somebody's baby

There is a guy who stands by the freeway entrance I often use - not on a daily basis, but several times a week. Enough so that I'm pretty sure he's there every day. He has a sign, a small cardboard one, asking for money. I have never given him any, although I feel a twinge of guilt every time I don't. Reports are that people who have tried to give him food say he refuses it and asks for money instead, but I don't know for sure if this is true.

If statistics are in any way correct, chances are high that this man suffers from some kind of mental illness, given the high percentage of various mental disorders among the homeless.

I'm not a very sentimental person, really. Even when I was pregnant, I wasn't especially weepy over Hallmark commercials or old people walking down the street holding hands. I'm just not very sappy. There are exceptions, of course - I got all misty-eyed fifteen minutes ago watching that youtube-marriage-proposal-video by some guy named Ian, who is indeed, a romantic bad-ass - but, for the most part, I'm a realist. I haven't gotten particularly more emotional since I had a baby, either. I don't know why this is, but there you have it.

I know perfectly well that all kinds of babies come into the world when they are not particularly wanted, or loved, or understood. It's ridiculous to imagine that every child born in this world is born into a delighted, happy family eager to welcome it home. Children are abused, and neglected, in a million horrible and unimaginable ways, and this has always been terrible, and always will be.

So I am not trying to be cheesy and greeting-card-saccharine when I say that, very often since my daughter was born, my first thought when I see Homeless Guy By the Freeway Entrance is, "where is your mom?" Everybody is somebody's baby. I wonder where he grew up; whether he was loved, wanted, welcomed, cherished. What his first birthday celebration was like. His first day of school. Whether anybody kept his first pair of shoes and the art project he made for Mother's Day in second grade. Whether somebody tucked him into bed at night and read him stories and told him they loved him to the moon and back.

Maybe not. Maybe his childhood was a hell, not a paradise, and home a place he was perfectly happy to walk away from as soon as possible.

Or maybe he was loved and nurtured and somewhere, somebody still has his baby shoes - but he was ill in such a way that he couldn't stay in his family, so he is standing by the freeway instead, hoping somebody will give him enough to eat and sleep. Or possibly get drunk. (See? Not sentimental.)

Yesterday, a few miles from where I live, someone who suffers from mental illness took a gun, went into a coffee shop, shot several people, carjacked and killed someone else, and finally shot himself. His family, being interviewed today, says that they tried and tried to get him help. If you have ever tried to get help for a mentally ill family member or friend, you know: this is not easy. You can't force it on anyone. And there are not a lot of safety nets out there.

What this guy did was awful. There's no excuse for it. There's no way to make it anything less than a reprehensible crime, for which he is responsible.

And yet he, too, was somebody's baby. Today I am thinking about his mother, along with the other grieving mothers, who are holding onto those first grade art projects and baby shoes. I hold my own daughter and I think about how lost I would be if something happened to her - if she went into a coffee shop one sunny Wednesday and never came out - and how deeply dark and awful it would be if I lost her, instead, to an illness that turned her into someone I no longer recognize. What would we do? Would there be anybody to help?

I don't have answers to any of this, except that I hope and pray my baby grows up to help turn this world into a less broken place than it feels today.

dear time magazine

Enough already.

You know what? I am enough. I am a good enough mother. Actually, I am a damn good mother (not all of the time, but pretty often). And, above all, I am tired of the constant messaging about how I am supposed to doubt myself, am supposed to feel horribly guilty when I leave my kid at daycare (I don't), am supposed to spend every single minute of my day bemoaning what a terrible mother I am (I don't), and that only women who do these things - who doubt themselves every step of the way - are really, truly, good mothers.

I realize that I am betraying two of my key principles by even writing this post: one, never criticize things you haven't read; and two, never reward stupid behavior by giving it undue attention. You got me on both counts.

No, I haven't read the article. I don't actually care what it says (from the one synopsis I read, it's about attachment parenting). I care that the headline is meant to do exactly what it does: get attention about how every parenting style under the sun is still not good enough. (My first problem here is that I have no discernible parenting "style," except for my guiding principle that everybody should be alive at the end of the day, myself included.)

I'm pretty much a of mix of stuff-I-wanted-to-do-before-the-kid-showed-up and stuff-I-ended-up-doing-because-things-don't-always-go-the-way-you-think. I breastfeed until she was 17 months and then she decided to quit. It broke my heart a little bit, but I'll get over it. She sleeps in her own bed and always has, although said bed was next to ours for the first six months.

We let her cry it out. It took one night and she has slept through the night ever since (although it took us 14 months to sleep past 5:30am). (That sucked.) She eats a lot of organic food. On the other hand, tonight we went out to dinner and she ate radioactively orange mac and cheese. With apples.

We read a lot of books and we weren't going to watch any TV until she was 2, but then I took her on an airplane and she watched Elmo and now she is completely, totally, one hundred percent in love with him. So we watched an Elmo video on Monday. Sue me.

She goes to daycare. She loves it. Sometimes she cries when I leave but I know she is fine after 2 minutes and when I come to pick her up, she is so happy playing that sometimes she hates to leave. I don't feel badly about giving her an opportunity to play with other kids all day long and have other adults in her life who love her and think she is the best thing since string cheese. Nothing wrong there.

She hugs me with ferocity, wrapping her arms around my neck and snuggling into my shoulder and when she wakes up, she says, "mama? dada?" sweetly and we know, for sure, that whatever stupid-ass mistakes we make on a daily basis (and there are quite a few), we are doing okay at the whole parenting thing. Certainly we will screw her up, but that comes with the territory. Hopefully we'll give her just enough dysfunction to make her funny, as I saw on some pin.terest thing the other day.

I'm not going to buy your magazine because I'm not giving you my money. Because I'm betting my money on this instead: I am a good mother. I know a whole lot of good mothers.

And we are sick of you trying to make us feel otherwise.

airpain

While at the airport, Baby Girl pointed at an airplane - one we were about to get on - and shouted, "AIRPAIN!" and I thought, "ohmylordgoodness, kid, you have no idea how right you are. AirPAIN."

This past weekend, Baby Girl and I (more like Toddler Girl now, but whatever) took our first solo trip. It went...uh, better than expected in some ways, and slightly worse in others, and was altogether completely and totally worth it (best. wedding. ever) but also made me never, ever, ever want to get on a plane by myself with a toddler again. Ever. Again.

The worst part of the whole thing was the security line. Held up both times, once by my Crazy Lawbreaking Organic Fruit Pouches (I fought the law, and the law won) - the second time by a renegade tube of diaper cream which I totally thought I had put in my checked baggage and which, certainly, snuck back into my carry-on under its own power. Damn stuff. Nothing makes you look like a great parent more than corralling a screaming toddler while waiting for the TSA guy to pull out the carefully-packed diapers, El.mo video (don't judge me, she doesn't watch TV at home but on an airplane I will give her whatever it takes to survive), coloring book and snacks in order to track down that one liquid you forgot to put in the plastic bin.

Because then what happens is that your kid sees the stuff you had carefully hidden in said carry-on, with the plan that you would pull it out when the jello hit the fan during the actual airplane ride, except now there are no secrets because all your worldly goods are sitting out on that stainless steel table and your child is yelling, "mo! mo!" which either means, 1.) El.mo; or 2.) more! or 3.) something you don't quite understand but will spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out.

The business-guy traveler behind me was itching to get past us, and I don't blame him in the least. I used to be that person. The one who whipped off her shoes, brought a quickly-removed jacket, got that laptop out in three seconds flat and made my way through security like a professional whilst inwardly sneering at the Parent With Screaming Toddler and now...well. Yes. Now that's me.

On the other hand, on the ride home, she slept for two hours (hallelujah!) and then played happily for the last hour or so (minus a few tears on the descent, but even I don't enjoy that part, so no blame there) and, when we landed, she smiled at the passengers around us like she was Queen of the Plane and they praised her as if she was, and that was pretty great.

I still don't really want to do this again, though. And I need a nap.

weaned. (sniff.)

I am writing this post on the run, because in my particular profession this week is holy (and by that, I am supposed to mean something churchy like, "set apart," and "filled with meaning," and "intentional," and I do, but what I also mean is more like, "HOLY FREAKING WEEK I have no idea how all this stuff is going to get done").

I went to a worship service today for pastors, in which a local bishop preached a really wonderful sermon, the kind that makes you realize that even though you are so worn out you could fall asleep on your feet, you are glad you braved the rain and got in the car and ate fruit candy for lunch so you could get there mostly on time. (By mostly, I mean that I got there five minutes late during a part of the service when everyone was facing the back, so I walked in panting from having run up the street and there's the whole congregation looking right at me, which is just. sheer. awesome. in that particularly humiliating way.)

Anyway. During the sermon, he started talking about how grateful he was for everything that pastors do, and how hard it can be, and I sat there thinking of all the things I have to do in the next few days and I started to cry. Not sobbing, choking tears or anything - more like rapid eye-blinking and then a few tears down my cheek because I am a mainline Protestant and we don't really get all emotional in church - but there it was. Crying. In church. It has been awhile since I did that.

I don't entirely know why, really, because it's not that I feel underappreciated in my life. I mean, life is insanely busy right now, and there have been a few bumps in the road over the past month, but nothing life-altering, nothing terrible. Nothing that makes you want to get in the car and drive to a whole different city and set up shop someplace where no one knows your name. Just normal hard. Regular hard, like everyone's lives, which maybe is the thing - it just seemed, on that rainy morning, like everybody in the world should get to sit down in a warm room with beautiful music and a kind person standing up in the front saying to you, thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for all the things nobody knows that you do. Thank you for being. This doesn't happen much in life. Which is a shame.

And when I got in the car, I realized that maybe part of my crying was about the fact that, a few days ago, we stopped breastfeeding. I had been hanging on, telling myself and anyone else who wanted to know (as well as people who probably didn't) that I was going to keep on nursing because Baby Girl and I are taking a trip to the midwest in the next few weeks, flying by ourselves, and I wanted to be able to nurse her if I needed to get her to sleep on the plane, or help her ears pop, or generally just stop the screaming, that kind that only seems to happen in small enclosed places where you have to keep your seatbelt on. That after we got back from the trip, we would work on the final weaning, because I am going on a trip in May for a week without her, and I wanted her to be done nursing by then so that she wouldn't miss me and mama milk at the same time.

But it was a big lie. BIG. Because I think she's probably been done for awhile. We were only nursing at night, and that was fine. A few days ago, my husband put her to bed and I realized that she hadn't nursed all day. The next day, he did bedtime again because I had evening meetings, and I realized it: it's over. She hasn't asked for two, maybe three days. I had this idea that I would pick a day to finish so that I could have that experience one last time, take in every second of it, mourn the loss and say goodbye to that whole piece of our mother-child story, and it didn't happen. We just stopped.

She's fine, but I am not. I am mourning it like I can't believe. I mean, breastfeeding is, hands down, the hardest damn thing I have ever done in my life, and if you had told me during the first eight weeks of her life that, at seventeen months, I would still be nursing and having a hard time giving up, I would have told you that you had lost your fucking mind. So. Hard.

But then it wasn't so hard after awhile, and then it was wonderful, and now it's over, and all I can think about is that I may never get to do that again - not with her, for sure, but maybe not with anybody, and it was the only thing my infertile body ever did on its own with regard to reproduction. I loved it. I loved it more than I could ever have imagined, and I am the only person in the world who is going to remember what it was like, at 2:00am, before naptime, to soothe her crying, to help with teething, to say ni-night - I am the only memory bank for this experience. She won't remember. She'll never know how much it meant to me.

She will never say thank you for it, and I couldn't possibly care less. It's something I did out of sheer love, and it meant everything, and I never wanted or expected to be thanked for it. You know what? That kind of thing never happens. Really. Remember that episode of Friends where Phoebe bets Joey that she can find a selfless good deed and then she can't? The thing doesn't exist.

The bishop stood up there and thanked us for all the invisible stuff, all the hard moments no one else sees, and I cried partly because that doesn't happen very often and partly because, in this holy week, I am letting go of the most beautiful of invisible, hard things I have ever known. Breastfeeding is the holiest thing I have ever done. It was sheer incarnational love, as we say in the church - love given flesh, made real. JesusMaryandJoseph it was painful too, the way holy love usually is. It was, occasionally, highly inconvenient. And publicly embarrassing too, once she started to throw the Chic Mom Cover off us and twist her head around to look at the world, leaving me hanging out for the world to see.

Now she is off into the world, without that last bit of me attached. I am so grateful for her health, for all the happy growing up she does, for the ways she is discovering the world - but oh, my child, someday I hope you find something you love, something you do because it fills you with joy, something you want to do and being thanked never enters your mind - because, let me tell you, there is nothing better. I love you.

things we say

All of a sudden, it's like a language explosion at our house. (I've read recently that some kids begin talking after they are weaned - a process we are working on, but a post for another time.) At any rate, whatever the reason, suddenly we have a little tiny person (a little tiny bossy person) who can say:

things she's been saying for awhile, like:
mama
dada (usually shouted, DA!!!!)
ba (ball)
mow (mole) (yeah, I know. But she loves pinching the mole on my neck while she nurses.)
lo (hello)
yeah
no

and all kinds of new things, like:
atsahhh (outside)
bu (bus)
maw (meow)
cack cack (quack)
bye
doh (door) (or possible Homer Simpson impression)
mo (more, accompanied by frantic and/or forceful signing of same)

Plus a whole lot of other language that I have, as of yet, not quite figured out, much to her consternation.

It's amazing, all the changes that happen overnight - when there are so many other things that seem. to. take. forever. But suddenly there's a little person living in our house, where there used to be a baby. What?

You know who else should get to say a new word for themselves? Mo and Will. They need to say "mommy" and "daddy" and it needs to mean them. They're in the beginning of another pregnancy and, if you don't know their story, suffice it to say this: please God, may this be the one. Go over and cheer them on if you haven't already.

leap (late).

In the spirit of "better late than never," accompanied by the spirit of "last week was insane but we survived, so here's to better days," a post in honor of Leap Day. Or, the one week anniversary of Leap Day.

The other day, I bought four boxes of Sam.oa cookies from my local Girl Scout Drug Pusher Cookie Salesgirl, and I hid them in the bottom drawer of the desk in my office. I do this because, although we also buy said cookies openly from somebody at my husband's school and eat them at home, the rate at which my husband consumes these cookies (lightspeed) is problematic for me, since I rarely get to enjoy them before they are gone. Which conversation usually goes like this:

me: where are the Sam.oas?
husband: (silence)
me: WHERE ARE THE SAM.OAS?
husband: you mean that box from yesterday?
me: (eye roll)
husband: did you want another one?

My dear, you have known me for nine years. You should know by now: I always want another one.

So, I have developed a Girl Scout Cookie Season Survival Strategy, which is to buy four boxes of Sam.oas secretly and hide them. At first I felt a little guilty about this. Spouses are not supposed to have secrets from each other, right? Surely this means my marriage is on the rocks and it is but a hop, skip, and jump from Hidden Cookies to Raging Affair with the Copy Boy (if we had such boy, which we do not, in my office).

But then I leapt to the realization, the other day, that the cookies might be about something else.

Here's the thing: we have fully entered toddlerhood in our household, and it. is. hard. Also fun, because she cracks me up with her emerging language (such as starting every "sentence" with rapid-fire "um, um, um, um," while trying to get out whatever mysterious word I won't understand anyway). And she is more communicative in other ways, like pointing at her bum when she needs to be changed - or, as the other day, laying down on the floor, throwing her legs up in the air, and putting a kitchen towel on her butt. Ah, subtlety.

But her frustration level is also markedly increased, I'm guessing because a.) she is so freaking close to being able to say things and, in fact, thinks she is saying discernable things, and she gets pissed off that we don't understand her; and b.) we are starting the weaning process. So we have a lot of screamy mornings, in particular. And given that our mornings start at about 5:00am (sohelpmeuniverse, if you know how to fix that, please tell me) it can make for a long day.

But those little funny moments - like how she has learned to sign "cold" by holding fists next to her upper arms and shaking them when you say, "brrr!"; and how she makes herself laugh when she thinks something is supposed to be funny; and how she lays on her back with a book held up in the air and 'reads' it, usually upside down; and how she says, "yeah," or, "no," in answer to everything regardless of what she actually means, and how, the other day, when I gave her dinner and asked her if it was hot, she said, "no," and then I said, "what would you do if it was hot?" and she blew/spit on the food - they're my Samo.as in the desk drawer.

And I need them. I need some hidden sweetness, in these days and the days to come, when I am going to lose my mind from getting up at 5:00am or trying to figure out what she needs or simply wanting to bang my head on the counter because I'm losing my mind with the whining. I need to be able to reach into the back of my head and pull out the moment when I asked her for a kiss and she ran across the room, lips pursed, and crashed into my mouth, saying, "mmmmmm." And the moment when she started saying, quite clearly, "what's this?" 

I need those hidden cookies because there is a lot of - I don't know, brussel sprouts, or whatever vegetable you don't particularly love but know is part of a healthy diet. Good news for me: there's a lot of sweetness. I just have to remember this.

Especially at 5:00am.

crabby.

I've started this post about fifty times (mostly in my head) and then stopped. Mostly because I am still overwhelmed by guilt any time I feel the need to vent about parenting, because I think about all the men and women still stuck in the Infertility Zone of Hell and I remember how, when I was there, I swore I would never complain about parenting because don't those people know how lucky they are to have children?

Also, I've read a few blogs lately about people whose fertility treatments have failed and I feel very sad about that for them, and that also tends to make my complaining seem really petty and small.

And then I live in an area of the country where a man just took his life and the lives of his two small children in a very terrible, awful, horrific manner, and I am without words to express how sad this makes me.

So there is a piece of me that says I should shut up about the hard parenting days and just let it go.

But there is another piece of me that needs to get this out. And for right now, that piece is winning. Maybe I'll delete later.

Here it is.

Some days I think I do not have enough patience to be a parent. Really. I think I might be a truly, unchangably, basically selfish person because when my kid wakes up at 5:00am AGAIN even though there is no reason for her to do so (seriously; I've checked) I just want to put the pillow over my head and let her cry because I don't think it's asking too much for me to sleep until, you know, 5:45am or something.

I am not even a stay-at-home-parent - I go to work and she goes to a truly wonderful childcare three days a week - and still, by the end of some days, I just cannot take the clutching, pinching, crawling-all-over-me, whining, constantconstantconstantconstant need. All. the. time. I can't take it. I need to pee by myself. There. I said it.

I am sick and tired of making five things for dinner, none of which she will deign to eat. Meanwhile, she will eat whatever her dad puts on a plate.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY SHE NAPS FOR EVERYONE EXCEPT ME and this pisses me off. A lot. I mean, I don't actually yell at her, but there was a big part of me yesterday that wanted to. I had to stay downstairs and let her cry for about 15 minutes because I was too mad to go up there.

(Before you call CPS on me, let me assure you that I have never, ever, ever hit my child and I cannot imagine actually doing so, but some days I understand why people who never learned how to manage their anger do that. I think every parent in the world thinks that thought at some point but nobody says it out loud because it makes you feel like the worst person in the world. So there, I said it.)

I am really tired of people a.) commanding me to "enjoy every moment because it goes so fast" (not at 5:00bloodyAM, it doesn't); b.) teasing me about how good it is that my child is wearing me out (an old guy at church does this and it just makes me want to punch him in the nuts, except that is wisely against the rules for pastors to do to parishioners); c.) offering me endless parenting advice that I never asked for and don't want.

I am tired of being crabby.

I. Am. Tired.

So, there. There it all is, in all its ugly and selfish glory. Because I love my darling girl, who is a complete and utter miracle, and who makes me laugh and gives me joy beyond words and whose life I am privileged to witness...

...but she also drives me fucking nuts.

I guess that's parenting.

(Also, if you want to read a much better and infinitely more thoughtful reflection on this sort of stuff, go check out this amazing post on Momastery. It's what I mean but am too crabby to articulate.)