A Hairy Situation

So I just took anonybabe down to meet two tellers who work in the bank building where my company rents space. They commiserated with me while I was with child and told me a little about the joys and travails of parenting young chillens. They both happen to be of eastern European descent, which got me wondering whether they have as much body hair as I do.

Anonybabe is hairy. She had a thick black inch-long thatch on her head when she was born, which shocked her dad and I. You would think I'd been running around with the mailman if Anonybabe didn't have her father's facial features transcribed eyebrow to chinbone on her own. Anonyhubby is of mostly Swedish descent, and was a white-blonde towhead until well into puberty. My hair is dark brown and my body hair is now thick and plentiful, but I started life as a blondie, and with very little hair on my head until I was about 4 and no dark hair anywhere else until I was about 20.

A.B. was covered in fuzz at birth, as babies are wont to do, and it was as dark as the hair on her head. It was everywhere: on her shoulders, on her upper thighs; there was an especially thick triangle on her lower back pointing down to her butt crack that hasn't entirely gone away. We were told all of Anonybabe's head hair would fall out at about 3 months, but although it thinned a little and lightened considerably, she held on to most of it. Now at 9 months she has a full head of blonde hair with dark brown tips that is easily 3 inches long where it hasn't been cut. I can already see the little blonde baby fuzz beginnings of a unibrow on her. She won't necessarily grow to be a hairy woman, but I could definitely see it happening.

In my family...in my extended family even, there was a complete vacuum of knowledge about body hair. My mother's was naturally very light -- she's never even had to shave above her knees it's so light and sparse. To this day I don't know if I have any hairy aunts. If they were, they never let on that they had hair to get rid of in the first place. So when, in my sophomore year of college I started to sprout dark thick hairs in previously unhairy places: my chin, my nipples, further and further up my thighs, it was like it was this secret abomination. I had moments of panic where I thought I was a freak of nature and then I would comfort myself by thinking okay, somehow, somewhere, there must be women out there who are as hairy or hairier than I am.

Of course there are. My own grandmother is. Many many women are. But I had no clue.

Which brings me back around (finally) to the eastern European tellers. These two ladies may be naturally smooth as a baby's bottom, but I was imagining that they weren't, and that they had a family culture that sat them down a la the birds and bees talk and told them all about body hair. It made me think about how different communities have such weird little bubbles of knowledge and ignorance. And it made me think about all of the things I don't know to tell my daughter. I'm kind of humbled and excited in the face of that. We both got a lot to learn.

Boy, are my arms tired

Welp, just flew back from Christmas in Texas last night. Where Anony-meme and anonybabe's great grandparents live (now christened Gigi Dot and Gigi Ed).

Man, travelling with a child is hard. Even a quiet, relatively good child.

I love going to see these grandparents. They live in the hill country of Texas, which is beautiful; they retired there to a drafty and cluttered house at the foot of a hill, adjacent to a field and a creek of their own. They have five children, all of whom love to visit them, in no small part because of the area they moved to. There is always some sort of run-in with nature while I'm there, good and bad.

This trip there was an inundation of thousands of blackbirds (grackles? I don't know what they were, although my granddad and an uncle and two of my aunts could name them) in their backyard for about 10 minutes. They were just passing through. My aunt & mom called everyone to the kitchen window to see. And then there were two bucks in the area tusselling. They were sighted twice. "They're just playing; practicing, see? They aren't really serious. If they were, boy, they would really be hurting each other." (This from my grandfather, who grew up in San Antonio, but has the country common sense of someone who had to know how to clean fish and build things and take care of any problem as it arose. He was an engineer for the phone company by trade, but as long as I've known him he had an easy appreciation for nature. He doesn't romanticize it, but he doesn't try to eradicate it. I get the impression he feels we all have our place on this rock...he feels he has the right to get along as much as his fellow fish and racoons and ants and stickers. I've known him to shoot or drown animals that were harrassing the chickens or eating the vegetables, but only after he tried trapping them and setting them loose miles from their property. A softy deep down, but a practical one.)

Other trips included a trio of baby foxes abandoned by their mother (my granddad left out dog food for them), a biblical infestation of grasshoppers in the guest house (my hubby spent half the night trying to kill them all), the occasional scorpion (my grandfather pooh poohs them as not too troubling "I've only been stung twice the whole time we've lived here; they'll only sting you if you apply pressure, you see"), and the alway ubiquitous mounds of fire ants. You just have to watch where you step when you walk down to the creek.

When I was 20, I lived one summer with these grandparents. I've always had a special connection with my grandmother (who is now sinking rather pleasantly into dementia) there. So long short of it is, I like going there a lot.

But this trip I was in a sleepy haze. I flew down with just myself and anonybabe, sleep deprived after a late night packing and then a very early morning flight. Little missy was quiet on the plane, but fidgety. She did eventually go to sleep and I napped with her in my arms, grateful for a moment's peace. Then we had a car ride home with my mom and a crotchety and slightly off-his-rocker uncle, who when we asked him to exit so we could go to a grocery store on the way home, took a wrong turn and then was determined not to turn around...it usually takes less than an hour to get home from the airport, and it took us three, in a carseat that wasn't right for Anonybabe so I kept giving her snacks to keep her quiet and holding her head to the carseat to insure she wouldn't get whiplash as my crazy uncle sped up to get right behind cars that were going too slow for him and then slammed on the brakes. At least he was predictable with his braking and I knew when to hold Anonybabe's head.

Anonyhubby didn't follow us out until a couple of days later, and even though my mom and grandma wanted to hold and help with the baby, there was still a fair amount of caretaking I did on my own. Being away from home made it just a little more exhausting to make her food and change her diapers and put her to sleep. I could really feel how much it was taking me away from one-on-one time with everyone else. There was one nice moment, when my grandmother was feeling sick, and I climbed into bed with her so we could warm our socked feet on each other's legs and chat. But that only lasted 10 minutes before we were called into open Christmas presents and the spell was broken. Oh, and my grandma and I did lie on the kitchen floor one night while Anonybabe practiced pulling herself up on my legs and then plopping herself down on her bottom. Pulling up, plopping down, pulling up, plopping down. She was great at it by the end of the holiday. I was so proud.

But generally I felt tired, everyone around me looked tired. Having a baby is such a blessing and a curse. I don't know; this trip made me really feel like time is marching on.

Food Fight Pax

I know you won't believe me, because it seems to be half of what I write about, but I really don't talk about food and feeding my daughter all of the time.

But I think I had a breakthrough and I'd like to share. I previously had all kinds of misgivings about giving our daughter juice, period. Thought it would rot her teeth, give her empty calories or at least take the place of much more nutritious calories. I had control freak fits with my husband about it. Water and breast milk only! So I was reading about how juice is a good way to get some vitamin C into kids at the same time you give them iron, which you want to do to help them absorb the iron. So I decide to call my husband to tell him I've reversed my stance on juice in my usual whiplash-like fashion.

And it suddenly (finally) dawns on me the way I've been talking to him about feeding her all along: like everybody in the world (including him) is trying to force poison down her throat and I am her lone defender. Like he's a moron who is going to put slurpees in her sippy cup. As soon as I would read something about nutrition I would get all anxious that he was doing the opposite and I would call to demand that he do it a certain way. It occurred to me that I could share what I'd been learning with him, and, being the reasonable human being that I've always known him to be, he could probably wrap his mind about the food choices I was trying to make. He may even have some good common sense ideas to help make sure she's well-fed without going off of the fear-based deep end. We could even *gasp* make decisions about what she eats together. That he actually cares about her as much as I do.

So I called him to tell him that. And to apologize. And he accepted my apology and told me I'd hit the nail on the head, with the treating him like a sub-intelligent human being. It felt really good to start to make nice with him about that. It'll be good practice for the approximately 20 billion apologies I'll be issuing to anonydad and anonybabe over the course of my lifetime as I figure out how to wife and mom with a little love and style and grace. Okay, maybe just the love. But they do say you have to shoot for the stars to hit the moon.

Well, well, well. Looks like I might get my wish of having a daughter that is a vocal little snit after all.

For the most part anonybabe is not a cryer. She cries when she falls down, sure, or gets her hand pinched in something, or gets her legs contorted into some strange shape when she tries to get up. She's been fussy because of teething, which means she gets pouty and looks up to be held as soon as you put her down some days. But she's not so much of a complainer, that one.

But I'll be damned if she didn't cry/yell at me the other day when I gave her a piece of apple to gum on and then took it back because she was suddenly able to bite off big unswallowable chunks. Cried/yelled with tears rolling down her face. She was pissed. And now all of the sudden, if you want to take something from her and don't distract her with something bigger and shinier, she grips onto it and screws up her face and just hollers.

I know the general consensus is that people who scream when they don't get their way are brats, but I'm enjoying the hell out of this newfound spunk. I start to worry that with this attitude I'm going to breed a monster, and then I think, screw it. We've got time to socialize her. For now, I'm going to sit back and revel in my daughter's reddened cheeks and dagger-shooting eyes. And maybe not take her out to restaurants so much.

Let us eat

So my main new year's resolution is to not be such a food marm.

"Food marm" is actually kind of a mild description of what I seem to be turning into. "Food Nazi" has been bandied about my home. "Self-righteous bitch" comes to mind, as well as "Overbearing killjoy".

Through a combination of wanting to eat healthier for my pregnancy & baby, and then reading up on the local food movement that's sweeping the white, middle-to-upperclass crowd (that's me!) I've been kind of fixated on learning about nutrition and being more mindful about what I eat. Which is good, but...If you've seen Dogtown and Z-boys, Skip Engblom talks about how as skaters, they really had to be able to execute their moves with style to be considered good. Even if they could do a lot of crazy skating tricks but looked bad doing them, they would get no respect. And the way I'm going about changing my family's eating habits is starting to get a little stank.

When I was pregnant it felt good to channel all of my fear about my changing body & the explosive way all pregnancies end into exercise and a good diet. I didn't worry so much about staying away from bad foods, I took every opportunity to put foods in me that I thought would make me strong and nourished and would make good building blocks for little baby organs and baby hair and baby fallopian tubes. But somehow since then things have gone south. I've talked a little about my rigidity in introducing foods to anonybabe. I went all Exorcist on my husbands ass when I thought his mom gave Gerber applesauce to our then six month old daughter, because it wasn't organic and it wasn't on my food introduction plan. That was warning flag #1. (It was actually more like flag #521, but it was the first one that got my attention). Then warning flag #20022 was when anonyhubby was buttoning up his coat recently to go to the grocery store and I told him I'd like to go to and he hesitated mid-button. "If you go, then I can't buy any junkfood" and he truly looked disappointed. He can't buy junkfood in front of me? Something is wrong. I hate that my husband drinks so many Dr. Peppers, but I hate it more that I give him the stink eye every time he does it, and I hate it more than that that he feels he needs to go in another room to drink his DP in peace. There's a lot more to life than eating healthy. I believe that how you interact with food is very indicative of how you interact with life, and this whole thinking that I can control all bad things in life by eating good foods is just neurotic.

So I need some food therapy. I don't need junk food, but I need to be open to some less-than-perfect eating. I need to enjoy food again. I need to let my husband work out his own food issues and accept the fact that my daughter is going to be seeing a lot worse things than her parents slugging down sweets, and that she'll manage to work things out. At least I'd like her to have a mother that she can openly eat her pixie sticks in front of.

Pumped dry

I'm not sick of nursing - far from it - but I am so freaking sick of pumping. I cut my pumping sessions at work from 3 to 2...which means I actually get a lunch break outside of the office. This taste of freedom only seemed to make my little plastic-tubed tether more onerous.

I am appreciative that my pump lets me breastfeed at all. But if I can get occasionally sick of my lovely husband and daughter, I can sure as hell get sick of my breastpump. Today I am giving it the finger as well as the stink eye.

Anybody got a more uplifting act of rebellion? I could write a hate poem. Or start a punk band that only writes songs about our angst towards breast pumps. (I will write a special song for the ridiculous rubberband/bra contraptions they sell to facilitate "hands free" pumping.) Or I could start a revolution. Power to the dirty pillows! Free them from their shackles of plastic tubing and rubber! Let them hang free among the tongues and lips of their sons and daughters! I'll paint murals on the subways of sucklings mothers crushing breast pumps underfoot.

Sex(in the)pot

I got laid on Sunday!!!! High fives all around!

I was at a book club on Saturday, and we were discussing this self-helpy book we read, and one of the women said, with an absolutely straight face: "You know that couple that had a terrible sex life? They were only having sex, like, once a week?"

So if I could remember back that far, I would guess that I could still count on one hand the number of times that Anonyhubby and I have done it since Anonybabe was born - 8 MONTHS AGO. At least our sex drives have been on the same dismal page since then, so in general we are both relieved that the other isn't feeling too depraved. We've talked about it. When we do get a precious moment of non-babycare time, the bed (or the couch, since Anonybabe is still sleeping there) isn't the first place we jump to. I guess now we know if we were stranded on a desert island, a sex toy wouldn't top our list of things we'd need to make it through alive.

But I am a little wistful about the lack of shtupping in my life. I've been listening to a lot of Savage Love podcasts at work. It appears I do have a sex drive hidden in there somewhere, since I haven't lost interest completely. Our sex life has a lot of evolving to do anyway, so I guess that's something to look forward to when we do start getting randy again.

Snot fair!

Okay, anonybabe seems to be coming down with another freaking cold! If I don't want her to get colds, I gotta be a lot more careful about where I take her and what she mouths, and I have to accept that if we want to go out and be social and fly in planes and travel in trains and eat at restaurants, colds come with the territory.

I need to get this off my chest: I honestly thought that if I breastfed her and and fed her good foods she would never get sick. I feel super gullible for believing this, but the idea didn't come from nowhere, and it seems to have been implied in lots of pro-breastfeeding literature I read. That pisses me off, because then I feel like I'm doing something wrong if she gets sick. Like, not just mildly wrong, but deeply wrong. I brought this up in a Le Leche League meeting and it looks like I'm not the only one who has fallen so completely for the breastfeeding = perfect health idea. I know, I know, I'm stupid for even accepting that premise, but I did and now I don't appreciate being taken for a ride.

Listen, I like the information and support I've gotten fron from LLL, and the friends I've made there, but sometimes they piss me off with their cultlike devotion to breastfmilk. It is great to encourage women to breastfeed and to give them the tools to do so, but let's be realistic please. In the last meeting I went to, the leader read another woman's internet post about how it's unrealistic to expect every woman to breastfeed, that it isn't alwasy possible for every woman to do it and we shouldn't make those who don't feel guilty about it. The leader proceeded to pick apart and ridicule this woman's post without acknowledging any of her complaints as legitimate, just because she didn't like the conclusion this woman came to. Thank god one of my cousins told me how hard it was to start breastfeeding, because I don't think I heard it from anyone other than her and I could have gotten seriously discouraged if I didn't know other people had such a hard time at the beginning.

Anyway, I have about me the wrath of the wide eyed believer who has seen behind the curtain. God, I hate feeling so naive and inadequate!

Magic

My in-laws left yesterday; I found myself singing happily along with the teeny bopper R&B station this morning on the way to work.

I didn't think I disliked them that much but I guess the proof is in bustin' out I did in the Camry.

Through the jungle, welcome shell shock

Well, we made it through the holidays "just fine". But it was too much, I tell you.

Thursday anonybabe and I flew to Arkansas to be around my family. An estate sale, Chuck E. Cheese, and a round trip flight from Chicago on a holiday weekend ensued. Did everybody note that I flew alone with my baby? Good, just wanted to get proper credit for that.

Then, after taking the train home from the airport on Saturday, anonybabe and I got to get in a couple of meals and a nap before anonyhubby's parents descended on us. Their timing was impeccable; they arrived just as anonybaby was about to cash out for the night. Of course, then the exhausted baby was awake for another two hours. She did a lot of crying while the 'grents were around; she seemed to have developed full blown stranger anxiety overnight. I don't know if all of the travelling finally made her snap, or having some big, deep voiced man in the sanctity of her home did it, or she just picked up on my and anonyhubby's ambivalence to our visitors. Who knows. But I bogarted the baby that anony-in-laws drove 6 hours to see and they were cool about it. I will give them that. They were respectful of my choice to swoop in every time anonybaby got nervous around them.

I thought I was doing just fine with their visit and then I noticed I was having tourettes-type outbursts behind everybody's back, i.e., I would spill some water in my lap and drop a string of impassioned f-bombs, or I anonyhubby would be 5 minutes late getting anonybabe to me after work and I would think dark thoughts about his family the whole time. Couldn't journal about it so I talked to myself about it the whole way up to work this morning. Am still harboring unvented anger but when a woman in the car opposite me cut off my view of oncoming traffic I only cursed her mildly, so I think I'm getting better.

You turkey

Well, I'm off to see my mom tomorrow. And my sister and her three kids (one is hers by vagina, two are hers by marriage...all 8-10 yrs old, all very loud), my brother and his two kids (both are the product of his loins, 3 & 4 yrs old, but the four year old we just found out about this summer as he found out about it when the mother of his 3 year old was pregnant, and he didn't want to piss her off by letting her know he had a kid with his old girlfriend...anyway, both are very sweet if busy) and me and my 8 month old (alternately v. quiet and v. loud) are all going to be there.

I have a sense of resigned dread about the whole affair. Mostly because of my sister's kids. They are completely overwhelming to me, and we are going to be spending our time in a small duplex apartment in the midst of an estate sale. My mom is moving to her parents to help her father take care of her ailing mother. It was an impromptu decision that brought on an impromptu trip for all of us to see her and "help" her get ready to move.

Yeesh, this is a lot of back story just to get what I just said off of my chest: I'm not looking forward to being around my sister's kids, especially with a baby daughter in tow. When my mom took my brother's son (the only one we knew about at the time...let's call this anonynephew "Blondy") to visit my sister and her kids ("Freckles," "Sweet" & "Salty"), she basically had to run interference the whole time to keep them from steamrolling blondy and scaring the shit out of him. It wouldn't be such a big deal if I were a drill sargeant like my sister, but I'm a pushover. There has always been an uneasy tango of power in my mind, especially with my birth-nephew Freckles. I am the adult, the one with experience and authority. And he is the one with force of will and disdain for me. He's not a bad kid, but he's loud and rough and he makes me nervous. And he hates it when I tell him what to do. As do I.

And that's just Freckles. When all the kids are together they are like a tsunami of loud. If my daughter becomes loud she will be in heaven in her visits to her cousins. If she remains kinda reserved holidays on both sides of the fam will be as hellish for her as they are for me.

Thanks for letting me expose my inner librarian here.

I don't know if I have it in me to be like my sweet, spacy, Pollyanna aunt to these kids. I've more followed the lead of my other aunts and uncles, who alway seemed slightly uncomfortable around me.

Devil Baby

Do you know why my baby is demon spawn, sent from Satan to ravage my soul? Okay, she isn't at all, but I kind of needed to open the entry that way for symmetry's sake (see my last entry).



But having a baby is really hard on a marriage. I found myself actively hating my husband last night. Like, lying in bed stewing and thinking of horrible things I could say to him. Have I mentioned he's the primary caregiver? Kind of? He has her 4 days a week, I have her 2 & a half, and then we have her together one morning or evening before he goes in to work a half day. This works for us for several reasons, not the least of which because my husband is a natural homemaker and I am not. It's not like he likes cleaning, but it drives him nuts if the house is cluttered, where I could happily step over our messes for months. And he loves organizing. And he has an eye for design. My habitat has improved greatly since we moved in together. Pre-baby, when we both worked full time, the house would get really cluttered and he would sigh and bemoan the fact that the house was a mess, but he would sort of beat himself up about it as well as me. But now that he has a bit more time in the house, he cleans up when he can, and beats up on me for making a mess, and bemoans the fact that he seems to spend most of his time cleaning.



So that's part of the backdrop for last night. Which was Monday. Here's the rest: On Thursday, my husband did some major housecleaning. On Friday, I took care of our daughter and managed not to leave too much of a footprint. On Saturday, he left for work in the morning and I did some cooking, in between taking care of my daughter and getting us ready to go to the suburbs for a game night with our friend. We were spending the night, so I packed a bag light enough to carry with her to the train (a 20 minute or so walk) and took off in the evening. I left a mess in the kitchen, which I knew hubby would hate, but the time got away from me and I couldn't miss the train. I'd made beef stock and was worried that the dirty pot and other dirty implements were going to stink to high heaven by the time we got back, so I covered them best I could. I also left a food-smeared high chair tray on a kitchen chair.

We made it to our friends, had great fun playing and drinking and talking into the wee hours of the morning. Anonybabe had already been asleep for a few hours, and by the time I fell into bed I was exhausted. She wasn't sleeping well, kicking and turning and awakening every hour or so to cry out, so I didn't sleep too well. Then we spent the morning gabbing more with my friend, did a little shopping, got home, and dropped all of our stuff in the living room on top of her toys and some clean clothes that hadn't been put away. So now the living room was a wreck, the kitchen was a wreck, the bedroom was pretty messy and we were all exhausted. My husband got the baby to sleep for a short nap and took off for work, kissing me on the cheek and waving away my apologies that the house was such a mess. Then anonybabe woke up immediately with what was turning into a viscious cold. I tended to her for several hours, then got her to sleep a little before her dad got home. By this time I'm exhausted, the house is still a wreck, and I fall into bed. As I'm drifting off I hear anonydad freaking out about the stream of ants mobbing around the food that must've fallen to the floor when I fed her Saturday morning.

Anonybabe's cold makes her super restless that night, and since I breastfeed, I'm the one to get up with her. We don't get much sleep. When I get to work, I am peppered with annoyed calls from my anonyhusband as he realizes just how dirty the kitchen is. What he doesn't realize is just how tired I am. So when I get home and take the baby from him and inform him I will graciously give him 30 minutes of cleaning time before I fall into bed, he lets me have it. Which pisses me off. We do that horrible thing where we insult each other through the baby: "we're going to have to call DCFS to take mommy away for letting so many ants in the house, aren't we?" "we're going to have to tell dad to suck it, won't we?" We aren't laughing. We're mad.

So I go to bed hating him, wanting to say something horrible, wanting him to suffer. Why does he have to get so pissed off about cleaning? Yes, it's important. But the reality is that I'm not going to get to it all the time, I am not going to spend all of my precious not-work time cleaning, so back the fuck off.

*Sigh*. Then I got some sleep and loved my husband again. And I even make an effort to remember to wipe up the food that falls to the floor when she eats.

But this is kind of scary. When you don't get enough sleep or enough time together so that fights about cleaning the kitchen turn into a 2 day hatefest? I knew parenting would be hard, but the strain on my marriage is something that kind of blindsided me.

And I'm thinking of having another? Am I nuts?

Angel baby

You know how I know my daughter is a fat wee angel sent from heaven?

When her nose is full of snot, so much so that when she nurses or tries to suck on a pacifier she has to cough and sputter to breathe, and I have to suction said snot out with our baby blue bulb of an aspirator, what does she do? She lies very still and tries to contain her glee while I stick the business end up her nose and slurp out a watery load, and then she laughs like a maniac and looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to do it again. She'll do this TWELVE OR MORE TIMES IN A ROW.

I think I'm in danger of losing my best friend who has a normal baby that spits up and refuses to sleep. She's angry that I didn't tell her how hard parenting would be. It's hard...but damn. When you have a kid that loves to eat, bathe, sleep and get her nose suctioned there isn't much room for complaint. She'll probably give us hades to pay later (we wait for it as she's an Aires) but for now I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of my cushy momhood. And be sure to call my friend and complain when she has a rare sleepless night or temper tantrum.

Speaking of aspirators, I'm four and a half years older than my brother. I remember very little about his babyhood. (He's kind of forever locked in my mind as an 8-12 year old. When I dream about him, he's almost always that age. After he passed that age I was a completely self-involved high schooler and then I went away to college and never really got to know him as an adult. But I digress). How come I don't remember that much of my brother cooing and crawling and grinning, but I vividly remember the rust-colored aspirator and white pasty Desitin my mom used to use on his butt? I remember the smell of his changing table better than I can remember the fat little legs that used to kick around on it.

Fat little legs kicking on a changing table...god, I love my daughter!

It take a willage

Sorry for the title. Been listening to David Sedaris lately.

Anonyhubby and I and a friend went to a local botanical garden to take some classes last night. Friend and I had the pollination class and got to giggle in the back while the cute and enthusiastic teacher talked about plant sex. It was fun.

But we left anonybabe with a babysitter last night. We've had people watch her before, but this was kind of a first extended leave-her-at-someone-else's-house-while-we're-gone-for-four-hours kind of thing. We left her with my birth doula, who has met her twice, briefly. Once - you know - as she made her entrance into the world and then once a couple of months ago, before anonybabe seemed to recognize even me.

If I was going to leave her with anybody I knew I would feel comfortable leaving her with this woman, but I worried. Particularly when a.b. fell asleep right before we dropped her off with the sitter. I worried that she would wake up and think "where the bloody hell am I and who are these motherfucking people and mom and dad have abandoned me!!! WAAAAA". So I worried through the cute little plant sex jokes. I worried through the chit chat with the teacher afterwards. I worried through the drive back to babysitters.

And then we walked in to the smiliest most contented baby girl I think I've seen in her short life. She gave us a full on grin when we walked in the door but didn't make a move to be taken out of doula's arms. And then we watched video that doula had taken of her kids playing with baby. And I saw an even smilier even more contented baby girl than I'd seen before. She was babbling with them and her eyes were alight and she just looked so freaking comfortable. We found that when she woke up in her carseat in a strange house she just checked everybody out, and the doula, being a respectful person, let her do that for five minutes or so until she made a move like she wanted out of the seat and then she got to play like she's never played before.

So of course I'm delighted that she was so comfortable and of course my heart is breaking that she was so comfortable without us. I don't want her to need us to be around to be happy, but it sure is heady stuff to feel needed. *Sigh*

Since before she was born I was determined that she would get to be around lots of different people. Nice people, mean people, ditzy people, razor-sharp ones, thoughtful people, selfish people, on and on. I want her to know the smorgasboard of personalities out there so that if she lives in a bubble it'll be one of her choosing, not one that she lives in out of default because it's the one her father and I have chosen for ourselves. If she ends up with a vastly different personality than her father and I, I don't want her to feel alone. I want her to be able to find a mentor, somebody she can talk to about who she thinks she is and who she is becoming. Whether she likes unicorns and promise rings and Focus on the Family (please god, no) or sex, drugs, and rock n' roll (slightly less no) or political activism or macrame, my dream is that she'll always be tripping lightly down the road of self-discovery. And if not tripping lightly that she'll at least have a hand to hold while she drags herself along the way. And I realize that my hand is likely not the hand she'll hold. Sometimes, maybe. If I'm lucky we'll be compatible enough that I'll get that pleasure a fair amount. Her father and I are kind of putting all of our eggs in one basket with this only child thing. Just because we share the same gene pool doesn't mean that we'll inhabit remotely similar head spaces. I know that we could easily be strangers for the most part...and if that's the case then I don't want her to be denied of somebody who gets her just because we don't.

All this to say I want her to enjoy other people's company. I want to be happy for her when she enjoys other people's company. I just am shocked and awed that it's happening already. Even just a tiny bit.

We're All Saints

Okay, here's an email I intended to send to a friend but thought better of it. We used to be roommates and close buddies before husbands and kids came along. We both came from religious backgrounds and she has gotten progressively more churchy while I have gotten progressively less so. We spend very little time together now and it always feels like we're trying to talk around what we think so as not to offend the sensibilities of the other. I try not to be too crass and agnostic; she tries not to wear her religious beliefs on her sleeve. It's uncomfortable.

Anyway, I dearly miss getting to fire off emails with thoughts like those that follow. She's about the only friend I could ever do serious navel gazing with without getting eye rolls or uncomfortable giggles. But I'm hurt that she hasn't made an effort to continue our friendship and I keep vowing to distance myself, so blabbing on about personal growth during pregnancy doesn't seem the way to do that.

Anyhow, esta aqui:

"The All Saints/All Souls celebration sounds wonderful. Embracing death as a part of life. I was so scared of pregnancy and birth before it happened that I feel like that was on my mind a lot in the past year. It's weird; I was drawn to watch some pretty violent movies and had some incredibly violent dreams while I was pregnant. Somehow that felt right...I went to see a movie while I was pregnant...I forget its name now but it was about a very imaginative little girl who lives in a very violent world - she's in south America under a socialist regime in a time of revolution if I remember correctly, her father has died and her loving mother remarries a very unloving captain in the army. He is cruel, life is cruel and lonely, and so she makes up lavish stories in her head in which she is the heroine. I heard an interview with the director that made me want to see it (Pan's Labyrinth! That's the movie); the little girl was very like him, and he thought the make believe was a positive way of writing yourself into life's narrative, and processing all of the scary and adult things that are going on around you. Anyway, it seemed like an important part of the pregnancy, accepting fear and blood and guts and then making...um....fear and blood and guts lemonade? Oh, I guess we could call that a human. :-)"

Just add water

I gave my daughter a name that by most accounts means "beautiful". I managed to overcome my disgust towards that particular interpretation when I found one account that said it is a name that means "instigator". She was born an Aires, why not embrace her inner ram?

Now, I myself have a stubborn streak, but I am for the most part a passive and retiring person. And I know it is the stuff of tragedies to wish your child could be the person you've always wanted to be. But wouldn't it be great if the kid were more than a little sassy? Sure of herself, not one to be pushed around? I could teach the child to be kind; help her walk a mile in another's shoes. But I don't know that I could teach grit. Ballsiness. I'd rather she were the bosser than the bossee.

So I have extremely mixed feelings about my daughter's newfound shyness. Maybe it isn't shyness; it's more like a studied reticence. She won't crack a smile until she's sized you up. If you really work to make her smile she may push her cheek to her shoulder and give you a demure little head cock. But she won't loosen up until she knows she's got your number. She stares. A lot. My dad was a little flustered when he met her the other day. She wouldn't smile at him or cry or anything; she would just sit stony-faced on his knee while he tried to win her over. She's not like this with everybody...moreso with men.

My interpretation: she's an observer. Not necessarily a follower, but she's a watcher. I guess I was hoping she would be a damn-the-torpedos-full-speed-ahead kind of girl. Of course that would make her absolutely different from her father and me, but it could've happened. Three of her four grandparents are that way. Anonydad and I would have had to scratch our heads at her antics, but...I don't know...I just imagine her life would be somewhat easier than ours was, isolated as we made ourselves for most of our young lives.

So, although I may be jumping the gun just an eensy bit in laying out my 7 month old daughter's personality hurdles, pipe dream number one may never come to be. It doesn't look like she'll be the insensitive, hard-shelled little snit I never could manage to be. *Sigh* At least I have a lot of good advice for how to overcome sit-on-the-sideline-itis.

Staph

I'm paranoid that my daughter and I have staph crawling all over our bodies, just waiting for an innocent fingernail scratch or whitehead popping to set up shop on the inside.

I spent a couple of days being mad at the medical community for giving away so many antibiotics so that this supermonster had a chance to breed. No fair! I thought. Now those of us living after the age of antibiotic overuse are worse off that those who perpetuated this in the first place. We're worse off than before antibiotics!

But then I realized that we're not. We're just right back where we started. Right back where we always were, only I forget it: subject to fate and nature.

coocoo for babynonmous puffs

Why does being a mother seem to be making me certifiable at every turn?

Bear with me; I'm going to try to avoid making the details of my neuroses too tedious, even though by nature that is what they are.

As I was washing the dishes tonight I found my self feverishly wondering whether I could safely offer my daughter yogurt tomorrow. A normal thing for a mother to wonder, right? As Andre 3000 so ably put it: wa-wa-well...yes and no.

First I should mention that I read this book called Super Baby Food in which you make all of your own food for your baby. The control freak and chemicalphobe in me loves this plan. So right there we're already stoking some fires that probably need not be stoked. Now this book is a handy source book - a very handy source book - if you want to make your own babyfood. The woman who wrote it is absolutely insane though. She explains everything in minute minute detail, like how to boil water six different ways in case one doesn't work for you. It's like she assumes everyone is an absolute moron...except I don't think that's where she's coming from. I think she just likes to leave nothing to chance and assumes you're with her on this lock, stock and barrel. I hate skimming books but I had to skim a lot of this one so as not to gouge my eyes out in frustration trying to get through the section on combinations of grains you can use to make porridge.

Anyhoo, although I have my qualms about Super Baby lady's method of communication, I like her diet plan. It's simple and sound. And it is based on giving your child one meal a day centered around a grain porridge and one meal centered around yogurt. (I'm making this tedious already, aren't I?)

Yogurt is a suggested first food but for various reasons I haven't been able to give it to my daughter yet on a regular basis. The first time I gave her a couple of tiny bites she heaved her shoulders in tiny little retches and spit what she ate up immediately. So I waited a couple of weeks and tried again. She ate yogurt and pears with relish but the next day had a flaming red diaper rash and then five days and counting of congestion. Add to this the fact that my husband accidentally gave her buttermilk when she was 2 months old and his family has a history of lactose intolerance and we may have a baby who just can't handle the yogurt, or at least not yet.

But do I find myself wanting to take it easy on her wee tummy? No! I find myself coming up with every possible excuse to give her yogurt, knowing it hasn't gone well thusfar, and knowing that she still primarily breastfeeds and it ain't no big thing if she doesn't get it.

But goddam it, this means she isn't on the plan. The Super Baby plan. And rather than envisioning her big blue eyes filled with tears of pain when I think of yogurt, all I can think of are charts and the jar of homemade yogurt I have in the refrigerator that will go to waste. What you want me to eat it? No thanks; I'd much rather foist it on my daughter.

Take a chill pill

See, babynonymous went to sleep at 11:30pm last night, but my feathers weren't ruffled. I was having a good time.

Can someone please give me a prescription so I can chill the fuck out always?

Slept, slept

So anonybaby only got a couple of hours last night before her dad and I woke her up trying to suction snot out of her nose. She could barely nurse because she was so stuffed up. I think it's from a cold I gave her. Or some yogurt I gave her. At any rate something that lets me self-indulge in some guilt.

She was pretty happy to be awake and got a big kick out of watching her dad take a shower (we hoped being in a steamy bathroom would help the green stuff flow). Can I just say I love anonydad? He was spitting water at her and making his hair into a mohawk and basically keeping us both entertained through our snot and sleep deprivation. Then I slept with her on the lazyboy so she could be somewhat vertical. Horizontal she was sputtering and coughing out her pacifier with all of the phlegm running down her throat.

She was unhappy, but I was unhappier and a little...shall we say...invasive?...with my comfort techniques.

I wonder if she would have slept better without them.

Dear god, parenthood is a bitch of a mirror in which to see yourself.

Anyway, score on getting to sleep with miss thang in my arms all night.

Sleep, sleep

Fuck.

My daughter just went to sleep at around 10:30. I was ready for her to go to bed earlier, of course, but that never means jack shit. But, given her usual sleep patterns I thought she'd be going down around 9pm.

*SIGH*

It doesn't help my mindset that I'm conflicted about how to get her to sleep. There's a part of me that thinks, let her sleep when she's sleepy. That doesn't work when we're out and about because there's no way she's going to sleep when there are things to do, people to see. But when we're at home that seems like a sound strategy, right? The whole teaching her how to get herself to sleep thing sounds good on paper, but it just doesn't feel right at this point to let her cry herself to sleep.

Only when I'm tired or really need some time to myself I get pissed off at her when she's not ready to go to sleep until this late. Really I should be going to bed now so I can get up and be off to work on time. But I just spent 3 1/2 hours walking around with my baby in my arms. I got home at my typical hour: seven. I fed her, anonydad walked out the door.

Have I *SIGH*ed already? Because it bears repeating.

This is getting harder, not easier. I mean, in some ways it's getting easier. We can put her down more and more, she can entertain herself, she has somewhat predictable patterns of eating and sleeping and pooping and whatnot. But now it's like I have time to wake up and look around and realize that I'm not happy. I need to see my husband more. I need to "work" less.

That's another thing. There is practically nothing going on at work. I'm being paid good money to sit around and do next to nothing. I could be at home hanging out with my daughter when we're both actually awake and alert enough to enjoy it. But then we'd be broke. B-R-O-K-E. Would that really be such a bad thing?

Last night she screamed bloody murder when we tried getting her to bed. She had a bright red diaper rash and I thought it was bothering her after I'd changed her diaper. I used this lotion potion on her butt and I thought maybe it was stinging and I felt awful. She really couldn't be consoled, so I told anonydad to run a bath so we could cool her butt. She loves baths. As soon as she heard the water running she calmed down. Smiled even. When we plopped her in her bath (her second one that night) she grinned and splashed happily. And I burst into tears. I don't know how to read her. I want to sooth her when she's hurting, but am I always going to get tugged around like this? I have horrible visions of the future where she knows exactly how to play me, and has me shelling out my money and my dignity while still thinking she's the bee's knees.

So there's that. Then with the sleep thing, I really don't know what's right for her. Teach her that bedtime is bedtime and she can fuss all she wants but she's got to go to sleep? Isn't she a little young for that? I foresee being tougher with her when she's a toddler. Telling her she can read all she wants, but she cannot get out of bed. She doesn't have to go to sleep but she has to go to bed. But am I deluding myself into thinking I'll be able to handle her sleep patterns later? I hate structure. But am I doing a bad thing by depriving her of it?

Here's the rub: nobody knows the answers to these questions. Only she and her dad and I can really figure this out. I just hope we don't figure out what we should have done with her when she's sixteen.

It works!

So my husband and I got about four hours alone yesterday. A friend watched our daughter while we took a short walk at the Morton Arboretum and then went to see the new Wes Anderson flick. Our time together wasn't particularly lovey. In fact, it wasn't very lovey at all. There was a little perfunctory hand holding during the walk and the movie, and we both got to talk about why we didn't like the movie, but it didn't feel like any old "gee I remember why I like you so much" sparks were kindling.

But I'll be damned if we weren't all chatty today when he called me at work to tell me what she'd been up to that morning. We got through a whole conversation without talking about what we'd heard on NPR that day. Score.

Hello, cruel world

So I just got finished reading the entirity of Mr. Nice Guy's excellent blog about becoming a daddy. I laughed, I cried. Really laughed and really cried. At work. (how embarrassing!) Not only did it give me some much needed hey-I'm-not-the-only-one-who-loves-my-new-daughter-madly-while-simultaneously-wanting-to-just-shake-her-sometimes goodness, it gave me the bright idea of starting an anonymous blog about stuff...mostly about trying how to figure out how the hell to become a mother. Because I was not born a mother. I was never that interested in becoming a mother. But then one day biology hunted me down and sat on my chest and shook me by the shoulders and said "listen, I'm going to make everything you hold dear suddenly implode unless you get pregnant NOW". So I did.

And now I have a daughter. The cutest six month old that ever existed. I love her voraciously and fear her and what she's doing to my life. It was a pretty...how shall I say...so-so life to begin with. But it had its moments. I'd stumbled into a marriage (also something I never planned for myself) that was sometimes rough but mostly the best thing that had ever happened to my happiness levels. I had a boring but serviceable job that let me do things like read blogs all day on a frighteningly regular basis. I had gone through some recent therapy and self-helpy art groups that had helped me throw some long-time monkeys off of my back. I lived in a city that I pretty much dug. Life was better than ever.

And now it's better than better than ever. But it also feels more precarious. More like I'm always on the verge of something big and/or life changing and/or euphoria inducing and/or tragic. And it's fucking unsettling.

Hence this blog. I don't really expect anybody to read this. I just need a place to be a bad speller, bad writer, bad parent. If you like other people's navel gazing (I know I do), then welcome. Let's talk babies or being a working parent or being married or books or movies or growing up in a psycho religious household. Whatevs.

But at the very least let me vent some psychoses here. Where else can a girl let her dirty laundry air out?

P.S. Anonydads are welcome, too. "Anonymom" was already taken, so I had to go with "moms" which makes it sound like peni are excluded...they ain't. I fully expect to find my husband on here some day ranting about how his wife is so anally fixated on what kind of bananas go into her daughter's virgin mouth but yet she can't be bothered to clean the kitchen floor before letting her daughter lay down and tongue it...stuff like that.