Doing what works

I don’t know if it is related to the full moon, growth spurts (my personal guess) or the busyness of our days, but about once a month, Fyo our now 13 month old baby who sleeps with my husband and I, tosses and turns, kicks and crawls his way through his night of sleep. He nurses constantly, not in that sleepy sweet way that is as relaxing for me as it is for him, but in that way as if he’s ravenous and can’t possibly get enough milk. He pushes his feet into my stomach and pushes himself away as he nurses. He pulls himself away, rolls over, latches himself on again, grabs my other non-nursing nipple and begins the whole gymnastics routine again.
In the morning, my husband and I sit at the breakfast table with our coffee and stare into space, until one of us – usually my husband - says, “I think I slept, but I feel exhausted.” And I usually on these mornings feel a little bruised. On one particular morning, when I tell my husband, that I spent the night with Fyo’s feet in my stomach and my breast being pinched and that I felt exhausted and bruised, my husband said, “I think it’s time to wean him.” I wasn’t quite prepared for this response. Generally my husband loves that Fyo is still nursing and has no qualms whatsoever with Fyo’s love of extended breastfeeding. “I don’t think it’s working any more.” My husband continues.
My bruised stomach sinks. I was exhausted and I did feel bruised. I also did not enjoy the occasional night where Fyo in bed with us was as restful as a carnival, but I wasn’t necessarily ready to give up all together either.
Kent continued again, “I’d like to be able to put him down in the evening and have some alone time. It’d be nice to not have to nurse him down.”
I could see his point, but getting Fyo to sleep without nursing him down didn’t sound easy either. Other than wearing him out and letting him fall asleep on his own accord – like he did in the stroller or ergo carrier – I don’t know how to put Fyo to sleep. The idea of giving up nursing Fyo down to sleep left me feeling slightly overwhelmed, as if I suddenly had no idea how to mother my toddler. It also left me sad. I began to realize that I continued to nurse Fyo as much for my own comfort as for his.
My husband and I went on to have a nice day though part of me stayed in this mental no man’s land of nagging self-doubt. I tried to imagine the future of getting a 13-month old to sleep on his own and saw only nights full of crying and family frustration. We rented bicycles and rode around an island off the coast of Singapore. We ran into a friend of my husband’s from work who had also rented a bicycle to ride around the island. Eric, was in Singapore for the same project as my husband. He had left his wife and nine-year-old daughter at home in Los Angeles as his time in Singapore was indefinite.
We stopped to take a rest and drink a coconut. Fyo had fallen asleep in his bicycle seat. We took him out so he could finish his nap on Daddy’s chest. We got to talking to Eric, but out of the blue, I interrupted the conversation and asked, “Hey, do you remember if when your daughter had growth spurts if she tossed and turned throughout the night?”
Eric looked at me, then said, “Well, you know, we had her in our bed.”
My husband and I both said, “You did?” At home in Los Angeles, with our network of friends, co-sleeping was normal. In Singapore, no one ever talked about it. I had just assumed we were the only people who slept with their baby. Kent asked, “For how long?”
“Seven years.” Eric said. I asked him how long his wife breastfed. He said, for quite a while, about three years or until just before she started nursery school.
"Oh, I said, so did she nurse her down to sleep at night?"
"Yeah. She'd usually just go to bed too though, because she was always tired." This is what I did. I went to bed early with Fyo, but got up later in the night or early in the morning to get writing or reading done.
I told him about our night of sleep, my love of nursing Fyo down, but Kent’s desire to be able to just put him down and have a free evening.
Eric said, “You want my advice? Just do what works.”
Of course. So easy and so simple. I breathed a sigh of relief. The self-doubt started to ease up. It didn’t matter if we were doing the right thing or the wrong thing. We were doing what worked. And overall, most of what we do with Fyo works and works well. It can be easy to take for granted how well it does work.
On the subway ride home, at the end of a good long day of riding bicycles, and then having a long dinner of fresh seafood, Fyo fell asleep in the Ergo carrier after discreetly nursing. I rubbed my nose in his soft reddish blond hair. I looked over at my husband and said, “This works.”
“Yes, yes it does,” he said.

On Reading: Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman

I just started Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman. I'm not far enough along to write a full fledged review. I am far enough along to say that her premise is that we're all bad mothers - not that it's anything personal, but, she points out, all the examples of good mothers are fictional: Mary Poppins, June Cleaver, Carol Brady etc. etc. etc. She also points out that women perpetuate this idea - that we're all bad mothers - by how much we judge other mothers and ourselves against these fictional role models.
I love Ayelet Waldman. I really do. She has four kids, a career she loves and a marriage that rocks, so really I'll listen to anything she says even if I respectfully disagree with her from time to time. But my first thoughts on this book are that I don't feel like a bad mother - and I love Mary Poppins and wish I could be like her in several respects. Granted, I have an awesome group of friends and family who constantly reaffirm my and my husband's parenting. However, I do admit, I feel like a mediocre wife (my husband never says this - and I will certainly never ask my mother-in-law her opinion on the matter), a lousy friend who is always behind on emails, thank you notes, and phone calls etc, a poor sister for similar reasons, and a disastrous housekeeper. But this of course, underscores Waldman's premise, that as mothers, we're always failing at something and perfection is always just out of reach.
I'm sure I will have more thoughts as I keep reading...

Things I Wish They Would Study: the Hunger Pains of the Nursing

When I was pregnant and reading all about the how-to's, ups and downs, and potential trials of breastfeeding, I remember coming across the detail of how thirsty breastfeeding women are and how much water they should be drinking. The statistic that breastfeeding women burn an extra 1000 calories a day is touted all over the place (this stat always makes me wonder why breastfeeding rates aren't higher. An extra 1000 calories a day! Why do women wean babies so early when there are such metabolic rewards? I like to eat so this baffles me.), but I read very little, if anything, about the all consuming hunger that comes with nursing a baby. No one mentioned it. It is the hunger of teenage boys. Tall ones who play lots of sports. I have actually met a couple of teenage boys since breastfeeding my son. And I have eaten them all under the table.
The books I read said to eat well, of course, and I do (generally). I am constantly surprised - still with my son nine months old - by the hunger and by how much I eat. When my son was first born I was even more hungry than I am now, in fact, I could not feel full. I was embarrassed by how hungry I was. When my husband and I had a friend over to dinner in the first month of being parents, I offered her dessert. She declined with the universal gesture of her hand held up to signal she was stuffed. "No, no, no," she said. "I couldn't possibly eat another bite of anything." I distinctly remember thinking, "Really? Because I could go again." I felt as if I hadn't eaten anything - and I had had seconds! I had wanted to help myself to more, but I was so self-conscious, even embarrassed, by how much food I needed to eat.
I am not as hungry as I was that first month of mothering, but I am still hungry and I do still eat a lot. If my husband and I are going to dinner at a friends' house or restaurant, I always eat before leaving the house. Partly, I do out of self-preservation. Along with the metabolic miracles of breastfeeding comes a blood sugar that drops to zero without notice. I can go from satiated to starving in a millisecond. And it is that kind of starving that makes me, and anybody with me, miserable. When the dropped blood sugar hits, having to wait for food is pure agony and I, in moments like this, have grown so desperate for food, I have threatened to drink my own breastmilk. And I wasn't really kidding.
Non-breastfeeders don't quite get it though - I can tell my husband I am hungry and need to eat, and he'll say, "Okay, we'll pick something up." which in my pre-breastfeeding days would be the ideal response. But now, I have to emphasize a couple or few times, that when I need to eat, I need to eat. Fellow breastfeeders, therefore, make the best travel and/or hang out companions. When I meet my breastfeeding Mom friends, whether we're at the art museum or going for a hike, one of the first things we do is eat. Today, a couple friends and I went to the Mommy & Me movie, and when we came out of the theater, all three of us simultaneously exhaled, "Oh, I am so hungry." If you're in a group of breastfeeding women, one of them has a protein bar in her purse. If it wasn't for fellow breastfeeding friends, I would think something is wrong with me. Generally, thinking about food most the time, and eating on your way out the door for dinner are the signs of a potential eating disorder. With breastfeeding though, it's just par for the course.

Learning Time Management avec bebe

Oh how many of us on the planet have abandoned blogs in cyberspace? Please say I am not the only one. I suspect I am not and am, in fact, in very good company. Well, here I am. And am now aiming for once a week posts. Is that realistic? With a 9 month old now crawling and planning a move out of the country? We'll see.
Between all the books on new motherhood and all the Baby Center emails, I see a lot of headlines about achieving balance and giving yourself a break. None of it really says anything new. Most of it, I think, is kind of misleading. The whole notion of achieving balance makes it sound like you'll never be exhausted if you just attain the right balance of things. Silliness.
I see even more in the books on new motherhood on giving up all the expectations of perfection because these are where suffering come from. This I do agree with. I think a big reason why I started a blog only to abandon it is because I had grand expectations of the kinds of things I would be able to write (long well researched well written thoughtful and thought provoking essays on fine details no one had ever thought of before). I'm slowly coming to peace with that for me to write means I just have to stay up late at night, and often at night, I'm rather at the end of my rope as my dad says. Or I'm not but I want to snuggle with my cute sleeping baby. Or with my cute sleeping husband. Or I just want a shower.
I did realize for not the first time that I am a victim of perfectionism. I want to create the perfect thing/novel/story/piece of art, but when I don't know how to do that or don't think I'm even coming close, I give up. Probably, the gift of a baby is that he is not something I can give up on. And I don't have to be perfect, and really, it's easier for a lot of us if I'm not. So rather than long eloquent, thoughtful essays on the tidbits of motherhood, probably about once a week or so, I'll write a short choppy odd observation on myself in motherhood. It might read like my high school biology lab notebook: "I don't know if I put the right thing in my petri dish". Or "dissected the frog. While there is an odd beauty to it, I never want to do it again."
But this week in my notebook, I did think of the beginning of quite a few essays. So I do have things to go back to work on. Things I haven't seen in the books on new motherhood or baby center emails. Like what do you do about children's Bible stories? On the one hand I want my son to have the mythology, on the other I don't want him smiting kids on the playground because they seem wicked. Or on breastfeeding mothers donating milk. There's quite a few of us who donate milk, but I haven't seen anything that really talks about that. Or for pete's sake, post partum in laws and dealing with them while you are also dealing with hormones (and what kind of cruel joke is that?) And postpartum sex? People really don't talk about that. So anyway, I have a lot of things I could work on. But first, I'm taking that shower since the husband and baby are asleep.

More thoughts on self-love

I had a couple of other thoughts on self-love in my brief blog hiatus. As I mentioned in my earlier post, what most of us new moms agreed on was most important in self-love in the world of new mommyhood was compassion. I realized that for me this is kind of like that old Chinese koan " The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping," yet in my world, when I am practicing compassion with myself it is more like, "The dishwasher is not getting unloaded because the dishwasher is not getting unloaded." This keeps me present and keeps me from being hard on myself or beating myself up for not doing more - because what I am doing is being with my son, and while I know that this is one of the - if not the most important thing I can be doing - there is often that little voice nagging at me that I should somehow be doing other things like discovering my next six figure income or sweeping the floor or doing a couple hundred crunches just to see if an ounce of muscle tone might return. Self-acceptance is not really my forte, (this is probably why yoga is so good for me) - but making up my own versions of old Chinese koans somehow helps.
I did also, by the way, get some sweet smelling soap from the Farmer's Market for my shower. Oh, and I bought myself a new pair of earrings. Earrings are still important - because you know, earrings are important.

Last week's Day to Day on Co-Sleeping

Last Thursday, NPR's Day to Day grabbed onto the Washington Post's coattails and had their own article on co-sleeping. Day to Day called up their local medical expert, Dr. Spesiel to offer his reservations on co-sleeping. Dr. Spesiel offered up that co-sleeping made him nervous and he alluded vaguely to some study where some babies died as a result of sleeping with their parents (but he didn't offer the details - if the parents were obese or drunk or drugggd etc).
As a new parent, I find these articles on co-sleeping where so-called experts are brought in to discourage new parents from sleeping with their babies so irritating. First of all, I find it fascinating that the people who are made nervous by co-sleeping are generally men. I don't think co-sleeping needs to become a gender issue, but I do think families need to do what works for them, and especially breastfeeding mothers who are the ones likely to be up with their babies throughout the night, so maybe we could leave it up to the people who are breastfeeding - since it is their sleep at risk. I mean really, until men lactate, maybe they could clamp it and defer to the ones who do lactate (my husband certainly does - but thanks to our co-sleeping, my husband is also sleeping through the night - and it turns out there's nothing he loves more than to snuggle with our sleeping baby).
I also hesitate to place a whole lot of value on the opinions of medical experts. If we just take a minute and review the history of the opinions of medical experts, we'll find more instances of where they were wrong than right - and not that there aren't things we should be grateful for - but can we just keep in mind that 50 years ago, these same medical experts discouraged breastfeeding because they thought (for some reason) that breastmilk was nutritionally insufficent. They also discouraged picking up your baby lest you spoil your baby. They encouraged feeding your baby on a schedule of every four hours then wondered why suddenly all the babies are colickly (when really they were just hungry). Medical experts, in the past, have thought some pretty weird things so do we really want to view them as the unquestionable authority on all things?
Lastly, humans are pack animals. Every night, I nurse my baby down on my side of the bed, then I get up and do a few things. When I come back to bed, my baby has scooched himself across the bed so that he is snuggling up against my husband. So how do cribs make sense? (never mind that just as many babies die each year alone in their cribs). As my friend Kristina says, just because something is common doesn't mean it's normal.
Anyway, at first I thought about our co-sleeping and thought, it works for us and really, it's nobody else's business. Then I found myself commenting on the Day to Day website and thinking "Oh hang it. I just became an advocate." So there you go. I outed myself. I'm all for co-sleeping - mostly because it entails sleeping. We're the most well rested family I know. So are all the people we know who do co-sleep. Why mess with what works?

Self-Love in New Mommyland

In today's New Moms' group, the topic was self-love. At first, the idea of self-love was a little hard for a few of us to wrap our heads around since most the time these days, there's a baby attached to the breast of ourselves and the line distinguishing us from baby can at times get a little blurry. So it took a little bit to get down to how self-love looks or how we express it post baby arrival. Finally, it hit me, that since I became a mom, a good haircut is imperative - and having my hair washed before my haircut is luxurious. A hot bath after everyone else in the house is asleep has always been a key component in my recipe for self-rejuvenation, but since I became a mom, showers are now equally important. And before I was a mom, those bottles of Whole Foods brand shampoo and conditioner for just a few dollars did the trick - I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it (however, the scents and quality of bubble bathes and bath salts were very worth putting some thought into), yet now, good quality shampoo, conditioner and shower gel are as imperative as good quality bubble bath. I mean, those ten minutes in the shower take on a meditative self-nurturing quality. Showers are no longer just about getting clean.
Other things that were important before mommyhood that become much more important in mommyhood: flowers in the house, morning coffee (and it better be good morning coffee), earrings, pajamas you love to be in, my journal, and make-up.
Probably the most important expression of self-love in new mommyhood? Compassion for our new mommyself we decided. Not beating ourselves up for not getting the dishwasher unloaded. Cutting ourselves some slack and trusting our instincts - sometimes you have to put those parenting books down (you can get too much in your head with too much theory).
And it turns out the cool thing about self-love in new mommyhood is that how we take care of ourselves is what teaches our babies how to take care of themselves - that it's okay to have time to yourself and sometimes having time to yourself means somebody else isn't going to get what they want - and that's okay too.
So with that in mind, this new mommy noticed that baby needed a bath - but we let daddy have his bath to himself first so he could relax and decompress after his day (and with this current rainstorm we're having in LA, it really is nice to sit in the tub and listen to the nighttime rain) then I added baby. It's good to pass the self-love along.

The New Yorker on Breastfeeding

Check out this week's New Yorker for interesting article on the evolution of breastfeeding, pumping and the related legislation in the U.S. It kind of makes you think - I'm all for women pumping and for them having the legislation that protects their right to do so (I mean not having that legislation kind of sends the message that we don't value the health of our children very much) - but I would much rather see women having much longer paid maternity leaves. Anyway, check out the article. It's good to see breastfeeding making the mainstream media in the New Yorker instead of just La Leche League newsletters. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

In terms of clothes

Whatever you end up wearing as a new mom (some of us could spend weeks in our pajamas), I think you can get away with anything as long as you have a great haircut, lipstick, and an awesome pair of earrings. With that said, check out these cute new mom nursing clothes from Hadley Stilwell: http://hadleystilwell.com/collection/. Word on the street is that there's a 20% until the end of February.