Tag Archives: motherhood

The thin grey hairline

I am suspicious of Starbucks. And I have more than the usual suspicions about which ingredient makes their coffee especially addictive, or whether or not cashiers have been genetically enhanced in pods to be extra pleasant to caffeine junkies, babies and dogs.

I want to see their employee handbook and find out whether or not they are instructing young male employees to flirt with married, middle-aged women. Here in America, we are one of the most highly courted consumer groups, after all. Just the other day, I pulled into the drive-thru for a quick cup in between stops. After all of the usual niceties seemed to be complete and I had pulled the gear back into drive, the young man leaned out the window with a flirty grin. “Hey,” he said, “I hope you have an amazing day.”

If this had been an isolated incident, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But this is just one of several events where I’ve been subjected to attention that seemed too oddly flattering. They ask superfluous questions about how I am doing, accompanied by meaningful arm-folding and head-tilting – like they’ve all studied John Corbett’s Aiden character on Sex in the City for tips about how to appear more concerned and sensitive.

Either that, or there is something about getting your first few grey hairs and a layer of mommy fat that makes you wildly attractive to a certain breed of men, many of whom apparently work retail. I heard the entire marital history of a man selling me office supplies on Tuesday for no discernible reason. I left wondering whether my wedding ring, modest though it may be, might have become invisible.

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Andy Wormhole

One of the great joys of the DVR is the fact that I can catch up on all of the old episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I missed when I had a social life. (I managed to pull off watching all of The Next Generation episodes I hadn’t seen before during those first few months of napping and nursing.)

As a result Declan has two requests that he makes daily: “space show watch?” and “wormhole watch?” These are usually code for “lie down and snuggle with me after I jump up and down while looking at images of space.”

But it’s more than a TV/snuggling fixation. His vocabulary expands daily: rocketship, Earth, meteor, planet. Space toys, outside of Twilight Turtle aren’t very easy to find at his developmental level. I stapled cosmic felt onto a board for the playroom last week, threw velcro backing on some glow in the dark stars and made a few planets and spaceships for him to stick on there. I think he would prefer that the whole room was covered in felt so he could stick these things wherever he wished, but at least it’s getting a little use.

When I went to a craft store to get some things for this project the other day, I also spotted a small reproduction of Andy Warhol’s painting, “Space ship” on sale for $2.50. I snagged it and handed it to Declan as soon as I walked in the door. “Space ship!” his father trumpeted.

“Oooooh! Space ship,” Declan repeated.

“It’s Andy Warhol,” I told them.

“Andy Wormhole!” said Declan, wandering into the living room, holding it in his hands. “Space ship wormhole!”

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Sympathy for the revel

After the past couple of weeks of mockery and scorn over her endless bender, I was actually relieved to see some traces of compassion for Britney Spears in the media this week. Being a sometimes music critic, my views of her popness have not always been flattering ones. But something about having your own toddler makes you extra sensitive to the cathode crows pecking away at a new, young mother, particularly one who seems to be coming undone in front of the world.

Most moms know that the very act of living with a newborn can make you feel ferociously inadequate, even if your strongest postpartum symptom is that diet diagnosis parenting magazines and books call the “baby blues.” Whether you are a pert little jezebel or comfortably frumptastic, your relationship to your own body and the outside world fundamentally changes with a pregnancy.

Every pregnant woman and new mom, famous or no, automatically becomes a little bit of public property. People touch you, bless you, look at you in disgust and pray for you in the cracker aisle of the grocery store. If you nurse in public, some people congratulate you and others openly gag. When your child cries, you can be eyed with suspicion, scorn or sympathy, depending on your karma. And when you look to those who can be your greatest salvation – other mommies – you sometimes find exactly what you need, but other times, they can sting you more deeply than you imagined possible.

I can’t imagine living through this period of life as a sexual icon surrounded by cameras, sycophants and gossip feeders. And I really can’t imagine what the hormonal effect of consecutive births, combined with the babyweight shedding at the frenzied pace of an image-conscious celebrity could be. Blogger Heather Armstrong of Dooce may be the first person that I’ve seen publicly suggest the taboo possibility of postpartum depression, even though it’s hard for many moms I know to imagine that it doesn’t have something to do with this. Rebecca Traister of Salon has the measure of what Spears culturally represents.

And then there is this heartfelt, little soliloquy from Craig Ferguson. I’m never up late enough to watch him, but after seeing this and last week’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show, he has impressed me as a truly decent man:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bbaRyDLMvA]

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Word Sponge


Cheese
Originally uploaded by tzt.

Lately, Declan has been swabbing up new words and concepts like a syntactic barnacle suckered onto a chubby unabridged dictionary. He began to request “more” of everything, from avocado and blueberries to images of nebulae and planets in the opening sequence of “Star Trek: Voyager” reruns well before Christmas. (To this day, if I don’t capture video of intergalactic travel on the DVR for multiple replay, there can be hell to pay.)

Then, suddenly, he could no longer restrain himself from singing along with the lullabies he’d made me repeat several times a day. He chimes in a word at the end of each phrase, adding new ones as they make sense to him. When his Giga (his name for my mother) gave him a book called “That’s dangerous!” for Christmas, he happily mastered the three-syllable word, sing-songing “Mommy, mommy, DAN-GER-OUS” as he sashayed through the house. Whenever my husband watches taped David Letterman shows during the day, Declan runs up to the screen during the “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches,” and chimes in along with FDR’s “fear” and points his finger determinedly while saying “ASK NOT…” along with JFK.

Now, I’m amazed by his sudden ability to recognize and name shapes and colors as well as several letters and numbers. Yesterday, he wiggled around the bathtub with a foam orange 4 displayed proudly on his belly, chanting “number 4, number four,” before sticking it up into the faucet, so that it looks like we’ll be taking Dali-esque baths filled with numbers and letters in the future:

fourwater

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The dream diet


Lynds
Originally uploaded by tzt.

Ever since I first found out that I was going to have a May baby, I dreamed of planting a vegetable garden every year around his or her birthday. It took me until my 30s to realize the rewards of eating homegrown food, let alone planting and nourishing anything, then watching it flourish.

In my pregnant daydreams, this child and I would play with plants in the dirt, then water and watch things grow together. On the languid evenings between late July and the early fall, we would happily eat our homegrown “birthday” tomatoes and cucumbers in celebration of his or her life and good food. I just had to keep my fingers crossed that this child would actually enjoy vegetables.

Now 14 months, Declan screams for bananas and berries in the grocery store aisles, so far mostly unaware of the sugary pleasures of things like chocolate and cookies. The other day he reached out his hand and cried as a bag of avocados rode past him on the conveyor belt in the checkout line, oblivious to a quart of ice cream. “Aha, you have one of those fruit and vegetable babies there, don’t you?” the woman bagging the groceries said.

Last night we stopped for sweet corn at Lynd’s Fruit Farm and walked past a table of tomatoes. Declan started to grab one, which would have caused an avalanche, so I redirected him to walk toward his father. There was another table of beefsteaks on the path, and before either of us could do anything about it, he had one in his hand and took a bite out of it like an apple. Customers and the owners all laughed as they watched him chow down as though his life depended on it, juice and seeds seeping down his chin.

Granted, a few more tastes of confections could change his tastes completely in the next couple of years, but so far, the gardening assistant of my daydreams lives on.

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Earth babies are easy

Happy earth day!

Things just get more amazing by the day around here. Declan’s cruising, babbling syllables that appear to mean something to him (including a few clear ones, like “dog” and “ball”) and picking up every speck of flotsam he can find on the floor to put in his mouth.

Right after he was born, there must have been dozens of friends and strangers alike who told me: “don’t worry, it will get easier!” The truth is, sleep deprivation notwithstanding, I basically felt that having an infant was a blast. It was the perfect excuse to live like a retiree – nesting into as complete a measure of domestic comfort as possible, napping at will, going on leisurely outings with the sling or the stroller, and shopping for needs that seemed trivial just to get out of the house.

And when I put my boy down, he’d just stay wherever I put him, smiling sweetly at me, content as long as we cooed at each other before he dropped off to sleep. Now he’s crawling like lightning, crying with frustration as he tries to lift things like this week’s favorite book – a collection of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes – onto beds or couches. We’re trying to teach him baby sign language for useful things like “food,” “milk,” “more,” “hurt” and “help,” but he either hasn’t grasped them yet, or we aren’t picking up on his cues.

This is the heartache of motherhood I’ve been dreading – trying to figure out how to help him through the frustration of knowing what he wants and not having the tools to fully express it.

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Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman

A couple of nights after I had my dream of bleeding breasts, I had another, even more vivid one.

In it, I was having a drink with a woman I used to be quite close with, but have not spoken to in years. I was trying to explain to her that I had missed her often, that I missed her humor, that I missed learning from her. Even though there has been nothing but silence since 1998, the fact that we were no longer friends still sometimes stung me like a fresh wound for reasons that I couldn’t explain.

She laughed.

And then she left the bar, still laughing at me. I followed her into the street and watched her walk away.

“But you hurt me,” I said, sounding weak in every sense of the word.
This made her laugh harder as she walked off into the night.

When I think about men that broke my young heart, I remember the fact that I felt pain, but I don’t actually remember the pain. Losing a friendship with a woman is different. Days after I ran into her in my dream, I ran into her, for the first time in about eight years, in life. With all that time behind us, I still wanted to curl up and cry.

During my mid-20s, A and I were co-workers and co-players who peed our pants laughing while drinking bourbon and smoking and watching “Billy Jack.” (“Watch his feet, he kill you wit’ his feet.”) We lauded each other when one of us turned a particularly good phrase at the alternative paper where we both worked. She had helped to get me hired. We were both obsessed with identity politics and pop culture and law and crime and finding the best ways to write about them. We also gossiped about co-workers, imitated our more annoying sources and tore some of the people we didn’t like to shreds, verbally, behind their backs. Like most exercises in the demeaning of other people, the subjects of our scorn didn’t always matter much beyond of their service to the art of a good story and the sense of belonging that could bring to the teller.

She knew secrets about me that even my mother didn’t – things that she listened to with loving consideration inside of the warm glow of times when the idea that we wouldn’t be friends for decades seemed absurd.

She was my colleague and friend, but became my sometimes boss, a role that probably wasn’t any more fair to her than it was to the rest of us. She was a good editor, but a lousy manager, and her first foray into boss-dom launched our relationship into open water where it sunk with the pressure and only periodically came up for air. Whenever she seemed to pull away or cut me out of the loop (which she often had to as my boss), I’d become clingy and annoying. I’d campaign for my own relevance with her to the point where I’d later smack myself in the eye for recoiling into an insecure adolescent persona I thought I’d outgrown.

There were other people to blame. There was an unreasonably hostile work environment to blame and there was our youth to blame. There was a culture that raises women to believe that they can’t be direct, especially with each other, to blame. But these problems sat around like unclaimed luggage in the office hallways, and were never really unpacked.

Naturally, there were also men involved. One man who I suppose she ultimately preferred sharing her writing with. Her relationship with him once put me in the excruciating position of having to choose between betraying her and betraying myself at work, and I chose the latter, or the “high road,” as my mom would call it. (The “high road” is often on the same sea level as a doormat, I’ve found. Other people were much hipper to that fact than I was in my 20s.) I also had a man who had his own way of butting in. And these things are a whole other part of the story.

I buried her and mourned the friendship more than once, only to have it resurrected when we had a particularly good laugh or accidental heart-to-heart. But after pitches and pitfalls and fits, our friendship croaked, well after our newspaper had met the same fate. She stopped returning my phone calls as I became more and more paranoid that I was now one of the people I used to help her avoid. When the phone rang after hours, I’d answer and she’d whisper “I’m not here,” while smiling and wiping the air with her hands. There were usually colorful reasons why a particular person wasn’t worth talking to or needed to be avoided, replete with anecdotes that summed them up like a well-drawn comic strip. She tended to withdraw from any conflict or tension, and whenever some sprouted between us, I would dread the idea that I might suddenly become one of those two-dimensional characters, animated inside of A’s richly detailed frames.

We also worked with another woman, K, who remains one of the only people I would cross (and, lord love a duck, I believe I actually have crossed) the street to avoid. Sitting in a desk next to hers in my first weeks on the job, I remember how she’d speak sweetly to people on the telephone, then begin cussing them out the second the receiver hit the base. Being one of those people she spoke to sweetly on a regular basis, it didn’t take long for me to realize that anytime she was on the other side of a closed door, chances were good that she was facing it and shooting me the bird. She identified herself as a feminist almost daily, but was no more capable of treating her fellow woman with respect than our publisher, a preening, self-absorbed lefty with the obligatory sensitive new age guy ponytail, treated the office receptionist. Like Kleenex.

Near the end of the paper’s existence, I actually caught K in the act of talking smack about me behind a partition, describing me as universally incompetent due to a rotten sentence I’d written during a 60-hour work week in which, due to our constant downsizing, I’d written over half of the news content. A had been cast back into the role of editor in the final act of the paper, so I complained to her sort of hysterically. She sympathized and apologized, but laughed that we all knew K, and the she had warned her that this kind of thing was bound to happen someday. When asked to apologize, K actually told me she was sorry about how I heard what she said, but that she felt it was all true. It was just unfair, especially coming from a woman who used to sweet-talk me into doing her job while complaining of headaches that lasted well over a year.

We were all like latent characters in scenes from Odd Girl Out.

A year and a half after the paper folded and several phone calls to A had been unreturned, I hadn’t lost all hope. I have plenty of friendships that have gone through stretched, elastic phases and eventually snapped back. Other former co-workers I ran into complained that they hadn’t heard from A either, expecting that I had. And she was in a one-year master’s degree program, which seemed like a legitimate reason to be out of touch.

Then I ran into a former co-worker who I saw fairly regularly who said “so, it was good to finally see A last weekend, but you didn’t miss much. Were you out of town or just so annoyed with her no-calling-anyone back act that you’ve written her off completely and decided not to go?”

It turned out that K had a party for A’s completion of her masters degree that I, who hadn’t moved, changed phone numbers or become in any way unfindable, hadn’t been invited to. This seemed strange, since people from our old accounting and production departments had apparently received their invitations.

A party snub is no big deal when you’re regularly in touch with a person. Apologies are made and you just see them the next time. But before I’d been a co-worker, I’d been a friend. And if I had just been forgotten – if people from accounting were a priority to reconnect with and I wasn’t – then that was almost worse. At best, I was simply forgettable, at worst, I was snubbed with the intent to h
arm. I held another funeral for the friendship in my mind and tried to banish the viral feeling I had that close relationships with women simply weren’t worth having.

A few weeks later I went to a bookstore where I often took refuge from the isolation of freelance writing among the crowd of weekday strangers that always appeared to be doing the same thing. As I charged toward the coffee counter to get a cup to take for a lengthy browse, I realized K and A were right there, chatting animatedly at a table in the cafeÃ?©. It was too late to just turn-tail and run, so instead I opted to act oblivious. I ordered my coffee and poured in my cream with my back to them, acting like I had no idea they were there. Then I bolted for the highest book stacks I could find to hide among, then sat down and tried to catch my breath. Not only did it physically hurt my heart to see them, I was immediately ashamed that the feelings it provoked in me were so strong that I didn’t feel capable of doing anything but fleeing.

Maybe it would have been different if A had been alone, or with anyone but K, who I thought could probably benefit from a 12-step program for people who apparently derive their entire sense of self-worth from demeaning others. I’m sure I felt hurt that a person who I had seen talk smack about virtually everyone she ever encountered was someone A saw as more deserving of loyalty, or who was in any way a more rewarding friend. I thought about calling A so many times to get angry, spill my guts or cry that year, I’m not entirely sure that I didn’t.

But I thought I’d let it go. In recent years I’ve worked with several people from her city and publication, so I hear of her sometimes. On the rare occasion that I’ve seen K, I’ve just looked past her, crossed the street or walked away. But it’s a little like cutting out a three and a half year period of my life which, while it was often absurdly stressful, was also formative and a time in which I produced work I’m still proud of.

And here we are eight years later with this dream, coming at a time when I’ve really just started to foster some of the deepest new friendships with women that I’ve dared to try since the A experience. Motherhood opened up all of these new possibilities for healthy, loving friendships with other women and I have tried to let go of some old fears and embrace that – to trust that we don’t have to be petty with each other or stop communicating because being direct is too painful. And maybe once you’ve had 16 doctors stare up your hoo-ha while they ponder the safety of you and your baby, you learn something that no one can really explain about humility and fear and love.

So this past Saturday, just a couple of hours after I had left the company of one of my newest, dearest friends – one of the only people that I exchange “I love yous” with regularly outside of my family (as I once sometimes did with A), I stopped by Target to pick up an extra set of lights for the Christmas tree. Declan was 19 pounds of asleep in my arms and the baby carts were blocked by a kid cart and A, who was talking to her younger sister right in front of them.

Maybe it’s because the dream was such a fresh event that I’d Googled her just a week before, or maybe it was petty self-consciousness over the fact that we’ve practically traded body types in ten years – she is now rail thin and I’m more Rubenesque – but I immediately felt kind of winded. But I wasn’t going to waste the trip by leaving and I wasn’t going to walk all the way to the Christmas decorations without a carrier of some kind. So I marched through them awkwardly and started yanking at the kid cart to get to the baby cart, apologizing under my breath for moving them aside.

“Tracy, is that you?” she asked. I think I tried to act surpised, but frankly, I’m terrible at faking anything. “Is that your baby?”

We had an awkward exchange, at least from my end. I babbled incoherently and sort of breathlessly about the writing work I’ve been doing lately. I let her know that I’d been vaguely aware of her whereabouts for years and met a few folks who knew her. But I didn’t say how much I love being a mother, only that I’d wished Declan wasn’t asleep so that she’d gotten to see what a nice person he really is. I didn’t say that I saw that she’d done something amazing with her career last year and that I was struck with both pride in once having known her and envy that I’m not currently in the position to do something similar.

She said something about how I should call her at work sometime, or let her know when I was in Cleveland, which I am a couple of times a year. But this became the thing it was hardest to let go of as I went on to buy my extra string of blue pearl lights. I think I made some kind of obligatory “that’d be great” kind of response, but then I contemplated that situation and couldn’t imagine any outcome other than I call, and then never hear back.

Having unresolved pieces of my past seems harder than it did before I became a mom. I want to be wise enough to know what to do when my little boy, whose eager smiles are so quickly returned by most of the world right now, suddenly aren’t. And how do I convince him to let go of rejection when my own old wounds can still feel so fresh?

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Blood and guilt

In a dream last night, there was no milk left in my breasts, only blood. In the netherworld of REM sleep, I remember feeling surprised and frustrated rather than mortified. I tried to convince myself that maybe there was a good reason for this biological change. Maybe the blood would protect my son from new, volatile viruses or cure his runny nose.

Instead, the nursing just became painful and Declan looked distressed and unhappy. I felt angry that my body was betraying me. The last thing I remember was carrying my crying baby, asking strangers for advice.

This is the precipice every mother I know has told me about at one point or another. Just when you feel like you’ve mastered the challenges of one stage, the next one comes creeping along and the ground crumbles out from beneath you.

Mostly, I’ve gotten pretty good at embracing the falls and having the faith that I will figure out how to keep from belly flopping. But every day I see this essence of goodness in a boy who is becoming more and more himself at lightening speed.

Then I worry about the emotional wounds I’m bound to inflict because I am an imperfect human. Like the times I’ll get angry at his father that he won’t forget, while he wonders at the depth of my feelings. Or the times that I have no answers to hard questions and he begins to feel his first sense of fear and aloneness.

Some say worry is useless and destructive, but if you check my DNA, I am preceded by at least two generations of worrying women. Sure, the rational side of me knows that I can’t control what happens to my son, and that overprotection isn’t going to help him find his way in the world any more than being a militaristic and controlling parent would be.

But at it’s best, I think worry can be a bit of a motivator. It challenges me to look for new means to handle things and be a better mom. It’s the anxiety that I need to extract like a painful molar.

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Mommies gone wild

My husband owns a live music nightclub.

I feel pretty comfortable bringing my baby to its quieter acoustic shows. There’s a smoking ban in Columbus, so the air is clear, and Declan loves music. We have places where we can escape if the crowd seems too overwhelming.

But there is one peril I hadn’t anticipated: the drunken mommy factor.

At two recent shows – first, David Lindley and second, Jimmie Dale Gilmore – moms with the night off had already hit the tipsy point when they spotted us. In the first case, a woman I know who is a mom to two elementary school-aged kids started talking to Declan and instantly making him smile. I didn’t realize until after I’d agreed to let her hold him and released him into her arms that her balance wasn’t quite all it should be. Another friend and I kind of put our palms out and buttressed her in case she teetered too much, until I could extract my baby safely back into his sling.

On Saturday, my brother-in-law and nephew came to the Jimmie Dale show, as anxious to see Declan as the music. I handed him off to his Uncle Rob directly. Shortly thereafter, a woman started screaming “OH MY GOD, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL BABY! IS THIS DAN’S BABY? OH MY GOD!” and before I knew it, my son was again in the arms of an intoxicated mommy who clearly hadn’t held a baby in far too long. While Rob sort of ran after her to prevent a disaster, another woman ran up to me to tell me it was clear that it was clear that Declan had “a certain spark that draws people to him.”

For the sake of our son’s safety (as well as the peace and goodwill of his patrons), Dan came to the rescue. He practically had to pry Declan away from his captor and her friend, who was obnoxiously smushing her nose into his cheek. We stuffed him back into his sling and hung out at the sound board (off-limits to the general public) for a few minutes.

No sooner were we back with Declan’s uncle and cousin than old drunko had returned, forcing us into hiding again.

I guess I’m going to have to stay in hiding until May if I want to keep my baby protected from Bird Flu…

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