on the home front | Bionic Mamas

June 20, 2014
by bionicbrooklynite 11 Comments

Midsummer

This much-delayed post brought to you by my visiting in-laws, Sugar’s taking a day off work, and my realization that even more than a donut, I would like some peace and quiet, alone in the apartment while everyone else goes to the coffee shop. It is indeed quite sweet.

The long silence, here and in your comments, is brought to you 70% by Having Two Small Children All Damn Day, 25% by How Can I Do Anything If I Don’t Even Know If We Are Moving In A Month, 5% by a mild case of the blue devils. In the 19th century sense, not the NCAA one — can you tell I am reading Patrick O’Brian again? I think I may just plan on slowly cycling through that series for the rest of my life, I like it so much. I’m in my favorite part now, the voyage that is Diane to Southeast Asia, Surprise back, and so far the best bits (Stephan’s orphans; the Edenic crater by the Buddhist temple; the demise of Andrew Wray) are only improved by anticipation.

For the moment, anyway, the blue devils seem to have been put paid by the sheer joy of a week on Cape Cod, celebrating the marriage of two friends. They did the city hall bit in the fall, and rather than having the usual wedding feast, invited some friends and family to visit them at a big house in Wellfleet, hanging out doing the things one does at the beach and cooking big dinners for each other in the evenings. (Maybe I will give you my shrimp and grits recipe one of these days.) It was heavenly. There was a tidal marsh in the backyard, suitable for kayaking on at high tide and chasing fiddler crabs on at low tide. There were other kids, so ours weren’t the principle disruptive force, and plenty of adults used to children, so we got some breaks here and there. All the charm of a family vacation with someone else’s family. We saw whales and no one threw up on the boat, an act of sheer will on the part of the Bean. He caught snails and hermit crabs on the beach and declared a love of being barefoot even when there were clam shell driveways to cross. He also ate his first s’more and huge numbers of “sea beans” from out back, actually some sort of succulent grass that tastes a little spicy and unbelievably salty; Sugar ate her weight in lobster rolls. I had my first oysters and Jackalope her inaugural french fries: we are both extremely pleased.

I imagine there may be gasping in some quarters at that news in concert with a glance at Jackalope’s age ticker: she is just over four months, and there is a fashion at present for ritual purity until at least six. When the Bean was this age, plummeting through the weight charts, and his doctor recommended letting him start tasting foods, I know some friends were appalled. My reading at the time suggested there wasn’t much difference in four versus six months for starting foods; the research cited to say otherwise conflates starting solids with ending breastfeeding, which we had and have no intention of doing. In any case, these fries were not her first foods. The Bean, flush with the joy of a “living room floor picnic” (dinner on a table cloth spread on the floor, a speciality of my mother’s, to make up for a rained-out attempt to eat at our community garden), let her taste an apple and a pickle a few weeks ago. “Come on, [Jackalope], get out your tongue….”

She liked the apple more than the pickle, the opposite of the Bean at that age, but Lordy, does she love a french fry. I had intended only to let her touch her tongue to the one I impulsively offered at our post-whale watching lunch in Ptown, but the look on her face! Only a monster could have taken it from her.

In fact, I am pleased at her hunger for fries, for reasons greater than my usual contrariness. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was in medical school. (No, she didn’t take time off, and yes, I am permanently out-classed.) The only food she could stomach at the hospital cafeteria was french fries, and so for the rest of our lives together, she seemed especially pleased when I ate them. “Eighty percent of your protoplasm was french fries, after all.” I think she would like to see the pattern carry on.

On our last morning at the house, watching the Bean balancing on the wall above the marsh, I teared up thinking of how she would have liked to hear about our adventures, more than anyone else would, in as much detail as I could render. It’s a hard thing, losing that. But I also realized that was close to the first time I’d cried that week, a new record, more noteworthy even than whales.

Now to the 25%: we are not moving this month, it turns out. Sugar had or perhaps was a fish on the line for a job in a town we would really like to move to, but then the line went slack. There are reasons it would be better to move in a year (principally to do with homophobic legal crap), but it’s exhausting, getting worked up about the prospect of a sudden, major change and then, BAM, never mind. And meanwhile, when you’ve thought you might be throwing everything in a truck on short notice, it’ seen hard to bother with niceties like cleaning the apartment or arranging a fall teaching schedule. Sigh. The only good I can see in all this, is that it did make us feel that yes, we are ready to leave, at least for the right situation. I’m trying to train my mind back on the things we like here, which is somewhat tricky. But the Bean has a neat preschool two days a week in the fall, our friends are still at hand (except for the ones who are leaving themselves), we saw an amazing free concert in the park (Janelle Monae, SWOON), and there is all the dim sum I can eat. (And a wonderful cousin of mine, just moved to the city and especially beloved of the Bean, to eat it with.)

Seventy percent of why I haven’t been in better touch is just, wow, two small children is a lot for me to keep up with, especially in the absence of a backyard. (Oh, how that house in Wellfleet made me long for a yard!) But while having two has made me a worse blogger, I think it may be making me a better parent. I just can’t obsess in the way I could with just one. Jackalope’s schedule is erratic and sometimes frustrating, but on the other hand, I barely remember it by the next day. The Bean is still a radically picky eater when it comes to food not growing right in front of him. (When it comes to the category of “leaves,” he could use to be just slightly pickier, for the sake of safety, though it does my heart good to see him wolfing down fennel leaves and lemon balm at our garden, even if I have also had to make him spit out some unauthorized attempts as well. Luckily the monkshood is nowhere near our bed.) But while I hope he will one day venture beyond peanut butter sandwiches, pancakes, and two specific flavors of yogurt, there’s just only so much energy I can spend fretting about it. He at half a spicy fried chickpea at dinner last night. That was something. Being willing to taste or even touch a food before rejecting it is extremely novel and welcome behavior.

Meanwhile Jackalope remains an easier baby than he was. Far more than half of my relative sanity is due to her sleeping more than he ever has, though she insists that most of it be in our bed, which I do not love. Lately this has meant “all-night milk bar” action, which is not my idea of relaxation. I got my stupid period back at one day shy of four months (the night before we left for the beach, naturally), so now my nipples hurt half the time. This is exactly the timing of its return following the Bean’s birth, almost to the day. And I have heard far earlier stories from other friends. Why on earth do breastfeeding advocates continue to all but promise at least six months off? I am less angry and bitter this time around, but hell, if we were straight (and fertile) I could be pregnant. No, thank you.

Where was I? (Surely you have realized by now that no editing is happening here, lest this never be posted at all.) Oh, right, my daughter.

She’s enormous, by the standards set by the Bean. We’ll see where things stand at her appointment next week, but at two months and change she was 90th%ile for length, 70th for weight. She is a capital wiggler, maneuvering herself off of play quilts in no time flat. She is smiley and charmed by the world — the look on her face at the first service plaza we hit on our drive to the Cape was less restrained than I’d have expected upon arrival at Disneyworld. Which is good, because there is no way Sugar is agreeing to a Disney trip. She is particularly enraptured with her big brother, who so far shares her delight at least some of the time. (Yes, I know that’s unlikely to outlast her ability to steal his toys, but I am nevertheless enjoying the moment.)

The Bean particularly loves to have us tell him what she is saying, and to in turn put his own words in her mouth. For a while she was telling, via his voice, very short stories in the narrative format of Runaway Bunny, mostly concerned with consumption. “Once there was a giraffe who wanted to eat a lion. So he said to his lion, I am going to eat you. And that was the end.” This habit has led to my greatest recent parenting coup, one that has radically increased the speed of getting dressed in the morning (a lucky thing, since it is suddenly hard to get Jackalope down for that nap except in a moving stroller, and I still come completely unhinged at certain kinds of crying). Here’s hoping it might work at your house, should you be in a similar situation:

The Bean no longer wants us to choose his clothes, which is fine and unsurprising. However, he also won’t choose them for himself in anything like a timely manner. It’s excruciating, and all previous attempts to speed things up have been fast tracks to tantrumland. But you know who is allowed to choose? Jackalope. It goes like this:

ME: Bean, do you want to choose your clothes today, or should Jackalope?

BEAN: Jackalope!

ME: Okay, Jackalope, which underpants should the Bean wear today: Friday, race cars, or octopus?

BEAN: She says octopus!

And so on through shirt and pants. He still insists on making his own shoe choice, which is fair enough since she can’t walk. I have no idea why this is so magically successful, but wow, it is. The only downside is that sometimes we have to wait for her to wake up from a nap, but if we plan ahead, sometimes she will choose his clothes the night before. Then he takes some mischievous pleasure in slyly choosing a different shirt while she is out of the room.

Ah, there is the sound of the door now. And the sound of a small and hungry person. How nice it has been, internets, spending this time with you. Let’s not leave it so long next time.

Fits and Starts (Take 2)

Did this pop up in your reader once already, when it was much, much shorter? Thank the awkward interface of the WP ipad app!

Hey, look! I got as far as a title for that post I didn’t write on Tuesday! Fancy that!

I was sneezing my brains out, and the state of my pelvic floor is such that I was put in mind of the notion of…let’s say ideas escaping a bit at a time. Then my allergy meds kicked in and I was left with the cognitive skills of a not-so-bright houseplant. So you missed out on an extended pee metaphor, is what I’m saying.

I know. I’m sad for you, too.

Meanwhile, in no particular order:

Item: The mother of one of the Bean’s friends, who also has a six-month-old, says of taking care of the two of them, “it’s really fine. As long as you don’t want to do anything else.” That about sums it up so far. Jackalope, praise heaven, remains about as easy to care for as it is possible to imagine for a baby her age (7 weeks ~~today~~ yesterday). Sometimes I also do one other thing, like some laundry or most of the dishes. We do not always leave the apartment. I shower on the weekends.

Item: I have found this game invaluable for achieving a sanity-sparing trance state while nursing. I have even won, once. If you are troubled by excess productivity, give it a try.

Item: Yes, I play games while caring for my children. I also mess around on the Internet and, in the rare occasion that I have access to both my hands and a source of light, read books. (I have been known to talk on the phone, too, though not so much now that I have lost the one person I could call anytime, even when there wasn’t much of a story to tell, and just…talk.) On Friday I was chided in a faux-friendly way by a (childless) acquaintance for bantering on Facebook rather than giving my children my undivided attention.

Item: I do not give my children my undivided attention at every moment.

Item: I do not feel bad about that. They do not need my undivided attention, most of the time. There are moments when one or, merciful heavens, both need all or most of my attention, and in those moments, I do my best to give it to them.

Item: I am a fully-fledged adult human, with a big brain and wide-ranging interests. No one needs my undivided attention at all times.

Item: Speaking of gender essentialism (because I believe that’s what is in play above), it continues to amaze me how casually it crops up in my life as the mother of a boy child. (I expect the girl child parts will kick in soon.) The mother of the Bean’s friend mentioned above expresses genuine surprise that I am not teaching the Bean to pee standing up. As if the presence of a Y chromosome demands it. (Or maybe it’s the testicles? An issue of airflow?) For the record, the first person to inform him that such an option exists gets to teach him; such behavior will be for outside of the house only until he is able to be in charge of cleaning the bathroom. Meanwhile, another friend — and a butch lesbian, at that — expresses relief that she is expecting another girl, because she knows “what little boys are capable of.” I am baffled.

Item: Our particular little boy is capable of more and more things, lately, almost all of them good. Potty training, pee-edition, is suddenly going much better. (Let us not speak of poop.) He prefaces questions with, “I’m curious,” and tonight at the computer remarked, noticing the connection for the first time, “it’s funny that you guy call that a mouse.” He “imsisted” the other night that I stop doing the dishes and instead eat ice cream. I was helpless to comply.

Item: Jackalope is up to new tricks, too. Last night, age exactly seven weeks, she had her first absolute fit of smiles, cracking up over my singing along to the Mendelssohn and Mozart Sugar was playing. She’s a funny baby in general. For reasons only the gods of hand-me-downs know, we own in her size what amounts to a black unitard. I tried, later on last night, to get her to smile for a camera, but was treated instead of pose after pose of hamming. Method baby, I guess.

Eyebrow work

Nathan Lane Impression

Hitchcock

Comedy

Tragedy

Fin

Item: We have all gone to our respective doctors again. The Bean had has three-year check up, passed with flying colors. Suddenly he is in the 40-somethingth percentile for height and, more surprisingly, for weight. This from a child who spent much of his first year clinging to the bottom five percentile points. He weighs in the neighborhood of 31 pounds and is roughly 38 inches tall. He is extremely glad to now be able to reach the green button that releases the lock on our building’s front door. City kid milestones.

Jackalope is huge. At that appointment, at which point she was five weeks and change, she weighed in at 9 pounds 12 ounces, somewhere in the 60s by percentile. Two pounds over her birthweight, three pounds over her lowest recorded weight in the post-birth drop. Imagine what she’d weigh if she didn’t spit up so much! She is deemed otherwise healthy, and now her acne is clearing up, too.

I took Jackalope with me to my six-week OB check-up. It was lovely, really. As different from the postpartum appointment of abuse and despair as can be imagined. We were thoroughly fussed over by everyone from the receptionist to that very young OB I only met once at my first appointment. I stuck my head into the office of Dr. Joy, the OB who delivered Jackalope, and she was so completely charming in her neon pink lipstick and her exclamations that I wasn’t even annoyed that she had to ask my first name. She clearly remembered me. “Oh! Was it better for you?? You were so traumatized! I just really wanted it to go really well for you!! And you did so well!” She danced around the room holding Jackalope and praising her and me for ages, even though I know she had a patient waiting. (Sorry, patient, but I did need that.) I just love her. I almost want to see her now for my annual exams, instead of the doctor I came to the practice for. But I also love her! Maybe I’ll let them each do one cervix.

For the actual appointment, I saw the younger of the two OB midwives, whom I didn’t meet before Jackalope was born but who gets a gold star in the birth story I will eventually write, for being the person answering the phone when Sugar called to say I was having contractions. Young Midwife could hear me in the background and, in marked contrast to the bitch of a nurse at Dr. Russian’s, who in similar circumstances told Sugar, “she needs to calm down,” said, calmly but firmly, that we needed to leave for the hospital, even if I’d only just started having contractions that made me sound like that. Thank you, Young Midwife, for your help in making sure our daughter was not born in a cab.

At this appointment, we mostly just chatted. My poor, tattered hooha had started behaving itself again, so no treatment for that. Isn’t it always slightly more frustrating than relieving when symptoms resolve prior to an appointment? My pelvic floor is nothing to write home about, but it does seem to be getting stronger; I kegel every time I think of peeing on myself, which is often enough that I occasionally overdo it and exhaust everything. YM told a story of being invited to the country house of a homebirth client and making an ill-advised decision to get on the trampoline with her kids. My own hopscotch misadventures pale in comparison. She asked about penetration and I said I’d let her know if the children were ever simultaneously asleep; she countered with a story of nursing while…multitasking. (Why is it that they tell you no penetration with anything prior to the six week appointment, and then, at the six week appointment, ask how it’s going? C’mon, people.) I am cleared to do everything, including sit-ups, but I told YM I’d be much, much to busy attending to my precious children to do anything so selfish as that. The Bean and I celebrated with a bubble bath.

Item: It’s taken almost a week to write this, and I can’t remember what else I meant to include. Time to wrap it up, perhaps. Good night, y’all.

March 13, 2014
by bionicbrooklynite 17 Comments

Bionic Family Newsletter

Hey, y’all, she remarked sheepishly. I am sorry it has been so long. I thought I remembered about this phase, how it means just nursing 27 or 28 hours a day, but I crucially forgot that nursing a newborn requires, at least for me, both hands. Also, by 28 hours a day I mean 40.

But anyway, here I am. Mostly because how many places am I free to talk about my nipples and hooha hurting? Y’all are a special group, internet. I don’t have real hope of managing a narrative post in the next two years, but I will indulge myself in some categorized items. (Spoiler: my nipples hurt. Also my hooha.)

[Several hours later….]

Where to begin? Jackalope, I suppose, since she’s the most novel:

Jackalope

Item: She’s marvelous. Disregard all the time I spend begging her to go the hell back to sleep at 3am. She’s healthy and growing and sleeping more than the Bean did, even if I could frankly use a lot more hours. She seems to be that proverbial easier baby that some people have. Now I understand the magical beliefs that persist about babies — how they give explicable cues before screaming that they are hungry, for instance, and how they like things like swaddles and pacifiers and soothing. I imagine some of this is our being more experienced parents, but mostly I think she’s just a wildly easier baby than the Bean. (Knock wood, knock wood.)

Item: She’s huge! She was almost two pounds heavier than the Bean at birth (7/13 to his 6/1), and she’s growing much faster. She was over eight pounds at her last appointment, at age 2.5 weeks.

Item: She’s tough. At five days old, she reached down during a clothing change, took hold of her umbilical cord stump, and tore it off. No crying.

Item (related): She nurses well! This, I believe, is both cause and consequence of being larger (and born two weeks later). Consequence, because her mouth is larger, her stomach holds more, and she is just more coordinated and, well, finished than the Bean was. She latched on and nursed better in the delivery room than he did for a month.

Item: I have SO much more milk than last time. Funny, it’s almost like a person is healthier when she keeps most of her original complement of blood. Someone should study that.

Item: Nursing a baby who is into it while yourself making adequate amounts of milk is SO MUCH EASIER than nursing a weak, tired, young baby while making not enough milk. It still takes forever and wears me out and hurts my nipples and drives me a little crazy, but really, not at all in the same ballpark. I did have a small nervous breakdown at her first out-of-hospital doctor’s visit, when she had lost still more weight and I imagined us spiraling into the same nightmare we had with the Bean. I took home formula samples and cried and refused to use them, which confused poor Sugar badly. I couldn’t decide whether it was more irrational to begin supplementing a baby I knew didn’t really need it yet, or to dig in my heels, the way I did last time, and allow us to go back down the road of failed exam after exam, needlessly starving baby, etc. (Side-item: I really wish we’d been able to see our preferred pediatrician for that visit instead of her young partner. I think she might have been able to calm me down.) But then, like in the books, my milk came the rest of the way in, and at our next appointment, she’d regained her birth weight. Just like they say happens!

Item: As much as I like the lactation consultant we ended up eventually seeing with the Bean (as opposed to the ones we saw before her, who were various flavors of useless), I like not having to see her even more. And even more than THAT, I like having a baby who can just be fed when she’s hungry and gain weight, without my having to go through routines of timing and facial exercises and diaper changes to wake her back up and horrible teas and pumping and crying and guilt. Funny.

Item: At the second weight check, when she’d regained her birth weight, I also had my first experience of really feeling like an experienced parent. The NP we saw that time, who had repeatedly praised her weight gain, asked about her sleep. At the time, she had been sleeping a 4-6 hour stretch at the beginning of the night, which, I’m sure you can imagine, was heavenly. (I mean, the Bean doesn’t even always do that, and he’s THREE.) Oh no, she said, you can’t let her go that long. You need to be waking her up to eat. And I thought, lady, you just said this baby is gaining weight and looking great; like hell I’m waking her up. But what I said was, “We’ll see.” Because I realized in that moment that not only did I not have to do that, I didn’t even need to tell her I wasn’t going to.

Item: We don’t always get that stretch anymore. Or it isn’t always at night. Sugar generally ends up in the Bean’s room, and I am alone with Jackalope, who likes to have a couple hours of being awake for no earthly reason sometime in the 1-5am stretch. I am tired.

Item: On Monday, my first day home alone with both kids, she stayed awake from 5am until 10:30, napped for 40 minutes, was back up for a couple of hours of continued, constant nursing, took another cat nap, was up again, etc. There was a period when all three of us were wailing. It was precious.

Item: On Tuesday, Sugar came home from work early and I took Jackalope to a department meeting at adjunct-institution-community-college. I had written to ask permission and not heard back, and I need brownie points over there. No idea if I scored them with the right people. I missed half the meeting, including the topic I’d come to hear about. A woman next to me was snide at me while using FB on her phone. It was one thousand degrees and packed; turns out my comfort level with public nursing does not extend to the front row of such a setting. I had the unsettling experience of realizing that the woman I thought was the chair of the department isn’t. But several people said kind things on their way out the door, and I reminded the person who hires adjuncts that I’d like work in the fall.

Item: Poor Jackalope is a second child when it comes to pictures, I’m afraid. We remember to take them, sometimes, but then they are stuck on the camera.

The Bean

Item: The Bean is THREE. How in cheese’s name did that happen? We got him a tea set.

Item: He turned three the same day Jackalope turned three weeks old. I tried to get a cute picture of them near each other. Ha.

Item: We had a tiny little party and a cake with trains on it. My mom tried to send the trains for his last birthday, but they arrived too late. He liked it.

Item: Still not eating many foods or sleeping through the night or reliably using the potty. But he can do a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle with almost no help. (Still figuring out how to work that “but” into his doctor’s appointment on Monday.) I am an unabashed puzzle pusher, and am beyond thrilled that he likes them, too.

[There’s Jackalope waking up….]

[And then the rest of the afternoon and the evening and the night happened, and most of the next morning. There was an interlude for an unexpectedly early first brother/sister bath, which damn near killed me with the cute.]

Item: The Bean is so much better with Jackalope than I thought reasonable to expect. He likes to put his nose against her toes. We failed utterly to move him to a big bed and decommission the crib/toddler bed in time that he wouldn’t associate the loss of his familiar spot with the arrival of the baby, but as soon as it was converted back to its baby configuration (he helped), I heard him stop mid-sentence, correcting himself to call it “Jackalope’s bed.” She was fussing in there one afternoon, while I was stuck on the toilet. I was a little concerned when he went in to her — he is a lot larger than she is and unaware of her comparative fragility — but he sat down on the floor with his legos and said, “don’t cry. I am making you a tower to make you happy.” Melt.

[Whoops, there went the whole weekend. My dad visited. There’s a lot to say about that, almost all unbloggable. He is charming with babies.]

Rotten Things

Item: Our older cat, Michaela, died. She was diagnosed with kidney failure right before Jackalope was born. Sugar learned to give her sub-cutaneous fluids every night. There were supplements but no real hope of recovery. She seemed okay for a while, and then suddenly wasn’t. We all miss her, and of course this has started another round of questions and pronouncements from the Bean about his dead grandmother and great-grandmother, with lots of crying from me especially. I know these questions are a typical part of being his age, but really, the last four months have been over the top for our family. I am so sick and tired of death.

Item: Michaela came to us as a teeny kitten found in the woods, so dirty we didn’t know she was white. (Really, she was a secret calico, with a smear of grey and buttery-tan on her head as a kitten.) She lived with us in Massachusetts and Chicago and New York. She nearly died of hepatic lipidosis in 2005 and after recovering, slept on our feet every night. Despite being standoffish with strangers (“Michaela has boundaries,” said an approving friend, comparing her to our more dog-like Orson), she turned out to adore babies, both ours and others’. We called her the Bean’s nanny. Here she is with the Bean, in 2011, and with Jackalope:

Item: Yesterday morning, Sugar’s paternal grandmother died. (Her maternal grandmother died in December.) It wasn’t a surprise, but it is awful. I am so tired of death.

Item: Sugar is going to Chicago for the funeral for the first part of the week. I’m not ready to be alone overnight with both Jackalope and the Bean, but, well, I guess I’m about to be ready.

My Addled Brain

Item: Despite everything, I don’t seem to be depressed. At least, I don’t think so. It’s almost weird. I am sometimes sad and sometimes overwhelmed, but yeah, not depressed. I do still cry about my mom a lot, but I have a hard time categorizing that as pathological; crying seems pretty rational to me, and naturally I think of her all the time, especially looking at this baby, whom she would so have wanted to know. There’s not much I can do to make that not awful.

My Body, Upper

Item: Remember that Cold of Filth I was complaining about before Jackalope was born? (COF is trademarked to either May or Mrs. Hairy, not sure.) I had this fantasy that somehow the intensity of labor would drive it out like a demon. Yeah, no. Instead, I was sick for a solid month, coughing my brains out. (Other things also coughed out, too, thanks to an enlarged uterus and a pelvic floor that went on strike altogether.) The Bean and Sugar were sick, too, but luckily Jackalope was not, nor does the codeine cough syrup I was living on seem to have bothered her. Still, I do not recommend the experience of being that sick immediately postpartum.

Item: Dateline: NIPPLES. The Reynaud’s is back. For new readers, this means that my nipples are spasmotically seizing up in response to breastfeeding, and if that sounds horrifically painful, well, it is. I got on the nifedipine in short order this time around, following some minor difficulties getting my OB to prescribe the extended release version in place of a “take as needed” regime of regular capsules. (Let me tell you, you take one of those at the same time as a slug of cough syrup and WHOA, good luck standing up.) Unfortunately, the nifedipine isn’t working quite as completely, though things are a great deal better than they were a few weeks ago, when many tears were shed. Now I mostly have spasms at night, and they aren’t so terrible.

Item: I can’t try a higher dose of nifedipine, apparently. I called the OB office a couple of weeks ago, when things were getting very bad, to ask about that and about some renewed locchia. The nurse insisted I come in to see a midwife. On the one hand, it was nice to feel they were concerned about my health, in marked contrast to Dr. Russian’s nurse. On the other, schlepping into the city is not easy, nor was there a point. As I had suspected, the bleeding was normal. Meanwhile, they are afraid my blood pressure will bottom out on a higher dose. I suspect that’s not right — my understanding is that, while nifedipine does lower BP in people with pathologically high pressure, it doesn’t have much effect in someone like me, whose body doesn’t have difficulty maintaining a steady BP. Certainly my BP while I was taking it last time was at my usual level every time it was checked. But, since my usual level is on the low side and I don’t want to pass out all over the place, I guess that’s how it is.

Item: I started taking some extra B6, on the advice of the internet. Hard to say whether that helped, but I already had it in the house. At least I won’t get pellagra.

Item: The Reynaud’s has new tricks. Several times a day, associated with let-down, I have what I think must be massive spasms in my milk ducts. (This happened sometimes with the Bean, but not this early or this fiercely.) The only reason I’m not weeping over this is that it doesn’t last that long, just a minute or two each time. It is more of a sore feeling than a sharp one, but it is intense, like each duct suddenly has a fist inside it. Not recommended.

Item: It was an act of purest optimism to have ordered that breastpump, wasn’t it? Sigh.

My Body: Lower

Item: I know y’all mainly read this blog for hooha news. It’s cool. I mainly write it to talk about my hooha.

Item: Ouch.

Item: In so many, many ways, my recovery from Jackalope’s birth has been nothing at all like my recovery from the Bean’s. Thank whatever it is you like to thank. I am healthier and happier and in much, much better shape.

Item: My pelvic floor is shot, but recovering. For a while there, advertising algorithms were chasing me across the internet with ads for protective undergarments. Depressing. Now I am mostly okay as long as I go to the bathroom a lot and, I discovered yesterday, don’t attempt any hopscotch games. Bad idea.

Item: The hemorrhoids are likewise retreating, like big, ugly glaciers. Butt glaciers. Thank God for witch hazel.
(Gratuitous witch hazel shot because I also love the plant, mostly because it blooms so early.)

Item: Stitches still beasts. The proverbial they say you don’t tear as much the second time, and I guess I didn’t, inasmuch as I’d already, erm, resected my vaginal septum and it’s hard to tear more than that. Nevertheless, I was fairly shredded, inside and out. My new vocabulary word is “sulchal.” That all hurt in a predictable way at first, then got worse around week two, when everything got irritated and the lines of stitches felt like they might rip right out every time I coughed. Or God forbid sat up. Things improved again, with a delightful interlude of suture ends poking me in personal places.

Item: Except now I have these hard spots I suspect are scar tissue, and nothing is stretchy enough. As in, it hurts to sit again, in sharp little ways, and then there is blood. Not a whole lot of blood mostly, but I think I am tearing a little bit every day now, just from sitting. I am so not into this, I can’t even tell you. I have my postpartum appointment on Tuesday, and I sure hope there is something to do about this problem. I’d like to, um, use that part of my body again someday, for one thing. Ahem.

Miscellanea:

Item: Sara started blogging again! Check that OUT.

Item: I have spent an absurd amount of time giggling at this, featuring drawings the Bean describes as “some funny folks!”

November 24, 2013
by bionicbrooklynite 30 Comments

Gravid Grief

The TLDR version: It sucks. Horribly. No, worse than that. Don’t do it.

Oh, internets. This is the worst dream I’ve ever had. I’m ready to wake up now.

Not pictured: more handkerchiefs

I keep trying to tell myself it could be worse. This might have happened when I was a child. It could have been violent. She might have suffered and suffered — and point of order, people telling me “suffering is over now,” but this is not the same situation as dying at the end of an increasingly painful bout of cancer or similar. Yes, she was sick, but she’d been sick for my whole life, and it’s a bit hard to tell me to think of all of that time as pure suffering. Yes, she’d had some particularly unpleasant migraine and tendon problems recently, but when I talked to her on Sunday afternoon, she said she was feeling much better. Nor did any of that have to do with her dying, though I’m sure plenty of people who don’t know the details basically think, “Bionic’s mom was sick for a long time,” as if that explains it in any meaningful way.

She had a pulmonary embolism. At home, alone. No warning. Given her propensity towards large bleeds under her skin and a fear of stroke, no one would have thought she should have been on a blood thinner (find more info about this type of medicines and troubles they can cause, including class actions – like in the case of Xarelto). Not much narrative satisfaction to be found there, sorry.

(May, please go give H an extra hug for me.)

So, yeah, no warning at all. And hey, there’s could-have-been-worse there, too. We might have been fighting. I think I forgot to say I love you on our last phone call, but at least I’d been saying it pretty often. It might have been the long, drawn out, cancerous sort of death more typical in my family. I’m not sure if that’s worse or not. It might well have been, given her auto-immune disease, some awful series of infections. Cascading, horrible medical interventions. Tubes and wires. Disagreement on the definition of “hopeless.” Soul-rending decisions.

It could have been worse.

The trouble, dear internets, is that it turns out that the Pain Olympics don’t make me feel any better, even when it’s me versus hypothetical me.

Given that focusing on the supposedly positive isn’t doing a damn thing for me (read: I am crying in public, bawling at (mostly) home, and have the emotional reserves and cognitive abilities of a newborn), all I can give you is a list, in no particular order, of things that make grieving while pregnant especially awful. You know, in case you were considering choosing this course.

You have to eat. At a time when renunciation of the flesh seems so right, too bad. You aren’t in charge of that anymore, and the very small person who is, is extremely determined. But Bionic, I hear you say, some of us like to eat our feelings. And being pregnant means you can eat as much as you want! To which I reply, hope you like wet sand, because that’s what everything tastes like now.
You can’t drink. Yes, I know, I know: plenty of people think a glass of wine doesn’t matter this late in the game. But I don’t want a glass of wine, and I’m pretty sure getting regularly blind drunk is still a no-no.
None of the good drugs, either. Sorry, they’re all category D. I checked.
You know that thing where you wake up and can’t remember what you were sad about, and then you do remember and it’s like being thrown off one of those 700-foot fjord cliffs all over again? Being pregnant means you get to do that four or five times a night, every time you need to pee or feed the tiny tyrant. See also: crying yourself to sleep.
Oh, were you happy about being pregnant? Maybe even enjoying it, despite the discomforts and indignities? Too bad about that. Now you’re not happy about anything. You do get to keep the discomforts as a parting gift.
Meanwhile, you’re supposed to “take care of yourself,” which means take care of the baby, even if you don’t feel like it. Vitamins, for instance. Trying not to get listeria. You’re supposed to keep going to your prenatal appointments, even if you’re pretty sure your mother died during your last one, right around the time you started shaking and crying in the waiting room for what seemed like no reason but is in retrospect exactly like what happened when your grandmother died.
Speaking of PTSD, guess how much cerebral CPU processing capability is now available for dealing with all that birth stuff you were trying to sort out? What, this isn’t what you meant when you said you wanted to stop obsessing over those fears? Your therapist, who is trying to break up with you*, says it’s appropriate that you aren’t thinking about all that, which makes you wonder if she owns a calendar and knows the basic theory of its use. Of course it’s appropriate, but it’s also a bit dangerous, no, given that this baby is likely to be born more or less on the original schedule? If there were any justice, you’d be allowed to hit pause on the whole gestation thing while you get your sea legs, but if there were any justice, you wouldn’t be in this position.

*Well, what she said was I could keep coming if I just wanted a place to cry and say whatever I feel like, but that doesn’t seem all that useful, really. I’m not working on the birth stuff at all, things being how they are, nor do I need therapizing about the grief in a way I can’t get from people I actually know and trust more. I’m not depressed, per se; I’m just really, really, really sad. Surely I could do something else with the money.

Are those clouds? Hills? Giant, fluffy carrots?

Speaking of that baby, whose arrival you were already scared about, how on earth are you supposed to take care of it while you’re like this? Let alone do a better job than you did last time, the way you had promised yourself you would? (You know, so your mother wouldn’t worry so much.) Do a little poking around the Internet on the topic, and find reports of a study showing babies born to grieving mothers have a higher rate of serious illness in their first four years of life, plus the news that you are basically guaranteed to get postpartum depression.
For the sake of your electronics’ integrity and not being yourself reclassified as an inland salt water sea, try really, really hard to avoid thinking about how this baby won’t know your mother (and your two-year-old probably won’t remember her). Don’t worry; you will fail in that attempt one thousand times a day.
In case you manage to steer clear of that thought for a minute, apparently a cavalcade of perfect strangers — work colleagues of your father, that sort of thing — now feels empowered to stand too close to you at the visitation, the last time you will see her body, and tell you how sorry they are WHILE RUBBING YOUR BELLY. This ranks among the most profoundly inappropriate experiences of your life, and it keeps happening again and again and again.

September 16, 2013
by bionicbrooklynite 9 Comments

Matroyshka Monday

I know “Mother Charmed By Own Child” is hardly breaking news, but I can’t help that swollen feeling my heart gets when the Bean asks to play with my matroyshka dolls. I love how careful he (ahem, usually) is with them, even when they do exciting things like drive buses. And I love that my boy, whose vehicular obsessions lead many people to reassure me that his gender expression matches his genitalia, so equally loves these dolls (and OMG dollhouses). Just like his mama, on both counts.

September 13, 2013
by bionicbrooklynite 14 Comments

Items From Our Catalog

Hi, Internets. I wrote you such a post yesterday! Well, we can all believe it was wonderful, because the WP iPad app ate it, and only the good die young, right? In the interest of posting something, anything, here are some items:

Current Events

Sugar did not get the promotion/new job she has been waiting to hear about since, oh, February-ish. (The actual interview was in August, but that’s around when she started the application process.) Waiting to hear has been a stressful situation for our family, and this news is, of course, even more stressful. The job would have meant more money and the kind of title and responsibilities that make it easier to move to another good job elsewhere, so that sucks. Then there’s the part where she is a great employee who has been in this small department for eight years, doing the work of this better job for most of a year, and generally feels pretty damn shafted right now. “We sure hope you won’t take this as a reflection on how much we value your [tireless, underpaid-even-for-this-department, grant-money-attracting] work in your current position,” says her boss, who can eat ALL THE BAGS OF DICKS, as far as I am concerned.
Her boss gave her this news following a big meeting about how there would be a lot of work for the department in February. She stayed after to tell him that he might need to assign extra staff to those projects, since we are expecting a baby at that time. Nothing like getting additional rejection immediately after saying things like “I might need to take time off if it’s like last time, because my wife almost died.”
No, I don’t think that influenced his decision. He is not a quick decider, just an asshole.
She isn’t getting fired, but it feels a little like that, because if they aren’t willing to promote her to management after eight years, yeah, it’s time to move on.
There has literally never been a better time to convince us to come be your neighbors! Seriously, if you have connections in educational technology and/or public health, be in touch, huh? We are open to leaving the city. Probably not — full disclosure — for Indiana.
Sugar left early this morning to visit her parents for the weekend, so we get to be apart while processing all this. Whee.

Democracy In Action

We voted in the NYC primary this week. Sugar tried to weasel out of it by saying she wasn’t registered to a political party (required for primaries in this state), but ha ha, turns out there’s a website to check that kind of thing. The Bean was putting up a fuss about going, but the return of the old voting machines (with LEVERS!) and the advent of never-seen-here-before STICKERS may have won him over for life.
I kind of can’t believe that in a field that included a lesbian and black man, I checked the box by yet another straight white guy’s name. But, hey, at least he’s married to a lesbian. And I’m married to a lesbian, myself!

Obstetrics and Midwifery

My appointment last week went well. I saw the midwife again, and I wish she were an OB. This practice has two CNMs who work with OB patients, but only the OBs deliver. I’m not sure why this is the system, but I wish I could see this MW more often. If nothing else, it was a nice break from grilling everyone about whether they are competent/emotionally stable, since I’ve already told her my deal.
I had told her about the postpartum anemia last time I saw her, but I hadn’t known for sure it was because of hemorrhage (as opposed to general pregnancy anemia). I told her the numbers from the hospital records, and she said they would definitely have offered a transfusion. That is reassuring, vis-a-vis hoping to not be that sick again.
She noted in my chart that I had had a postpartum hemorrhage, but said she thinks it is unlikely to recur, since it was probably mostly the septum doing the bleeding. If a septum includes an artery, she says, “those things can really pump.” I guess that explains why the doctors used up all the gauze in the room and the supply closet both, stuffing my vagina full of it and pulling it out again. (Which hurt a surprising amount.)
I made a supposedly off-hand comment about how maybe none of this will matter anyway, if the placenta doesn’t move, since I’d end up with an automatic c-section. She waved her hand, as if dismissing a joke. “Please. It’s marginal at sixteen weeks. It will move.” I think she is likely to be right, but this was still a nice antidote to my mother’s gloom on the subject. (My mother generally seems to think I don’t take bad news sufficiently seriously, and so takes pains to impress upon me that bad news is bad. I’m not sure where she got the impression that I am an optimist.)
The most surprising aspect of the appointment is that we did not have a fight or even a lengthy discussion about my plan to refuse the glucose tolerance screening this time around. I told her how sick I had gotten last time, confirmed that I had eaten beforehand and still was neurologically wrecked for three days, and mentioned my low risk factors for gestational diabetes. (I restrained myself from opening with what BS I think most of the things written about GD are, at least when it comes to bad outcomes among patients without pre-existing insulin resistance. And since when is an episiotomy in the same category of outcome as a c-section, anyway?) I was all set to argue, with data and citations and everything (thanks to Dr. J. F. Scientist and my mother), but she said, “We had a patient like you really recently. Are you willing to do some monitoring at home?” I am — what’s a few more self-inflicted stab wounds for a fertility clinic veteran, am I right? “I’ll bring it up at the OB meeting this week, but I’m sure it’s fine. You’ll have to get a meter.” And then she got out the doppler and we listened to Jackalope’s galloping heart.
I feel surprised, relieved, and perversely thwarted. I have data, damn it! Don’t you want to even look at it? Please?
In general, the visit was reassuring on the “have I once again chosen insane care providers” front.

Addled Brain, My

I am somewhat bemused to report that the one thing that would have irritated me about that appointment, in other times, namely the MW referring to the amount of weight I’ve gained as “not bad,” didn’t bother me at all, except in an impersonal, cultural-political kind of way. Huh. I realized that I never gave them the “please don’t bug me about eating/my weight” talk that led Dr. Russian’s practice to label me as an active anorexic (and therefore interrogate me about my diet at every opportunity, FAIL), partly because they have never told me anything dumb like some imaginary, ideal amount of weight to program my animatronic body to gain without exceeding. Funny, how not setting a person up to think her weight in under surveilance is helpful in the not-feeling-under-surveillance department.
However.
I am not doing so very well in the “putting that birth behind me” category (the one comment from my last appointment with this MW that, while meant kindly, did in fact rub me the wrong way).
And so.
I have decided to look for a therapist.
I have very mixed feelings about that.
Bunny mentioned in a comment a few posts ago that she wasn’t sure of my feelings about therapy except that I had been utterly enraged by the Baby Factory’s requirement that we see their counselor. For the sake of clarity, my feelings about Our Dumb Appointment are not my feelings about therapy in general, but are more to do with the screening-for-parental-fitness nature of that requirement. Eugenics is so pre-war, darling.
That’s not to say I have no issues with the idea of going into therapy, many of which are conveniently wrapped up in my feelings about my mother, who is a psychiatrist.

I prefer the convenience of boring and annoying my family, friends, and readership.
My previous experience with therapy (in college) was deeply pointless. I now realize that might have had more to do with my therapist being a 22-year-old intern from Alma Mater’s social work school than with therapy as a whole.
A lot of therapists, however, are tremendous flakes. I imagine it’s not a majority, but admit it: it’s a visible group.
Therapy is the town pastime here, in a way that makes me feel ooky. Woody Allen is much closer to a documentarian than I had realized when living elsewhere. I am not interested in a lifetime commitment, let alone such an expensive one.
While I think SSRIs and the like are very useful in some cases, I am unconvinced they are all they are cracked up to be for many people. No, I don’t think you should stop taking yours, but I don’t want to start taking them, either.

However, I have to admit that while all the processing I’ve done here and elsewhere has been tremendously helpful (and you have been, you really, really have), I’m getting to a point where I could use some more help. As much as it feels like heresy to claim this about a vaginal birth that brought me a healthy baby, I am beginning to think that the initials P, T, S, and D are not entirely inappropriate here. I look at diagnostic checklists, and it’s increasingly difficult to deny that a lot of those boxes have x’s.
Thinking of this as PTSD and therefore a cognitive issue rather than only my special snowflake feeeelings makes me think that maybe I should talk to someone who has actually studied this stuff. Which brings me to more sub-bullets! Criteria:

No generalized wading into my feelings in a global sense. I am not interested in analyzing my whole life and my relationship to food and my mother and the military-industrial complex. I have a goal (not completely losing my shit as I approach my due date) and a deadline (my due date). No quagmires.
No support groups. I have those, in a virtual sense (Hi!), and in-person ones I think will only feed my sense that what happened to me was not bad enough to feel bad about.
No well-meaning idiots. Or, as a friend put it, “you mean you don’t think talking to someone with no idea about how birth works and what you were going through will help you deal with feeling traumatized be being surrounded by people who seemed to have no idea how birth works and what was going on for you?”
No “natural”-birth fanatics. None of what happened was the fault of the epidural or modern obstetrics as a whole, and furthermore, I am planning to go back to the hospital, so I will thank you not to freak me out about that.
Here’s the deal-breaker: takes my insurance. This is hard enough without feeling I am spending money we don’t have on such a self-indulgent project.

So far, I’ve called one person, who has an opening at a difficult time for childcare. Contrary to my desire, I did not spend the rest of the day hiding under the covers, but lordy, this is harder than I thought. I can’t believe so many people do it.

And now it is past time to run off to the hippie food coop and cut the cheese for a few hours. I’m going to publish this anyway. Verisimilitude, all that. Links later.

September 7, 2013
by bionicbrooklynite 5 Comments

A Tiny Cake For A Half-Birthday

When Sugar and I got married — the big party time, not the legal time — we tried to make a registry that wasn’t careless with money. We asked for things we were sure we would use, and we looked for good deals. Not everything on the list was dirt-cheap, but there were plenty of inexpensive things we really, really wanted; after all, we are usually broke when doing wedding shopping, ourselves.

One thing we particularly wanted was some new loaf pans. We had two, scavenged, I think, from Sugar’s mother’s kitchen. I suspect they were nonstick once, because I have no other explanation for the streaks of dark brown paint amid a few decades’ worth of scrapes. We found some decent, non-nonstick ones from a kitchen store with an easy website, at a reasonable price. Someone bought them for us! Oh, the loaves of bread we looked forward to!

When the pans arrived, our dreams…shrank. As it turns out, the price was so reasonable because the pans were very, very small. Mini loaf pans, in fact. Reading comprehension fail.

Happily, mini loaf pans — ours are about 3 by 5 1/2 inches — are the perfect size for tiny birthday cakes, and tiny birthday cakes are just the right size for family celebrations: big enough for all three of us to have a slice twice, small enough that the cake doesn’t have a chance to get stale. (I know there are other solutions to that problem, but oddly, sometimes I don’t feel like gorging myself on dessert. Meat is another matter. So are French fries.)

Sometimes I make proper icing and divide the cake horizontally into layers, as with the Bean’s first birthday.

For his half birthday, I did not plan ahead, so there wasn’t time for the cake to cool enough to be iced. The Bean tends to mostly eat the icing, but it occurred to me that if the cake were chocolate, he might eat some of the part containing actual nutrients (eggs, flour, milk). (Yes, his diet is such that I am serving him cake for nutrients. A topic for another time.) I cobbled together this recipe mostly by reducing this one (minus the espresso because we have sleep problems enough with this child), with a few ideas from this one. I’m not often pleased with chocolate cake, which can be dry and more “brown” than “chocolate,” but this was lovely. We served it with whipped cream, and it was devoured, nutrients and all.

Half-Birthday Cake

2.5 Tablespoons butter (1/3 stick)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 egg
Scant 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Butter the sides and bottom of a mini loaf pan (~3×5 1/2″).

Cream butter and sugar. Add, mixing after each addition, salt, vanilla, baking powder, and cocoa powder. Add egg, and mix to a crumbly texture. Add flour and buttermilk, in alternation, and mix well.

Pour into greased pan. Bake at 350 for approximately 35 minutes, until a chopstick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Or a broom straw, if you’re traditional like that.

Serve with whipped cream, or whatever sounds good.

For a full-sized loaf pan, multiply ingredient amounts by three, except vanilla (2 teaspoons) and baking powder (1/2 teaspoon). The original recipe calls for plain milk, so that will work in a pinch.

Bionic Mamas

you're not losing a vagina, you're gaining a son

Category Archives: on the home front