Are You Having So Much Fun?

Another neighbor (as in not Frank the jerk) stopped me on the way home from a walk the other day to say, "Are you having so much fun with your baby??" She is around my age, thinking of having kids soon, and seems to be a really, really happy pleasant person. But I was on that walk with Miles because he had been screaming for an hour or so without rest, and continued to cry on my walk.

I said, "Well...we haven't reached the fun part yet." Her face fell. She seemed to think I was a mixture of a horrible person and a Debbie Downer. I told her how Miles keeps on making those noises and weird, contorted faces once we get inside. And all night. And then again all the next day. Her question really stuck with me for a long time. Still does. Am I having fun?

Every now and then, there will be an hour or so where I can think, "Yes! Awesome! This is so great!" But really, the majority of my time the past 45 days has been spent desperately trying to comfort a screaming, upset baby OR super, super tense with anxiety that his calm will be short lived and he will explode into unrest again.

My son cries. A lot. You could say he has colic. You could say he's a fussy baby. You could go the Dr. Sears route (like Corey and I prefer to do) and say he is a high needs baby. You could do what my dad does and say he is spoiled...or else that there is something desperately wrong with him. It all amounts to the same thing. Miles cries. And he doesn't sleep. And it's not fun to parent him right now.

Do I love the crap out of him? Sure. But do I also scream right back at him in desperation at 430 every morning? Do I use the F word at my infant child after numerous hours of incessant wailing? Do I sometimes hand him to Corey and just leave the house to stand on the porch and stare at my plants? Yes. Every single day.

Corey is currently downstairs fiercely rocking our son in the rocking chair with the radio blaring 91.7 (pure static) at full volume. Miles is tightly swaddled with a pacifer, stomach down like Dr. Karp suggests, jiggling away. With his eyes wide open. Because he doesn't sleep. At least he isn't crying right now. Fun?

Some people have babies who don't behave this way. Like there are people in the world who can put their children down on surfaces that aren't made of human or can, like, run errands or show their babies off at work or even take showers while home alone with their kids. I guess lots of people. Some people have really great ideas or advice on how to help these babies (gas drops are working a little, we nurse frequently, tuck up his legs...I have tried pretty much all the advice except the catnip tea. Oh. I won't give him whiskey, either). Some people come over and hold him for me for a bit and he goes right to sleep for them and I wonder if they think I'm exaggerating. Fun?

Our doctor told us this is not something to be concerned about and that he is confident it will pass. He told me I will look back on this time like a grain of sand in the hourglass of time (he talks that way...) and he is probably right. It will be like I remember junior high, when I had a bright green retainer and horrible glasses, greasy skin, basically a mullet, and my mom let me wear MR Ducks shirts to school with too-big pants. I look back on those times now, when I thought I would NEVER get breasts or have a friend or have someone fall in love with me, and it's like a grain of sand in the hourglass. But it's like a black, greasy grain of sand from an oil spill or sewage explosion with jellyfish stings clinging to it. In other words, I still recognize that time as agonizing.

I feel like Corey articulated our experience the best (he always is good at articulating the really important things). He says that parenthood so far has been the very highest of highs and the very lowest of terrible lows. With Miles, there is no middle ground. We are either on the brink of despair, crawling on the floor in prayer to some entity to soothe our unsoothable baby, clinging to one another in broken-hearted agony OR we are clutching our chests in ecstasy, sure that our hearts will swell too large to fit in there. Only the joyous, chest-clutching moments come really infrequently.

I have faith that things will improve and that I will come to view parenthood as a blissful blessing. For now, though, I will say only that I am exhausted. The space between my blood vessels is tired. And I will stop there, because my baby finally fell asleep and that means I can go stare at him with Corey, clutching our chests as we forget our exhaustion and marvel at our perfect child.

Thunder Vision returns

Frank, the old Italian man across the street, spends his days working on his landscaping or people watching on his porch. As such, this summer, every time I open my front door he yells across the street "Your baby cries a lot!"

For the first two weeks of his life, this gave me such a complex that I wouldn't take him anywhere public. Because you know the implication of his comment is that my baby cries, he can hear it, and I am somehow inadequate as a baby nurturer to stop said crying.

After that, I got a little more confident and more angry at Frank, but still either he or his wife had that ever helpful comment each time I opened the damn door.

Last night, Miles was in rare form. He hadn't napped all day and said, "Fuck yinz! I am NOT sleeping tonight. Instead...I will CRY!" So between 8pm and 730 this morning, the little turd slept a total of 4.5 hours. The rest of that time? Wailing.

Our evening was spent alternating between sixty minute nursing sessions and Corey marching up and down the stairs with Miles in the Bjorn. There were brief periods where Miles would sleep in the Bjorn on Corey's chest, but otherwise, it was wailing, agitated nursing, and me yelling right back at my infant child.

So this morning, when we went to leave for the Aviary (I hoped that the screeching birds would drown out my screeching kid), I had my Thunder Vision activated. You see, I opened the front door and Frank said, "Miles sure cried a lot last night."

In my fantasy, I told him, "Really? He must have gotten agitated when we set him in the back yard and went inside to snort coke."

In real life, I just looked at Frank. I relived the previous twelve hours, the tense muscles, the crying from all three of us, the poop smeared under my nails, the barf on my pajamas, my non-showered body and furry unbrushed teeth. I wondered what small part of Satan sneaked into Frank's skin and urged him to make this comment, a statement that no amount of garden beans or fresh figs can forgive. I blinked my baggy eyes at him, got in the car, and drove away as Miles howled down Route 28.

Eff you, Frank.

Lingo

You know how when you start a new job, everyone runs around using abbreviations and acronyms like you're supposed to be in on the joke? Like "oh, just run it through the GTO" or "Well I put it on the Blue/Gold form." It takes forever to catch on and you find yourself thinking can't these assholes speak English?? I hate all of them!!!!

As it turns out, motherhood is filled with its own lingo. Only I never felt like there was a learning curve. I just seemed to instantly understand all the words on the first go around and, worse, I now throw these words around as if everyone in the universe is hip to be square. I find myself at stores referring to the Bjorn as if everyone should know what this is. Or latch. Or at rugby reunions talking about hooter hiders and nursing necklaces like these things are as common as beer and barbeque.

Which all makes me wonder: what is it exactly about this process that makes the learning curve so desperately steep and yet so dismally flat? How is it even possible to feel simultaneously in on the world's biggest secret and yet have no idea in the world how to be mediocre at this task?

While I ponder this question, I'll just keep on fluffing my boppy, concentrate on my let-down, and try to bypass fussy time. Because I knew (intimately) what all of those things were within about 8 seconds of signing my W4 for the job "mom."

Triumph?

I went to CrossFit this evening! When the midwives told me I could return to working out, they said I could do whatever I was doing third trimester. Well, considering I was doing CrossFit 4x a week, that really wasn't too limiting. For the time being, CrossFit is holding sessions in the park by the river, so I knew it would be a lot of body weight stuff, too.

This is the torturous workout we did in the soupy humidity:
100m lunges
30 stair climbs
100m lunges
30 burpees (I modified these to just do planks, so no pushups yet)
100m lunges (by this point my knees were not bending too far...)
30 handstand pushups (I did 5 decline pushups with my feet on a bench, then collapsed to regular pushups on my knees)
100m lunges (barely made it. Did breathing a la labor, moaned and cursed the world)
30 kettlebell clean and jerk (only got through 5)

By the end of the workout, I really thought I would pass out. My milk had come in super hard, I was seeing black spots, and I felt really, really barfy. So I just sat on the ground and pitied myself for a few minutes.

Then I got up and drove my stick shift car with the sticky clutch all the way home and thought about it. My body has been through hell. I mean, five weeks ago my innards were on an operating table. I am going to go ahead and feel proud of my workout. And then, Monday, I am going to go back and do it again. And again. And one day, I won't remember that it was hard to finish a workout.

I will look just like Annie in the Fran video from YouTube. Seriously! It could happen. She has had babies, too.

Whoopee

Immediately after my surgery, I mean before I even vomited rainbow Jello on Corey, before they even untied my arms and stuff, a resident popped her head over the bedrail and asked me, "Now. What kind of birth control will you be using?"

You are stunned, right? Stunned that this was the first question asked of me after delivering my baby. I was expecting someone to ask if I was planning to breastfeed or maybe if I wanted chicken or fish for dinner. I sort of sputtered and asked her to repeat the question, certain I was hallucinating. She said it again. "What method of birth control will you be using?"

I told her Corey and I hadn't discussed it yet.

For the next four days, any time a medical professional came into my room, he or she asked me what form of birth control I would be using. You know, in case I felt an overwhelming urge to make whoopee after my catheter came out or they took the staples out of my stomach.

Again and again, people asked me this question. I eventually discovered they are uber concerned that women will get pregnant again too quickly and risk damaging their fragile insides. At any rate, I never answered them and they sent me home with prescriptions for condoms and spermicide and the morning after pill. Oh, and Vicodin. Because after all, I had just had surgery and might be thinking about relieving my pain before I got down with my husband.

Finally, at my 10-day postpartum check, I just told them an answer so people would stop asking me the damn question. I said we would use a diaphragm. It seemed logical at the time, they wrote it on my chart, and nobody asked me about sex again for like 5 weeks. Which was great.

Today, I had a marathon postpartum checkup in which I got such an extensive pelvic exam, the midwife had to change her gloves three times. Why such invasion? Evidently, when you write down that you want a diaphragm, you actually have to get FITTED for such a thing. Did you ever see one? Do you know what one is? Because it is huge. And rubbery. And really pretty gross. It looks like a prosthetic breast.

After they decided which one I should use, the midwives told me they would leave the room and I had to put it in myself. I didn't want to put that thing inside me! But I did. Upside down. So then I had to extract it from myself. I was running around that room naked, propping my feet up on things, trying everything possible to wedge that prosthetic breast in my damaged hoo-ha. It was terrible. Frustrating. Smelly. Very weird.

In the end, I have a prescription for my very own prostethic-breast-shaped contraceptive device. And nobody will ever again ask me what form of birth control I will be using. But if you did? I would hazard a guess that diaphragm will not be the likely answer.