Incommunicado

This post is way over due, as our story begins at Thanksgiving, but let me set the stage:
Branson, MO
Vacation with lots of family in a rental house
Kid with green goo pouring out of his face
Double ear-infection
Making the switch from crawling to walking

The Thanksgiving-destination-vacation was great!  We went to see the sights, ate turkey, and genuinely enjoyed each others company (Yes, I got lucky.  I love my in-laws).  Everything went without a hitch, except for the tantrums.

I have talked before about my child's experiments in rage as well as my inability to form coherent sentences when he is experiencing said rage, so add that together with being a new place, with people my son doesn't remember (so he thinks they are strangers, and my kid could host his own after-school special about stranger danger, he is NOT one of those, "I'll go to anyone"-kids), and add to that,  trying to contain his outbursts so as not to set off his sweet, 4-month-old cousin.  We were gearing up for something big.

The first day we had a few melt downs and chalked it up to getting 6 hours of sleep, ear-infections, blah, blah, blah, but several days later, it had only gotten worse.  He was extremely attached to me, which is sweet and makes me feel his love, but is also very exhausting.  It was at Bob Evans that it all came to a head for me.  After being routinely hit in the face, screamed at, and head-butted by my kid in the lobby while we waited 40 minutes for a table, I was starting to enter mom-demon-mode.  I felt it start to wash over me.  I could no longer listen to the conversations around me, I was alone with this little monster.  We got our booth.  He ripped everything off the table in record time and screamed and began banging his head in the place where his food should be.  The food came and after a few bites, the little morsels we had placed in front of him made a quick trip to the floor.  I got the pity look from a few moms who had been there, but I could take no solace in it.   My kid was acting terribly and I was too burnt out to take it anymore. 

I did something I never do, but got on my phone to reach out to an internet mom blog/forum for help.  In the status box I typed something like, "Help.  Tantrums bad, 14-months.  Make stop. please." Within minutes the replies started coming in.  About a half dozen of them said, "He is probably frustrated because he can't express himself."  I thought about this and wrote back to them a short while later, explaining about his hearing impairments before he had tubes put in and his delay in speech acquisition.  They continued to suggest ways to let him express his feelings and opinions.

I'll be honest, at first I was kind of annoyed.  I thought-if he is just frustrated that he can't talk, I would have known that.  I am with him everyday, I would know if that is all that it was.  I don't think he is developmentally ready.  I am a teacher, I know these things (turns out I really don't)...yady yada. 

It took me about a day to think on all that was said and actually accept someone's advice.  I thought about how frustrated I would be to not be able to communicate even the simplest needs-hungry, hurt, hot, cold, tired, etc.  So, I tried to bridge the gap.  The next morning for breakfast, I held out an English muffin and his cereal.  I asked him which one he wanted and held them close enough for him to reach.  Eventually he batted the muffins, I clapped and cheered and made him a muffin.  I don't know that he knew what he was doing in that moment, but he does now.  I started working on yes/no head nods.  At bedtime, I tell him it is bedtime and he walks to his room instead of being carried.  I offer him two different shirts in the morning.  Our entire world is opening up.

We still have melt downs and tantrums.  He is perpetually cutting teeth, which accounts for most of the hitting on others and hitting himself, but this switch has changed our lives.

I think it took him reaching such a state of intensity to wake me up to the fact that he is not a baby.  He made the switch to personhood, and I had missed it some how, but I am really glad he told me.

Tonight I was getting him ready for bed and began to feel that lump in my throat.  I put his superman jammies on and sat down in the rocking chair.  We jabbered back and forth for a few minutes, then he laid his head down, and started to settle.  I rocked and rocked until I heard the slow, steady breathing of sleep.  And then I rocked some more.  I rocked and cried for my love of him.  For his people-ness.  For his personality.  For his preferences.  For becoming my little boy and no longer my baby.  For sadness that I missed his message.  For joy of wondering what is to come.

 Below is the unusual lullaby I have to sang him his whole life.  If you need me, I will be rocking him for the next to weeks that I am off work. 

Love, 

J

Baby Boy Curls

That is all.

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.  

Parental Roles as Defined by a 13 Month Old

I always thought my first child would be a boy.

When I got pregnant two years ago, I pictured myself holding a little dark haired boy in my arms in the hospital nine months from then.  I envinsioned his little features and sharp cry.  I just felt sure that this little bean was going have a beanbag.  At the 20-week anatomy scan, my husband and I looked away as the ultrasound tech wiggled the wand around looking for organs and bones, so as not to accidentally see the gender of the baby.  And though all we saw that day, was north of the equator, still I felt like it was a boy in there.  Maybe it was the high levels of activity and aerobic exercising the child did in utero that hinted me in to his maleness.  Maybe it was intuition.  Maybe it was a decent guess on something with 50/50 odds.

And nine months later, after one final and very epic gust of willpower, my husband's choked-up voice said, "It is a boy." (sans dark hair)

I have loved his boyness right from the start.  He has been rather independent and was not much of a cuddler from the get-go.  He loved to stretch out and lay unbound on the floor.  He wriggled and squirmed, working on his mobility just days after getting home.  He has grown up and become destructive and rambunctious.  He is curious and inquisitive.  He is relentless and sneaky.  He is loud and strong.  He bangs things together and tears things apart.  He has a dimple.  He gets away with too much.

( I know, I know.  Gender stereotypes.  But, dude, there is a reason that certain stereotypes exist.  My kid is a lot like the others that have come before him.  He can be whatever he wants in this life ((except mean)), but right now, he is exactly what one thinks of when they think of little boys.)

And as a boy in the midst of his little-boydom, he has defined his relationship with his mom and dad. 
Parents are baby's whole world.  I didn't realize how much this was true until going to visit family several states away.  Every night a different house.  Everyday a house full of different folks.  The only constant: mom and dad.  I really saw his point of view when I got away from all the daily distractions of my everyday life. 

Dad is baby's best friend.  Dad is baby's playmate, hide and seek partner, tickle machine, and climbing tower.  Dad is fun and dad is funny.  Dad captures baby's eyes.  Dad is baby's role model.  Dad is baby's buddy.

Mom is baby's home base.  Mom is where baby goes to get reassurance and healing.  Mom is baths and bottles.  Mom is the stuff of the daily grind.  Mom is safe when we are in new places and with new people.

Learning this about ourselves and about our son has been very meaningful because it made me realize something:  Everyone who has a had a baby will tell you how demanding babies are.  Even happy, healthy babies require constant support, supervision, and care.  Then I thought about myself.  I thought about all the people who contribute to my welfare- my husband's love, support, and friendship.  My parents endless love and patience. My siblings humor and kindred-spiritness.  My friends encouragement and solidarity.  My co-workers challenge and camaraderie.  The list goes on and on.  As adults we get fulfillment by collecting little bits and pieces of what we need from boatloads of different people.

Who does baby have?  Baby has you.  And if you have partner in this, then that makes two.  Babies need all that social and emotional support that we need, but they only have one or two resources to get it from.  They require it all and they deserve it all and that is why we are dead-on-our-asses tired by 8:30 even on days we haven't left the house or gotten dressed. 

If you have raised a child or are doing so now then, "this bud is for you".  (or this glass of wine, or this donut, or this DQ blizzard...whatever your vice)  If you have been the birthday cake maker, the doctor, and the teacher in one afternoon-this one is for you.  If you have been peed on, kissed, and hit in the face in the same hour-this one is for you. 

They say "it takes it village", so I guess by that logic, I am a village?

A Quick Update- My Kid

I am a few weeks behind, but a quick update is needed.

My kid had chronic ear infections.
My kid had hearing loss in both ears.
My kid had only one letter sound-"da"
My kid had taken antibiotics 10 out of his 12 months of life.
My kid got ear tubes put in on Thursday.
My kid said "mom" on Friday.
My kid said "ba" on Saturday.
My kid danced and sang to Those Darlins with complete joy and lack of pain.
My kid makes my heart explode with happiness and love.