The kids are alright

Disclaimer: The parenting decisions listed in paragraph two are used simply as examples of controversial ones. Their presence in this diatribe does not indicate my opinion toward them.

I have been thinking long and hard about writing something like this for a while, and then my friend posted a blog, and the discourse that followed (on her personal facebook page) was enough to make me engage in a facebook status argument. Ugh. And then I sobbed at my desk for five minutes thinking about how I'm destroying my child. About how my friends might respect me less for my parenting decisions (that was not directed at you, Jillian). And about how I have sacrificed so much for my child, but I'm still being lumped together with "lazy and/or mean" parents because I adopted an apparently unpopular bedtime routine. So I called my pediatrician and left a crazy message on the nurse hotline. Then I pulled it together, and thought critically about why it is so upsetting to me.

I'm not going to defend the choices my husband and I have made. It's irrelevant, and it just invites people to poke holes in my argument. What I will defend is my right not to be judged. I have spent the better part of my professional life working with abused children and violent couples. I have seen lazy and mean parenting up close. To insinuate that sleep-training a child (or co-sleeping or baby-led weaning or using formula or strollers or refusing immunizations or working outside the home or circumcising or whatever else you could be doing) is abusive or neglectful minimizes true abuse and neglect. Further, parents are so bombarded with information these days, it's a full time job just to sift through it all, to determine what's personally important and what's not, what sounds like voodoo and and what doesn't, and what is feasible given your circumstances. With that burden, no one can find all the answers.

In the five short months that I've been a parent, I've learned that a lot of people think they're experts on raising kids. They gleefully dole out unsolicited advice, inadvertently condemning something you may or may not be doing. This judgment only serves to marginalize parents, especially new ones. To separate us when what we really need are supportive parenting communities.

So I talked to old people, and guess what I learned? Not breastfeeding will likely not make your kid stupid. Letting your child cry herself to sleep will likely not make her an axe-murderer. Giving your kid rice cereal will likely not make them dependent on Happy Meals. Putting your kid in day care will likely not turn him into a woman-hating basement-dwelling ineffectual troll. I say "likely" because of course there are correlations out there somewhere. Who knows if the Steubenville rapists were weaned too early or left to cry unattended for hours or were plopped in front of the TV at too young an age. But what's more likely is that they performed heinous acts in a social and temporal context after a long and complex series of life events. There was no one decision that their parents made that caused them to rape and humiliate that girl. So I think we, meaning new parents, can rest assured that we can make these early mistakes. What's more important, in my opinion, is that the decisions we make are made with love and serious deliberation. If they are, the kids will probably be alright. So let's leave judgment up to the mothers-in-law (of course I don't mean you, D-Lo).

This kid is alright.

Sleep Training Update

You know, babies just do whatever the hell they want. They just do stuff, and you just have to let them. With sleeping, this means that some nights, Little Miss Dottie Lu smiles when I place her in her crib and babbles herself to sleep. Other nights, she screams for 20 minutes and then wakes up every 45 minutes for the next three hours. There's no pattern. We can't predict what makes her do this. We make all kinds of assumptions. Her room is too hot. Her head itches. She's wet. She's hungry. Something smells weird.The fan is rotating in the wrong direction and the books on her bookshelf are not in the right order. Whatever it is, she can't tell us other than by crying and complaining, neither of which are very specific or helpful.

I don't like listening to my baby cry. It's horrible. But rocking her and cuddling her doesn't help either. When we rock her to sleep, she usually wakes up and screams as soon as we set her down. And if she happens to stay asleep in that moment, she wakes up 10 minutes later, probably wondering why she's not being cuddled and rocked anymore. I think it's a disservice to her that she wakes up alone when she went to sleep otherwise. And frankly, she wakes up smiling and happy every morning regardless. No hard feelings. So this is what we do for our baby. And we don't really have opinions about how other people put their babies to sleep, because I'm sure many parents are just as aimless and insecure as we are. I guess I just rest assured that we're doing the best we can, and Dot will be just fine, if only because she has dozens of people around her who love her intensely.

Sleep Training = Blurgh

Reformed screaming demon baby.

Dot is a wonderful child. No really. I know people say this about their children, but she's really animated and curious and happy for most of the day. She experiments and explores and socializes eagerly. She's a hard worker and a good communicator. Day care reports to me that the only time she whines is when she's hungry. She doesn't even care when poo is running down her leg. She takes after her father.

But...BUT, we were having some problems getting her to sleep. Bed time was kind of yucky. We would go through our routine (bath, nurse, stories, diaper, crib), and somewhere in there, usually during stories or diaper, she would short circuit and scream until we rocked her all the way to sleep and placed her carefully in her crib. This placing-in-the-crib business usually happened several times before we could do it without her waking back up. Additionally, when she would wake up in the middle of the night to eat, we would go through the same thing to get her to go back to sleep. This could take an hour to an hour and a half, which meant I wasn't sleeping.Which meant I was a crazy bitter witch lady most of the week who harbored secret resentment toward her peacefully sleeping husband who still managed to complain about not getting enough sleep.

So we decided to try the Ferber method. Before you shoot side-eye at me, we did explore other methods that were more gradual, or "gentle." Dot's problem is that she doesn't respond well to rocking or cuddling anyway, and she won't take a pacifier. She will nurse to sleep, but I'm not okay with that, as I deserve a night out occasionally. We had to stop swaddling her because she thrashes all over the crib, and heaven forbid she roll over in her sleep swaddled. And really, I prefer methodology that has hard and fast rules, so there's little room for error or improvisation. Some of the other methods (i.e. Pantley's No-Cry Sleep Solution or Tracey Hogg's method) just seemed to be too unstructured and indefinite for me. Plus our pediatrician told us to do it, and we just blindly do whatever he says.

I read the book. We picked a start date. And that first night, we sat in silence as our daughter screamed for 80 minutes while we checked on her every three, five, then seven minutes. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I held up pretty well. I knew in the long run, she would benefit from this (although attachment parenting advocates might say otherwise). But then the next six nights, she still cried for at least 20 minutes before falling asleep, and it started to wear on me. I felt like maybe it wasn't working. I felt like I was ruining my baby.

Then, after about eight days, she went down happy and smiling and talked herself to sleep. This happened the next day at nap time and the following evening. We seemed to have turned a corner. I was so proud of her for gaining this independence. And even when we traveled to Chicago the following week, she went to sleep with minimal complaining despite her upended routine.

I thought I would be writing a success story here, but I'm not. The last few nights she has started screaming again at bed time, and for progressively longer periods. Last night it took her almost 30 minutes to fall asleep. The confidence I felt that first night has waned, and I now feel slightly nauseated as I check on her and resist the urge to pick her up. We're not sure what, if anything, happened to disrupt our peaceful routine. She still puts herself back to sleep after a nighttime feeding, and she seems to be waking less often at night, so it wasn't all for naught. But we may be searching for other options again if she doesn't improve soon.

All this is to say, we have no idea what we're doing. Other parents may confidently tell us that what they do is good or better or best, but I don't think they really know either. They may have stumbled upon something that worked miraculously well for their child, but they don't know our child or our family or our schedule or our mental capacities (which seem to be limited these days). And frankly, I don't know her that well either. She's constantly changing. Every day is trial and error. She spends the better part of her waking hours with day care providers who are also tending to 19 million other squiggly babies. Even more reason why Dot needs to learn independence. Dot will often be cared for by people other than myself. That is her lot in life. My lot is to make sure that despite the first-world woes of working mothers, she can learn to do things for herself, and that her father and I are always here to help. Crying in her crib, while gut-wrenching and terrible, is not the worst thing I will have to watch her endure. I just hope that by her first breakup or bad haircut or college rejection letter, she has at least learned to blow her nose.

The Lenten Discipline

I've always participated in giving up something for Lent, even when I participated in a church that didn't observe Lent, and even when I didn't participate in a church at all. I think maybe as I teenager I thrived on acting deprived and put out, advancing beyond the physical temptations of this world. Then the self-absorption just gave way to habit.

In the past, I've given up ice cream (the year I had my wisdom teeth removed. dumb), electronic media during certain times (no TV or internet before 8:00 pm), alcohol (did not go so well), etc. All the things I've chosen were to challenge myself to forgo a common worldly vice (e.g. red wine) or to meet a bigger goal (i.e. losing weight). But this year, I was having a really hard time coming up with a Lenten Discipline. As a new parent, I feel like I'm already sacrificing so much. I tell myself I'm a martyr for working, breastfeeding moms. No more boozy Sunday brunches; no more band practice in the basement; no more pretty clothes (unless they have quick boob access, which is mutually exclusive to pretty). I don't even have time to paint my nails or blow my hair dry or put on makeup before work. Of course these are all first world problems, but nonetheless, it's quite a change from my prior, childless life. So why should I give something up for 40 days?

Because. Just because. Because no matter how selfless I think I've become in raising Dot, I still have bad habits. One of which is shopping. Not shopping like I have a spending-money-type-shopping addiction, but shopping like I-need-to-get-away-from-a-screaming-baby-and-a-hairy-husband-so-I'm-going-to-poke-around-Target-for-an-hour shopping. Of course, despite the previous statement, it does lead to spending money. I can go to Target intending to buy wipes and batteries, and come out with four bottles of clearance organic shower gel and a dog Halloween costume. It's just unnecessary. I've also developed this problem where I'm ten pounds below my baby weight. You can hate me for that, but I earned it. So most of my clothes don't fit, and the ones that do, I can't nurse in them. Anyway, this led to a lot of money spent at Nordstrom Rack. It's so easy to just spend $20 here or there, and before you know it, you've blown your whole fun money budget on scented highlighters and house plants.

So to further avoid falling victim to mindless consumerism (a very behavior I should not be teaching my daughter), I'm giving up shopping. No more baby clothes for my really cute baby. No impulsive Nook book purchases. No etsy. No Amazon. Nothing. But groceries of course. But aside from that, nothing. Instead of using shopping as an excuse to get out of the house, I'm going to try exercising perhaps. Or just being satisfied by being in a different room than everyone else sometimes. Even if it's the basement.

Breast milk does not make you a superhero

Before Dot was born, nay, before we even conceived our first baby, I was determined I would breastfeed. I had lots of reasons, but many of them concerned the benefits to infant health. The public health initiatives advertising the benefits of breastfeeding rang in my ears during those first trying weeks after she was born. Fewer ear infections! Reduced risk of GI infection! Lower risk of obesity! The promises sounded like snake oil ads from the traveling circus era, a la Water for Elephants (so erotic). I thought breastfeeding would make my baby a bullet-proof mutant who might one day be asked by the CDC to ingest the last remaining small pox cultures, since her superior immune system would obviously destroy them and save humanity from a biological terrorist attack.

But despite my religious commitment to breastfeeding, my baby now has an ear infection and bronchiolitis.

The day she was diagnosed with an ear infection.

The day she was diagnosed with bronchiolitis. She clearly prefers bronchiolitis.

We have been to the doctor three times in three days, during which they have excavated her ear canals, suctioned her sinuses with a super machine, and tested her blood oxygen level. I have "worked from home" (a.k.a. worked during nap time and after bed time) during those three days, since daycare has banned the little human-sized booger and maternity leave consumed every last drop of my PTO. And during all of the nose-suctioning and medicating and breath-timing, I keep thinking "but she's breastfed!"

Unfortunately, germs do not listen to reason, nor do they read scholarly journal articles about the antimicrobial properties of breast milk. They pretty much gave me and Dot the middle finger. Nonetheless, I'm convinced that one of the few comforts she has right now, when her ear hurts and her chest is tight and her fever burns, is nursing. Despite her reduced appetite, my sick little dinosaur snuggles up to me every few hours just to feel my skin and play with my hair and listen to my heart beat. And if I can't make the ickiness go away, at least I can give her that. So even if the health benefits of breastfeeding are overblown, the health benefits of cuddling are pretty undeniable.

Post-meal cuddles. And squishy face.

Lies. All of it.

Dot and I had some difficulties breastfeeding, but we've been going at it strong ever since that first hurdle. I'm proud of both of us; her for being so patient and diligent, and myself for gritting my teeth through the pain and enduring several bouts cluster-feeding. Granted, I didn't have too many issues once we got started. I've never had to battle mastitis or thrush or the like. And even though she's a biter sometimes, it's something I generally look forward to. So we're lucky. I love sitting quietly with her in our rocking chair while she cuddles up to me for breakfast. Or second breakfast. Or 3am snacktime.

But since returning to work, maintaining breastfeeding has become something of a challenge. And a nuisance. During my first three days back, I noticed a dramatic drop in my supply, which I attribute to the use of a pump. Pumps are simply less efficient than babies at expressing milk, and I learned that I had to pump at least every two hours while at work, in addition to pumping after she goes to bed and in the middle of the night just to get enough to feed her for the next day. I follow the rule that you only send to day care the milk that you pumped the day before, and that your freezer stash is only for date nights and when you're too drunk to nurse. It's a good way to prevent inadvertently telling your body to make less milk. Either way, it doesn't feel like the cozy breastfeeding I'm used to, and kudos to all my sisters who always pumped exclusively. You guys are superheroes. I would have dropped it like it's hot.

I also realized that pumping at work made me much less productive (it's like a 30 minute interruption out of every two hours), so I bought one of those hands-free bra things. The manufacturers want you to think that hands-free pumping will be like this:

Or this:

Who could she possibly be looking at?

But it's not. It feels more like this:

And frankly, you can't do stuff like answer the phone, because even the cadillac of breast pumps is audible on the other line. Other knowing women who call me at my desk hear the rhythmic wheezing in the background and immediately call me out. And you can't just hook up and forget about it for 15 minutes, or the receptacles overflow all over your pants and you end up like me on this day:

Or this day:

Thankfully I have my own office, and I can at least shut the door, but I'm constantly covered in my own fluids, and my desk is probably a biohazard. And contrary to popular belief, breastfeeding (that is, breastfeeding after returning to work) does not lead to less dishwashing, because you have like a million of those Medela tubes and pump parts to wash every day, in addition to the bottles you took to day care.

I'm not saying all this to bash breastfeeding, because I'm sure some people would just tell me to quit if it's this much of a pain in the ass. I'm saying all this in an effort to dispel the myth that it comes naturally to breastfeed. If it did, our newborns would plop out of us and toddle over to nourish themselves from a teat that hung to the ground. But they don't, and now we live in a world where (God help us) women work. It requires continuous commitment, whether you work or not. Thankfully we have pumping technology, but no one really talks openly about how challenging it is to maintain breastfeeding in general, but in particular after your six or eight or twelve week leave. I love the time that I get with my baby when I'm home, and I'm eternally grateful that my job is flexible and affords me the freedom to work from home sometimes and take breaks to pump when I can't. But some breastfeeding advocates are calling on the community to be more frank about the challenges, and I couldn't agree more. I certainly would have liked to know that I wasn't the only mom who sobbed in the shower because the hot water felt like battery acid on my nipples.

Why Dot may be an only child.

This is lady business. But whatever it's on the Internet so anyone can read it.

So if you read my birth story, you know it was pretty rough. Twenty-two hours of labor and two hours of pushing, back labor, tearing, 'roids, etc. It was terrible. I know I said some mushy stuff at the end of that post, but really it's awful, and I'm surprised anyone gives birth ever. Namely, it was awful because the recovery has been so horrendous. I'll spare you (most of) the details, but I had a tear which has now reopened twice, and has been repaired with silver nitrate five times. If you've ever had silver nitrate applied to a wound, it's like having a thousand dragons spew lightning into your raw bleeding flesh. I imagine it's what Luke Skywalker felt when his hand was severed by a light saber.

I was extremely fortunate, and had not even a smidgen of baby blues. Though worse for wear, my first weeks after having Dot were lovely. I felt collected and clear-headed. Physically, I probably resembled the leftover gristle from a cheap steak dinner, but overall I thought I was handling parenthood pretty well. What I didn't expect was experiencing what I can only describe as subclinical PTSD following delivery at my first postpartum visit. It occurred to me that I may have developed some kind of anxiety when the midwife told me she was going to do some stuff to me that would "hurt like hell," and I lost my shit. Like, sobbing, grabbing for Mitch, and yelling no. After the second time I had to endure the procedure (this time alone), I started questioning whether I ever wanted to give birth again (hint: no). After the third, I had a serious conversation with Mitch, and I started resenting Dot for destroying my womanhood.

Anyway, mostly this is why I haven't been writing. I have been consumed by the physical recovery from delivery. Two iodine baths a day doesn't leave much time for recording the humorous musings of a first-time parent. And when you have unsavory (albeit fleeting) feelings toward your baby, you don't really feel like sharing them. But, fingers crossed, it's all behind me now. My darling child laughs and smiles and talks to me, and I'm again allowed to do things like swim and use toilet paper. Life has never been grander.