.kittenish.

Introducing the newest member of our clan: Iris Woolf

Iris is a (now) 10-week old kitten rescued from a feral cat mill just outside of town. Judging from her ears and paws, I expect that she’ll grow to be a large cat! She’s sweet, snuggly, and super-playful. I had forgotten how much life-force a kitten contains (I had especially forgotten about the kitten life-force between the hours of 1 and 5am – not unlike our human newborns)! Bram is completely smitten with Iris, though we’re having to really work on playing soft and gentle. He wants to throw his toys at her out of sheer delight (ouch kitty!). Our girl-cat, Nemesis, is slowly adjusting. She had become completely withdrawn and had stopped eating after Hades died. She’s been showing some interest in food again (especially the kitten food) and she’s been coming around more and more. So far there’s been no cat bloodshed and everyone’s going to the bathroom in the proper spot, so I’d say we’re doing well! I look forward to watching the two cats (hopefully) grow closer together in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, R and I are finding a baby cat presence very soul-lightening as we finally see the light of spring after this long and dark winter.

.sad news.

Hi, Friends — R and I just wanted to let folks know that we’re in the middle of losing our little Love Child. They did an ultrasound at our 8-week appointment this morning because R’s been spotting some, and there was no heartbeat. Our wonderful midwife is giving R’s body the chance to handle this naturally. We are very sad tonight and feeling the cumulative grief of losing three babies in less than three years. I’m feeling extremely numb right now. We are thanking the universe that we have this beautiful little toddler to harness our energy and attention to the present. We are so grateful for the support of our blog community. We will, obviously, post again soon with more details; this is all I have the emotional energy for tonight. — J

.a new day.

I have to say that I woke up giddy with anticipation this morning.

 
I came out as a lesbian in 1995 at the age of thirteen, years after the outset of the AIDS epidemic, the year after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was implemented, and the year before DOMA was signed into law. I witnessed the deaths of peers to bashing and suicide. I was in hot water with every high school principal I met ;-) And now, eighteen years later, I sit with my wife and son awaiting a certain something from the highest court in the nation (not validation, certainly, but a certain degree of recognition; of contrition, perhaps?). Because I came out so young, I’ve always felt a certain parallelism between my personal growth and that of the gay and lesbian movement. I’ve found comfort and camaraderie in the shared struggle for identity, for equality, and for a welcome place at the table of life.

 
I think of those millions who came before that are not now here to see this monumental shift. And I think of the millions who will come after to see a world that is beyond our current imaginings. And I think how lucky I am to be alive in history. Despite its challenges, I am so grateful to be here now.
And then I picture our children as young adults moving through a world that strives to be more and do more for its brothers and sisters. It’s an ideal, yes, but isn’t that what the living is for? I treasure the daily trudge to higher ground and more fertile dialogue as it’s masked in family, marriage, career, and activism.

.turning over.

The snow is finally melting today, and, though it’s teased us with this prospect before, it does seem that spring is near. I am so looking forward to a new season, to new life, and to more time outside. By the end of February living in the north, I start to feel trapped by the constant deluge of snow.ice.scraping.sliding.cold.dark.days. And this winter has seen its fair share of dark days of the soul with losing Saul and then R’s dad.

I’m currently at home sitting out a rare sick day with acute mastitis (sidenote: Ouch!). I’ve never had any kind of breast problem throughout the 14 months I’ve been nursing Bram, but I awoke Thursday morning with tenderness in my right breast (which I chalked up to PMS). By 9am, though, it had grown intense, and by the time I pumped at 10am, I was really miserable. I left work early and by lunchtime was running a 102.5 degree fever while taking extra-strength motrin, so we decided to go get it checked out at urgent care. I was prescribed antibiotics and motrin and told to keep nursing, massaging, applying heat, and taking it easy. I’m supposed to go in for a recheck tomorrow. The rest of Thursday, I was out.of.it. I was delirious with the high fever, had tingling and numbness in my joints and neck, and was just beside myself with discomfort in my breast. My heart goes out to the many new mamas who experience this multiple times early on in their nursing relationship. It’s really the pits. So today I am feeling a little more like me. The fever has abated and the prescription motrin seems to be keeping a handle on my pain. Bram and I aren’t showing any reactivity to the antibiotics (a fear given his recent bout with penicillin allergies). Still, though, I can’t move any milk through the left quadrant of my right breast. It’s red, hard, and warm to the touch, which makes me think that there’s still a plugged duct(s). I really hope that I can get this worked out myself, as the idea of more aggressive treatment sounds really unpleasant (and makes me worry about keeping our nursing relationship consistent). So: Heat-Massage-Drain-Rest-Repeat.

In much happier news, how about R’s last post!?! We are so so so excited by our new Love Child. Early Days, yes, but I’m choosing cautious optimism over debilitating fear and anxiety. We just miss out on so much living because of the latter. R is at the outset of nausea and fatigue (though that could also be the byproduct of it being less than a month before she goes to committee with her dissertation). Our first appointment with our midwives’ group will be in April, and we think we’ll be able to see our beloved friend and midwife, C, before she’s out for maternity leave with her own new bundle-of-joy. We really do love our practice and are very encouraged to think that we’ll be able to birth at the low-risk hospital again! And I for one am hopeful and excited about becoming an NGP to a baby that R carries. I look forward to the many things that I missed out on because I was so locked into my own bodily experience of our pregnancy with Bram. I caught glimpses of those benefits during our time with Saul, but I am curious how those dynamics will play out for me over a lifetime of parenting.

And I would be remiss to not offer some recent photographic evidence of our toddler (Toddler!?! How did that happen?). R has had to handle all of the big news and heavy pronouncements on the blog lately, so I’m bringing some lightness!

Storytime with Bubbie is the level-best:

Bram and I handle our co-op shopping together every weekend. He’s getting really sweet about interacting with the other customers and carrying produce for me…

Bram planking with Uncle Buddy:

B still adores being worn everyday:

Bram’s snow adventures in our backyard:

And he’s up! Bram started walking at right about 13 months. It was a shy skill at first, but he’s walking more and more each day:

This is our beautiful, sweet, goofy, earnest toddler (photo credit: Aunt Kippie at the Children’s Museum):

.words for caemon.

Devastatingly, we learned yesterday that beautiful Caemon of C is for Crocodile lost his nearly six-month battle with a rare form of childhood leukemia. He was only three years old. I can’t imagine the pain and despair that his moms must be feeling after so many months of fighting and hoping. R had the idea that we might take some time away from blogging this week as a way to symbolize that there are no words for this kind of loss. In losing Emmett and Saul, it was painful (for a time) to see the world go on about its normal rhythms as our lives were so utterly transformed by grief. And I cannot imagine the exponentiality of losing a child you’ve spent years loving and parenting. R said earlier, “when there’s truly nothing to say, silence can be such a powerful tool.”

And so we lift up our hearts and healing thoughts to Jodi, Timaree, and their extended family and friends as they walk through this first impossible day without their perfect son.

.birthday boy.

This kid. I just adore the hell out of him. And I can’t hardly believe that he’s a whole year old! It seems like just yesterday we were dizzy with the newness of this little creature in our family. What lucky moms we are to have such a sweet little boy. I’m at work right now, so I don’t have time for a proper post. In lieu of thought-provoking insights, I’ll just say that Bram is finally on the mend after two weeks of illness (RSV followed by croup followed by ear infections — poor bug). It’s so nice to see him back to his joyful self. And that self is careening into toddler hood at lightning pace! We’ve had a few tentative steps (all while mommies were looking elsewhere, of course), and he’s starting to pick up signs at a steady clip. We had a big one-year birthday party planned, but we had to cancel because of his illness. Still, we had my Dad and Kelley in town from down south, and R’s mom drove up for the day, so we had a very nice family affair. B ate up all of the grandparent attention! Here he is pictured with a most excellent drum that my mom sent for his birthday – this thing really has a great sound. R and I also found B a beautiful handmade wooden kitchen, which he loves to crawl inside of (oddly enough). We’ll post more pictures and updates soon, but I just wanted to check in with a big “hello” to the blog world.

All good things,

J

 

.anger.

I haven’t posted on here to now because I’ve been desperately holding out hope that L would change her mind this week. That in taking Saul back she would realize that she isn’t fit to parent him, that he was being consummately loved and nurtured in our home, and that he should be reunited with us. And in the midst of these hopes, I have been so very angry. And I worried that my anger spilling out (as it’s had to be simmered down to a quietly boiling rage because Bram needs a present, positive, and loving pomo) would compromise any chance of Saul returning to us. But with each passing day, and with each passing communication with L, it becomes increasingly evident that he won’t be coming back to us. She is the most manipulative person I have ever known. It turns out that so much of what she told us was lies. She is committed to perceiving herself as a victim, and she seems to have demonized us in an effort to justify her actions. Everything is about her. Her and her ex. Never about her children. Never about the child we love so much.

As gut-wrenchingly devastating as it is that he won’t be coming home, knowing it in my heart gives me the freedom to stop censoring myself, to take the actions necessary to ensure Saul’s safety, to prevent L from doing this to other families in the future, and to begin the long-work of healing our family from this crushing loss.

My heart aches as I write this blog post. While I can appreciate any birth mother’s desire to raise her baby – and though in so, so many cases, that’s in the child’s best interest -  I cannot wrap my head around how L could have sent us home with Saul for nearly a month to assimilate into our family as our son, as Bram’s brother, before suddenly asking for him to be returned. And beyond that, how she could sit across from us a little over a week ago and be reassuring about our arrangement. How she could continue to text us encouragingly into the night even after telling our social worker that she wanted Saul back. I struggle to understand how, as a mother, she could do that to other parents. Knowing what I know, I cannot conclude that this is best for him.*

Adoptions fall through about 20% of the time. We were prepared for that possibility. But 99% of those reversals happen at or before the hospital. Less than 1% of failed adoptions are reversed once the baby leaves the hospital with the adoptive family, and even those usually happen within the first few days postpartum. So to wait three weeks into the placement? That’s extremely rare. Our adoption agency has never had a case like this before and neither has the court system where Saul was born. Did L know that? Or did she feel like this was a perfectly normal thing to do? Does it even make her sad to have so deeply ignored our pain, especially when we had worked so hard to minimize hers?

We trusted L. We confided in her. We worked to bring her into the fold of our family. And now, she has shattered us. Once again we are faced with the grim prospect of grieving another lost child, another child that will never be with us through milestones, holidays, and the dailiness of being a part of our family, one of our children.

From where I’m sitting there are only two ways that I can read this situation:

The first possibility is that L truly wasn’t sure whether she wanted to place or not. And if this was the case, she had an obligation to be honest with us about her feelings. Instead, she led us to believe right up to the very end that this was her choice, a painful choice, yes, but a choice that she was confident about. We would have walked this road with L. We would have respected her decisions. We would have held him in our hearts as “hers” long enough for L to find her way to this place. But instead, we brought him home as “ours” and became deeply and irrevocably attached right away. I nursed him at my breasts for nearly four weeks growing his tiny body with the milk of my own body. R has worn him and rocked him through every sleepless night of his first four weeks. Our bodies ached with the daily work of attachment parenting a newborn. Bram underwent significant shifts in his schedule, in our attentions, and for what? So that we could, ostensibly, nanny and wet nurse her child while she led us on? While she wallowed in the muck of chaos that she had explained to us her life had become?

Or the other possibility, the most horrific notion, is that L always knew that she didn’t intend to place him permanently. That she knew by choosing an adoptive family that she could have financial and emotional support through the pregnancy and birth and that, with little consequence, she could back out at any time that it was convenient for her to do so. I had to assume that this wasn’t the case, though there’s now more than enough evidence to suggest that this is exactly what has transpired. To point, there’s reason to think that she’s done this to other families in the past. And it’s my feeling that only a mentally ill person could have such a break with reality to think that it’s okay to treat other people that way.  A compassionate human wouldn’t just play with people’s lives in this way. We have worked so very hard to cultivate a family based on trust, integrity, and mutual respect. The sickness that we can sense coming from L’s home life makes us very scared for Saul’s long-term well-being. The history of domestic violence with Saul’s father, the references to drug and alcohol use that L made in the hospital, the scarce family resources already being split among three existing children. All of this makes us worry for Saul. We could have given him a better life: Two focused, devoted parents; Access to excellent healthcare, schools, activities, peers; An extended family network of friends and relations to carry him through and to teach him how to be a gentleman in this tumultuous world. And now, we worry what path he’ll find himself set on by the time he’s a young man. The son we hoped to raise in him will surely be gone, and will the man in his stead find himself happy in his childhood? In his life? I certainly hope that the answer is yes, but I have my doubts.

So as I write this blog post desperate with missing his perfect sleeping form on my chest, content from nursing in our dark, quiet home, the only peaceful environment that he’s known since birth, I think about all of the emotions that I’m trying to process right now: Deep sadness, fear, grief, shock, anger, love, exhaustion, worry. I feel like our perfectly full little family has been violently torn apart. And there’s nothing I can do about it but watch. What impotence I feel as his parent to be unable to protect him from the whims of his other parents. L has violated us with her dishonesty.

My heart is also so sad for what Bram is losing. He had become so attached to this baby brother and had begun self-motivated rituals of looking for and kissing the baby when he woke up in the morning and from naps. He loved nursing tandem with the baby and rubbing baby’s feet and hands. I know that children are highly adaptable and this will fade for him, but I worry that he feels insecure or thinks that we’ve “sent the other baby away” and could do the same thing to him.

I think I’ve said all that I can muster at current. I don’t expect that L has the capacity to see things from our perspective, but I do hope she’ll take the things we’ve communicated to her into consideration as she moves forward. And I certainly hope that if she is pregnant again in the future, that she will never put another family through the absolute hell that she’s put us through. We’re taking steps at current to secure that hope.

Most importantly, we are in love with Saul, with the tiny person he is now and with the beautiful man I pray that he will wind up being. He will always have a seat in the spirit of our family.

With the heaviest of hearts,

J

* The only way this could be right for him is if L decided to use this opportunity to truly change her life. To stop feeling victimized by everyone, and to stop using the sense that she’s a victim to justify absolute selfishness and deceit. To stop using people the way she does. To truly think of his needs, and work to meet them. And we pray every moment that she’ll do this.

.missing what we had together.

.ten things for ten months.

My ten favorite things about ten months:

* Turning the corner on daytime naps and night-wakings. Hello again, sleep my old friend.

* Waving hello and goodbye. Heart melting.

* Watching Bram watch big kids in order to learn more about his world.

* Yoga for the almost walking set.

* Almost walking!

* The patience and desire to finish every last morsel of dinner.

* The desire to share dinner with the cats (where chicken is, of course, welcomed, but broccoli takes more convincing) ;-)

* Big unexpected bear hugs and snuggles. This kid has gotten so good at throwing his arms around your neck and nestling in. Again, heart melting.

* His ability to still seem like a little baby when his 23 pound self is nursing sweetly in my arms.

* His newly found desire to fall asleep in the car (see #1)

And a bonus eleventh thing: Getting to do all of this over again starting in only eight (or so) weeks!

And a few recent shots of his adorableness. The first is of B helping me to prepare a mother hubbard squash and the second is of B showing off his bookish side at the optometrist (there for me, not for B):

.co-sleeping with B at nine months.

I realized that I haven’t written a blog in quite awhile. There’s so much afoot in our world these days: the anticipation of our new arrival in two short months, the daily pleasure that is watching Bram grow and change, R’s national job market search, and the beginnings of my birth doula work. The long and short of it is that we are often tired women. As such, we’re motivated to improve Bram’s sleeping habits, both at night and during the day. We are opposed to any cry-it-out approach and, to this point, everything around sleep has been purely baby-led. But now that we’re expecting again, we need to know that B can take naps and night sleep at consistent times, that he can nap out of our arms, and that he can make it through the night with minimal waking and nursing.

I plan to tandem nurse B and Sailor, though Sailor will need to have primary access for exclusive breastfeeding. My goal is to do this without supplementation, so I’m working hard to increase my supply, to freeze backstock milk, and to gradually nightwean Bram so that Sailor can have milk throughout the night AND I can ever sleep again! Right now Bram co-sleeps with us almost exclusively (he does have a sidecar toddler mattress that he often begins the night in). He’s waking up every 1-2 hours to nurse (last night it was eight wakeups!). Increasingly, he’s having longer periods of wakefulness in the night (1-2 hours at a stretch) where even nursing and rocking won’t settle him back to sleep. Obviously, this current pattern is unsustainable with one, but it’s downright crazy with two.

We don’t want Bram to associate night weaning and any change in sleeping arrangements with the arrival of the new baby, so we’re working hard to incorporate these changes over the next two months. Our goals are: two naps a day (1-2 hours long) around 10 and 2 each day, weaned from bottles and onto a sippy cup of breastmilk by 12 months (still nursing freely at the breast throughout the day), bedtime around 7pm with a goal of 12 hours in the bed, one to two night wakings/feedings. He’s eating solids like a champ, so I think that the decrease in milk is likely to be self-selected. Naps are getting better already. It’s the nighttime that we’re having the hardest time with. I’ve begun consulting both the No Cry Sleep Solution and Beyond the Sling,and we’re beginning to incorporate some new co-sleeping suggestions this week. I wish that I had started to use some of these solutions with him when he first started co-sleeping with us at four months (before that, he was in a sidecar portacrib). Both of these books are quick reads and full of helpful information.

One thing in the No Cry text that really struck me was a section where she asks parents to really interrogate themselves to see if they might be at the root of their child’s sleep problems (i.e. preventing the family from changing patterns). That was a real a-ha moment for me, because, despite how fatiguing it is, I really treasure my time with B in the night. I work full-time outside of the home and miss him so desperately when I’m away, that the nighttime snugs and feedings are such a touchpoint of reconnection after time away. I love smelling his milky breath and stroking his soft downy head back to sleep. I love to wake up and find that he’s latched himself without me even noticing. I love the moments where he connects R and I in bed (sometimes he’ll take both of our hands in his or he’ll roll from side-to-side checking in with both of us). They’ve certainly had their challenges (and more than one bitten nipple), but all-in-all I’ve treasured these last five months of exclusive co-sleeping. But I want for Sailor to have these same opportunities for intimacy and bonding, and I know that two babies in one bed is a safety hazard, and so I know that this time must change soon. We’re thinking that we may have to divide and conquer at first. Perhaps abutting a twin bed up to our queen sized bed? R and B can be in the smaller bed with the new baby and I in the larger bed. My only fear is that the babies will wake one another in the night. Personal experiences with this, anyone?

Perhaps, once they are a little older, we could invest in a king sized bed and extend family bed for the four of us into the preschool years. I’d love input from how other families have handled these questions (especially from anyone with multiple children close together in age).

Also, many of you have asked how our meeting with L (Sailor’s birthmom) went last weekend. I think that it went really well. It’s a very unique kind of relationship building. Our agency has said that ours is the most “open” adoption they’ve every facilitated. It was surreal, though, to sit across from our baby bump for over three hours and never be able to touch him, to sing or speak loudly to him, or to protect him. This is one of the biggest lessons in surrender I’ve ever experienced…

Thanks, all, for your support and encouragement. I can’t imagine parenting without this community!

.on parenting my better self.

I’m interrupting R’s gorgeous daily photo challenge to publish a blog post that I’ve been writing in my head since June. This is long and rambly, but it’s a reflection (of sorts) on the ways that parenthood has shaped me so far.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the crossroads between expectation and reality. I am a person who holds myself to a high (sometimes impossibly high) standard, and, in turn, I struggle with detaching from expectations (of myself and others). I am striving for a life wherein I find peace in the present, a life where I can find strength in vulnerability and imperfection. I have been gradually moving toward this center balance in recent years, but parenthood has really accelerated the pace of this work in my life. I have high ideals of my parenting, of our son, of our future family dynamic. Still, the reality of parenting is very much rooted in the daily. My future is shaped by the small choices moment by moment. That is the only real path to the overarching vision I desire. Attachment parenting has been an excellent canvas on which to learn the subtle, balanced brushstrokes of parenting. It requires of me a dynamic presence in my own reality. What works for our family may change from moment to moment and may look radically different from another family practicing a.p. with their own children.

My young adult life was very much spent in “assume crash position.” I was desperately afraid of vulnerability, of intimacy, and of success. As such, I white knuckled my way through early recovery, failed relationships, and shaky academic and career prospects. It didn’t happen all at once, but eventually,  gradually, I came into myself. I really met myself where I was and I began to heal and grow. Through this process, the world around me opened up. I became less angry, less fearful, and I was able to experience love and trust and pleasure on a whole new plane. In losing Emmett Ever, I found my desire to control come rushing back in. My beautiful, conscientiously cultivated life was reeling with the devastation of pregnancy loss. I felt upended. My already deeply broken faith in a higher power was irrevocably shattered. This is the mindset with which I went into our pregnancy with B. I felt so much fear that he, too, would be taken from us. And I felt it my mission to keep that from happening, despite my logical understanding of my powerlessness over such an event.

Still, like a phoenix, the fear with which I went into pregnancy with has had a transformative effect over me. Like a fire that ate through my body, I have been so humbly transformed. I work to revel in my vulnerability now. It’s a new skill, awkward at first, but it’s mine to own and develop. And, as an unexpected consequence of preparing for pregnancy, birth, and parenting, I found a career path in birth work that is so well-suited to my passion and advocacy for women and families.

In birthing B, and subsequently feeding him from my body, I have had the privilege of making peace with my female-(em)bodied self for the first time in my entire life. This has been a double-edged sword, as I know my physical experience (which was difficult for me to embrace initially) is something that R wanted to experience for herself. Parenthood has been a dance of surrender within our marriage. We have had to take down so many barriers that we weren’t even aware of as we’ve learned to trust ourselves and each other with these new heights of love and responsibility.

Quickly responding to B’s needs and desires has, in a sense, given me permission to meet my own needs and desires. And while they can’t always be handled on the same swift timetable that B’s needs are met, they are important and precious in their own right. Same goes for R’s needs and for the needs of our friends, family, and community. Other aspects of a.p. like babywearing and co-sleeping have helped to reshape boundaries around autonomy, sleep, and touch. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of days where Bram goes to bed for the night and I can’t even stand the weight of a cat in my lap, so desperately am I craving physical space, but, for the most part, I just want R and B close to me.

Perhaps the biggest paradigm shift that I have gained from practicing a.p. is the impact of positive discipline and work-life balance on my own head space. My unrelenting desire for control manifested in a number of unhealthy coping mechanisms: compulsive over-scheduling, isolation, rage. And with hard work, I’ve been making in-roads to ridding myself of these influences in my life. Through B (and through our shared care of B) I can see the futility of this wasted time, this misused energy. And I value my time and my happiness too much for these behaviors to continue unchecked. My hope is that our children grow up without ever worrying for my contentment in the world. A big ask, maybe, but I believe it’s possible.

I’m not sure how to close, other than to say that parenting my child has allowed me to grow closer to the sense of self that I enjoy carrying with me into the world. I hope that with each of our children, this better self thrives…