the house for a bit makes me feel refreshed and happier than a nap would do.

At night, when Edith is sleeping I sometimes stay up for an extra two hours reading an especially interesting book even though I really need that time to sleep, because I don’t have uninterrupted time during the day and I just really want to, and weirdly, I don’t feel that much more tired the next day than I do when I go right to sleep when she does.

I suppose having a baby rewires you physically in some ways. At any rate, I’m relieved to find that not only am I capable of getting by on an infant mom sleep schedule, but I’m even comfortable enough with it to do other things besides sleep when I have the option. In my wildest dreams, I would not have thought that would be the case.

Of course, all this will likely go out the window when I go back to work. But then, I guess that’s what Adderall is for.