Missing

Leaving the fascinating quandaries of childcare for a moment, I'll write about where I'm at personally. I get a little break on Sundays. A few hours. I waste some of it doing a torturing class at the gym, ascertaining that my body still doesn't look the way I'd like it to look, and my physical strength is a fraction of what it used to be. The instructor is at count 8 and I'm still at 5. I'm slow in all things, including doing pliés. But I keep at it, because I need my body for the long haul, you know, if I don't die of cancer before I die of old age.

If you are struggling in the trenches of IF, this post may be awful to read. You may hate me. I have warned you, so please stop reading. But, if you are in the trenches of IF and you need an account of what it's like on the other side, minus the unicorns and rainbows, then read on.

I love my baby. I love being a mom. There is nothing like getting Gummy Girl in the morning and seeing her excited little face when I appear above her crib. I feel like a teenage heartthrob. I like taking care of her. I like thinking about her care constantly and deeply. To think about what she needs, how I can meet her needs, and how to minimize my own issues getting in the way of meeting her needs.

I must admit, though, that it sometimes feels all consuming. And that can be uncomfortable.

I must pause here to say that even writing that it is uncomfortable IS uncomfortable. Complaining about my life with baby post years of heart-shredding infertility seems absurd. Yeah, you can hate me now. Or at least, I'm pretty sure I hate myself for it. It seems so hard to let those two realities sit together. 1) I longed, waited and worked so hard for this baby. 2) I am sometimes unhappy in my role of mother.  

I try to chalk this all up to adjusting. Which is fair enough. Every woman (and probably every man) who becomes a mother has to wrestle with a big shift in her identity. Who am I now that I change diapers, mix formula, sing the itsy-bitsy spider, run to the crib when I hear her cry, walk around town with a stroller for a living (thank you government of Canada for paying me to do so)?

Lately, I've been feeling like I've gone missing.

weird.

unsettling.

I don't really know what that makes me, but I'm afraid it might mean that my mother's deep-seated narcism was contagious.

There is a healthy part of me that chimes in, not too loudly, but says that it's ok. My gummy girl is still so little and needs me so much, and that I've gone from entirely looking after myself to looking after this precious daughter almost exclusively. I mean, I do the things to keep myself going at least on a basic level. I brush my hair, people. I even wash it sometimes.

But I've not figured out how to carve out some good time for me. Mr. A tries to give me some time to myself and that is appreciated. But it's not a lot (and that's ok. I'll take what I can get), and it is often unpredictable. But it's probably more than many of you or my Pleasantville mom friends get.

I am very good at keeping us busy and structuring the days for her and for me. We have yoga on Tuesday, swimming on Wednesday, and music on Thursday. There is a hike with my moms' group on Friday, and on Mondays, I sometimes go to the drop in at the Early Years Centre.

There are rhythms to the day. Ups and downs. Naps. Feedings. Floor time. Meal time. Daddy coming home time. And bed time.

And at the end of the day, there is time for me, and what I usually do with it is wasteful. I watch tv series. Instead of writing. Instead of reading for pleasure or doing professional reading. Instead of trying to connect meaningfully by writing emails. Instead of cleaning the house. Our very filthy house.

It seems like when there is a moment to look for myself, I don't. I just eat more chocolate. Scroll on the twitter feed.

And I feel angry a lot, which can be scary. Is she ever going to feel like I resent her? Because I don't resent her. I love her. But I also have to find a way to make room for my non-mother self. So that I don't ever resent her. And because I will die someday. And I have to make this life count. That's all I can do with these mere 80 years, if I'm lucky.

Mr. A gets the brunt of my anger. Unfortunately. He forgot to take the Brussels sprouts out of the oven while I was putting Gummy to bed last night and I was livid. I wanted roasted Brussels sprouts, not burnt Brussels sprouts. Is it too much to ask? You know you're in trouble when those words start coming to your mind. At least I didn't say them out loud, but I might as well have, since I was visibly upset. 

I wish I could wrap up this post with a satin bow by outlining the steps I will take to find myself again. But I'm slow (still on count 5), and I haven't come up with any yet. I have a few inchoate ideas of things I could look at. I think picking up my gratitude journal could help. And trying to get to yoga (a non-baby class) might help. And getting to the other side of harvest season will help, when Mr. A has more time on his hands and I can schedule time for myself every week. And finding a way to write a little bit every day. But that might be too ambitious.

Anyways, thank you for reading and letting me work this out. And please share if you will in the comments if you've also had these similar feelings and what helped you.

You've been warned

That off week was just that. An off week.

Let me say that it's a bit hard to express things not going perfectly well to a community of women who struggle with infertility when you've got an infant on your hands. Thank you for reading what I had to say and not jumping down my throat. 

I'm much less lonely, and less down. I've had some insomnia (which is odd when your 2.5 month-old is sleeping through the night. You're tired, but not for the obvious reason), and some anxiety, but all in all, I think things are good.


I've become more proactive in scheduling outings and visits with friends, on top of weekly activities like yoga and our informal mama's group on Friday. I think I've also relaxed into the role a bit more, and stopped trying so hard to get shit done. Working without interruptions is a pipe dream.

I've also started taking the steps I feel I need to take to sort of wrap up (to avoid using the term closure) the stuff around the birth. And by stuff I mean the story, the thoughts and the emotions linked to what happened. And by what happened, I mean mostly the hemorrhage, but also the birth and the high blood pressure stuff. I've loosely mapped out three steps to this wrap up.

Step 1: talk about what happened to people who care about me and have time to listen. This is mainly so that I can have a full story of what happened by asking what others remember about it. Also, it helps to talk about it out loud so that I can stop running the scenario in my head over and over again (which I was doing for the first two months). 

Step 2: Send out thank you cards to the care providers who helped me during the birth and postpartum complications.

Step 3: Write out the details of the birth story and subsequent complications so that I've got a fleshed out narrative.*

Step 1 is mostly done. I've reviewed what happened in therapy, and with my therapist's suggestion, talked about it with those who were involved (Mr. A, friends who helped that night or weekend). Step 2 is well underway, and I would say that it has helped a great deal. And now, for your part. I can do step 3 in my journal, but I think I will do it here on my blog. It will be incredibly boring. You do not have to read it (or anything I write for that matter). But I'm asking you to be patient while I crank out a few posts containing waaaaaaaayyyy too many boring details about gross and scary stuff. I need to tell the story and then move on.



*Psychologists are annoying like that. Can't help it.

 

just sayin'

I spend a lot of time alone with Gummy. I talk to her in English, then in French. She gurgles and smiles sometimes. Or grunts. Sometimes she farts, often to register disapproval, like when I change her diaper at 3am before feeding her. 

But mostly, I'm with my thoughts.

I had a pretty lonely week last week. I wondered if it was PPD (postpartum depression) visiting. I felt like PPD and I we were two cats on a fence, vying for the same backyard. We were checking each other out, ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness in the other.

I think I won that round, though. It was just loneliness. I didn't have too much scheduled and what I had scheduled fell through.

Monday: I went to the community centre for parent and child time. The place was crawling with toddlers and moms of toddlers who were way too exhausted to talk to me and my angelic looking infant. The moms that had infants also had toddlers, and were busy intellectually stimulating two progeny instead of one. So, no chance to make a connection. I left. One facilitator ran after me and said I should go to the infant time.

Tuesday: The other Augusta was nursing a sick baby. So, they didn't come to yoga. Only that annoying woman with the cute baby boy who she WON'T VACCINATE* was there, so I made myself scarce after class, lest she wanted to hang out again.

Wednesday: I had planned to attend the infant time at the community centre, held at their location at the mall, and to arrive early to get Gummy a sun hat. I realize early that the infant program runs on Tuesday for parents and their infants of 0 to 6 months, and Wednesdays for parents and their infants of 6 to 12 months. I had until then believed infant time was both on Tuesday and Wednesday, regardless of said infant's age. Plans foiled again.

Thursday: I planned to stay home and work on Gummy's napping (and get thank you cards all done. ha!). It sounds so ridiculous to write it like that, but that's what I thought at the time. We'll stay home and I'll put her down for several naps and she'll be blissed out on sleep and I'll win a "mother-of-the-year-award". Snort. She had terrible naps and went to bed cranky and exhausted at 8:45pm. No awards were handed out.

Friday: Mom's group at my house in the morning and out-of-town friends visiting in the afternoon. It was a lovely day. Gummy had great naps.

In that lonely week, I was often lured by the dangerous and seductive self-shaming thought that goes like this: "you've waited so damn long to have a baby, now that you have one, you need to enjoy every second of being a mother" I was helped by convincing myself that having the baby you wait so damn long for does allow you to press the reset button and become like every other mama out there. New parents are allowed to struggle and find some areas of parenting difficult. They are allowed to have an adjustment period to parenthood. Why shouldn't I also be allowed to adjust?

Consider yourself pressed, reset button. I'm just like any ordinary mother out there with my cute DE baby.

 
*Don't get me started on that

don't touch my bebeh

Many a pregnant woman dreads the belly rub from a stranger. I was fearing it myself a few months ago, as my expanding belly became more appealing to the common groper. I am happy to report that it never happened, despite my apprehension that it was just a matter of time before someone would touch my abdomen without my permission. Some close friends rubbed my belly after I gave them permission and that was a-ok. My mom rubbed it once after asking me, but it turns out I really meant to say no, so I backed away and that was that. Thankfully, no one else tried to cop a feel.

I was taking a walk yesterday with gummy in the mo.by. This woman clad in a completely coral outfit (coral sweat pants and coral t-shirt. Did she have coral socks and coral underwear? I didn't care to know) came up to me cooing over my baby. And then, she did the thing that annoys me the most: she tried to touch my baby's face.

This happened twice before, which annoyed me then too. Granted, once she was touched by a 2.5-year-old who was excited to see her. I wasn't as annoyed with this child, as I was scared for my own. The 2.5-year-old had just been sick with a cold and my baby was only 3-weeks old. I could picture myself in the emergency room AGAIN in short order. But no. My baby was fine. The other time, we were walking downtown and this woman from church tried to touch my baby's face.  I wanted to punch her.

Faced with the situation of strangers touching my baby's face, I see only two options:

Option 1
Barricade myself and gummy inside our home. Deal with crushing isolation and develop PPD (like I'm not already at huge risk. So, no.)

Option 2 (the option I've been exercising)
Swat at the ladies' hands like they are flies. Yes, you read correctly. Swat at them.

I'm incredibly surprised at how emboldened I've become as a new mother. I don't want anyone's germs on my brand new, immuno-fragile (what's the word here, science bloggers?) baby. So I've been, reflexively at first, and now consciously, swatting people's hands off my girl. It goes against every fiber of my good-girl upbringing, and it is incredibly satisfying.

So if we see each other on the street and you want to touch my baby, please identify yourself as a fellow blogger. I'll bust out the hand sanitizer and let you tickle her very fat cheeks.