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“oh yeh,” said i, back in those dim, fuzzy days before parenthood. “oh yeh, i’ll work from home when the baby comes. i can edit online, and maybe do some freelancing…it’ll be fulfilling, keep my mind sharp. i’ll just work when he naps.”

oh yeh. obviously, i spent most of Life Before Parenthood on crack.

my mind? sharp? i don’t even have the wherewithal to lament how blunt the instrument has become. naps? yeh, i’d love one, thanks. i drool at the thought. but i have this twenty-hour-piece of editing i committed to finishing up this week (errrr, well…last week) and i don’t think the child has napped a cumulative twenty hours all month. freelancing? right. unless The New Yorker is picking up my blog for syndication and has simply failed to notify me, i don’t think that will be happening until O starts writing columns himself.

apparently, i am not the born Mary Poppins cum intellectual wunderkind cum floor-polishing housewench i somehow once imagined myself to be.

i am okay with this, it seems. a little peeved, as i really did plan on getting more done with these days, but i’m genuinely okay with my own limitations and the priorities they reflect. Oscar? very important. laundry? a minor OCD i’m trying to work on. mindless internet surfing for at least fifteen minutes every couple of hours? hey, brains don’t just sharpen themselves, folks. they need input.

but this is all okay mostly because the fine Canadian government, in its rare but occasional wisdom, has seen fit to provide new parents here with what in other countries would be the equivalent of a bloody lottery haul. we get a year, more or less, of paid maternity/parental leave. not paid by our employers. paid by the government, in the form of what’s known as Employment Insurance. you work 600 hours in the year prior to delivering or adopting a child? you get approximately $1400 a month in EI for the year following, so you can stay home with that child. it’s not a fortune, by any means. but it beats a kick in the arse with a frozen sneaker, as Dave is so fond of saying. he’s freakishly fond of that phrase, actually…but that’s another post. this one is about the fact that i have approximately two months left of paid at-home child-minding, and then i need to figure out what i can do with myself to earn money while spending as little of that money on outside childcare. or i need to get a job and give up on the whole idea of working from home whatsoever. (other than that laundry compulsion, and the other little compunction about not letting dishes get moldy in the sink, and whatnot…the menial crap which makes households run without Children’s Aid visits.)

but writing/editing from home in twelve minute increments while Oscar peeps/whines/howls for my attention doesn’t seem to be working so well for me thus far. perhaps if he didn’t insist on getting new teeth every week his capacity for self-entertainment would be higher, admittedly…but he still has twenty teeth to go. sigh.

the work gets done, and i kind of enjoy it. i’m not doing it for the money right now anyway…just to keep my hand in.  but my hand feels…stretched.  it’s the kind of work that’s so much smoother when an unbroken hour or two can be dedicated to it…and by the time those hours are free in the evening, what’s left of my mind has disintegrated into a puddle of gray cabbage. such is my little problem. there are moments, at three in the afternoon when i am two paragraphs from finished and O is clearly two paragraphs past finished, when i would sell my mother for ten more minutes just to really focus on the task at hand and get it done and get that nice, rare little feeling of accomplishment that so seldom comes with laundry or bum-wiping.

and i guess that’s really where my little problem lies. i want it all. i want to be home with my child, and i want the ivory tower of an office to hide in and finish things too. i do, in the end, want to be the Mary Poppins genius prodigy TideeBowl queen. and i want more time, for all of it. sweet time, that once i squandered…this is a really nasty trick, this disappearing act of yours.

what do you all do, about time, and work, and juggling? did you go back to a job after your kids were born? did you stay home but do some paid work on the side? how’d you manage to carve out time for that work? (besides plying your offspring with crackers, which is my current, albeit only moderately successful, strategy) please tell. i need some help, here.

unless someone want to volunteer to nanny for the world’s cutest nine-month old (with a minor biting problem)? send resumes. :)

okay, i’ve been cheerful long enough. done now. :)

i tried to bring my most positive, reflective self to what posts i eked out over the holidays. now that the house has been purged of chocolate, though, and daddy and the multiple grandparents have all departed for those outside-the-house things they normally do all day, i am not feeling quite so bloody sunny about the gleefully biting little terror that is my eight-month-old. today, i’m with Linda over at Purple is a Fruit. today, i would like permission to mention that sometimes this “being home with the baby” thing sucks some serious, whiny, dirty little ass. amen, sister Purple. sometimes i just don’t feel like being patient and entertaining all day.

does Disney do house calls?

i thought not.

how about Captain Morgan, then?

bah. i suspect that the glamourous allure of drinking in the afternoon wears off pretty quickly, leaving one feeling even more like a haggard Joan Crawford-esque mommy dearest…but i’m still tempted. i’m grumpy, and frustrated. i feel housebound. heck, i AM housebound. literally. and it’s kinda my own fault, which only makes me grumpier.

Dave went to work with the stroller in the trunk of the car this morning. like i said, my bad. i could have retrieved it from the trunk just as easily as he could have, but never thought of it…though in my defense i was NOT the one who popped out to the car at ten pm last night and dug the bottle of absinthe we bought on our New Year’s trip to Halifax out from under the stroller without a care in the world, admittedly. (insert glare in Dave’s general direction, here. very impressive, withering glare). i also did not drink any absinthe, for the record, lest you all begin to suspect me of being a closet drunk. i just like to imagine myself in altered states…the reality takes too much recovery when one has to wake up and be mommy at six in the morning.

i’m the one who insists that we be a one-vehicle family because i can’t see the sense in paying for craploads of car and insurance when we live in a town that one can walk across in forty minutes, so i accept that i’m not always as mobile as i’d like. sometimes O & i get housebound, particularly in bad weather, and that’s usually okay.

but today is sunny and warm and picture-perfect, at least for strolling. and my fussy boy and i had a much-looked-forward-to “playdate” with our mommy coffee friends, who help keep me sane by getting me out of the house midweek every week and commiserating with me about how mommyhood isn’t all sunshine and Gerber babies. but, as Oscar now weighs a rather strapping twenty pounds even before his snowsuit is forced onto his unwilling body, i require the stroller if we’re going more than, say, thirty feet…and the coffee date is a twenty-minute walk away. you see my problem here.

so, while my lack of mobility may lie largely on my shoulders, i still believe that certain circles of hell are reserved for fathers who accidentally abscond with the family stroller on the sunniest day of the winter, and then turn out to be “in a meeting” all afternoon while the mothers of their children frantically call/skype/curse them. particularly when said children have already been bundled, flailing, into the cruel horror of their Evil Snowsuit before the stroller has been discovered to be missing.

i also believe that the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe (note attached photo, titled “A Boy’s Best Friend is His Cracker”) is a perfectly acceptable way of coping with a fussy, stroller-less baby on a sunny afternoon when all you wanted to do was get the hell out of the house and see grown-ups and are bitterly tired and disappointed and wondering where all those nice, comforting Christmas chocolates got to, anyway.

the Baby Mum-mum cracker bribe also buys time to write a rant, and publish it…particularly if you have a large backup supply of crackers.

thank the lord for small mercies. and don’t report me to Children’s Aid.

just send Dave home with that damn stroller, already.  and maybe send me on another vacation? :)

so…i’ll shut up about New York soon, i promise. but i will mention, before i close the subject of The Very Exciting Trip, that taking a breast pump around the Big Apple wasn’t nearly as fun as one might imagine.

we’ve come a long way in the past generation, regarding feeding options for babies. in most parts of the Western world public breastfeeding is no longer repressed as an act of wantonness akin to pole-dancing, which is nice. breastfeeding in front of strangers is still a little awkward and/or discomfiting for many mamas, sure, but it’s less likely to raise vocal hackles from random passers-by than is bottle-feeding, in fact. in the swing of the pendulum that accompanies so many aspects of our knee-jerk culture, it’s socially acceptable (if persnickity) now to openly criticize a mother for not breastfeeding, whereas it’s seen as mildly Neanderthal to chide her for doing so. limited progress, methinks…but perhaps progress all the same, even if it merely shows that our modern minds can now once again handle the age-old fact that breasts’ primary purpose is suckling.

pumping, however, doesn’t quite fall under the amnesty that breastfeeding now receives. whipping out a teat in downtown Manhattan to suckle a plastic pump and thus keep the mammaries primed for baby feeding? that can getcha a citation for public nudity, a bunch of weird looks, and a brand reading “shameless hussy” burnt onto one’s forehead. or at least i think it can. except for a few brief and unproductive squeezes under my sweater and two layers of down jacket in the corner of a near-empty Korean restaurant, i was too shy to try during this last visit.

which meant i needed bathrooms. private, closed-door spaces where i wouldn’t be flashing my endowments and stretch marks at everyone in a fifteen-foot radius.

now, New Yorkers were a lot nicer than i’d expected. and the city – subways aside – was cleaner and far less Gotham-esque than pop culture had led me to expect, but the public washroom situation still left some civility to be desired. when i could find a private stall in which to sequester myself and get the milk flowing, it was usually decorated with overflowing garbage and the piquant scent of urine. if it was terribly nice and posh, i was usually rushing…or worse, occupying a single toilet while a line of New Yorkers queued outside. apparently, i should carry a little sign reading “Mom Pumping Breasts” to post on the door of such establishments: the colorful comments coming from outside the door while i held up the line were enough to shrivel my milk supply. apparently, pumping wasn’t quite what they imagined i was doing. ;)

basically, pumping is a pain in the ass…particularly when one is away for three days in the most fabulous city on the continent, and the place one is staying is an hour’s subway ride from the cafe/theatre/restaurant/boutique/park/museum/monument that one happens to be near at that moment.

and i’d never intended to pump in New York. back when the Trip was planned, i was having serious milk supply issues and no guarantee i’d even still be nursing Oscar by November. i thought, if i was, that it would be a logical time to wean.

but as the date of departure grew closer, i got cold feet. O doesn’t nurse all that often – four times a day, most days, with at least two of those feedings supplemented by formula (we never did quite work our way back to a full milk supply). but i like nursing him. i like the convenience of it, particularly in the mornings when i’m exhausted and zombie-like: having milk means i can retrieve my dear boy from his crib and crawl back in under my nice warm covers with him for another few minutes of prone stupor, and snuggling. these are precious minutes, from all perspectives. i’m not quite ready to give them up…plus i figure the extra antibodies and other unidentified goodness he’s getting from the breastmilk are worth a few minor irritations. so i pumped my way through NYC, and am teaching him to be gentle with the teeth that are cropping up, top and bottom, through his gums. we may do this awhile yet. i do not have an end date in mind.

despite all this, though, i know i’m no poster child for breastfeeding…and i don’t really want to be. i’m delighted that O and i have managed to muddle our way through it, but it hasn’t been the picture postcard of madonna and Gerber baby that i’d been led to expect. before Oscar was born, if you’d told me that formula would be a steady part of my son’s diet from the time he was seven weeks old, i would have been indignant. and i would, i think, have projected myself a failure as a mother, at least in the eyes of society. and i think that‘s sad.

i don’t think there’s enough frank conversation out there about the reality of feeding infants – the challenges, the miseries, the flexibility of options really available. sure “breast is best”, and i’m glad i’ve been able to offer much of that to my son. but like any simple maxim, “breast is best” leaves a lot of the story unspoken.

so why don’t you tell us the rest of the story? join us tomorrow morning, Saturday November 18th at 10 am EST, for a cribcast about feeding and what worked and what sucked…pun intended. :) moms who’ve breastfed, bottlefed, and run the gamut of options in between will be here to share how their stories unfolded, and why, and what kind of surprises and reactions they got along the way. if your babies were weaned twenty years ago, or were born last week, doesn’t matter. if they’ve never seen a boob, or if you’re still breastfeeding them at four, fill us in on your choices. Skype Cribchronicles to participate, or check out the chat room which will magically appear here on the site at 10 am tomorrow.

i just ate a chocolate cupcake for breakfast.

it’s ten am, and i’m still wandering around the house in bright red flannel pajamas dotted with snowmen, like a refugee from a tweenie slumber party in 1983. Oscar’s been asleep for half an hour, bless him, but i haven’t showered, nor have i lavished any much-needed attention on the laundry, the dishes, or the acrid kitty litter in the back corner of the porch. no, i’m not depressed. i’m just trying to deal with getting my resume in order.

this weekend an electrician came to install heat in Oscar’s room and managed to dust the entire house with nasty little remnants of wall and wiring. and summoning up the will to vacuum out – and thus confront and organize – the bulging horror that is our front closet, now home to the heating wires delivering warmth to wee O, filled me with despair. not because it’s really that much work, even in the nap-sized increments i have for working in. the despair comes because i keep wondering “if it’s this hard to keep things together now, while i’m at home with the baby, how in the name of god will i ever go back to work?!?”

i know people do it all the time. the how is the part i don’t quite get. i envision myself dragging my tail into some professional environment, wrinkled and spit-spotted, black circles under my eyes from a sleepless night spent trying to eradicate baby oatmeal splashes from my walls, pack the stuff to be carted to the sitters, wash the diapers, and hush Oscar back to sleep…not to mention shave my legs and pluck those stray hairs that have cropped up on my chinny-chin-chin. i envision myself falling asleep and drooling on my desk. in these visions, i look vaguely like a very old, washed-out Raggedy Ann doll in a power suit.

such waking nightmares of life as a supermom are the result of a fundamental contradiction in my person. i am compulsively tidy, craving organization and a sense of completedness in my environment. i am also pathologically lazy, with a deep embedded horror of work. it is, admittedly, a problematic combination.

it doesn’t mean i can’t work, or even that i don’t normally bustle about quite diligently, taking pride in my accomplishments. my abhorrence is reserved for the spectre of work, work in the abstract, the obligation to do. because once i commit to doing, my anal tendencies require me to do thoroughly, and to do well. i am doggedly loyal to my obligations, yet resentful and nervous of their claims on my time and energy…especially in my current state of constantly tired. thus, when i consider sizable or numerous tasks, a fluttering panic deep in my innards pipes up “you will never sleep again!” and, poor Pavlovian dog, i immediately lapse into grief and exhaustion and dauntedness, just considering the job(s) at hand.

i do try to hush this gut-bound voice of doom by burying it under chocolate. however, i’d need a whole Wonka factory to quell the overwhelmed feeling i get when i consider hopping back in the saddle of a full-time job. i haven’t actually had a full-time job in years, in the first place…i’ve done a lot of part-time work and sessional teaching and overseas contracts with twenty hour teaching weeks over the past few years. and juggling those things, even without kids at home, has kept me plenty busy, thank you very much. but once the Canadian government’s generously lengthy parental leave expires…well, i’ll need to bring in money, and i do kinda like the idea of doing something with all those degrees hanging in my mother’s basement. hence, the reason i’m tuning up ye olde resume. but i’m also dearly attached to the idea of someday feeling rested again…hence the reason i’m eating cupcakes for breakfast.

i’d like to find something part-time, something rewarding both professionally and financially, here in this small Maritime “city” famous for underemployment. i’d also like to win the Pulitzer for blogging, and win a Merry Maids spree. and lose twelve pounds eating all this chocolate, while we’re wishing.

in real life, i’m going to get that closet cleaned out, take a shower, and enjoy my boy. and perhaps another cupcake. and hopefully some of you can tell me how this job-parent-sleep balance thing really works out?

tell me the nice parts, mostly. i don’t want to have to go make brownies.

we had a big day today.

this afternoon was the 2006 Run for the Cure, the breast cancer fundraiser. i bundled up O in too many clothes – i have this nervous horror of him being underdressed – and we walked the route…along with my mom, her friend/longtime companion Henry, and my sister Erin.

we raised just about five hundred dollars for the event, which i thought was rather amazing. i haven’t fundraised since those nasty magazine subcription drives we were conscripted into in high school, when i couldn’t find a donor to save myself and ended up having to buy a year’s worth of Women’s World Weekly or some such schlock just to stay on the student council. but this was pleasantly different. when i registered for the run, i set my fundraising goal at $150, which i thought was modest but reasonable. after all, when one only gets organized enough to register five days before the run, one must not be too grandiose. but the generosity of family and friends blew me away.

Erin and my mom and i walked in memory of my grandmother Hilda, my father’s mother. Hilda died in 1988. i was sixteen then. Erin – who is my half-sister, the youngest of my father’s children – was three. my parents had been divorced fifteen years. but there was a bond stronger than mere marriage between my mother and her ex-mother-in-law…a shared staunchness, a respect and odd likeness. Hilda’s funeral was the first time i remember seeing my mother cry. so, we three walked today for Hilda.

Henry walked for his wife Laurene, who died almost exactly seventeen years ago, in early October of 1989. Laurene and Hilda would have known each other in the 60s, when Henry was minister at a then-growing suburban United Church where Hilda was a Sunday school teacher for thirty years. they would have known each other fairly well, i imagine…wives in their thirties and forties, raising children in the same small community, organizing lobster suppers together, dishing out potatoes in the big kitchen at the back of the church hall, holding fundraisers of a different sort from the run today.

i don’t think they could have imagined us…the very model of the modern muddled family, walking today in their memory. nobody aspires to be a statistic, however inspiring. Laurene would be in her seventies now, had she survived breast cancer. my grandmother would be in her early eighties. they brought us together this afternoon, our strange little group…just as the memory of thousands of other family members or friends or coworkers brought together the other runners and walkers and strollers and riders in the throng of white and pink shirts.

cancer scares the shit out of me. three of my four grandparents have died of it, two before i was born…it skulks in the gene pool, waiting. my mother celebrates her fifty-eighth birthday on Tuesday: she is just about the age Hilda was when she found the first lump in her breast. both of my mother’s own parents were dead by fifty-eight. and i looked at her today and realized how much i don’t want Oscar participating in the Run for the Cure in her memory. i don’t want him, like Erin, to have only faint memories of his grandmother. i don’t want him, like Henry and Laurene’s grandchildren, to grow up never knowing her at all.

and i really don’t want him and Dave left alone, to run in my memory. not anytime soon. not ever.

the pinny on my back this afternoon said “i am running for Hilda.”

but it wasn’t entirely true…and not just the part about the “running”. i walked to honour Hilda’s memory, and it made me proud to do so. but i walked for Oscar…Oscar whom i’ve nursed with these breasts, who i want to watch grow in the long term. so i think we’ll do this again next year. i’d like O to grow up thinking of the run as an annual event we do around Nannie’s birthday, with other families, for a great cause. and maybe if we can raise enough money to beat cancer, he’ll never have to walk or run in anyone’s memory…because we’ll be there with him.

i’m sleepy.

this isn’t anything out of the ordinary, though today’s stupour left me unusually, splendidly stunned…i kept forgetting whether or not i’d fed the baby, so he probably gained about three pounds in the course of the day…i erred on the side of “fed.” i also managed to wash the dirty diapers in with Dave’s work shirts. hopefully, they rinsed clean…i hear eau de poop is really out with the office set. :)

a doctor’s visit Tuesday revealed that Oscar’s teething cold is actually bronchiolitis. it’s a viral inflammation of the lungs that’s common in boys between three and six months, but which has scary statistical links to the eventual development of asthma. sigh. i left the doctor’s office feeling overwhelmed, a failed combatant in the primal mom war against germs and danger and affliction. Oscar is vulnerable, mine to protect. when i can’t – and i can’t all the time, no matter what kind of Herculean hand-washing efforts i remind myself to make – he risks being affected for life.

that still blows my mind.

we rented a nebulizer (an air mist thingy, with baby-sized mask) from Shopper’s Drug Mart to deliver the meds he needs. the mask covers more than half his face, and lets off steam like a smokestack: the first time, it terrified him. his pupils dilated and his face took on a look i’ve never seen, like a baby animal in a trap…the flight mechanism activated but the body unable to respond. his father held him and his flailing arms and i whispered the soothing, loving nonsense litany of mothers in his ears…”you’re okay, it’s okay, it’s alright little one, mama’s here baby, you’re okay.”

now he’s still wary but tolerates the treatment…then gobbles up milk like a piglet. high on breathing free, he peers at us afterwards like we’re the new Thursday night broadcast lineup sent in to entertain. between this medicated overstimulation and his still-present cough and general malaise, Oscar hasn’t been sleeping well. and so my days – and nights – have been getting long.

getting into the crib has suddenly become a Very Bad Thing in O’s mind. we try stories and books. we try some singing and some rocking. we feed a little, if it’s anywhere near feeding time in his routine. then “we” go to bed, and that’s where “we” part company, at least in terms of our division of labour, because from here on in Oscar and i each have separate jobs. he screams with all his sixteen-pound might. i pat gently, hold my hand firmly on his back, and repeat “you’re okay, sweetie, it’s just bedtime” for about twenty minutes. or thirty. his lungs may be inflamed, but they’re certainly vigourous.

last night, during a zesty howlfest, i tried to model good sleeping behavior by nodding off myself, standing up, with my head on the crib mattress beside Oscar. while those seconds of sleep were vaguely restorative for me, they failed to impress my indignant son…apparently my snoring is not a very convincing salespitch.

my nap was brief due the proximity of Oscar’s sobbing face to my ear. desperate to get him to sleep and hightail it to my own bed, i scrambled for something comforting to offer other than my usual “it’s okay, darlin’, mama’s here.” he knew damn well mama was here, i figured, and that fact was obviously failing to lull him into anything resembling sweet merciful rest.

i saw the chewable copy of “Goodnight Moon” sitting next to the crib. by the glow of the nightlight, i leaned in and started reading. Oscar couldn’t see the pictures, as his eyes were all scrunched up with screaming anyway, but i thought he might be listening. and when i couldn’t make out the words in the dark, i made ’em up. i started enjoying myself. we said good night to the green room, to Oscar’s bunny, to his socks, to the moon, to all the relatives i could think of, and to the old lady whispering “hush”…who is a white rabbit in a rocking chair, for those of you not familiar with the middle of the book. by the time we got to her, i could have sworn i could hear her, rocking right there next to me, singing lullabies in a whispery rabbit voice – this sleep deprivation stuff is better than acid, sometimes.

eventually, about the time Oscar and i had said goodnight to all the condiments in the fridge, he wore himself out, snuffled a few times, and drifted off. i watched him in the faint light for a minute or two, his small fat fists gradually unclenching, splaying fingers over the blanket, huffing himself into sleep with little grunts.

he is beautiful.

but god, i hope he sleeps tonight.

it appears i am running dry.

this isn’t entirely news, as Oscar began pulling off the breast in the middle of feedings at least a month ago. but that didn’t last, and i chalked it up to nipple confusion from too much bottle supplementation. i wondered whether the fact that it happened right at the end of my first cycle back on the pill might have some significance, but my doctor had sworn this pill wouldn’t affect milk supply. as my hormones didn’t sort themselves out well after the delivery, leaving me a wan and prolapsed estrogen-free zone, i’d gone willingly back on birth control in hopes of getting my body and certain, er, aspects of my relationship back in order.

(for Dave’s dad and any other faithful readers who may feel squeamish about the paragraph above, you will be excused if you wish to flee this screen and resume playing Spider Solitaire). :)

i just finished month two back on ye olde pill a couple of days ago. i also spent half the week away from Oscar, up to my nicely waxed armpits in two very lovely weddings, one of which i stood in, as a claret-befrocked and fully decked out best woman. it was fun. but pumping one’s milk in one’s skivvies next to the wedding tent while one’s bridesmaid’s dress pools on the bathroom floor and mosquitoes nibble on one’s thighs is not fun. nor fast. so i probably didn’t do it as much as i should have. and by the time Dave & i made it back into town to our boy (and his kind, babysitting grandparents) the morning after the grand event, i’d apparently lost some of my milk supply.

it didn’t seem so…i woke up that morning with breasts the size of melons, and i faithfully pumped them in the car on the ride back into town – not as risque a practice as it sounds, though i don’t recommend pulling up directly behind school buses. i fed Oscar without difficulty the first feeding back home. but the next, he started to pull off again, almost immediately after we started. i thought remnants of the wine i’d had at the wedding might be affecting taste, so we gave him a bottle of formula.

this continued on and off for three days – him sometimes feeding normally, sometimes not. he also started rejecting his soother, and being in proximity to his crib. yippee.
yesterday, i finally clued in, at least to the feeding bit. i’d taken O to see the pediatrician in the morning, just for a checkup, and i mentioned his nursing resistance and how i wondered whether the pill was affecting my milk, as most of his pulling off seemed to coincide with the end of my cycles. she said nothing. but when we got home, he flat out refused to nurse, though his wailing made it clear that he was hungry. so i tried to pump…and got nothing. i tried squeezing milk out, just with my fingers – which has always previously resulted in a shot splashed clear across the room. i got nothing.

i googled milk supply and discovered that, indeed, any  pill combined with a few missed feedings, or even with the kind of regular once-a-day supplementation we’d been doing, can cause a fairly sudden supply problem. the cure? most sites suggested what they coyly call a “nursing holiday,” where O and i take to our beds – or rather, to the big family bed – and do nothing but nurse for a coupla days. interesting. so much for all the independent sleep training Dave & i’ve been working on with him for the past five weeks.

but we’re trying it. when Oscar peeped at 2 am last night, instead of getting a soother and a pat back to sleep like he’s grown accustomed to, he got the Vegas treatment: free transport to a queen-sized bed and unlimited breasts shoved in his face all night long. he seemed shocked – perhaps my mother’s Methodist streak showing through in him. :) and i’ve been pumping like a mad thing, whenever O’s not at work on the girls. but trying to get them to give again feels futile, at this point. there are drips of milk and little else left, even after 24 hours of stimulation. in a supply-demand system, i was hoping for more.

my boy is hungry, and his routine is shot to hell.

i feel dismayed, and slightly betrayed. partly by my doctors – in one dark corner of my self is a surge of righteous anger, a sneaky, hateful streak of blame that wants to lash out at them for not warning me that this could happen, or for not recognizing it when it did. but like most inclinations towards blame, this one covers for a lot of anger and self-pity and guilt – it is myself  i’m struggling with here. i wonder how i’ll feel if i have to stop nursing my son against my wishes?  i wonder if the formula really agrees with Oscar after all, and what effect it’ll have on him if it’s his only food for the next two or three months? i wonder how i’ll cope with this, if my choice to breastfeed ends up being out of my hands from here on in?  i wonder if four months of breastmilk have given him enough antibodies?

i wonder if there’s something i’m missing, that would bring the milk back?

and a part of me wonders why i care so much…what the breastfeeding really signifies to me.  i’m not sure i’ll know until this story unfolds itself, and i learn whether or not O and i can keep on with our nursing or not.

i do know that, once again, i seem to have no clue what i’m doing.  welcome to parenthood.

it happened again.

Oscar and i were at the pharmacy this afternoon, picking up some things we didn’t really need while my weary brain defiantly blocked all memory of the baby wipes we’d actually come out to purchase, when a sweet, blue-haired lady sidled up to the carriage and peered in.

“how old is he?” she cooed.

“three months,” i answered, hardly believing it myself. and then i added, because i could see the comment coming anyway, “it goes awfully fast.”

“oh, it does indeed!” she chirped. “before you know it, he’ll be off at college. enjoy every moment.” she smiled at me in a knowing way and took one last peek at O, breathing him in.
i watched her walk away down the aisle, and i stood there frozen for a minute, forgetting not only the baby wipes, but where i was. i had tears in my eyes, but they weren’t quite the tears of sentimental motherliness that the lady had likely been aiming for. they were tears of guilt, and frustration, and great sadness.

i love him dearly. and i did nearly melt down in motherly heartbreak the first time he outgrew a tiny preemie outfit, and i’m amazed by how big he is now, and sad in that beautiful, bittersweet way about the fact that every day that passes is one we can never get back. but enjoy every moment? the ones where he’s been crying for five hours and his little throat is raw? the ones where it’s three am and i’m stunned with exhaustion and seriously fear that i will never sleep again? the ones where i’m trying to shush him to sleep for the seventh time in a row and i hear my voice get shrill and i say “why can’t you just sleep, child?” in a tone i don’t mean and don’t want and don’t like. i can’t. i can’t enjoy every moment. and sometimes i feel like a failure because of it, because of the constant reminder from well-meaning souls out there that someday he’ll be big and gone and i will never have him to snuggle again.

one of the saddest things about life, i think, is that the capacity to be fully present in the moments we want to be present in sometimes escapes us. i want to take joy in Oscar’s daily growth, and most of the time i do. but sometimes i lust for sleep like a junkie in withdrawal, and sometimes i fixate on the piles of dirty laundry and can’t really get totally focused on my sixth chorus of “Mama’s Gonna Buy You a Mockingbird.” and sometimes i really wonder if i can do this at all, and if it’s fair to him that he got such an anal, impatient person for a mother…no matter how i try to improve myself.

i don’t know the answer to that question. i do know that the moments i’m asking it aren’t ones i’m enjoying, much.

those come, though. i spent an hour nursing him in the middle of the night last night, and in the almost-dark of the nightlight his downy hair glinted in soft spikes all over his head. and i nuzzled him, and smelled him, and allowed myself to really feel the weight of him in my arms and the heat of his small body curled into mine. and i felt complete, and present, and full of grace.

then i fell asleep on him, and woke in a sweaty, milky tangle with him breathing his baby-snore rhythm beside me. and that sticky, groggy puddle of us, i cherished that too: the reminder of our visceral human-ness. and i cherished it in part because i know, no matter how long these night wakings seem now, that someday they’ll be far in the past and i’ll miss that feel of my baby boy in my arms. i know that. i know that even when those same arms ache to put his kicking, thirteen-pound self down.

and i know that forty years from now, i’ll probably be accosting new mothers in the Shoppers Drug Mart and telling them to enjoy their babies, because it goes so fast. not because i actually expect them to enjoy every moment – i hope i remember to explain that. nobody enjoys everything. nobody remembers everything. and they shouldn’t try…i shouldn’t. i know. but the outside reminder that this wild, exhausting, heart-rending period is also precious and finite is helpful sometimes.

thanks, blue-haired lady. next time, why don’t you offer to babysit so i can nap and you can enjoy him too?

i’m new at this publicly pregnant thing.

wandering (waddling) through the aisles of Canadian Tire today, absentmindedly looking for some kind of contraption in which to store the overgrowth of plastic bags that has taken over our mudroom, i noticed people looking at me funny. not unkindly, just…intently. expectantly, even. it took me a minute to realize that my protuberant belly – and not my haircut or the spinach in my teeth, as feared – was probably at the root of the gazes. i offered a vague smile up to the strangers. they beamed in return. and then they swooped. and the questions, complete with belly petting intense enough to warrant a slot on the sports channel, began.

it seems there are four basic queries that everyone – or at least every female between the ages of forty and ninety-seven – considers herself obliged to ask of a visibly pregnant woman. the script is preset: ‘when’s your due date?’ ‘do you know what you’re having?’ ‘is this your first?’ and – if question three be answered in the negative – ‘what do you have at home?’ i’ve spent most of the very pregnant part of this incubation in a maternity hospital rather than out in the wide world, so i’m only now, at 35 weeks, starting to see this pattern emerge. and i am only beginning to process my answers into a litany suitable for strangers.

it shouldn’t be complicated. i’m due on the 18th of May (to which i inevitably get either a comment on what a nice time of year that will be to have a baby, or a raised eyebrow at the vastness of my belly so far in advance of due date). i’m having a little boy (which reaps much praise, though i suspect/hope most would be equally banally enthusiastic if i were having a girl). and no, this isn’t my first. but what do i have at home? well, no one. a kitten? i tried that deflection, which got me looked at severely. in the discourse of public pregnancy, one apparently does not stray from the acceptable script.

but the script does not really have room for my answer. we had a son. his name was Finn. he was a 26 week preemie, sprouted with tubes and incomprehensibly loud machines that tried pointlessly to keep his collapsed lungs functioning. he grasped our fingers in tiny hands, fingertips black from lack of oxygen. he had his father’s toes. he delighted us, and changed us…he made us parents. and he died in my arms at 11 hours old, last April.

now it is April again. Eliot called it the cruellest month, but April has been kind to me so far, this year…i am big of belly once more, and free suddenly to roam about the world at will. the baby i’m carrying is far along enough to be born safely and without major complications, should he decide to come soon. i am happy, full of grace. and still, i am stumped, when it comes to this script about babies – this public discourse of cheery questions and belly patting. there is no polite way to announce to a perfect – and perfectly benevolent – stranger in the middle of a grocery aisle that my firstborn died. the stranger doesn’t want that information. she doesn’t really want any information about me as a human being, though there is no rudeness intended in the exclusion: she wants to participate in the ritual conversation my belly invites her into, pat said belly, wish me luck, and disappear, never to see me again. me, i find myself wanting to disappear in the middle of the conversations.

and yet, perversely, i delight in the normalcy of them. i didn’t get far enough along in the first pregnancy to really experience them – i was whisked out of public and into a hospital just at the mysterious “is she pregnant or chunky?” phase of bodily blossoming. and when i was confined to bed at 25 weeks in this pregnancy, somewhere underneath my terror for the baby and for us, the everpresent fear of being heartbroken again, there was a much more mundane little voice whining quietly “poor bonnie.” i expected to be in bed for the rest of the pregnancy. and i secretly grieved the rites of passage, however irritating in practice, that i thought i’d miss out on again – the belly patting, the unsolicited advice, mostly just the general goodwill extended to those carrying the next generation. i also grieved the fetching red maternity shirt i’d saved up for but still not gotten to wear because it was too huge.

i wore it yesterday. it stretches now, over the belly – i almost missed its window of wearability. and the cashier at the market asked me the usual questions, and i lied. and felt plastic, and strange…but safer, less exposed. this baby is not my first: i’ve been through labour, had my milk come in, gazed into the small face of my newborn. but i left all that out. i smiled, and said “yes, it’s my first.”

i don’t want to dishonour Finn by pretending he never existed. he was my first, and he was wanted, and loved. those who know me know about him. but what i’m realizing is that the discourse of pregnancy is not about him, or me, or even the new baby-to-be, not as individuals: these women with their shopping carts and their questions are not asking to know me. they are initiating me, rather, into public motherhood, wherein my child (and my interactions with him) will be the focus of plenty of inane inquiries and repetitive questions and proud sharing of minutiae. all of this will be a first for me…and i am ready and waiting, and kinda psyched.

but i don’t think i’ll mourn the end of all this belly patting. :)