to my angel
Dearest BOM,
You turned four weeks yesterday and you celebrated in style. You slept and ate like an angel all day and gave your dad and me some much needed rest after a couple of really tough days (and evenings, especially). I am crossing every finger and toe of my body hoping you will be the same today and tomorrow and so on, but I know it is merely wishing and I know there is a risk the stomach aches return.
I just ordered toys for you. You don’t know what toys are yet. At the moment you’re satisfied looking at the ugliest postcard I have ever seen, but it is black, white and red and these are apparently colours you can see and make sense of so it works. You lie in the crib looking at it and slowly you doze off. But at some point we have got to introduce you to real toys and I want to be the one deciding what you play with. They are wooden toys. Other mothers may find them a bit too 70′es, but I liked them the minute I saw them and one day you will laugh at the road I travelled to make sure you got them (this involves having them sent to another country and having someone pick them up on their summer holiday and bring them back home and as I write I am not sure it will work, but I had to try).
You turn one month old tomorrow. The nurse is coming to see how much weight you have gained. You gained too little weight during your first two weeks. Your dad and I were beside ourselves because you were not sleeping and we thought we had tried everything and you were just awake and occasionally crying and all of a sudden we found out you weren’t gaining weight as you should and we got nervous. Problems turned out to be easily solved, at least for now, and the minute you started getting enough to eat you starting sleeping much better and during your first four days of feasting you gained 200 grams (this is what they say you should gain weekly). Your dad and I are excited to see how much you have gained tomorrow morning when we undress your little body and swaddle you in a clothes diaper and let the nurse weigh you.
Vacation is up. Next week you and I will be alone, but then your dad has three weeks of vacation. He will get to be with you every day and see you grow from five and a half weeks to eight and a half. He is very excited about this and I completely get why because spending days with you is a joy even though you do have days of crying and not sleeping. Three weeks is a long time and especially when one is the same size as you. I think we should take a picture of you and dad on the first day of vacation and on the last so we can compare and see how much bigger you have gotten.
You are slowly waking up in the room next door and if I have to choose between you and blogging I choose you. I really just wanted to thank you for being an angel yesterday. It was much needed and I promise I will do my utmost to remember that you can be like that the next time you are crying because the stomach aches or you just don’t want to sleep or something else.
Much love
Mum
bad mother?
(Note 090709. I just updated the title of this post. J thought I should add the question mark. I didn’t mean to say I am a bad mother, I don’t actually think I am a bad mother. What I wanted was to express my insecurity, my worries that I am not as good as other mothers, that I am not what people see as the “good mother”.)
She wasn’t many minutes old before I started feeling momentarily like a bad mother. I worried if I did things right, I wondered if I was fit to take care of the little creature and so on. Since then the feeling has only increased. Through the past four weeks I have worried daily (and more than once) whether I was doing my best and doing the right things.
Her stomach aches. She cringes – awake as well as in her sleep. The pain is so obvious and J and I take turns trying to comfort her, trying to relieve her pain. We do our best, we really do, and I know that, but there is still the sneaking feeling of not being good enough.
Do good mothers after a whole night of crying wish someone would take their child so they can have a full night of sleep? Do good mothers close the door to the bathroom so the crying from the living room isn’t so obvious? Do good mothers get desperate and google every page in the universe for an answer to the question: “When will it wear off?”? Do good mothers try to shut off the “I am hungry”-sounds from the crib in the middle of the night?
I feel the deepest love when looking at her. Every single time. But I feel desperate when she cries. And I get some kind of angry when the pain and the crying start early in the day because I know that this will put an end to my dream of the afternoon nap that is supposed to make my night easier. I am sad because all J see of his daughter at the moment is crying, and I am sad because this means our enjoying her is strained. Naturally, we feel all the love in the world when looking at her, when she smiles at us (because she does so now), when she is calm and at ease, and we talk about these moments, but then she cringes in pain and we wonder what to do, how to help her, how to be the best parents in the world, and we are left without answers. We have yet to find some miracle cure helping her and it pains both of us.
Do good mothers wish their child would sleep just a little longer? Do good mothers think “hey, if she was bottle fed I wasn’t needed all the time”? Do good mothers feel happy for instead of jealous of those mothers with easy children or children beyond this specific phase? Do good mothers favour the dishes and the laundry, almost anything but the screaming child, at night when there is a father present?
When my mother calls me and asks me how everything is, I tend to say “sort of okay, but…” I have yet to say that we have had a really great day or a really great night and this sort of pains me. I know that she knows I am happy to be a mother and that I love my daughter, but it pains me that I am not able to put this into words. Why can’t I ignore the difficult times? Why is my account of her smiling at us and all the happiness this brings us followed by tales of rough nights or lack of sleep or a screaming child at dinner time? Why can’t it just be happiness?
I guess my feeling like a bad mother won’t ever disappear. It will forever stay in me and I will have to live with this. In time when motherhood isn’t as new to me as it is now, I am hoping that I will start to feel more and more like a good mother and that I will be able to look back at these days and think that maybe I wasn’t a good mother, but I wasn’t bad either. I tried my best and that is all anyone can ask.
little things
I don’t think I was naive going into this whole pregnancy-baby thing. I knew it would be a lot of hard work. I knew days of reading Dostoyevsky on the sofa would be numbered. I knew I would be sleep deprived. And I knew I wouldn’t necessarily shower every day. And despite all of this I still wanted a baby more than anything else in the world.
What our time together has taught me is to value the little things to a degree I didn’t know was possible. Who knew you could feel so satisfied cooking an entire meal without having to dig out your breasts? Who knew that you could feel so grateful for half an hour with your eyes closed in the evening? Who knew that doing the laundry and hanging it to dry outside, meaning you get a break from the baby, would ever feel so good?
This morning as I made my tea, I looked at the stove and there is no denying that it needs cleaning. As I stood there I actually thought to myself that if I could get that done some time this week, I would feel as if I had accomplished something. And when I looked at the tooth paste stains on the bathroom mirror, I felt the same way. I used to need a spring cleaning or getting some other major thing done before feeling satisfied like that. I used to feel guilty for not getting more of the smaller things done. These days I am happy if days allow me to check my email, write a little and nap. And if I get other things done (like making granola as I did yesterday), I feel absolutely flying.
Days are all about the little thing(s).
on our own
She sleeps, finally, in the bedroom. At every sound I rush to see if she is awake, if she is okay – and every time I find her sleeping, find her beautiful blue eyes closed and her angelic face coloured by sleep. I look at her and I feel proud, I feel love, and I feel nauseous about having to wake her up in no time to breastfeed her again. We are doing scheduled breastfeeding. Every three hours. They told us to do so at the hospital because she didn’t really have an appetite in the beginning. She does now but they have told us to keep doing the scheduled breast feedings and who are we to do anything else but what they tell us. It pains me though. She has yet to wake up herself and actually want to eat, and I have yet to not set the alarm for late and early feeding hours at night.
J is back at work. A wonderful fortnight ended yesterday when he returned to leaving the house before 8am. Yesterday was a crap day. G wouldn’t sleep and I didn’t sleep and when J finally came home, she just cried and cried and cried and despite the tiredness being written in her face, she just couldn’t doze off. It was tough.
A friend of mine, and mother of two – the youngest being just 8 weeks old, phoned me today. At first I thought about not picking it up. G had just eaten and I was desperately trying to get her to sleep (we have sleep issues), but I picked it up thinking that if I could afford to show anyone how tired, desperate and lonely the last couple of days have left me it was her. “I don’t remember much of the first month with A [her first], but it gets better. You are allowed to wear your feelings on your sleeve and you’re allowed to just want to be left alone,” she told me. As we talked I felt a little better. G fell asleep and I realised that I have exactly 16 days of motherhood on my resume and every day I do my very best and no one can ask more of me.
One day I will tell my little girl about the Friday her Mum spent on the sofa in her pyjamas, not brushing her teeth until after noon because she was just so exhausted. I will tell her about nipples so sore they make you want to cry. I will tell her about desperation at 4am when she wouldn’t eat. I will tell her about the anxiety I felt when her father went back to work. I will tell her about long nights of stomach aches – mostly hers, but mine due to her crying. The stories will be numerous, but every time I look at her sleeping face, every time I wake her up and her blue eyes meet mine, every time she practices the reflex that will one day be her smile, I am melting, I am overwhelmed with how much you can love such a little person making such a mess of the life you used to live.
the first words of motherhood
She was born just as the elderberry trees blossomed. She was born during strawberry season, close to the lightest night of the year. She arrived on a Wednesday noon, the last day of fine weather that week. After her birth the rain poured down, or so they told us because we didn’t notice. Rain has a special place in our hearts. It rained when we were married; it poured. And it rained for the first couple of days of our daughter’s life. Rain is new beginnings and new life.
***
I was getting impatient, tired of waiting for her. As we got to my due date, I was quite sure she would never come out and I was sad and annoyed that she seemed to not want to be born into this world and meet her parents. J and I paced the streets after dinner each night hoping it would start things, but I felt nothing but the same mild Braxton Hicks as I had for so long and I figured I had a long way to go.
On Tuesday I visited a friend. I walked the five floors to her apartment and I rode my bike to and from. As we sat drinking coffee and I cooed over her five week old son, I began to feel some irregular contractions – nothing heavy, but still with a little more edge than I had felt before. On my way home I grocery shopped and prepared mentally for labour to begin. That afternoon I had a series of five or six regular contractions. The regularity lasted just long enough for me to smile, but then the contractions faded. At dinner I had another series, but the rest of the evening I felt nothing. Despite hoping not to be able to concentrate while watching Mad Men, I was 100 percent there.
I woke up at 3am on Wednesday morning and couldn’t sleep. I have no memory of even the slightest mild Braxton Hicks and surely there wasn’t anything edgier. I tossed and turned, spooned with J and tried to accept that labour was far away and that I had to be patient. At 5:10am the first “real” contraction kicked in. And soon after one more. And from here they just went on and on. I woke up J and we lay beside each other a little nervous of what was to come and relieved at the prospect of, hopefully, getting nearer the point where we would meet our baby.
From the beginning J suggested me to take a shower, but I didn’t feel like it. I wanted chamomile tea and he made me some, but by the time it was ready I was desperately trying to walk around in an attempt to ease the pain from the contractions, but the only place I felt fairly good was in bed lying on my side holding tightly on to the bed whenever contractions hit me. I was in pain and made J promise to not leave me at home that day. At some point I told him I would not be able to go through labour without an epidural. It was the plan, but pain was killing me and I figured I had a long way to go and the pain I was feeling just the beginning of the show. J showered and began moving a lot quicker around the apartment. I kept thinking about asking him to time the contractions, but I never got around to it. Luckily, he did and at some point he told me he would call the hospital.
The midwife on the other end of the phone was sweet. I told her I had had contractions since 5am and she urged me to eat some breakfast and then “stop by” for a check up. At 8:40am J called for a cab and around 9am I waddled down the stairs in pain.
At the hospital I am told to wait for the midwife and while in the waiting room I am in so much pain my only thought is that I can’t bear to be sent home. They need to keep me.
They do. As the midwife examines me she changes from “time is something we’ve got” to “let’s get her in a bed right now”. I am 9 centimetres dilated. All thoughts on epidurals and being sent home are off.
***
At 12:43pm she is born. She screams just as her head is born and before she is lifted out. She is put on my stomach and I forget the pain of the last couple of hours. They ask me questions and I answer and yet I have no idea what is going on. J is tearful whenever I look at him and I keep murmuring “I love you, I love you”. Because I have a slight temperature (which turns out to be nothing at all), we have the many first hours to ourselves. The give us peace and only come in to check my temperature and to draw blood (once).
J sits with her and just as I expected, because he did the exact same thing with the belly when she was in there, he starts whispering to her. “Only a few hours old and you and her already have secrets,” I smile. He looks up and his voice is suddenly clear. “Do you think we should tell mommy,” he asks the bundle in his arms. I look at him, slightly confused. “Do you think we should tell mommy what you and I have found out about your name,” he asks. As he says this tears are in my eyes because I know that what he is about to tell me is that our little girl will be named my favourite name on the list of 4 girl names we have talked about. And this is exactly what he tells me and all of a sudden she is just that name, her tiny body only a few hours old are forever tied to that name, G.
words can’t describe it
It’s a girl. A tiny creature that it took me less than a second to fall completely in love with. She’s is beautiful and ours and she deprives us of our sleep, but it is all worth it and J and I are the happiest people on earth.
I have to run. There’s a girl to adore and love, but I wanted to let you know that on Wednesday the 10th of June the greatest moment of 2008 turned out to be a little girl, our little girl.
I love you BOM, love you.
plans
Tuesday: Coffee with a friend and her six week old.
Wednesday: Midwife.
Thursday: Coffee with a friend and her three week old.
Friday: Need to make plans.
***
A month ago a midwife told me that it was a good idea for pregnant women in general to take it slow. She told me to thank my lucky stars I could leave work six weeks before my due date. “The babies are much healthier and much calmer when they come out. Keep in shape and sleep whenever you can, it’s the best thing you can do,” she told me and because my due date was far away, I believed her and went for swims and dozed off on the sofa whenever my eyes felt the slightest bit like they were about to close.
Yesterday, I climbed the stairs to the attic and then all the way down to the basement, and after this J and I went for a walk – a power walk – and this morning my body feels a little worn out, but I plan to climb the stairs again today. I have reached the point where I no longer care for a relaxed body that doesn’t ache once labour sets in, I just want it to happen. I want a healthy baby more than anything, trust me, but at this point it feels as if it is a little too comfy and if the naps and the relaxation is making it settle even more in there, and it is not supposed to be like that.
After a long weekend with J by my side, I am once again alone with the waiting and the constant trying to read labour into any (expected as well as unexpected) movement or sign from my body. It is unbearable, so I have spent my morning arranging coffee dates throughout the week. I still need something for Friday, but otherwise I am covered and know that if the baby won’t come out this week at least I will.
