My Dad is dying.
To be fair, everyone's Dad is dying. We're all dying. Some of us just a little quicker and assuredly than others.
My Dad got his marching orders last December, right before my son was born.
So he didn't tell us for about five months.
He has been diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, a lung disease that slowly transforms your healthy lung tissue into scar tissue which eventually seizes their ability to function.
Average lifespan from diagnosis is five years maximum.
My Dad is pretty healthy.
He may live longer.
He may also get hit by a rogue meteorite tomorrow, but most likely he will enjoy a slow decline in lung function for the next few years, followed by a rapid period during which all the inhalers, drugs, and oxygen tanks the hospitals can throw at him will only prolong the inevitable.
One day, my father will asphyxiate.
He will run out of breath.
I can only hope that it is at home, in fairly decent shape, preferably after a truly epic meal surrounded by those of us who love him the most.
There are many ways I have felt about this since I found out around the end of May.
At first, I knee jerk gasp-cried into a diaper, while the baby, naked-arsed waggled his legs in confusion on the change table below me. I may have put the tear soaked diaper on him. I don't recall. He doesn't seem the worse for it.
*shrug*
Immediately following, I decided I wanted to do something to help.
Could Dad get a lung transplant?
No, even with the new lungs, it only resets your life to the point of diagnosis granting you another five probably years, and these years will be spent in a bubble of drugs, sterility, and restricted activity to ensure you don't reject your new organs. Dad doesn't want to live like that. I don't blame him.
Drugs, there's a good idea. Aren't there any pill cocktails to treat this biz?
There are, but they're steroids, and my Dad, remarkable bastard that he is, has a spot of TB on his lung leftover from when he self inoculated against the illness as a child. Steroid use would wake the little bugger up, and then my Dad would have the ironic pleasure of dying of consumption in the 21st century.
That's pretty much it.
We met with a holistic healer, who prescribed Dad a prohibitive diet restricting him to consuming only plants and whole grains and water, but again, my dad wants to enjoy his life. He figures, what's the point of prolonging it, at the age of seventy, if it's going to be miserable?
Carpe Lagunum as it were.
or
Seize the Cake.
So we have to get right with this.
We have to get right with the idea that we are all going to die someday, perhaps soon, perhaps not, but unlike most of us, my Dad now knows exactly how he's going to go.
I want to make it better for him. I want to make it easier.
I contacted the Pulminary Fibrosis Foundation in their home city of Chicago, and they excitedly told me all the ways I could fundraise for them.
I thought really hard about it. I so want to be useful. I want to use my hands, my health, my time, my abundance of breath to do something for my Dad, but there's little incentive to having a fundraiser for a foundation that will gladly take all the money I raise and pay themselves to "raise awareness".
My dad doesn't see any of that cash. It won't help pay for his inhalers or new lungs or even research in the field.
So I am stuck with only one recourse.
Make however long we have left together wonderful.
Give him as much access and time with his grandson as he wants. Let go of the petty bullshit from our fights and disagreements, and forgive him for the big stuff he fucked up when I was a kid.
As a parent now, it's a little easier to do the latter. I'm also still his child though, so it's hard.
Amazing, isn't it? How we remember so vividly the way we felt about our parents as children?
My father was so god-like in my eyes. The smartest man, the bravest, most adventuresome, cleverest, funniest, wildest one.
He was also the one who got angry quickest, the one who had the most cutting comment when you made a mistake. His fuse was the shortest, and his punishments were long.
I remember being grounded one summer for two weeks.
I remember the sense of injustice was enormous. While he yelled at me, I could feel his breath on my face, and I burned with it as though I was being forced to wear a hair shirt. I spent the time in silence, living monastically, pledging myself to not hug my father for at least a month after my grounding was complete.
I think I forgot about that part a day or two after I regained my freedom.
There are other memories.
Roadtrips and Christmases and long family walks through the woods and on beaches. All of us sharing a block of Cadbury's fruit and nut as we sat on felled tree at the site where my parents built their dream house.
I remember my Dad springing up like a lion when Alex fell through the roof of a shed on the Australian property. We were picking pears, and I'd lifted her up there not knowing there was a hole in the corrugated tin covered over with plastic. I'd never seen my father move so quickly. He was over the fence in moments and running out of the shed with Alex wrapped up tight in his arms. His breath coming fast and hard.
When I went to college, and after, I remember the weekly phone calls with my parents. My dad was always talking about how beautiful my sister Sarah was becoming, how clever, how talented a writer. How proud he was of Alex living in Chicago and fighting for her dream of working in the movies.
I tried not to seethe with sibling jealousy. It occurs to me now, he must have spoken about me the same way to them. I would listen to him clear his throat on the phone and try to come up with my own accomplishments, my proud moments to hold up in shining comparison.
My father has always said that my emotional happiness has been my priority before anything else.
When I was younger, it sounded like a flaw, but now it's a compliment.
I see the love he has for my sisters, for me, for my baby boy, and I realize how my Dad is only now allowing himself the luxury of forgiveness and love with abandon.
In the shadow of what's to come, he is using what is left of his breath to tell us how much happiness we bring him. He says over and over all he wants is to spend as much time together as we can.
And when you begin looking at the hourglass of breaths we will take in life as running low. The stream between the two globes as thin as a thread, you realize that letting go of the frustrations and the agonies doesn't mean forgetting them, and loving someone doesn't mean that you forgive them for everything.
It just means that bringing it all up would be wasting breath.
And we don't have that luxury around here.
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Saturday, July 16, 2016
The Voices
I know I've been writing a lot about my struggle with an eating disorder/disordered eating and my postpartum biz, but it's helping.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).
Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.
I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.
The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.
I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.
Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.
So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.
So I cut wheat out of my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.
And then, I started to lose weight.
It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."
Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.
It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.
I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.
Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.
Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.
It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.
Then I got pregnant.
So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...
Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.
And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.
Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.
Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.
And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.
Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).
Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.
I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.
The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.
I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.
Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.
So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.
So I cut wheat out of my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.
And then, I started to lose weight.
It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."
Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.
It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.
I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.
Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.
Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.
It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.
Then I got pregnant.
So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...
Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.
And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.
Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.
Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.
And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.
Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Prescription Time Killer
Hello,
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
The Motherload of Guilt
Last night...around 2am when I was getting an extra feed and pump into the babesauce, I read an article on facebook a good friend brought to my attention.
The article was titled Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid. And the link to it is here:
http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/
It's important.
Any woman who is planning on having a baby, or recently had a baby, or had a baby a while ago (like twenty years ago) needs to read this.
I don't agree with everything Rufi Thorpe says about her struggle to find balance and temperance between being a mother and a writer (and when I reference writer in my posts anywhere I always think of subbing in the term "artist" or "creative individual" because to me, while very different, the struggle applies to all three), however, I still think it's really important that she says it, and that it is seen.
Hey guys...is that feminism? I think I'm getting the hang of it!
The thing about motherhood is that it no longer has any defined borders. It used to be (a few generations ago), that the mother was the Lady of the House. She took care of all things domestic, cooking, cleaning, laundry, by default because she was at home with the baby(ies). The Gentleman of the House was doing his 40 hours a week to provide and so she did hers. At least that was the theory.
Of course by now, we all know that most of the housewives who had sparkling homes, Good Housekeeping meals on the table seven nights a week, and bouncing children, were also nursing serious depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. They didn't work 40 hours a week, they worked 140, and they were told over and over how good they had it.
Then the 1960's second wave feminism movement shook things up a little. There was a wee backlash, but there was a lot of hippie mothering, a return to intuition so to speak, and a reclamation of rights (some of which have yet to be won a solid fifty odd years later wtf).
But in general a lot of women shed their restrictive undergarments and mindsets and started trusting each other more than the menfolk who were oppressing them (sorry dudes, I know a lot of you are cool now, but some of you aren't, and the majority of you back then weren't). They dared to ask the question: "Why don't I want what I've been told to want?"
Then the 80's gave us the Career Woman/Mother. She and her shoulder pads could have it all!
I recall in my early childhood watching the film Baby Boom with powerhouse Diane Keaton do corporate battle against the super slimy, ultra sexy James Spader. She was booted from her fancy job because she got pregnant. She lost everything, and had a baby out of wedlock (SHOCK! AWE!). She went to the country and began making organic baby food and used her business wits to turn her bitty backwoods project into a major business!
I thought she was just the coolest.
Of course she was a fictional character who could montage her way through the hard parts (woodchopping, failed recipes, baby puke on everything), which didn't help base her experience in reality very well, but just the same, women in the 80's were supposed to be finally liberated enough to do the mothering and the careering and dammit why weren't they happy yet?
The early 21st century has seen a kind of weird split in motherhood.
There's the super mindful twenty and thirty something women who are consciously deciding not to have children for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons.
There's the goopy yoga moms who are some weird meta housewife, pseudo career mother hybrids who have introduced the *shudder* Lifestyle Blog as means of income which is basically profiting from competitive motherhood.
And finally there are the Creative Individual mothers who have always been feminist and fairly independent, but who answered the maternal calling, had a baby, and now are struggling with the borderless, amorphous, never ending role of mother that seeps into all the carefully separate and managed visions of self we had always had before.
Thorpe laments her loss of time for self, but follows it immediately with rushes of maternal guilt for not being satisfied with her role as mother. She simultaneously resents her husband for not intuiting that if he doesn't pick his dirty undies off the floor of the bathroom that the foul retrieval falls to her, and loves him for helping support her and their family. She mourns the loss of her ability to travel alone, or write uninterrupted for hours, but then self flagellates because she's the one who chose to breastfeed her child, and she's the one who decided to be a writer, a vocation which she reasonably (read: pre-baby) assumed she could do from home while bringing up a child or two.
Man...
The shit I thought I would be able to get done while at home with my child. What the fuck happened to all that I wonder?
Here is the crux of the problem I have with Thorpe's article.
She never forgives herself for her presumptions. She never lets herself off the hook for her choices.
I am very anti-competitive motherhood. We, as women, have been programmed by the media to compare ourselves, our lives, and our journeys with each other every step of the way, and that is pure poison.
Thorpe has never done this before!
I've never done this before!
Just as every baby is different (which is a mantra I repeat to myself almost hourly), every motherhood is different.
My mother, for instance, moved to Australia with my Dad after knowing him for 6 months in 1979. When she had their first child (me), she quit her job at a magazine, and stayed home. My Dad expanded his journalistic career and traveled around the world. Sometimes he was gone for months, leaving my mother with me and later, my sisters, to take care of house and home with no family for thousands of miles to help her. My mother held two degrees, one in English and one in Education.
My father had quit school at 16.
Later, after we had moved to the states to avoid financial difficulties, which didn't work, my father was the writer staying home to take care of the children and my mother taught and brought home at least 50% of the household's income, often more.
This was in the mid 90's, when single motherhood and the plight of the divorcee was in vogue.
The house was volatile to say the least. My parents tried to split things evenly, tried to treat each other as partners, each with an equal stake in the future of the family, but there were still super shit times. Times when my sisters and I would come home from school and be forced to walk on tiptoe so as not to disturb my father, plugging away at his novel in the office. On weekends, we did all the housework together, and after, my mother would have to grade papers, and often Dad caught up on more writing so we were ordered to occupy ourselves, and keep quiet. Rarely did we have the luxury of inviting friends over due to the imposition it would be on "the work".
So I ask you this, creative mothers:
Are you as miserable as you think you are?
There's no question about parenthood being difficult.
It's one of the hardest things we can do in life. There's no lack of preparation for it, and yet it still knocks the wind right out of us, out of our sails, out of our plans, out of our perfectly perfected chaotic little worlds.
But does compromising our creativity so that we can be good parents and then compromising our maternal ideals make us bad people?
Fuck no.
I think the biggest thing that Thorpe ignored in her article was the guilt.
She talked about feeling it.
She talked about why she felt it.
But she never talked about how it's okay to let it go.
There are some fundamental things we should avoid...
Like hitting our kids, forgetting to feed them, ignoring them constantly.
You know, big shit.
But everything else?
You've got to have a little bit of a sliding scale.
If you don't take care of your creative outlets, you will be a poorer parent for it.
Believe me, I know.
From my own struggles to finish my degree while breastfeeding at all hours of the night to my memories of my Dad, who could be sour and cranky and hard to deal with demanding silence and isolation for his process for a month or so, but then exploding with energy and excitement after that month. Between novels and school years my parents took us on road trips up and down the east coast. They taught us how to plant and tend to an enormous vegetable garden every summer, and they fostered in each of us a deeply important love of books and reading.
So mothers of all walks of life, you have to accept it.
This is a marathon.
We are not sprinting a cute little 5 k where people throw colorful dust on us or hand us glowsticks to make it more fun and feel more accomplished.
This is an ugly, all weather, some injuries acquired 26.2 mile slog, and there are going to be dark moments when we want to give up, when we crawl on our hands and knees and taste blood, but there are also going to be miles that are so beautiful we forget we're even running. We forget that this is a really hard thing we're doing.
The point is, it will end someday.
The children inevitably grow up.
They move out.
You are left with a long stretch of time ahead of you to fill with creativity. If you have a relatively healthy constitution, you will probably have a good thirty to forty years after your children have left home to do your art.
So forgive yourself for not being able to juggle it gracefully right now.
Forgive yourself for plunking your kid in the playpen for an hour with a toy you despise, a snack not recommended by the almighty Gwenyth Paltrow, or (gasp) a screen to keep them occupied while you shower, do laundry, make your art, or just sit in your kitchen floor and deep throat a sleeve of ritz crackers and a wedge of brie.
It's okay.
You're doing a great job.
I really really mean it.
And you will make room for your art as best you can, and your kids won't be fucked up for the solitude. If anything they will learn how to entertain themselves by themselves, a skill that I don't see in a lot of adults these days.
We're all gonna be okay.
The article was titled Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid. And the link to it is here:
http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/
It's important.
Any woman who is planning on having a baby, or recently had a baby, or had a baby a while ago (like twenty years ago) needs to read this.
I don't agree with everything Rufi Thorpe says about her struggle to find balance and temperance between being a mother and a writer (and when I reference writer in my posts anywhere I always think of subbing in the term "artist" or "creative individual" because to me, while very different, the struggle applies to all three), however, I still think it's really important that she says it, and that it is seen.
Hey guys...is that feminism? I think I'm getting the hang of it!
The thing about motherhood is that it no longer has any defined borders. It used to be (a few generations ago), that the mother was the Lady of the House. She took care of all things domestic, cooking, cleaning, laundry, by default because she was at home with the baby(ies). The Gentleman of the House was doing his 40 hours a week to provide and so she did hers. At least that was the theory.
Of course by now, we all know that most of the housewives who had sparkling homes, Good Housekeeping meals on the table seven nights a week, and bouncing children, were also nursing serious depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. They didn't work 40 hours a week, they worked 140, and they were told over and over how good they had it.
Then the 1960's second wave feminism movement shook things up a little. There was a wee backlash, but there was a lot of hippie mothering, a return to intuition so to speak, and a reclamation of rights (some of which have yet to be won a solid fifty odd years later wtf).
But in general a lot of women shed their restrictive undergarments and mindsets and started trusting each other more than the menfolk who were oppressing them (sorry dudes, I know a lot of you are cool now, but some of you aren't, and the majority of you back then weren't). They dared to ask the question: "Why don't I want what I've been told to want?"
Then the 80's gave us the Career Woman/Mother. She and her shoulder pads could have it all!
I recall in my early childhood watching the film Baby Boom with powerhouse Diane Keaton do corporate battle against the super slimy, ultra sexy James Spader. She was booted from her fancy job because she got pregnant. She lost everything, and had a baby out of wedlock (SHOCK! AWE!). She went to the country and began making organic baby food and used her business wits to turn her bitty backwoods project into a major business!
I thought she was just the coolest.
Of course she was a fictional character who could montage her way through the hard parts (woodchopping, failed recipes, baby puke on everything), which didn't help base her experience in reality very well, but just the same, women in the 80's were supposed to be finally liberated enough to do the mothering and the careering and dammit why weren't they happy yet?
The early 21st century has seen a kind of weird split in motherhood.
There's the super mindful twenty and thirty something women who are consciously deciding not to have children for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons.
There's the goopy yoga moms who are some weird meta housewife, pseudo career mother hybrids who have introduced the *shudder* Lifestyle Blog as means of income which is basically profiting from competitive motherhood.
And finally there are the Creative Individual mothers who have always been feminist and fairly independent, but who answered the maternal calling, had a baby, and now are struggling with the borderless, amorphous, never ending role of mother that seeps into all the carefully separate and managed visions of self we had always had before.
Thorpe laments her loss of time for self, but follows it immediately with rushes of maternal guilt for not being satisfied with her role as mother. She simultaneously resents her husband for not intuiting that if he doesn't pick his dirty undies off the floor of the bathroom that the foul retrieval falls to her, and loves him for helping support her and their family. She mourns the loss of her ability to travel alone, or write uninterrupted for hours, but then self flagellates because she's the one who chose to breastfeed her child, and she's the one who decided to be a writer, a vocation which she reasonably (read: pre-baby) assumed she could do from home while bringing up a child or two.
Man...
The shit I thought I would be able to get done while at home with my child. What the fuck happened to all that I wonder?
Here is the crux of the problem I have with Thorpe's article.
She never forgives herself for her presumptions. She never lets herself off the hook for her choices.
I am very anti-competitive motherhood. We, as women, have been programmed by the media to compare ourselves, our lives, and our journeys with each other every step of the way, and that is pure poison.
Thorpe has never done this before!
I've never done this before!
Just as every baby is different (which is a mantra I repeat to myself almost hourly), every motherhood is different.
My mother, for instance, moved to Australia with my Dad after knowing him for 6 months in 1979. When she had their first child (me), she quit her job at a magazine, and stayed home. My Dad expanded his journalistic career and traveled around the world. Sometimes he was gone for months, leaving my mother with me and later, my sisters, to take care of house and home with no family for thousands of miles to help her. My mother held two degrees, one in English and one in Education.
My father had quit school at 16.
Later, after we had moved to the states to avoid financial difficulties, which didn't work, my father was the writer staying home to take care of the children and my mother taught and brought home at least 50% of the household's income, often more.
This was in the mid 90's, when single motherhood and the plight of the divorcee was in vogue.
The house was volatile to say the least. My parents tried to split things evenly, tried to treat each other as partners, each with an equal stake in the future of the family, but there were still super shit times. Times when my sisters and I would come home from school and be forced to walk on tiptoe so as not to disturb my father, plugging away at his novel in the office. On weekends, we did all the housework together, and after, my mother would have to grade papers, and often Dad caught up on more writing so we were ordered to occupy ourselves, and keep quiet. Rarely did we have the luxury of inviting friends over due to the imposition it would be on "the work".
So I ask you this, creative mothers:
Are you as miserable as you think you are?
There's no question about parenthood being difficult.
It's one of the hardest things we can do in life. There's no lack of preparation for it, and yet it still knocks the wind right out of us, out of our sails, out of our plans, out of our perfectly perfected chaotic little worlds.
But does compromising our creativity so that we can be good parents and then compromising our maternal ideals make us bad people?
Fuck no.
I think the biggest thing that Thorpe ignored in her article was the guilt.
She talked about feeling it.
She talked about why she felt it.
But she never talked about how it's okay to let it go.
There are some fundamental things we should avoid...
Like hitting our kids, forgetting to feed them, ignoring them constantly.
You know, big shit.
But everything else?
You've got to have a little bit of a sliding scale.
If you don't take care of your creative outlets, you will be a poorer parent for it.
Believe me, I know.
From my own struggles to finish my degree while breastfeeding at all hours of the night to my memories of my Dad, who could be sour and cranky and hard to deal with demanding silence and isolation for his process for a month or so, but then exploding with energy and excitement after that month. Between novels and school years my parents took us on road trips up and down the east coast. They taught us how to plant and tend to an enormous vegetable garden every summer, and they fostered in each of us a deeply important love of books and reading.
So mothers of all walks of life, you have to accept it.
This is a marathon.
We are not sprinting a cute little 5 k where people throw colorful dust on us or hand us glowsticks to make it more fun and feel more accomplished.
This is an ugly, all weather, some injuries acquired 26.2 mile slog, and there are going to be dark moments when we want to give up, when we crawl on our hands and knees and taste blood, but there are also going to be miles that are so beautiful we forget we're even running. We forget that this is a really hard thing we're doing.
The point is, it will end someday.
The children inevitably grow up.
They move out.
You are left with a long stretch of time ahead of you to fill with creativity. If you have a relatively healthy constitution, you will probably have a good thirty to forty years after your children have left home to do your art.
So forgive yourself for not being able to juggle it gracefully right now.
Forgive yourself for plunking your kid in the playpen for an hour with a toy you despise, a snack not recommended by the almighty Gwenyth Paltrow, or (gasp) a screen to keep them occupied while you shower, do laundry, make your art, or just sit in your kitchen floor and deep throat a sleeve of ritz crackers and a wedge of brie.
It's okay.
You're doing a great job.
I really really mean it.
And you will make room for your art as best you can, and your kids won't be fucked up for the solitude. If anything they will learn how to entertain themselves by themselves, a skill that I don't see in a lot of adults these days.
We're all gonna be okay.
Monday, June 20, 2016
The Teeth of Night
People laugh when i refer to my son as a Were-baby.
I laugh too.
It's a joke I made up because the day I went to the hospital to be induced was December 11th, and it was 60 degrees farenheit. I remember stepping out the back door with my hoodie and coat on and realizing I probably didn't need the latter. I was anxious, and I stood on the porch, while Beard finished packing up things and tending to the details, a talent with which he is exceptionally gifted.
I watched as a long, slow tendril of fog unfurled across our driveway and spread thickly over the backyard. The sky was a flannel kind of grey, and if I had been inside looking out I would have expected it to be a good twenty degrees chillier. In fact I had, hence the coat.
I placed a hand below my bulging abdomen, and felt the taut skin stretched to capacity over the overripe moon of my belly, and I remembered the phrase, "werewolf weather" a term we used anytime the fog was of this particular quality and the air felt somehow wrong.
I hoped it wasn't an indication that things were going to go poorly in the delivery room.
Then Beard came out, and we got in the car to drive toward the future.
When Bastian was born, it was between moons. It wasn't full, in fact, I think it had been full a week earlier, and I'd been disappointed that the celestial event hadn't tugged my stubborn uterus into action, but just the same, as I lay in a daze in the early hours of Saturday morning, with my newborn son clinging to my chest, I reached a hot, pink finger down to stroke the backs of his perfect, folded little ears, and noticed a fine layer of black hair coating them. There were similar stripes of this fur on the backs of his shoulders, where feathers might be if he had wings. Beard laughed at them, and I did too, but secretly, I repeated to myself, "werewolf weather".
Six months (and a little bit) later it is a full moon in Bastian's birth sign of Sagittarius. It is also the summer solstice. The shortest nights of the year are passing by as quickly as bright yellow sheets on a post it calendar that we tear off with sweaty abandon, crumple and toss, not caring in the heat if they make it to the trash basket. These days of summer are so forgettable in their miasma of pollen in its ochre death throes, the New England meteorological disposition making good on its humid reputation, and the nights are so fevered and the stars so bright, they make sleep a kind of brief attempt at respite from the burning blue flame of a midday sky. Night is a navy tongue that lashes briefly across the earth, searing with salt crystals, and then retracts so quickly, we small animals have no chance for the long consideration of the peppermint midnights of winter, or even the smoky, pensive twilights of fall.
Here, inside these days that are millennia long, and nights that are crackles and flashes of darkness, my baby boy is growing his first teeth.
Long gone is the black fur of his birth. The down rubbed off in his second bath, and I didn't even noticed its disappearance. Teeth are another story. Their entrance is fraught and preempted by months of struggle and discomfort. Indeed, we have yet to see a whitecap break the surface, but Bastian has been drooling and chewing for months now, growing slowly in fervor until we have reached this point in his transformation where there are only brief flashes of respite, when he eats or sleeps, brief and teasing as those swipes of night we get in this early season, and the rest of his waking hours are spent squirming and gnawing on anything he can get his hands on. His pudgy fists clenched like claws around any object he can lift, always straining, always pulling, always working toward bringing the thing to his mouth in the effort of seeking relief from the eruptions working their way to fruition inside his gums.
Alone in the wee hours of the brief night, when he stirs and quiets himself, and I, being the adult, cannot find sleep as readily available as exhaustion would have you believe, I search the internet for possible ways to soothe him, for symptoms I can compare to his, for reassurance that the bairn is experiencing a typical rite of passage.
Only page after page of testimonials, diatribes, and dialogues between mothers reveals over and over that the first teeth a baby breaks are always the two in the front, either bottom or top, making for that hilarious and precious kind of pudgy, hairless, gopher look that is so adorable in a largely pink, and harmless infant smile. And Bastian is not cutting his front teeth. Those, in fact, are noticeably not a source of discomfort in any way.
Instead, when I slide my hot pink finger into his jaws, I feel the gleaming point of an incisor working desperately to come through the top right gumline, and diagonally across from it, on the bottom left, its mate struggles to break the surface in a bulging lump of flesh with the telltale bud of sharp, new bone, a translucent white beneath.
I lie awake in the brief snatches of time when the moon is wide and watching through our window, and I let my werebaby child chew harmlessly on my hand in his sleep, wondering when the change will happen, when the elements will align, and that first shard of bone breaks out of its pink prison, and draws blood.
I laugh too.
It's a joke I made up because the day I went to the hospital to be induced was December 11th, and it was 60 degrees farenheit. I remember stepping out the back door with my hoodie and coat on and realizing I probably didn't need the latter. I was anxious, and I stood on the porch, while Beard finished packing up things and tending to the details, a talent with which he is exceptionally gifted.
I watched as a long, slow tendril of fog unfurled across our driveway and spread thickly over the backyard. The sky was a flannel kind of grey, and if I had been inside looking out I would have expected it to be a good twenty degrees chillier. In fact I had, hence the coat.
I placed a hand below my bulging abdomen, and felt the taut skin stretched to capacity over the overripe moon of my belly, and I remembered the phrase, "werewolf weather" a term we used anytime the fog was of this particular quality and the air felt somehow wrong.
I hoped it wasn't an indication that things were going to go poorly in the delivery room.
Then Beard came out, and we got in the car to drive toward the future.
When Bastian was born, it was between moons. It wasn't full, in fact, I think it had been full a week earlier, and I'd been disappointed that the celestial event hadn't tugged my stubborn uterus into action, but just the same, as I lay in a daze in the early hours of Saturday morning, with my newborn son clinging to my chest, I reached a hot, pink finger down to stroke the backs of his perfect, folded little ears, and noticed a fine layer of black hair coating them. There were similar stripes of this fur on the backs of his shoulders, where feathers might be if he had wings. Beard laughed at them, and I did too, but secretly, I repeated to myself, "werewolf weather".
Six months (and a little bit) later it is a full moon in Bastian's birth sign of Sagittarius. It is also the summer solstice. The shortest nights of the year are passing by as quickly as bright yellow sheets on a post it calendar that we tear off with sweaty abandon, crumple and toss, not caring in the heat if they make it to the trash basket. These days of summer are so forgettable in their miasma of pollen in its ochre death throes, the New England meteorological disposition making good on its humid reputation, and the nights are so fevered and the stars so bright, they make sleep a kind of brief attempt at respite from the burning blue flame of a midday sky. Night is a navy tongue that lashes briefly across the earth, searing with salt crystals, and then retracts so quickly, we small animals have no chance for the long consideration of the peppermint midnights of winter, or even the smoky, pensive twilights of fall.
Here, inside these days that are millennia long, and nights that are crackles and flashes of darkness, my baby boy is growing his first teeth.
Long gone is the black fur of his birth. The down rubbed off in his second bath, and I didn't even noticed its disappearance. Teeth are another story. Their entrance is fraught and preempted by months of struggle and discomfort. Indeed, we have yet to see a whitecap break the surface, but Bastian has been drooling and chewing for months now, growing slowly in fervor until we have reached this point in his transformation where there are only brief flashes of respite, when he eats or sleeps, brief and teasing as those swipes of night we get in this early season, and the rest of his waking hours are spent squirming and gnawing on anything he can get his hands on. His pudgy fists clenched like claws around any object he can lift, always straining, always pulling, always working toward bringing the thing to his mouth in the effort of seeking relief from the eruptions working their way to fruition inside his gums.
Alone in the wee hours of the brief night, when he stirs and quiets himself, and I, being the adult, cannot find sleep as readily available as exhaustion would have you believe, I search the internet for possible ways to soothe him, for symptoms I can compare to his, for reassurance that the bairn is experiencing a typical rite of passage.
Only page after page of testimonials, diatribes, and dialogues between mothers reveals over and over that the first teeth a baby breaks are always the two in the front, either bottom or top, making for that hilarious and precious kind of pudgy, hairless, gopher look that is so adorable in a largely pink, and harmless infant smile. And Bastian is not cutting his front teeth. Those, in fact, are noticeably not a source of discomfort in any way.
Instead, when I slide my hot pink finger into his jaws, I feel the gleaming point of an incisor working desperately to come through the top right gumline, and diagonally across from it, on the bottom left, its mate struggles to break the surface in a bulging lump of flesh with the telltale bud of sharp, new bone, a translucent white beneath.
I lie awake in the brief snatches of time when the moon is wide and watching through our window, and I let my werebaby child chew harmlessly on my hand in his sleep, wondering when the change will happen, when the elements will align, and that first shard of bone breaks out of its pink prison, and draws blood.
Thursday, June 9, 2016
The Mythical She
Who is this mythical She?
The one who the 80's held up on a platform, shoulder pads and crisp waterfall bangs, diane keaton in a box suit selling applesauce to spite James Spader, boom, this baby's got fangs...
Who is SHE?
The once overachieving college student with a 3.8 GPA and an eating disorder, and bruises on her back from where she doesn't know how to lie down anymore
without shivering.
Who IS she?
And What does she do now that the roles she fought so hard again are suddenly her definition
and she doesn't want that definition
like the cross fit yoga mom infantry
surging across the horizen with their SUV strollers all looking each other up and down to see
whose spandex is bunching here
and whose latte cost more
and whose eye bags are bigger
and whose baby has the colic worse
and which of them might have sneaked some gluten when the rest of the group wasn't looking?
Does she have an instagram account
she can be taken into account for?
Can I recognize the filter she used to make herself look less tired
and more productive
her house a little more expensive
her bowl of food a little more appetizing
her child a little more precious
her slip of the tongue
her forced ubiquitous sharing
her contrived colloquialisms
filling her and filing her into the boxes she once tore apart with the back of a hammer
in a room filled with sawdust and iron filings on mister america's promise of a dime coming back
as long as she pursued her dreams in an equitable manner.
Once
she was locked in a space
padded with expectation
she convinced herself she was mad
and the doctor reassured
HER
that she could swallow
she could
swallow
she
could
swallow
down her insecurities
this pill
those fears
and anything else
he might offer her
in exchange for
a good
night's sleep.
who is THIS mythical she?
The gossiping mongrel
breathing wine vapor through lipstuck teeth
and veloured decolletage
thumbing her mental lexicon for the
hip
hipp
hippest
build my sisters up
and tear them down
as I pick myself apart
brick by brick
because nobody likes a BRaggart woman
nobody likes a
happy woman
nobody likes
a woman
to be loud unless she's laughing.
And even then...
there are people who frown
who shake their heads because
mirth is the new girth
and obscenity is the new obesity
and feminism is the new diabetes
with every talking head
floating on a screen
saying hot button
push button
this button
words
like
I'm with her
I'm withher
I'm wither
I'm withered
down
by your demands
to the point of desiccation
to the point of being a woman sucked dry
by all that I can be
SHE.
Who
is she?
A destination?
A final resuscitation?
A last
gasp
at what we all wished when we were little
and someone told us we mattered.
Do you remember the last time someone looked you in the eyes and said
You matter?
Do you remember the last time someone
looked you in the eyes?
Do you remember the last time
you were able to look in the mirror and say your own name?
She
is walking down an alley and she wears your name on the back of her wrist in dayglo ink stamped on by a sweaty security guard with too much hair gel and she sees a shadow that is bigger than it should be and she is suddenly so filled with terror she can barely breathe.
But her mind
an anaerobic reflection of the day
is chastising her
for wearing that skirt, and those shoes.
You know the kind
the kind
you can't
run in.
She
is quitting her job because she can't come back from maternity leave because her child is still sick at 12 weeks, and because she doesn't even know if she's a person yet because so recently she was split in two like an atom, and we for some reason expect her to be the same afterwards,
as though someone can set off a nuclear bomb and see the same country reflected in their rear view.
She
is taking the misogyny in stride so that she can move up a pay grade, so she can get the corner office, so she can become partner and then, she is promising herself, then she won't take their shit anymore.
She
has a prayer for every student
has a picture of their homelife
has a portrait and a card and a drawing that they did on her wall
and she also has a bulletproof vest in the cupboard with the markers
just in case.
She is everywhere
and she is
you
and she is
me
and she is
STILL GOING TO BE HERE EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING YOU'VE DONE TO HER
AFTER EVERYTHING SHE'S BEEN THROUGH
AFTER BLOOD
AFTER WAR
AFTER POVERTY
AFTER FLEEING
AFTER VIOLENCE
AFTER VIOLATION
SHE
STILL
IS.
And always will be.
She
the mythical
SHE.
The one who the 80's held up on a platform, shoulder pads and crisp waterfall bangs, diane keaton in a box suit selling applesauce to spite James Spader, boom, this baby's got fangs...
Who is SHE?
The once overachieving college student with a 3.8 GPA and an eating disorder, and bruises on her back from where she doesn't know how to lie down anymore
without shivering.
Who IS she?
And What does she do now that the roles she fought so hard again are suddenly her definition
and she doesn't want that definition
like the cross fit yoga mom infantry
surging across the horizen with their SUV strollers all looking each other up and down to see
whose spandex is bunching here
and whose latte cost more
and whose eye bags are bigger
and whose baby has the colic worse
and which of them might have sneaked some gluten when the rest of the group wasn't looking?
Does she have an instagram account
she can be taken into account for?
Can I recognize the filter she used to make herself look less tired
and more productive
her house a little more expensive
her bowl of food a little more appetizing
her child a little more precious
her slip of the tongue
her forced ubiquitous sharing
her contrived colloquialisms
filling her and filing her into the boxes she once tore apart with the back of a hammer
in a room filled with sawdust and iron filings on mister america's promise of a dime coming back
as long as she pursued her dreams in an equitable manner.
Once
she was locked in a space
padded with expectation
she convinced herself she was mad
and the doctor reassured
HER
that she could swallow
she could
swallow
she
could
swallow
down her insecurities
this pill
those fears
and anything else
he might offer her
in exchange for
a good
night's sleep.
who is THIS mythical she?
The gossiping mongrel
breathing wine vapor through lipstuck teeth
and veloured decolletage
thumbing her mental lexicon for the
hip
hipp
hippest
build my sisters up
and tear them down
as I pick myself apart
brick by brick
because nobody likes a BRaggart woman
nobody likes a
happy woman
nobody likes
a woman
to be loud unless she's laughing.
And even then...
there are people who frown
who shake their heads because
mirth is the new girth
and obscenity is the new obesity
and feminism is the new diabetes
with every talking head
floating on a screen
saying hot button
push button
this button
words
like
I'm with her
I'm withher
I'm wither
I'm withered
down
by your demands
to the point of desiccation
to the point of being a woman sucked dry
by all that I can be
SHE.
Who
is she?
A destination?
A final resuscitation?
A last
gasp
at what we all wished when we were little
and someone told us we mattered.
Do you remember the last time someone looked you in the eyes and said
You matter?
Do you remember the last time someone
looked you in the eyes?
Do you remember the last time
you were able to look in the mirror and say your own name?
She
is walking down an alley and she wears your name on the back of her wrist in dayglo ink stamped on by a sweaty security guard with too much hair gel and she sees a shadow that is bigger than it should be and she is suddenly so filled with terror she can barely breathe.
But her mind
an anaerobic reflection of the day
is chastising her
for wearing that skirt, and those shoes.
You know the kind
the kind
you can't
run in.
She
is quitting her job because she can't come back from maternity leave because her child is still sick at 12 weeks, and because she doesn't even know if she's a person yet because so recently she was split in two like an atom, and we for some reason expect her to be the same afterwards,
as though someone can set off a nuclear bomb and see the same country reflected in their rear view.
She
is taking the misogyny in stride so that she can move up a pay grade, so she can get the corner office, so she can become partner and then, she is promising herself, then she won't take their shit anymore.
She
has a prayer for every student
has a picture of their homelife
has a portrait and a card and a drawing that they did on her wall
and she also has a bulletproof vest in the cupboard with the markers
just in case.
She is everywhere
and she is
you
and she is
me
and she is
STILL GOING TO BE HERE EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING YOU'VE DONE TO HER
AFTER EVERYTHING SHE'S BEEN THROUGH
AFTER BLOOD
AFTER WAR
AFTER POVERTY
AFTER FLEEING
AFTER VIOLENCE
AFTER VIOLATION
SHE
STILL
IS.
And always will be.
She
the mythical
SHE.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Ravenous Upon the Joy
So back when my little BooBoo had the colic real hard, my Dad and my Beard's Mother were leaning on me super heavily to give him rice cereal in his bottle. Or as my slightly still English Dad put it,
"Just a little pear puree, my darling. The young man is perfectly capable of handling it I'm sure."
This of course, during a time that the young man in question couldn't handle any presence of wheat in my breastmilk.
So here we are, three months later, colic firmly in the rear view mirror (THANK ALL THE DARK POWERS OF FISHER PRICE OR WHATEVER), and all the baby lit both electronic and printed states that BooBoo is ready for his maiden voyage on the good ship solid food as soon as he has reached the following milestones:
1. He is six months old or older
2. He is interested in food and actually grasps at what I am trying to eat
3. He can sit up unassisted
In a little less than a week, we will have unlocked level number one.
He's been trying to hijack my fork since about four months old, so we're good on number two.
But number three is still not quite nailed down.
We can sort of hold ourselves up if Mummy is there to provide back support, but the moment she takes her hand away, we list somewhat violently to port or starboard, and the ship does not sail on.
So let's talk about Mama then. Since we might not be starting the pear puree for another couple of weeks, Baby is still exclusively breastfed (or as the cool kids call it ebf), and this means my little wad of cookie dough, who is pushing twenty pounds is SUCKING THE LIFE RIGHT OUT OF ME.
Seriously though.
Before I got pregnant, I considered myself somewhat of an amateur distance runner.
I used to start with three and four mile runs in March and by mid to late summer I would run a half marathon, then scale back down as the bad weather encroached, and take Late December to March off because eff New England's treacherous sidewalks, and eff treadmills in gyms. Eff gyms in general. I've never been able to get down with the spectacle, theatre in the round, bread and circuses bullshit of working out in a cement box with other showy-offy humans. We're grunting, heaving, pushing ourselves to do things that we probably shouldn't, and there's a good chance at least one bodily fluid is going to come out of us during the experience. Why the hell would I want to do this around other people, let alone in the bizarre stadium set up of the modern gym?
Anyway...I digress.
So around August, when I was in peak running form, I would turn into a metabolic wonder.
As a sluggish teenager with severely sedentary reading and brooding habits, I never experienced the joys of a speedy metabolism. I never had that insatiable teenage appetite, or anything like it. My idea of a big meal was setting up a full tea service, bringing it to my bedroom, and working through it over the course of Sunday afternoon while I did my homework. Yeah...I had so many friends.
So the first summer I ever ran real distance, my need for food surprised me.
I HAD to eat.
I had to eat a lot.
And I had to eat the right stuff. Lots of white carbs for running fuel, plenty of protein for building my muscles, and heaps of bananas for potassium and recovery.
Yeah...so cake and peanut butter mostly.
Of course, when I got pregnant, I shelved the running shoes, and paid very close attention to my diet.
I wanted to build my baby out of the best nutrients I could.
Which brings us to here.
Now.
I am juicing my melons at least once every two hours into this kid, and he is gaining steadily.
I am also incapable of satiating my hunger.
Sure, make all the delicious virgin sacrifice jokes you want, and anytime you want to swing by my place with a spit-roasted sixteen year old with an apple in his/her (I'm not picky) mouth, you are welcome, but seriously, I am dying here.
We theoretically start solids in two-ish weeks, after the doctor appointment, the okay go ahead, the sitting up without lolling over like a drunken old man, etc.
But for the next two weeks, how the hell do i survive?
Turns out eating without wheat is hella difficult.
Like all I want is pizza.
Always.
Oh, and dear national donut day,
go fuck yourself,
love,
me.
Shit that I never even craved while pregnant is sounding better and better because just in case you were wondering, smoothies last for about an hour, trail mix, unless eaten by the pound, also lasts about an hour.
I can consume a salad the size of my child with cheese and chicken and avocado, and about two hours later, I am crawling out of bed and scavenging the fridge for leftovers, often times I settle for a container of greek yoghurt with a generous spoonful of peanut butter stirred in. It's cold, creamy, and shuts up the tummy demons for about three hours, and then...well...then I'm creeping again like some kind of terrifying scavenger bird with a baby hanging off one boob.
Anyway, this is more of a whinge than a blog, and I guess a cry for help?
If anybody has the terrible misfortune of being celiac or has to be wheat free for other reasons, and has some magnificent secret they feel like sharing, please please please share along.
Because I'm one brazil nut from turning into a squirrel.
"Just a little pear puree, my darling. The young man is perfectly capable of handling it I'm sure."
This of course, during a time that the young man in question couldn't handle any presence of wheat in my breastmilk.
So here we are, three months later, colic firmly in the rear view mirror (THANK ALL THE DARK POWERS OF FISHER PRICE OR WHATEVER), and all the baby lit both electronic and printed states that BooBoo is ready for his maiden voyage on the good ship solid food as soon as he has reached the following milestones:
1. He is six months old or older
2. He is interested in food and actually grasps at what I am trying to eat
3. He can sit up unassisted
In a little less than a week, we will have unlocked level number one.
He's been trying to hijack my fork since about four months old, so we're good on number two.
But number three is still not quite nailed down.
We can sort of hold ourselves up if Mummy is there to provide back support, but the moment she takes her hand away, we list somewhat violently to port or starboard, and the ship does not sail on.
So let's talk about Mama then. Since we might not be starting the pear puree for another couple of weeks, Baby is still exclusively breastfed (or as the cool kids call it ebf), and this means my little wad of cookie dough, who is pushing twenty pounds is SUCKING THE LIFE RIGHT OUT OF ME.
Seriously though.
Before I got pregnant, I considered myself somewhat of an amateur distance runner.
I used to start with three and four mile runs in March and by mid to late summer I would run a half marathon, then scale back down as the bad weather encroached, and take Late December to March off because eff New England's treacherous sidewalks, and eff treadmills in gyms. Eff gyms in general. I've never been able to get down with the spectacle, theatre in the round, bread and circuses bullshit of working out in a cement box with other showy-offy humans. We're grunting, heaving, pushing ourselves to do things that we probably shouldn't, and there's a good chance at least one bodily fluid is going to come out of us during the experience. Why the hell would I want to do this around other people, let alone in the bizarre stadium set up of the modern gym?
Anyway...I digress.
So around August, when I was in peak running form, I would turn into a metabolic wonder.
As a sluggish teenager with severely sedentary reading and brooding habits, I never experienced the joys of a speedy metabolism. I never had that insatiable teenage appetite, or anything like it. My idea of a big meal was setting up a full tea service, bringing it to my bedroom, and working through it over the course of Sunday afternoon while I did my homework. Yeah...I had so many friends.
So the first summer I ever ran real distance, my need for food surprised me.
I HAD to eat.
I had to eat a lot.
And I had to eat the right stuff. Lots of white carbs for running fuel, plenty of protein for building my muscles, and heaps of bananas for potassium and recovery.
Yeah...so cake and peanut butter mostly.
Of course, when I got pregnant, I shelved the running shoes, and paid very close attention to my diet.
I wanted to build my baby out of the best nutrients I could.
Which brings us to here.
Now.
I am juicing my melons at least once every two hours into this kid, and he is gaining steadily.
I am also incapable of satiating my hunger.
Sure, make all the delicious virgin sacrifice jokes you want, and anytime you want to swing by my place with a spit-roasted sixteen year old with an apple in his/her (I'm not picky) mouth, you are welcome, but seriously, I am dying here.
We theoretically start solids in two-ish weeks, after the doctor appointment, the okay go ahead, the sitting up without lolling over like a drunken old man, etc.
But for the next two weeks, how the hell do i survive?
Turns out eating without wheat is hella difficult.
Like all I want is pizza.
Always.
Oh, and dear national donut day,
go fuck yourself,
love,
me.
Shit that I never even craved while pregnant is sounding better and better because just in case you were wondering, smoothies last for about an hour, trail mix, unless eaten by the pound, also lasts about an hour.
I can consume a salad the size of my child with cheese and chicken and avocado, and about two hours later, I am crawling out of bed and scavenging the fridge for leftovers, often times I settle for a container of greek yoghurt with a generous spoonful of peanut butter stirred in. It's cold, creamy, and shuts up the tummy demons for about three hours, and then...well...then I'm creeping again like some kind of terrifying scavenger bird with a baby hanging off one boob.
Anyway, this is more of a whinge than a blog, and I guess a cry for help?
If anybody has the terrible misfortune of being celiac or has to be wheat free for other reasons, and has some magnificent secret they feel like sharing, please please please share along.
Because I'm one brazil nut from turning into a squirrel.
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