Cheaters blog alert! Not every wise word written on parenting comes from me, didn’t you know?? 🙂 so every now and then I’ll re-post an awesome article or blog. It’s cheating and I have no regrets.
I read this today and felt like the words came straight from my addled, malnourished brain. Enjoy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/una-lamarche/how-to-be-a-perfect-parent_b_2888253.html
I was talking with my Best Friend the other day about some bad news she had recently gotten. Many of you who know me know that she had a harrowing 2012, being diagnosed, treated for, and eventually overcoming, stage 2 breast cancer. It was triple negative. You can read about triple negative breast cancer here and learn why it is a scary diagnosis. My friend was 36 when she got hers.
Anyway, said friend is doing great with a lovely new pair of boobs and a flatter tummy to boot. But she has met and grown close with many other women during her journey, and learned that one friend had to have a hysterectomy because her cancer came back. She was a newlywed and hoping to get pregnant. 😦
This made me think. When we talk about being a SURVIVOR, what does that mean? That one has escaped death? I guess in the most literal sense, you are escaping death when you survive, but I think being a survivor is so much more. My friend didn’t just survive breast cancer. She endured despite (because of?) all she experienced while getting treatment. When you survive something, you don’t just survive the event itself; you survive everyone else that didn’t. You survive what you went through to come out of the other end, most likely very different than how you entered, if not just on the inside, maybe even on the outside. You have battle scars and wounds that you wear proudly and you will never be the same again.
Her weekly trips to Hopkins were not exactly summer camp excursions. She is likely to have more stories like this as time goes on, sad as that is. But this makes her even more of a survivor to me. I imagine the diagnosis of cancer is not nearly as scary as chemo, surgery, mastectomies, or the pain she feels when she hears of another fallen comrade. Of these things, she is a survivor, too. I tended to think that after this surgery of hers (see “boobs” above), that it was pretty much over. But she is now inextricably linked to this culture, and these other women that crossed her path on her journey. And to endure the loss of another friend, well– that, to me, might be the worst part of being a survivor.
We are all survivors, though, aren’t we? Everyone has a story. Look at us. Marriage. Relationships. Breakups. Divorce. Fertility treatments. Pregnancies that made us so sick we thought we’d never get out of bed or gain weight. Painful births. The scar of a c-section after 2 hours of pushing. Mothers. Sisters. Wives. Daughters. The decision to stay home with our children, or go back to work, either one an agonizing decision to make with equal downsides. Caring for ailing relatives. Sacrificing. Dealing with illness. Admitting we need help. We are all survivors. As women, this is part of the hand we are dealt, and we all must survive. And every day, we grow stronger.
Being a “mom” before I had kids was so one dimensional to me. I only knew how to be a daughter. Now I know that “mom” isn’t just a dictionary definition of a maternal parent, but a symbolic representation of the greatest and strongest type of survivor. It is entry into a club that you can’t even fathom until you get there. It is looking at life through a new and permanent kind of lens. It is seeing every human being as somebody else’s baby. It is truly understanding why God made Woman. It is feeling connections with other mothers through a single look, because that’s all it takes to say the thousands of words we want to say to each other.
I would imagine that surviving cancer is like most things in life, in that you can’t understand it until you’ve gone through it. I would never presume to. And my friend is one of quiet contemplation, not a boisterous noisemaker like me, making it something even more individual, complex and unique. The next time I see someone who has gone through cancer, I won’t just see someone that beat a disease, I will see someone that survived two lifetimes worth of battles.
A good friend passed this onto me yesterday. Hilarious.
http://www.scarymommy.com/when-mother-knows-best-its-the-worst/
So I have to thank my friend Lisa Dvorak at Housewife Hon for inspiring me to write again. Well, maybe the competitive edge in me came out. Lisa stays home all day, every day with her 2 1/2 year old and 7 month old. Lisa is hands on in every sense of the word, and makes all of us fellow playgroup moms look bad by making fun crafts and then having time to blog about it. She has managed to post like 10 times already in January. Her most recent post is about cleaning toddler poop up from the carpet, on her hands and knees, WHILE SHE BREASTFED HER INFANT AT THE SAME TIME IN THE ERGO CARRIER. You read that correctly. I would have been sobbing in a corner on the phone to my mother or husband, baby screaming from hunger. But I digress….
Where to pick up? Seeing as how I have both my kids parked in front of Dora the Explorer, I estimate I have three minutes to write. So, uh, yeah I got pregnant, was sick for three months (If Kate Middleton was a 10, I was a 9), lost my job, moved to the suburbs in the middle of a Baltimore summer (AGAIN) and had my cutie pie Gus William on December 1st. Okay, so you’re caught up.
Well, I guess not quite. This blog started out as something to discuss fertility, and slowly walk you through my journey of having Beatrice. Then I got pregnant again (not through fertility… oops!) What many people don’t know is that I suffered Post Partum Depression very badly with Beatrice and somewhat again with Gus.
Maybe this is a post for another time, but if you’ve had PPD, or even a touch of baby blues, you and I are sympatico and we share the war wounds. If not, you are one of the lucky ones that my friends and I secretly make fun of, because newborns are like ZERO fun on a good day. Just kidding, hahaha, seriously though you were lucky and probably have a sunny outlook on life all the time. So I won’t get into how it felt, how I got help, etc. That’s an important story but, again, for another time.
When going back to my Doctor for a check up recently she asked me if I would accompany her on an upcoming psychiatry lecture to med students. She was going to be discussing Post Partum Depression and wanted someone who had experienced it to be there with her to talk to the group and answer questions. She said she knew I would be “brutally honest.” LOL. I was more than happy to do this! I feel like everything happens for a reason, and if I could possibly help one person who will eventually become a doctor go on to help another person, then it was worth it. I mean it was worth it to have my kids and all, but you know what I mean.
It was an auditorium full of med students and my doctor and I basically walked through my history… having Beatrice, taking her home and feeling full on as though my life was over as I knew it. Getting help, getting better, having another baby…
But I wish I had talked about one other thing. As a doctor treating someone with PPD, I think its important for them to understand, contextually, what it means to be a parent today. And that is, that we are wayyyyy too hard on ourselves. From the minute a woman gets pregnant, she wants to do it better than her own mother and instantly starts making mental notes of what she knows she’ll NEVER do as a parent (wink, wink). And when we give birth, we immediately feel we aren’t doing enough, should be doing something better, bigger, more spectacular. We don’t spend enough time with them, they watch too much TV, we haven’t done the baby book yet, they haven’t learned to swim or missed out on immersion Mandarin classes. Why do we do this to ourselves? Where does all the guilt come from?
I couldn’t articulate this any better than the blogger, Pregnant Chicken. She wrote about Why You’re Never Failing as a Mother and a good friend passed it along. Honestly this article sums it up for me, and I want every pregnant woman to read it!
Its important, I believe, when trying to understand a new mom’s feeling of depression, to know that she has just been thrust into this new competitive world of parenting. She’s been preparing for motherhood her whole life, and now that she’s finding its terribly hard, she feels like a failure. She sees all these other super moms around her (who are actually feeling the same insecurities, she’ll later go on to find). The pressure to breastfeed (breastmilk is best!), feed organically, to co-sleep or not to co-sleep, to make sure your child doesn’t lay eyes on a television screen more than 10 minutes a month…. this new mom feels the pressure, and feels guilt for not enjoying EVERY SINGLE MINUTE of her newborn child as everyone says she should.
They only make “Congratulations” cards for new moms, so that must mean I should be constantly feeling on cloud nine, right? They don’t make cards that tell the truth: “You are about to fall in love like you never thought possible, but it may not happen for you right away and you are still a good mom if it doesn’t. It is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and you will not get much gratification for your efforts at first. I am here if you need a hug. Oh yeah, and you will sleep again, just not for a few months.”
Take it easy on yourself, Mom. You are doing great. And, what your child needs most–more than breastmilk, a natural birth, organic carrots or violin lessons– is a happy, healthy, semi well-rested mom.
My playgroup friends and I were having a discussion recently about the topics that come up on a local listserv we all belong to. There seems to be a rotation of hot-button issues that come up every so often and are always sure to stir up strong reactions. I often wonder if the poster realizes what a hot, messy shit storm he or she (usually a she) is about to start when they innocently ask a new mom question about breastfeeding, sleeping, pacifiers, behavior, eating, food choices, education and the like.
It usually goes something like this:
“My pediatrician/ mother/ friend/ nanny told me that Baby is having a reaction to cows milk/ formula/ a food/ my boob/ our shampoo/ sleeping next to me/ public education/ our pet/ our water supply/a recent vaccination/ his daycare/ his crib and I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on alternatives?”
*Sigh* Poor Mom. She has no idea what questions like this to do the seasoned mothers on the other end of this message, just dying to opine on why what they did with their child was best, or what new research they uncovered from a study in the UK. Of course, this is a broad generalization. Most moms offer good, sound advice and keep their judgements to themselves. But there are always a select few that start violently typing away, ready to explode with self-righteous indignancy.
Because of the latest crop of posts, I was inspired to develop a sure fire way for you moms to alienate your other mom friends. Whether you are just tired of hanging around with them, or just feel like totally effing with someone that day, these are guaranteed to get you kicked out of your playgroup! Trying just one or two is likely to get you a raised eyebrow here and there. Three or four will get people whispering about you after you leave. But if you incorporate at least five of these in the same playgroup, you are happily on your way to being black balled, and free to seek out other like-minded and enlightened moms such as yourself.
• Let your child eat off the floor. You’re at Panera Bread, your kid drops his gigantic chocolate chip cookie and before you can say “yuck,” he is gnawing on it again. You look around; no one saw you. You make a mental note to watch for hives and fungal infections over the next 48 hours.
• Forcing sleep Part 1: the swilling nurser. Your breastfeeding baby has been AWFULLY cranky the past few evenings—oops, was that your second glass of wine or your third? Oh well, no matter, its mostly metabolized, time for bed!
• Let your child go more than 3 days without bathing. Life gets in the way. Its 30 minutes past bedtime, and you have to get up for an early meeting the next day. A wet washcloth with some hand soap will have to do for now. They stink all the time anyway, right, what’s one more day? Its not like they’re trying to impress anyone.
• Laughed when they cried: You’re usually not a cruel person. You love to see your child happy. But today you have been hit in the face 9 times, kicked in the groin, had your home cooked meal spit out, been told ‘no’ ad nauseam and now your child has the audacity to ask you for a snack before dinner? You say no, the tantrum begins; the tears start to flow and deep down you’re thinking “Now you know how I feel, buddy. Sucks doesn’t it?”
• Forcing sleep Part 2: the ‘extra long’ case of hives. Hell, I’ll cop to this one. Beatrice had an awful case of the hives last fall. The doctor said Benadryl every 6 hours until the hives were gone for 48 hours. We all slept fabulously that week. But when the hives started to disappear, hmmm, well let’s just say I was being EXTRA cautious to make sure they were gone for good. “Bob, don’t you think that looks like an itchy spot? We don’t want the hives to come back, do we? Its 7 pm, she needs some Benadryl.” Time for bed!
• Cheetos for dinner. Or cookies, or French fries, or cake. Cheetos is a metaphor for “I haven’t had time to go to the grocery store, husband is coming home late tonight, I have laundry to finish, the kids are at their wits end and I think they had broccoli two days ago.” Sometimes, you have to make trade offs for your sanity.
An old Chinese Proverb states that “An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or circumstance. The red thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.”
I came across this while reading an article in Good Housekeeping Magazine (yes… ok?? I read Good Housekeeping, and I can tell you how to get super glue off your ring or that yellow stain out of your polyester jacket).
There is a book by Ann Hood that was published last year called “The Red Thread.” Its a novel based on her experiences with adopting a Chinese girl into her family. http://www.annhood.us/books/redthread
Now, according to my extensive Wikipedia Search research, this proverb is actually meant to apply to two lovers, much as we Westerners would apply the term “soul mate.” I don’t know if I believe in one particular soul mate, but I suppose it’s a convenient theory. Maybe a blog for another day?
Anyway, I really want to read this book now. The author has taken the idea of the ‘soul mate’ and extended it to parents and children. This concept resonates with me so much deeper than the idea of a lover/husband/ partner. “No matter how tangled or frayed the thread becomes, our child is waiting for us at the other end.” As a mother, I love this notion. As someone who struggled with infertility, I have to acknowledge others that are doing so at this very moment, and tell them to hang onto this doctrine… even if by a thread. 😉 As the wife of someone who was adopted, I live this truth every day of my life.
I remember when we were thinking of what to name Bea, we tossed around several names. I liked Ruby, Ramona and Amelia, just to name a few. I didn’t want my child to be one of five, ten or however many in her class (In the 70’s, Carrie and its many versions was a common name, and I had two other girls on my very BLOCK of the same name and spelling). Granted, Carrie was no Jennifer, but I always knew I’d lean towards an older and unique name.
We obviously settled on Beatrice. Baby Bea we called her. And now I look at her and she simply can’t be anyone else. She’s always been Bea. Since I was a child, she was waiting for me on the other end. I look at the relationship she has with my mother and could conceivably take that thread back even farther to before I was born. She was waiting for my mom at the end of their thread too.
When you look at your child, don’t you just say “ah, THERE you are?” I didn’t feel that the minute I laid eyes on her… I’ll be honest. That sentiment was clouded by stitches, epidurals, hunger, thirst, pain and exhaustion. But I do now. This is how someone once described the feeling of having a second child to me. She said, “You wonder after your first how you can possibly find room in your heart to love another as much, and then when they are born, your heart opens up and you say ‘oh, so THAT’s how it feels.'” And PS no I am not pregnant. Just stream of consciousness blogging and a tasty microbrew on this fine evening.
Does this concept ring true to you too?
My sister-in-law, Christy, gave birth to her baby boy yesterday. When we say “welcome to the club,” this is what we mean. Now she understands that he has been there all along. “The parent club,” isn’t just about diapers, poop and sleepless nights, but gosh sharing those fun times with others does make it a bit easier. No, the ‘club,’ is about realizing how interconnected the universe is, and how our world is just a tiny little piece of something so much bigger that we’ll never even be able to understand a fraction of. I described it once as walking through a glass door. On one side of the door, you look through, and you see a part of what’s going on. But it’s not until you are on the other side–the parent side– that you understand what it truly is like. And once you are through that door, you can’t go back. You can still peek back into that other room, the one where you didn’t have any kids. Your friends that don’t have kids are still there. And the world looks so much different to them than the way you see it. And you remember those days. You sometimes even remember them fondly, and wish you could have them back (especially when your kid is 18 months-4 years… or so I’m told…haha). But you are a part of something bigger now.
This blog started out as a blog on fertility, and I do still want to tell that story. But that’s one part of the bigger story, and that is the story of being a parent. Because I’m learning and realizing that parents and children come in all shapes and sizes. Its not the way the thread is weaved, its who is on the other end that counts. A parent is a parent. Love is love. So congrats to Christy on finding Jesse this week. He has been waiting a lifetime to meet her. 🙂
One of my playgroup friends (with two children) sent this link around last week. It really resonated with me. This blogger is a mom of NINE. Yes, nine. How many times have you marveled at what must be super-human patience, the ability to go on 5 hours sleep, and cook a meal for a family larger than four? I do it constantly. I only work part time, and I think to myself, “How do full time working moms do it? How does anyone do it with more than one?”
I am constantly saying “Oomph, Bea, you are so heavy.” In my defense, 28 pounds…
But oh how she is light. This article made me think that maybe I’m doing a better job than I think. And maybe I could handle one more? We’ll see. And NO I’m not pregnant. LOL.
To the Mother With Only One Child
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/to-the-mother-with-only-one-child
Milk is delicious from a cup!
There should be a support line of some sort for moms when we need a quick pep talk. I don’t mean like a health-related, or nursing support line (thankfully those DO exist).
I mean when we’re having a moment of Mom guilt and need to hear from another mom that we’re doing the right thing, its not so bad, etc etc. I was really blindsided tonight. I am not one to feel much of the aforementioned Mom Guilt. MG eludes me in most cases. Doctor’s visits, shots, blood draws, sick baby, leaving for work, taking something away when its time for bed–none of it really ever gave me pause. I hear other moms say how they cried when their baby had shots, or had to have their husbands there, and the feeling is just foreign to me. I guess Beatrice should to get some credit here. She does fairly well with doctor visits. But, really, I thought I was immune to the MG. If you don’t feel bad when they are blood letting your child, when can you feel bad?
But tonight was our first night going bottle-less. We just switched to whole milk. That’s been going ok so far (save for a little, umm, plumbing tweak here and there). My doctor said we really could wait until as old as 18 months to be done with bottles, but I figured, hey, we don’t really need them now, they are a pain, she likes her sippy cups. Let’s just do it. Yeah! Let’s do it!
So tonight, instead of her bottle in the cozy dark in the rocky-rock with Mom or Dad, she got a quick story, a little snuggle time and BOOM, was plopped cold-hearted into the crib with nary a drop. Mind you, she wasn’t thirsty, she had three cups of milk today and some water. I’m not THAT cruel.
But she wailed for like 30 minutes! I felt terrible. I took away yet another part of her being a baby and replaced it with something more grown up. (Oh, she’s still crying, I stand corrected). *sigh*
Was I being greedy? Should I have just been happy with the milk for another month and weaned the bottles more slowly? Would that have killed anyone?
..okay… its really not slowing down…. I’m taking a sip of beer. I guess I’ll give her another few minutes and make sure she hasn’t thrown herself out of the crib. *Double sigh*
Maybe this is a good sign. I was beginning to wonder if I was just heartless, what with the absence of MG in my life. So, maybe this is just a sign that I do have a little compassion. #Silverlining?
I promised some backstory to how we came to have the lovely Beatrice in this post, but our bottle-less evening has changed my plans. More later.
Live Poop Laugh Love 