Fail Better

I am writing this two days before her four month birthday. She is strapped to my chest in a stretchy wrap I made for us. I am trying to type quietly, so she can sleep. Every so often, she rubs her face against my chest, and burrows deeper into sleep. I love moments like this, when her head is close to my heart and we breathe in unison.

This is the month where I returned to work fully. It was (and is) a big transition for me. Sometimes, I think I’m doing it well, but most of the time I feel like I’m failing spectacularly. This week, felt like mostly failing.

I had a week where my work schedule changed daily. I started as early as 8 PM and ended as late as 4 PM on some days. On others, I started as late as 11 AM and ended as late as 8 PM. At work, I feel like I accomplish a fraction of what I used to acomplish. I can blame this on the almost eighty minutes of pumping or cleaning my pump parts that I do throughout the work day. But I also just feel like my output is less, as if I am constantly playing catch up during my day.

At home, I only get to see Nora for a few hours each day. And those hours are filled with eating dinner, feeding her, bathing her, and getting her to a nap or to bed. It’s transactional – these are the tasks we need to do, so that she is happy and healthy. Gone are the leisure days of my maternity leave, where I could read her books, play with her, and feel like a hands-on parent.

In general, I am tired. I am tired from physically providing all of the food for my daughter, every day. I am tired from waking up at 5 AM, or more likely 4:30, each morning. I am tired from missing quality time with her and quality time with my husband. And in those moments of sheer exhaustion, I feel like I’m failing.

It’s hard to explain now that I’m two days in to a three day weekend. But I woke up at 4:45 on Thursday with an overwhelming sense that I am doing it all wrong. Aaron and Nora were up and playing in her bedroom and I thought, “Babies shouldn’t be up at 4:45. She must not be getting enough sleep. I’m doing it wrong.” This sense led to a full-scale meltdown. Never mind the fact that Nora is a natural morning person (so far). Never mind that she wakes up to be fed around this time every day and doesn’t settle down again until a 6 AM nap. Never mind that she naps every two hours during her day. At that moment, I was terrified that I was breaking her ability to sleep through the night, a skill she has yet to develop.

Thinking about this perceived failure, I started to catalog all of my other failures as a wife, new mother, and worker. I am not working as I hard as I used to at work. FAILURE. I barely have time to see my husband during the week. FAILURE. I don’t pitch in with the chores around the house, as much as I should. FAILURE. My two cats are utterly neglected. FAILURE. I don’t know if I spend enough time, or the right type of time, with my daughter. FAILURE. I have nightmares about missing meetings at work and not being able to call in, and nightmares about dropping the baby, often in the same night. FAILURE.

Like most perfectionists, I have a debilitating fear of failure. It’s not that I’m unaccustomed to it. I’ve failed (or almost failed) plenty throughout my life. I almost failed out of high school, much to the shock of most people who know me as an adult. I need to be good at everything I do, or everyone might find out that I am not as smart/capable/resourceful/functioning as I seem (or as I think I seem).

Knowing this about myself, I have chosen to embark upon a path that is littered with failure. There is no way in the world that I will raise a child successfully without failing at something. We all fail at some part of parenting, because we are all human. I realized this weekend, after sleeping in until 6:30 on Saturday and recovering precious sleep, that I need to embrace failure. I picked this motherhood path, not because I would be a perfect mother. I wanted to share the love I have with my husband with another person. I wanted to work on something hard and meaningful with him. I wanted to contribute someone awesome to the world. In order to do all those things, I have to fail and fail often. I now just have to learn how to accept my failures and failings.

In the midst of my panic about my parenting and personal failures, I thought that I need to figure this out before Nora can remember me failing. Now I know this is wrong. I need to teach her how to fail well, to fail better. Every time that she learns something new, she will fail first. I want to show her and teach her that she can pick herself up and try again, try more passionately, try with more skill and experience. Not because she will one day be perfect, but because one day she will do better than the day before. This is what we are going to work towards, together.

Missing This

I get the impression that it’s pretty standard to get a little verklempt when packing up the adorable tiny clothes that no longer fit your adorable tiny person. I’m no exception to the verklemptitude, as I’ve discovered a few times already; our five-month-old is wearing 9 month clothes, thanks to his weedy height, so I’ve stashed two rounds of clothes into boxes so far with the requisite sniffle or two. But I’m not sure if this next bit is as universal: I also get teary when I stow the clothes he can’t yet wear in the dresser: the rummage sale bargains, the gifts from family and friends. I try to imagine the boy that will be that tall, that broad, and I realize it will be a boy who doesn’t coo softly to himself. It will be a boy who doesn’t need help to stand—over and over and over again—so he can jump and dance. It will be a boy whose fluffy cloth-diapered butt doesn’t swing like he’s doing the hula as he balances precariously on two feet. It will be some other boy, who is in some ways still this familiar child and also someone else. And while watching this “becoming” is exciting and wonderful, there is so much I will miss about this boy as he is right this moment.

To be frank, I never thought I would like the drooly, leaky, needy infant stage especially well. I always thought babies were cute in small enough doses, but I entered this journey because I wanted to parent a person, not because I wanted to have a baby, per se. As a former middle school teacher, I envisioned myself being both more adept with and partial to small people who were…well…more like small people than babies. You know: verbal, capable of feeding and pottying themselves, creative and funny and surprising. Since becoming a parent to this baby, however, I’ve made some unexpected discoveries: I don’t mind diapers. The sleepless nights of nursing do eventually become routine and manageable. The neediness, while sometimes somewhat overwhelming, is also heart-breakingly sweet, like when he clutches tightly to my thumb to drift safely back to sleep at night. And the creativity and the humor seem to make their appearance even before the verbal skills. To my surprise, I have not yet been bored with the drooly, leaky, needy stage we’re mired in because even as those aspects stay monotonously static, something—and often many somethings—is new every single day. Something unexpected will trip his emerging sense of humor. He will be newly fascinated by some shape or color or texture and stare at it endlessly, reach for it over and over again. He will startle both himself and me with a noise he’s never made before, or in one swift movement, he will do something neither of us knew he could. He will practice his emerging skills with an unmistakable look of pride and excitement. I love bearing witness to this newness. I even love listening to him grumble with frustration as he chases an elusive ball or accidentally drops his spoon for the twentieth time just as he gets it to his mouth. He foams at the mouth when he fusses, by the way. I don’t know if that’s normal, but even those frothy mounds of spit bubbles are endearing in their own way as they mark the boundaries of the abilities he is constantly testing.

Shortly before the hobbit was born, a well-meaning supervisor pulled me aside after a training. “Go home,” she said. “Have a healthy baby. Love your baby. But don’t forget that you are a smart, talented woman, and you need something more than to stay home with your baby.” Even at the time, I remember feeling taken aback that she felt she could say this to me, since we’d worked together for less than six months, and certainly had never become closer than colleagues. Still, her words are perhaps part of the reason that I have struggled mightily with the fact that I’ve turned down two part-time jobs since Samwise’s birth, one of which was offered by that admonishing supervisor. To be fair, I have one part-time job already. To be more fair, it’s very part time, I do the vast majority of it from home, and I would love to drop it entirely.

I know a lot of smart, talented women, many of whom have kids of their own. Like many, many women in our society, they are working moms. And among them, I often feel alone because virtually every one of them says that being a stay-at-home mom would not be or would not have been a good fit for them; they need more. Or they at least need something else, part of the time. My feelings may change as my child changes, but for now, despite my record of chronic overachievement, I don’t feel that way. I love being home with my son, sharing these small moments with him, and I find myself reeling at how much he has already changed in the short months since his birth. Contributing to my current lack of employment enthusiasm is the fact that the work I do is something I do because it’s part time and from home, not because I am emotionally invested in it, which is something far different that what is faced by women who became pregnant when they have inspiring careers aligned to their passions. And, to be honest, I’m intoxicated by working less because of the opportunity it offers for me to chip away at the list of personal passions for which full-time work in education (especially the all-consuming, amorphous work hours known by those educators who are truly committed to education) never allowed enough space: neglected writing projects, unread books, the development of groundwork for the first projects my husband and I will undertake with our shared business.

But, like so many, many mothers, no matter what combination of work/partner/personal life/mothering balance they strike, I feel guilty. I feel like I should want something more or different. I feel that being content to be home with my child demonstrates a lack of ambition and a willingness to “waste” my talents. I feel somehow defective or lazy because I don’t long to be in a classroom or an office somewhere. At the very least, I feel decidedly unfeminist. I feel guilty that I don’t feel called to be superwoman, balancing full-time work and full-time mothering with aplomb. I feel guilty that I want a slower pace of life and that I am willing to take it as long as our budget can bear it. And because of the choices and needs of most of the mothers I know and respect, I also feel isolated. I question this decision. I window-shop for full-time jobs. When I start figuring the costs of child care, however, the likelihood that we’d need to buy a second car or to move to a bigger city rather than continuing to share a home with my mom in Small Town USA (a situation which has been a gift for both parties), and the fact that all these added expenses would mean that I’d spend almost all my full-time income to cover the costs of taking a job…well, I haven’t yet seen a job compelling enough to inspire me to choose to pursue it beyond the window-shopping stage.

I talked with a good friend about my guilt complex after I turned down the most recent job offering. She’s a university professor and mom to a preschooler; with her husband’s self-employment status and her nontraditional hours, they cover all their child care needs between them. I don’t think she ever wanted to stay home full-time; she’s one of the moms who was working her dream job when she got pregnant. Still, she was able to look at me and say exactly what I needed to hear: “You have a whole lot of years ahead of you to be a working mom.”

She’s right. I do.

All too soon, I will find myself in a classroom or an office again. Until then, however, I am going to try to set aside my guilt and just love this, right now. Putting away those clothes Samwise can’t yet wear—but will, very soon—is an exercise in understanding how much I will miss these transformative first months. I already do miss them. Each day I feel as though I am watching one day race into the next, bringing new wonder with it even as the miracles of earlier weeks grey and fade into forgetfulness. I feel so blessed to be able to be here to see it all and to mark its presence and passing. When life is full to bursting in this way, the last thing I want to spare space for is guilt.

Blissful Body

Tonight, I got home early, hoping to do some mama/baby yoga with Nora. But then,  I learned that what she needed was a feed and a nap, tout de suite. Even though I know in my bones that what she needs comes first, I felt disheartened. I thought, My day job and my mothering is why I will never lose this damn baby weight.  But like a good mama, I swallowed that impulse and did what was right for her in that moment. I fed Nora and waited for her to get tired.

While I wound her down, we listened to this Ani DiFranco song on my iPod and I sang to her:

Lately, I’ve been glaring into mirrors, picking myself apart
You’d think at my age I’d thought of something better to do
Than making insecurity into a full time job
Making insecurity into an art

And I fear my life will be over
And I will have never live unfettered 
Always glaring into mirrors
Mad, I don’t look better

And now I’ve got this tiny baby
And they say she looks just like me
And she is smiling at me with that present infant glee
Yes, and I would defend to the ends of the earth
Her perfect right to be, be, be, be

I teared up as I sang to her because I know that she doesn’t have that nagging body hate that so many of us women carry around with us. She is still learning she has a body and each day, as she discovers some new limb, it’s beautiful and fun and frankly, something to try to shove in her mouth. I wondered how long I get to keep her like this, keep her happy in her perfect working body? I want more than anything in this world to not burden her with that heavy baggage. Step one is to release my own burdens about my body, which is so much easier said than done.

Now, as she lays against my breast bone, comforted by the sound of my heartbeat and the movement of my breath, I am telling myself that my body does good work. I may not get as much exercise as I would like and I may not always eat as healthfully as I should, but my body is good. It is a source of comfort and nourishment to my child and a thing of beauty, even as it settles into its new shape. I was once as blissful in my body as my daughter and I want to mirror that bliss back to her as best as I can, for as long as I can. That’s my new job.

Gratitude for Thirty-Five…Three Days Later

A graph illustrating the typical adaptation period with a newborn and new parents, given to me by my doula and tacked up on my refrigerator. 

On Tuesday, I turned thirty-five years old. At the beginning of the morning, I started making a list of all the things I was grateful for, hoping to get to at least thirty-five. I included gratitude for big things, like the addition of my daughter Nora into my life and the way my husband has embraced fatherhood, and for little things, like avocados and sleep sounds at night. I had high hopes to post it on Tuesday evening, in my twenty minutes of wakefulness after Nora goes to sleep.

But then, I left my half-written list at work. No worries – I could rewrite a smaller list after Nora goes to sleep. But then, Nora fussed at her last nursing session and it took longer than normal for us to get her to sleep. And then, a friend called to wish me happy birthday and I had a short whispered conversation with her. And then, I had to return my mom’s two calls. Suddenly, it was nine o’clock and I was crawling into bed, with no list and no plans for writing one. This is my life now, I thought, before passing out cold.

I would have posted my list on Wednesday, but like many WordPress bloggers, I decided to black out my site to protest SOPA & PIPA. Then on Thursday, I got food poisoning. Blech. Now, my aptly numbered list of gratitude seems less and less important the further I get from a timely posting.

Instead, I want to express my gratitude for one thing: time. On Wednesday, I went to the same New Mama’s class that I have been attending since Nora was two and a half weeks old. I was exhausted and numb and I had no idea what I was doing as a mother. All of the other mothers seemed much more together and their older babies were awake and reactive. I attended each week, got to know some of the moms, and slowly I’ve gained my footing as a mom. I know that a lot of my newly gained confidence came from listening to the older moms and attending that class.

As the “older” moms gained more experience and returned to work, they dropped off the class and newer moms joined. On Wednesday, I was the mom with the oldest baby, outside of the teacher. I listened as moms of three-week olds and five-week olds talked about the difficulty of mothering  brand new babies. Their babies only sleep and eat and want to be held. They have trouble going to the bathroom, for fear that their babies will need yet another nursing session. They curse their Moby wraps, for being too hard to figure out on 2 hours of sleep. I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s right. This was really effing hard at first.” 

I remembered how many times I broke down sobbing, because Nora wouldn’t latch properly or I couldn’t leave the house because she screamed each time she went in a carrier or car seat. I remembered having to set my alarm to wake her to eat every two hours at night and cursing her when she would wake up fifteen minutes before the alarm sounded. I remember feeling, above everything else, that surely I was the most incompetent mother who walked the earth, because I couldn’t do any of it. I could manage registration and counsel wayward students at work, but I couldn’t get my baby to stop crying. That was the hardest for me, the feeling that I couldn’t master one single skill and floundered at all of them.

Listening to them, I realized how far I’ve come in just fifteen weeks. It’s not to say that it’s no longer hard or I’ve figured everything out. I haven’t, not by a long shot. I know I’ve got years and years of learning how to do all of this. But I’ve grown accustomed to the work. I’ve had time to develop a few systems and screw up a few times. I’ve untangled the Moby wrap and I’ve learned how to pee with the baby in another room.* I’ve gained competence at the basic skills of keeping a baby alive, fed and happy, after weeks of drowning in incompetence.

It’s also helped that Nora, through the gift of time, is becoming more self-sufficient. She can play on a blanket for ten whole minutes at a stretch. She no longer fusses when I put in her one of our carriers. She nurses like a pro. She’s also smiling and babbling and every day becoming more like a person and less like an eating-sleeping-pooping machine.

I’m grateful that I’ve had the time to watch her develop and to figure some of this out on my own (and with the help of other more experienced mamas). I’m so grateful that I’m having this experience in my middle thirties, since I know so much more about myself than I did when I was in my middle twenties or even early thirties. And frankly, I’m grateful that I never have to go back to those days of parenting a brand new baby and that overwhelming feeling of desperate incompetence. That time is long gone.

*I know that just by writing this, I’m jinxing myself. Nora will now proceed to go on a nursing strike and nap strike after starting teething early. I’m doomed.

Birth Matters

Creating this space was Jessica’s idea. Although both of us tend to mark time in our lives by writing, my writing tends to be more fragmented and half-formed. Jessica is far more accomplished at polishing and publishing than I am,  so it comes as no surprise that by the time I finally trucked my patoot into our shared blog project, she had already populated it with a variety of thoughtful posts. All of which means that my first visit here was as a reader, not an author. The bonus of being late to the party is that she’s already started the conversation, which makes it easy to jump in with something to say, though sometimes the words needed to sketch out this new reality for someone else feel frustratingly elusive.

I suppose it’s worth starting with the birth of the hobbit, Samwise. (Our babe is so dubbed on this blog thanks to his small stature, big feet, love of the outdoors, general good nature, and his voracious appetite. Think breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, brunch, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, supper…the list goes on. More on that in another post, I’m sure.) One of Jessica’s first posts really resonated with me: her reflections on what it meant and means to have a low intervention birth, free of pain medications. Like Jessica (and my mother and my sister-in-law and a handful of my friends), I guess I, too, “went all frontier woman” for my birth. If, that is, you discount the fact that I birthed in a hospital after 9 months of awesome prenatal care, regular chiropractic, and a very opportune visit to an acupressure specialist. Not exactly a rough scenario, in many ways. But, realistically, what many people are interested in is the epidural or lack thereof. There was no epidural. There was, however, more than a week of near-total sleeplessness, thanks to an extended prodromal labor and the intensity of the days-long, post-birth adrenaline rush. There was a shopping stint at the local food co-op when contractions were two minutes apart, prompting the deli manager to check on me as I stood, silently swaying, at the end of the hot food bar next to the veggie korma. There was an emergency response team frantically searching the ground floor of the hospital for me at one point. There was also a lot of blood. And as I lay in bed hours after the birth, wide-eyed and trying to calm my racing heart, I told my husband, “I want to do that again.”

Birth is predictable, in the sense that some steps have to happen for a natural vaginal birth to take place. You gotta grow that baby. The cervix has to dilate and efface, the uterus has to forcefully and progressively contract, the pelvic bones need to move and the ligaments stretch, and that baby has to work its way out from the snug safety of the womb to take its first breath in the wide expanse of the world. However, births are far from predictable. Variables such as the mother’s and baby’s health, their physiology and proportions, the baby’s positioning, the stressfulness of the environment, the support the mother has as she labors, and how prepared and informed the mother and support people are about the process of labor—all these things matter profoundly in determining outcomes and the path that will be taken. Some women or babies need and benefit greatly from the interventions offered in hospitals. However, most healthy, prepared, and well-supported women can give birth with minimal intervention. I was lucky to be one of those women. I’d had an uncomplicated pregnancy, great prenatal care, a lot of birth education, wonderful doulas, a well-positioned and healthy baby, and as the descendent of Norwegian immigrants, I had the bonus of being a larger-than-average woman who gave birth to a perfectly average-sized babe.

While pregnant, I read a heartbreaking and thoughtful post on why the healthy baby isn’t the only thing that matters about the birth experience. It’s such a common thing to say when a woman has a particularly difficult birth experience that results in a lot of pain, in unplanned surgery, or in scars—literal or metaphorical—she will wear for the rest of her life: “You have a healthy baby, though. That’s the only thing that matters.”

A healthy baby is an amazing gift, and most moms who have babies born with health problems would be more than willing to bear their babies’ burdens themselves if it could but make their babies well. But, even so, it’s dispassionate and short-sighted to tell a mother struggling to make peace with a difficult birth that a healthy baby is the only thing that matters. The mom matters. Her experience matters. Her feelings about the birth, about what her experience does to her and for her, matter. The birth isn’t just the beginning of her child’s story; it is one of the most powerful and intimate chapters in her own story, and it colors the first few days (or weeks or months) of her developing relationship with her child. How amazing to begin with your child feeling that his entrance into the world was one of the most beautiful experiences of your life. It’s what I wish for every woman who chooses to have a child. It’s what my birth experience with Samwise was, even without painkillers, which may surprise some people. In fact, considering the particulars of the birth, part of why it was so intensely positive for me was because I had a team of people who cared about me and trusted in me, but I had nothing blocking or confusing the physical sensations of birth.

Birth is incredibly intense. I remember feeling nearly overwhelmed by the powerful surges rocking my body, remember feeling like surely my bones were creaking as they moved to create space for the baby’s path. But with the trust I had in my body’s capacity for birth, with my husband holding tight to my hand, with the hands of one doula stroking my back through contractions and the hands of the  other repeatedly offering a bottomless glass of ice water and murmuring words of encouragement as I labored, the strain and stretch of my body felt strong and productive rather than something painful that I wanted to escape. In many ways, it reminded me of the summer I rode my bicycle, alone and laden with gear, along the Pacific coast from Canada to Mexico: the burning intensity of the climb up seemingly endless peaks in northern California, the protesting joints and muscles the day I rode a hundred miles before sundown, the swell of emotion experienced when teetering on the nonexistent shoulder of a narrow, winding road wrapped around a sheer cliff that tumbled to the ocean, the feeling that surely, my body wouldn’t be able to keep on doing this, even as I knew it already was. With nothing to numb me from what I was feeling, I was startled to feel and instinctively identify details of the birth that I treasure. I knew, for example, when his ears and nose emerged because I felt them as tiny pops, each one like a miracle. The only true pain I felt−that is, pain that felt simply like pain, not like intense effort−was a white-hot, ripping sensation just after those three beautiful pops. It felt as though someone had grabbed hold of my son and was tearing him from my body rather than letting him come on his own time. It lasted only a second before vanishing. It turned out that one of his hands, snuggled securely and stubbornly next to his cheek, was more than my body had bargained for, and my labia had torn from the pressure just as he made his exit. Despite the initial hurt, however, it healed both quickly and comfortably in the weeks postpartum, thanks to the resiliency of the tissue and my doctor’s skill with needle and thread.

My labor started on a Monday afternoon and ended on a Thursday evening. It was a lot of hard work. That’s pretty much the nutshell version of my experience with labor: an all-consuming physical effort with a few mercurial seconds of pain. It has left me with my most treasured memories and a lot of wishes for my own child. The healthy baby matters, yes. But a healthy birth experience also matters. For the mother. For her partner. For the new family.

If my son should choose to have a child of his own someday, I hope he and his partner have as much laughter and joy and hope in the birth story they write together as his father and I have in his. I hope his partner is amazed by the power of her body, by how strong and resilient she is. I hope they find the most beautiful people, familiar faces and strangers, meeting them with open hands when they most need them. I hope my son and his partner discover new depths to the trust they have in each other as they navigate through the birth, an experience impossible to know and a path impossible to chart in advance. I hope my son knows, as his father does, what it is to lie awake in the dark and be the force pushing back against the contractions rocking his partner’s body as he lends his strength to her hips. I hope his partner knows the unshakeable stillness that follows a powerful contraction and that, in that stillness, she discovers that she is still herself even then, smiling and laughing and asking that white Christmas lights be hung to welcome the baby. I hope they both know what it is to hold their healthy baby for the first time and marvel that anything could ever feel so brilliantly alive. I hope that after the birth, when they are lying awake in the dark listening to the racing of their hearts and the soft breath of their babe, the words on both their lips are, “I want to do that again.”

Living with Machines

I’ve been back to work for three part-time weeks now. Most aspects of my job are how I remember it. I have the same colleagues, the same job responsibilities, the same stress.  My desk hasn’t moved. It’s comforting to come back to something so familiar and (for the most part) enjoyable.

But now, I have a new constant in my day. Four times a day, I lock myself in a vacant office, peel back my nursing tank top, and pump for fifteen minutes. When I was pregnant and imagined breastfeeding,  I pictured the experience I had during my maternity leave. I thought that each feeding would take place in a warm room, with my baby nuzzled up against me. Even though I always planned to return to work, I never really imagined myself in this empty office, tethered to a humming machine.

Yet, here I am, four times a day. During my first week back, I thought I needed to write a love letter to my pump. After all, it was helping me to feed my child in the way that I want,  without endangering my income. It may not be comfortable or warm, but it is my new reality and I just have to learn to like it. But after the week I’ve just finished, I’m just as likely to throw the damn thing against the wall.

On Friday night, I had very little sleep before a long Saturday at work. So, when I produced very little milk from my pumping sessions, I blamed my sleepless night. Surely, my milk would be there when I needed it. I didn’t work again until Tuesday. I fed Nora throughout the weekend with no problems. On Tuesday morning, I pumped before going to work, as I do every work day. (I have to replace five feedings, so I pump once at home and four times at work.) I pumped and pumped…and pumped,but nothing came out. I had dribbles of foremilk, when I knew that my breasts were relatively full. The longer I pumped, the more I panicked. Was there something wrong with my supply? Was I becoming unable to use a pump? Was I going to make myself late to work? Any nursing mom can tell you that fear and panic do not make for a good letdown, so I packed up the pump and took it to work. Lest this sound like a rational decision-making process, it was preceded by a good fifteen minutes of ugly crying.

Luckily, my husband stays home with Nora during the day. We made a plan to have him meet me at work for the next pumping session, before his play date with a friend. (As a side note, I am so lucky to have this flexibility with our child care arrangements. If we had to work with a daycare, I don’t know what I would have done.) With my afternoon pumping sessions, I still couldn’t pump enough milk. Not knowing what to do, I made arrangements to pick up a different brand of pump at Amma Parenting Center. I was hoping and praying that there was a defect with the pump, rather than an inexplicable drop in my milk supply or an aversion to the act of pumping.

That evening at Amma, as I was shelling out beaucoup bucks for another pump, the salesperson reminded me that my pump should have a warranty. I would have to call them the next day, since their service hours ended at 5:00 PM Eastern time. I bought the back-up pump and kept it sealed, in case I could get a quick replacement pump through the original pump company. On  Wednesday, I called the pump company. They walked me through some troubleshooting steps and determined that yes, the problem was with my pump. (A cool trick I learned: remove the hose connector from the pump, plug the little hole with your finger and turn the suction on high. If your pump makes a squeaking sound or a labored sound when pumping, there is something wrong with the motor. Good to know for the future). They offered to send me  a new pump, which would arrive in…2-3 business days. Seriously, pump company? What working mom can afford to wait 2-3 business days for a new pump? Luckily, I only had to ask once for a quicker delivery method and they agreed to overnight me a new pump. (I wonder how many moms refuse to argue and get the shaft on delivery times?)

For the next two days, I tried to use the half-working pump. I dropped the morning pumping session, to avoid terror-filled freak-outs before my day started. I learned early on to pump one side at a time, to maximize the pump’s remaining suction power. So, at some sessions, the pump worked too well and it felt like the pump was trying to devour my nipple. At other sessions, the pump barely worked at all and I was left with full breasts and no expressed milk. The challenge was that I had to figure out another way to get the milk out. Let me just say, there is nothing more frustrating than having full breasts and no way to relieve them. I tried using the manual pump that came with my electric pump. It was pretty useless. I was much more effective at simply hand expressing into the bottle. Even though it got the milk out, I felt ridiculous squeezing out just enough milk to relieve engorgement, in my work clothes. Most effective, of course, was when Aaron brought Nora over for a pumping/feeding session…as long as Nora was hungry. The one feeding that we hadn’t timed well was completely frustrating for all three of us.

The story has a happy ending. My new pump arrived on Thursday and it works great. I was able to return my back-up pump to Amma with no problem. But this chaotic week made me realized just how tethered I am (and will be) to this pump. I plan on breastfeeding for one to two years, depending on when Nora starts to wean herself. That means that for the foreseeable future, I am completely dependent on a machine that goes ping. For a mama that’s committed to a natural and organic relationship with my child, that’s a hard truth to realize. As thankful as I am for having the ability to continue feeding Nora my own breast milk, I don’t know if I will ever truly be comfortable with my pump. Maybe I should name it.

What It’s Like (Two Weeks In)

Returning to work after maternity leave is learning that more than one person lives inside of me, the mother and the other.

The mother is newer and more uncertain, having only just been born. The other is impatient, ready to regain the life she once lived. The mother knows that other life is long gone.

The mother thinks only about the home, the child, the small chores that need to be done each day. She forgets appointments, ignores emails. The other lays awake at night, thinking about the work waiting for her tomorrow.

Both of them get ready in the morning, taking turns. Feeding and cuddling, grooming and packing. Both of them are afraid of forgetting something. Both of them leave.

The mother mourns the lost time with her baby, thinks of all the diaper changes and naps she is missing. The other dives back into her element, finally feeling competent at something again. It’s seductive for both of them, the lure of being needed. Secretly, both of them are terrified of being needed too much or not enough, at work and at home.

The mother goes throughout her day knowing she has left something essential at home, another limb, another heart. The other says, “See what it’s felt like for me, all of these weeks?” Neither of them feel whole, day or night.

Living like this, we long for what we once held: the sleeping little one breathing on our neck, the pen drooling ink onto our fingertips. We want more out of our days and nights, but wind up feeling less.

We spend so much time wanting, together. Wanting to be elsewhere, wanting to finish one more story, one more email. Together, we must learn to take turns, to want presence in each moment. For now, we only hold hands in the middle and stretch in opposite directions, just to see how thin and flexible we can become.

Three Months

Dear Nora,

I started thinking about your three month birthday at the beginning of this week. I thought about all the things that have happened to us as a family over the course of the month. The list is long, filled with mostly fun events. But first, what I want to tell you about is who you are becoming this month.

You are becoming a morning person. You are happiest a few moments after you wake up, especially in the morning. Your dad has a new practice with you, for when you wake up from naps. He sits you on your bottom, facing him, and asks “What did you dream about this time?” Each time, you start to gesture and gurgle, as if you are really telling him about your dreams.

You are becoming interested in the outside world. Even more than last month, you prefer to face out in the world in our arms. When Daddy carries you in the Balboa Sling, you no longer like to lay down. You like to face out and watch the world around you.

You are becoming stronger each day. You can now hold your head steadily and look around you. You also can keep your head level when we gently pull you from laying down to sitting up. You also like to stand on your feet while we hold you around your ribcage. You still don’t like to be placed on your belly, but you are developing your neck and abdominal strength in other ways.

You are becoming a little person with a big sense of humor. You are so close to laughing, but we haven’t quite reached it. You like it when I make funny sounds and when I tickle you on the changing table. I think in a few weeks, you’ll be laughing up a storm.

This month, you are becoming more of your own person, with your own preferences and rhythms. I love being a part of this process, learning what you like and don’t like. I love learning more about who you are.

This month, you have also participated in a lot of events. We went to my work place twice this month. First, my friends through us an awesome baby shower. You were passed around to a lot of new people and we received many gifts. Most people gave us books, which we’ve been enjoying all month. Two days later, we participated in Las Posadas, a Mexican celebration of the nativity. At the last moment, the organizers desperately needed a baby Jesus, since their original baby fell ill. So, you got to play the part of baby Jesus in front of about 150 people. For the rest of the month, I’ve been calling you LBJ (Little Baby Jesus) for short.

We also celebrated your first Christmas this month. Originally, Grandma Jean and Grandpa Marvin were going to come up and celebrate with us. Unfortunately, they both came down with a cold and didn’t want to make you sick. Even so, both your dad and I got sick, so we spent our first Christmas sniffling. Strong girl that you are, you  didn’t get sick with us! Grandma and Grandpa mailed Christmas to us and we celebrated it just this week. You got a cute snow suit, pink with animal ears on the hood. I can’t wait until it’s cold and snowy enough for you to wear it.

As much fun as this month has been, this was also the month that my maternity leave ended. I began returning to work, at first on a part-time basis. By the middle of next month, I’ll be back to full-time. I didn’t anticipate how difficult this transition would be for me. For the first week, I cried every day, either before going to work or when I came home. I’ve been with you for almost every minute of your life and you have become a big part of me. Going to work each day, I feel like I’m leaving an essential part of me at home. I know it’s going to get easier as I continue to work, but it’s hard right now.

I’m lucky that you get to stay home with Daddy and he takes excellent care of you. Together, you’ve been baking bread, organizing his work files, reading and playing. You’re already so close to him and I can’t wait to see how your relationship deepens and grows as he spends each day with you.

Nora, I cannot believe it’s already been three months since you’ve been born. Every day, I am amazed at how unique you are and how you reveal your personality to me in new ways. I cannot wait to see what your next month brings!

Love,
Mama

One Little Word for 2012: Nurture

For the past several years, I have selected a word to help shape and guide my year to come. This practice was inspired by Ali Edwards, who calls it “One Little Word“. My previous words were:

• 2009 – Essential - In this year, I wanted to simplify my life and pare it down to what was essential to create and be happy. By focusing on this word, I was able to say no to more unnecessary purchases and commitments.
• 2010 – Resource - For this year, my most successful One Little Word year, I wanted to focus on where I was using my free time, creative energy and money. With that in mind, I focused on buying more from local vendors and finding time to work on my writing. It’s the year I published my book, by finding time to edit it in the wee hours of the morning. It was a good year.
• 2011 – Create - Outwardly, I talked about “create” as a way to focus on my creative process. I wanted to create more writing, another manuscript, and connections between my book and other readers. Inwardly, I knew that my husband and I were planning on creating another life together. We very successfully created life (I was pregnant within a few weeks of the new year) and I barely worked on my writing. I actually spent most of my pregnancy not writing about it and now I think I’m finally ready to integrate writing back into my life.

This year, and in all of the years to come, I know that so much of my energy will be focused on meeting Nora’s needs, as it should be. So, I wanted to pick a word that reflected that focus. As I thought about it more, I also wanted to pick a word that would help me maintain my relationship with my husband and myself. After all, transitioning to parenthood can be challenging a couple, especially a couple that has been together fourteen years prior to parenthood. I wanted a word that balanced self-care and other care.

With all that in mind, my word for 2012 is nurture.

Image created on Wordle

nurture [nur-cher] verb

1. To feed and protect: to nurture one’s offspring
2. To support and encourage, as during the period of training or development, foster: to nurture promising musicians
3. To bring up, train, educate

When I think ahead to my Year of Nurturing, I think about slowing down enough to notice the needs of my husband and daughter. With going back to work, I know that it will be hard to balance the pressures of a busy full-time job and the needs of  an infant and a husband. I want to be able to be focused on work while I am at work and focused on my family when I am at home. I want my first thoughts at home to be about helping my family, supporting them, encouraging them to grow. I want this to be a regular part of our lives.

I also think about hearing and responding to my own needs for self-nurturing. In the first few weeks postpartum, it was incredibly easy for me to forget to eat for hours on end. I would suddenly realize I was hungry and then devour way too much food at one sitting. I don’t want my self-care to follow the same path. I don’t want to ignore my needs for weeks and then suddenly feel like I need to gorge on manicures or clothes or crap from the internet. (This is my typical path when I don’t consistently care for myself.) Instead, I want to carve a little time out for myself each day, whether it’s to take a short bath or to read a few pages of a fun book. I want to find a way to make this a part of my daily routine.

I think that the best way for me to achieve this lifestyle is to have a few goals for the year:

1. Find the place in my life for nourishing rituals. I’ve noticed that Nora thrives on routines, on doing the same thing in the same way each night. For example, we have our bedtime routine down pretty pat. She is familiar with what we do each night. She knows what follows the bath and when she can expect to be fed before sleep. This type of routine soothes her. As I was walking through our bedtime routine the other night, I realized that this routine was actually a ritual. I could find moments of mindfulness and presence within our repeated actions. I think in order to really nourish my family this year, we need to find the rituals that work best for us. Where are the places that we can look forward to nourishing each other?
2. Ask my husband each day for ways that I can support his creative and professional work. My husband, Aaron, is the primary daytime care provider for Nora. He will also be working two nights a week at his teaching job. As I learned over the 11 weeks of my maternity leave, providing daytime care for a baby can be exhausting. He did such a good job during my maternity leave of making sure I had free time away from the baby, so that I could continue to be a good mom. I want to return the favor for him.
3. Make room for ways that I can nourish my body. I know I can find time for my work life. I know I can find time to take care of my baby and my husband. But do I have time to Zumba? I know that seems a little flip, but I am being serious. Right now, I don’t know how I can work healthy eating and healthy exercise back into my life. I am working on it, but I am finding it hard to make it a priority. For this year, I want to make sure that I am putting healthy behaviors first, so that I can have enough energy to take care of everyone else.
4. Take time to nourish my creative spirit. Again, this has to do with time. I may not be able to find time to create every day, but I hope that a creative practice can continue to be a part of my life. During my pregnancy, my creative work really fell away as I focused most of my energy on making room for Nora in our home. Now that she’s here, I want to reconnect with my creativity and find ways to share it with her. Hopefully this blog will help me stay on track.

I know I am setting myself some very big goals for 2012. I also think that they are valuable goals. They will help me to really manage my time in a way that focuses on what’s most important: my family, my health, and my spirit. Here’s to working towards a nourishing 2012.

What Did You Do for Eleven Weeks?

Nora and I reading together, last night.

Yesterday was the last day of my maternity leave. Eleven weeks and five days ago, I left my job in the middle of the day to give birth to Nora. Since that time, I have enjoyed my longest absence from work since I started working at age seventeen. (That was a long time ago). I feel like I’m emerging from some alternate universe where I got paid for not working. Now that I am at the end of my leave and returning to work this morning, I have so many conflicting emotions.

On the one hand, I am so grateful for this gift of time. I know many women do not have the luxury of a nearly three month maternity leave. I cannot imagine having to return to work after only a few days or weeks after a birth. I would have been a physical and emotional mess. I am glad that I had the time to heal, to get to know her, and to (frankly) get bored.

On the other hand, I wonder if I had enough time. I’m struggling with this feeling that I had eleven and a half weeks with my daughter and I don’t know if I did enough. Did I create a strong enough bond with her? Did I get the house organized enough for her father to take over the daytime care? What, if anything, do I have to show for all of this time?

If I were at work, I could list my outcomes after a three month period. I accomplished X, Y and Z. At home, my milestones are more subjective and harder to see from this point. So, I thought that I would list everything I have done over the past eleven weeks, in order to really understand what happened during my leave:

• I gave birth to a healthy baby girl, which should be enough.
• I looked at the pictures from our birth dozens of times.
• I learned to sleep in short bursts, ten minutes here, forty-five minutes there. A luxurious two hours at night.
• I changed approximately 1,215 diapers, almost all of them cloth.
• I attended nine New Mamas’ classes, which was the saving grace of my maternity leave.
• I learned how to breastfeed at home, at New Mamas’ class, in front of friends and finally in public.
• I washed a lot of miniature clothes, which at first, is more fun than washing adult sized clothes.
• I wrote many thank you notes, to the nurses who helped deliver our baby, to our doula, our Lamaze instructor, and to all the people who gave us gifts.
• I watched four seasons of Cake Boss. (Really.)
• I read ten books.
• I learned how to wear my baby at home and out in the world, using a Moby wrap, Maya ring sling and an Ergo carrier, by watching hours of instructional videos online.
• I learned how to be out in the world with a baby who seems so small inside it.
• I helped her grow to almost double her weight.
• I learned to do everything one-handed, from typing to peeing.
• I learned to eat dinner in under ten minutes.
• I kissed her forehead approximately 1,500 times.
• I started exercising again, if sporadically.
• I watched and participated in many of Nora’s firsts: smile, coo, bath, trip outside of the house, doctor visit, vaccination, book, and projectile spit-up (yesterday!). There’s many more that I am probably missing in this list.
• I have seen her grow from a mostly sleeping baby to a baby who interacts with the world around her. She bats at toys, smiles at my husband and me, listens to board books in their entirety and looks forward to our little routines.

I am (and am not) looking forward to this latest transition in our lives. In a few minutes, when I am at my desk hanging up my six favorite portraits of her, I can reread this list and remind myself that I did enough. I will continue to do enough. I can be enough for my adult working life and the world my daughter is starting to explore.