The id, the ego, the superego, and the momdemon

The id is governed by the pleasure principle.  The ego is governed by the reality principle.  The superego is governed by the goal of perfection.  The little-known fourth level of consciousness, which will be referred to as momdemon, is governed by the ensuing meltdown of one's own spawn.  It is this fourth level that we are going to explore today, but first the LONG backstory.

On Saturday, we went to a pre-Thanksgiving feast at a friend's house.  The pre-Thanksgiving feast was hosted by a beloved friend and his girlfriend, who together have 10,000 friends who are all beautiful.  So there we were, the two parents and baby, in a house exploding with single people working on their careers and personal interests.

Attempting to mingle with the masses, we introduced ourselves to a few people who made really exaggerated faces at our son and kind of poked at him in a sweet-intentioned way. And as usual, we retreated further back until we found ourselves standing around the folding tables in the kitchen, waiting for the brie to come out of the oven.  We made small talk about how amazing filo dough is.  We tried to explore the topic of walnuts and honey, but conversation died quickly and anxiety rose faster.

My family is kind of like a bunch of hermits who live together.  We have friends that we dearly love, but for both my husband and myself, parties are just generally hard for us.  Especially when there are no pets around to pretend to be overly interested in.  

We arrived at 2:15 to a 2:00 invitation and feared that our tardiness would interrupt the meal.  At 3:30 the brie finally came out of the oven and appetizers began.  We shoved crackers at our child who was starving and we made ourselves a little station in the corner to enjoy some snacks.  Other folks caught the smell and made their way to the kitchen as well.  These other folks had been drinking wine since they arrived, so the attempts at small talk became even more distorted and impossible.  Crowds started pushing their way in.  And we quickly found ourselves sitting on the floor next to the trash can and the attic door.  In a corner.  Out of the way.  When the food came in sometime after 4:00 everyone was warm with wine and delighted at the prospect of food.

Everyone else = happy

The baby = LHS

LHS- A new acronym I just made up, which means "Losing His Shit".  We were still sitting in the corner on the floor (the table was full) and that is when it happened.  MOMDEMON.

Let me lay it all out for you- It started when the baby started to buck himself around.  Turning into a stiff board and shoving himself upright and out of any sort of restrained position.  Whilst bucking, he was squawking his awful gut-scream.  I had kept him contained for two hours in an environment where nothing is baby friendly (i.e. finding multiple screws and pennies on the floor), in environment that causes me great emotional turmoil, being hungry, and knowing the baby is hungry, and then the wave came over me.  The wave of transition as my consciousness switched from something human into what for lack of a better term, shall become known as, momdemon.  

My eyes become hyper focused on the kid.  Everything else going on the the world is a pain in my rear end at the moment.  I start thinking short, abbreviated thoughts.  I start communicating in single word demands. "Roll."  I bark and my husband. "Fork."  He stands near us on the floor and watches as the baby smacks the plate and our food goes flying.  He watches as I attempt to gather some of the little bits and shove them into his screaming mouth, while licking my fingers to get some sustenance for myself. My husband stands there as an ally in the war, but some how in momdemon state, even having the other half of your soul stand and look on as you fail to control your child, pushes you too far.  I demand, "Just go." (his friends are eating outside).  "It's fine", I state 10,000 times.  "I don't want to be an absent father, who walks away when things are hard," he retorts. My heart hears it and thinks, "I love this man."  My mind sees him and thinks, "NO ONE LOOK AT US!  EVERYONE GO AWAY!  CAN'T YOU SEE HOW HARD THIS FOR MY KID.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! I CAN'T BELIEVE I USED TO THINK PARTIES WERE FUN!  STOP LOOKING AT ME!"


After a short fit of this, I took the baby outside and went for a walk.  It was 42 degrees and I was wearing a dress, but dadgumit I would sit in that corner no longer.  He eventually calmed down and we returned and ate pie and all was well, but the whole memory of that party will be forever filled with the red-raged momdemon moments of trying to survive that situation.  I don't know if women get in this mood as some evolutionary by-product of saving a child against all else or if I just literally cannot handle it all sometimes.  

A quick 4 hours after we arrived at the party, we got into the car.  For a few moments we drove in sweet silence.  Then my husband begins, "When you get in 'that mode'…"  I tried to come up with how to explain myself, but found it impossible in that moment and I was also still on the borderline of going back to the 4th state of consciousness, so I just didn't answer him.  However, the idea for this post came to mind.  Anyone else find themselves in momdemon mode, too?

RAGE Against the Momchine (Zack de la Rocha gets no money for ripping off this title)

My son is in a stage of trying on different emotions and roles.  He is significantly more dynamic since he turned one.  He has moved on from his repertoire of: hungry, tired, needy, silly, and/or annoyed to loving, sincere, thoughtful, determined, strong-willed and sometimes very, very angry.

Like head shakin', hands-in-fists, angry. The accompanying noise can either be one of a blood-curdling scream variety or a monster-undertoned-grunt-yell.  It is so strange because in a span of five seconds, he can go from happy, to rage, to right back to happy.  Sometimes stopping at remorse or annoyance along the way.

Unable to handle much more of it at the current moment, (as I have been solo parenting for quite a while due a blessing in my husband's career) I decided to make a list of all the things that have induced rage in my fourteen-month-old this week, in hopes that the ridiculousness of it all will ease the upcoming bath battle followed by the hysteria of a diaper change.  And since it is nighttime, that means the cursed diaper rash cream must also be applied.  Lord, help us all.

Things that have made my child IRATE since last Sunday:

• Diaper changes
• Using wipes
• Applying diaper rash cream
• Applying lotion
• Using nasal saline
• Using the bulb syringe to pull the gallons of constantly draining snot from his nose, in attempt to make him breathe better
• Putting on a jacket
• Taking off a jacket
• Not being able to instantaneously get myself around to the back door of the car after putting the vehicle in park
• Buckling the car seat straps
• Closing the door
• Hair washing
• Body washing
• Really just anything involving hygene
• Not being allowed to crawl up the concrete steps outside in a thunderstorm
• Putting on pants
• Not having the macaroni in his mouth my the time his butt hits the high chair
• Adults eating anything in front of him
• The sound of crinkling anything (he assumes it is graham crackers)
• Not letting him pull glass jars from the fridge
• Not letting him rip my glasses off my face
• The dog deciding to stop wagging his tail
• Putting his water bottle full of dried beans into a koozie
• Getting in the car after an hour at the park
• Pulling the bits of a half-eaten Kroger receipt out of his mouth
• Not letting him chew on the hangers at the Goodwill
• Restraining him when he tries to pull my hair out
• Placing him on the other side of the kitchen when I have to take the food out of the oven
• Not letting him pinch his fingers in the lazy susan

Please note, that he has played contentedly with a metal potato masher, a medicine cup, and the dog while I wrote this entire post.  He is so good, when he is not trying to summon dementors with his howling cries of anguish.

Also, this whole thing reminds me of a great tumblr feed.  Please see below.

http://imgur.com/gallery/yLaMU
 


 

Another Therapy Post

I had a really good therapy session this week. The 45 minutes I spent on that couch probably added another 10 years to my life.  But not every week is like that.

When I first started therapy, I was expecting fast results, believing that this was something I could just do for a while until I got back on the right track and then walk away from it.  What I didn't expect to learn was that this was going to take a while, be hard work, and I would eventually realize that I was on no "right track" to begin with, or that 5 months later, I still wouldn't exactly know what the right track looks like.

There have been many weeks where I walk out to my car, seemingly unchanged, and I think, "That wasn't too exciting.  Maybe I should start coming only every 2 weeks?"   And then there are those weeks.  Those weeks when I have wadded Kleenex in both hands and I float out to my car on some cloud of freedom.  This was one of those weeks.

Remember back when I explained about taking the hormone test and beginning supplements?  Did I mention somewhere in here that I had melanoma a few years back?  Well because of those two things, last week I found myself standing in the nude getting a nooks-and-crannies-check by a resident looking for freak moles, and as she was lifting my arms and looking in my armpits, she began causally talking to me about the laundry list of supplements that were listed on my chart.  She mentioned her time spent studying at an endocrinology clinic and some condition where women can produce low cortisol after having a baby, due a disorder in the pituitary, caused by...(brain stopped listening)  My head started swimming.  A few minutes later she can back from the computer in the corner of the exam room with a slip of paper informing me of my appointment with the endocrinologist next week. 

I don't do well with health issues.  Long story short, I have some amount of hypochondria and that little piece of paper in my hand, just made me feel immediately doomed.  

I was STRUGGLING through the week waiting for that appointment.  My body was flipping out and being dizzy and wonky and genuinely stupid.  My mind was caught in a circular trap.  And I was not in a good place.

By Thursday, sweet, blessed, Thursday (therapy day), my mind was an eff-ing disaster.  I sat across from my therapist, heart-pounding in my chest trying to figure out how to begin this conversation.  Within about 5 minutes I erupted into a mess about how I feel the Grim Reaper knocking whenever I have health issues.  And she made me face it.  I had been circling around the fear that there was something terribly wrong with me.  But at the same time I was obsessing over the thought of "I shouldn't be thinking this.  Brain shut up.  This is stupid., etc"  All of this was compounding into a week of intense anxiety and depression.

"What is the worst thing that could happen?"  She asked me.  And she made me say it.  She made me say that the worst thing would be to go in to that appointment and a find out I have some fatal disease.  Saying it gave me freedom.  It was there the whole time, but I kept trying to squash it.  Extinguish it and make it go away.  But at the same time, I never fully acknowledged it.  It was like a shadow that I knew was there, but was too scared to turn around and look at.  And while my brain knew that that shadow would just be my familiar shape on the ground, some sneaky back corner of the brain was throwing out suggestions like, "Ooh, maybe it's a murderer!"  So, to let my brain think that worst-case-scenario-thought (look at the shadow) and stop trying to run from it was the first step.

"Ok, so they tell you that.  Now what do you do?" She asked.  I begin to tell of all the things I would do.  She looked at me, tortise-shell glasses perched on the end of her nose and nodded.  She was right.  If I found out some end-all news, I would live my life.  Because that is what you do in that situation.  This was the second step.

"So when you have these thoughts, what do you do next time?" was her final question.  Together, we made a list of things to do next time (a la cognitive behavioral therapy) which included things like: let myself think it, write every single stupid circular thought down for ten minutes, stop saying "should" to myself.  Step three.

I wish I could say it more eloquently, but that is proving to be very difficult.  What I am trying to say is: my brain is wired for worry.  Ask any woman in my family and they will agree, we are biologically and conditionally prone to this kind of thinking.  My previous patterns of thinking provided me with dead ends and lost routes that expended much of my time and energy.  Now, I can actually feel my brain start working in a new way.  I am learning how to think through things in new ways and learning how to stop fighting myself.  

That 45 minutes changed my life.  For how long, you may ask?

P.S. I had the endocrinology appointment, took some tests and got a prescription.  More cortisol this time, but not the supplemental form I had been taking.  Some real drugs with safety lid.  There was never great cause for concern, but I couldn't convince myself of that on my own.