For a few reasons, we have to take a little hiatus from posting here. Hopefully only for a few weeks, or a month at the outset.
We are all doing well, though, and we can’t wait to connect with you all again. Really: I can’t even describe how important this space is to me.
Much, much love to you all this season. I feel that I carry your families with me, and I know you carry ours with you.
Clouds.
Taken at the end of our little block, on a much needed family walk last night. (Which felt like a Friday night though it was Wednesday, so long and trying has this week been).
* Having been privileged to watch her change and grow into herself as a person and a parent, I loved J’s post yesterday. I won’t say it’s always been easy to be married to each other through so much growth, but it is rewarding in immeasurable ways. I hope we get to be old people together, looking back on the pain and joy with equal respect and appreciation.
* I’ve thought several times about writing a post explaining why I love wearing my son – why, especially as a non-gestational parent, babywearing is so critical to me – but I’ve never known just what to say. It’s always felt a little ineffable. With the exception of his first two or three days, I’ve worn Bram every day of his life, and for many, many hours. Though we’re transitioning to back carries more and more, as often as not I still wrap him tightly to my chest, and I love the feeling of his breath against my chest, his heart beating against my heart beating. Though I ache by the end of each day (my son is not small, and I am not big), I plan on doing this until he self-weans off of wraps, which I hope he won’t do for a long, long time. It’s such a small period of time, the years when our children are small enough to be secured to our bodies. A blink, I’m guessing, and I don’t want to miss a moment of it. It makes him visibly happy, and it seems to make him feel safe, sure of me, sure he is loved. When he’s tired, it’s the quickest way to soothe him: sometimes he’s sleeping even before I finish tying the wrap. Other times, he’ll pull back so that he’s staring straight into my eyes, his face only inches from mine. Sometimes, he’ll even lean forward and put his lips on mine before settling back in with his head to my chest. When I badly sprained my ankle on our vacation last month, wearing Bram was my first thought: I can’t have broken it because I can’t not wear him. But I’ve never had quite the language to say why it matters so much to me. Beautifully, Cricket’s mama has written a stunning post about just that: why babywearing, for non-gestational parents, can be so powerful. Here are her words, which describe my heart.
“So I know it’s just a spring haze
But I don’t much like the look of it
And all we do is circle it
And I found out where my edge is
And it bleeds into where you resist
And my only way, way out is to go
So far in” — “Spring Haze” (Tori Amos)
This post has nothing and everything to do with parenting. This is a subject that has been the work of a strenuous inner-dialogue, though it’s the first time that I’ve written anything publicly on the matter.
The day that my maternity leave ended, a large road construction project began smack dab in the middle of my route to work. As such, I’ve had to take a longer detour into the office each morning. Along this detour, I pass a settlement of recovery houses by the side of the road. The whole mismatched complex boasts the sign, “Serenity House” at the entrance. From what I can make of it, there are two residential houses with satellite trailers sprinkled on the grounds. Each morning when I pass (a few minutes before 8am), there are small throngs of folks hanging out at picnic tables outside. They are mostly scruffy smokers, some young, some old. There are a number of questionable fashion choices and scraggly haircuts. For some reason, seeing this sight in the morning (maybe because it’s early and I’m still very tired) brings about in me an extremely visceral reaction.
The reaction comes from the truth that I used to be one of those people. For years. This isn’t something that I talk about a lot anymore. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s a topic I’ve ever touched on this blog. In my teens and early-twenties, I had a serious alcohol and drug problem. I first got clean at 17, relapsed at 20, got sober again at 21, and have been clean since then (over eight years). My “program of recovery” has evolved to look very different from the 12-step prescription that’s so prevalent in America today. I don’t go to meetings, have a sponsor, or believe in an interventionist god. I’ve done all of those things in the past, and they were helpful in their own way, but the dogma couldn’t overcome the lack of authenticity that I found in myself in that space. For me, and I can only speak from my personal experience, the constant attention to the problems of my past (and other people’s chaotic lives) kept me in a sick spiral. Breaking out of that mode of thinking about recovery, like breaking out of the cycle of addiction, has been one of the most formative intrapersonal experiences of my adult life.
I find that this topic ruffles a lot of feathers within the structured recovery community. It’s never my intention to offend, but I can’t help but think that the subject upsets people because it casts a little grey area on the black and white rhetoric of 12-step programs. The bent is usually something to the effect of, “those who don’t go to meetings are dry drunks who will use again.” Nothing in life is that clear cut. I value my sobriety. I value my formative years in a structured program of recovery. But now, I value the time and energy that it takes to attend to the life I’ve built out of that recovery. Perhaps that’s a selfish conclusion (i.e., I’m not paying forward the time and attention given me by others). Still, I feel that the life I lead today best enables me to be of service and love to my wife, our son, my friends, parents, and colleagues.
When I sit back and think about what it took for me to get here, I’m floored by the complexity of my experience. While I hit a low “bottom” when I was actively using, I think that I sustained more unhealthy behaviors and relationships over time in recovery than at any other point in my life. Some of this was the by-product of getting sober so young, but some of it is what happens when sick members justify the behavior of other sick members. Dis-ease breeds dis-ease. This was by no means my across the board experience, so I don’t mean to sound petty. I was also inspired to new levels by many of the friends I’ve made in my years in recovery. There are some beautiful, healthy, intimate, vulnerable, loving people out there. And I’ve had the good fortune to share the road with many of them during some difficult times. That said, I haven’t found 12-step programs to be the magic bullet promised. I’m always striving for authenticity, which is fluid, not prescriptive. It’s like the dilemma in R’s last post about food: How do we strive toward higher ideals without sacrificing our critical thinking?
I don’t have the answers to that question, but I’m learning to trust my intuition more readily. I can make healthy choices for myself and my family. I can eat cleaner, locally grown foods. I can parent my child openly and actively. I can protect and strengthen my marriage each day. I can make smart choices of how to spend my time, money, and energy. I can find a way to work for myself while empowering other people. I can fight for my civil rights. I can strive to be a better friend and a better daughter. I can choose to tell the truth. I can choose to amend my behavior. I can choose to accept and love myself as a whole and unique person. I don’t think it’s true humility to walk through each day thinking of oneself as an emotionally diseased person who must submit their agency, as one is not to be “trusted.” I want to find my humility in reverence to life, to nature, and to the experience of love. I don’t need religion for that. And, I find, that as I strive for these goals, I’m able to measure myself by the yardstick of my own life. I spent much of my young life fruitlessly comparing myself to others. Inevitably, I always prided myself on my seeming superiority or chastised myself for my seeming inferiority. But when I take myself on my own terms, I can see the ways in which I have already outpaced my best self of last year. And I hope that I’ll be able to say the same thing with each subsequent year. Mostly, I don’t want to quell that deep inner voice with the thunderous pronouncements of external direction. If I want to teach my children that they need to learn and follow their own internal compass, then I have to be willing to lead by example.
All of this is just to say that I’m the most satisfied that I’ve ever been. Not because everything has fallen into place, not because I’ve solved all of the conflicts in my relationships, and certainly not because I think I have the answers, but because I am slowly surrendering what I think I “know” to what I actually need.
the baby: Is either sick with his first minor cold or teething really early. To wit: he’s stuffy, but no fever. He wants to suck on everything, and even to chew a little. He’s drooling like a mastiff puppy. He can’t get comfortable enough to sleep very long. He only wants to nurse, to be worn, and to listen to Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans. The child will listen to anything (seriously, he was jamming out to some polka on Prairie Home Companion yesterday), but he has his preferences. Lots of strings. Big orchestral numbers delight him. And Sufjan Stevens seems to be his first favorite musician. He also adores a board book we have full of Matisse paintings (which is making me notice Matisse in a new way – how incredible is that? my son is teaching me about art!) and Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Red seems to be a favorite color: when he sees it (especially on book pages) he just kicks and grins, grins and kicks (which is how he responds to almost every book page, but he does so with more vigor if there’s red on it). He lights up around his little baby mirror: he loves that little baby, whether or not he knows it’s him. He’s started to like zerberts, but only very gentle ones, and only if after you’ve given him one, you look up at him and laugh. Then he’ll laugh too. And he started rolling over last week. It is the cute cute cutest thing to watch his face when he realizes he’s suddenly on his back.
the fellowship: I got it (one of the three I applied for)! I got a full year of dissertation funding through my university. This means that as soon as I’m done teaching this class (in five weeks), I can focus exclusively (work-wise) on my dissertation for ONE WHOLE YEAR. No teaching for a full year. I still can’t believe it. The freedom this gives me to spend lots and lots of time with this baby is indescribably great. It’s just a dream. And the time to immerse myself in my project is thrilling. I need to finish by May of next year. The next twelve months will be full of hard work, but it’s work I WANT to do. I can’t tell you what a privilege this is. I really am over the moon with gratitude, relief, and excitement.
the food: So the story here is that J has had to give up dairy, gluten, and soy to get this boy’s rash to go away. This has meant some changes in the way I cook/we eat, but we’ve used the opportunity to make a shift we’ve been heading towards for years. I have been dogmatically vegetarian for a long time. For my first five years, I felt righteous in the knowledge that I ate (lived) ethically because I didn’t eat animals. A few years ago, I started to think about non-food products – soap, shampoo, make-up – and we began to eliminate things that were tested on animals from our household. What good is not eating meat if you buy from a company that, for example, coats a rat’s eyes in mascara? Isn’t that even more cruel? Then I started to avoid factory-farmed dairy. Especially as we neared the TTC period of our lives (and began to think about breastfeeding), I stopped feeling comfortable buying diary that came from animals that were kept for years on end in tiny box stalls being milked by machines all day, This is worse, I would argue, than eating meat because at least beef cattle have a shorter period of suffering. I still believe in all of this. To my knowledge, we buy no (or very few) animal-tested products. But here’s the piece I didn’t get until now. Not eating meat for so long led me to incorporate more and more fake meat products into my diet. Tofu. Tofurkey. Tempeh. Veggie burgers. And when I started thinking about THESE products, I felt troubled. We’d done so much work to eliminate anything but whole, real foods from our diets – to learn how to cook using single ingredients – but fake meat products are full of ingredients I can barely pronounce. And their status as vegan doesn’t tell us anything about the ethicality of manufacturing them. Because they’re mass produced, I can only assume they’re made in assembly line conditions, by factory workers. How well are those factory workers compensated? I don’t know. How far must the products be shipped to reach my supermarket shelf (i.e. what’s their carbon footprint)? No idea. What’s in them, really; I mean, what ARE all those ingredients? I don’t have any idea. This is something J and I have been discussing a lot lately. She’s been eating fewer and fewer of these products and more and more local, ethically-farmed meat for the last year or so. And now I’m finally on board. So here’s what we’re doing. We’ve stopped shopping at the huge regional-chain grocery in town and joined the co-op. If we can’t find it there, it probably isn’t something we need to eat. And for the record: so far it hasn’t cost us any more money to stock up there than it did at the chain. We’ve started to buy local meat that we can trace back to a farm here in town. We could go visit this summer if we wanted to. There’s very little packaging on our groceries now, which means we’re cutting down on the waste products we produce. I still eat a very small hunk of local, ethical (the cows are pasture-raised and hand-milked only twice a day) cheese each week, which feels like such a delicious treat now that it’s rationed. I’ll still eat gluten if we go out, but at home, I’m cooking with lots of brown and wild rice instead. And it’s delicious. I no longer believe that vegetarianism is the feather in the crown of ethical living. I think it’s too tempting to conclude that you’re being conscientious just because you don’t eat meat. I know I felt that way for a long, long time. Now I’m trying to understand the full effects of what I purchase. What I put in my body. Even if animals don’t die to make a particular food, are they mistreated? If so, I shouldn’t eat it. How are the humans who are a part of making a product treated? If I don’t know they’re treated well, I probably shouldn’t eat it. Who’s ultimately profiting off of my food choices? If it’s a farmer, great. If it’s a corporation getting rich off of genetic modifications, I’m not interested. Or at least not regularly so. Because that’s the other piece here: letting go of all-things-dogmatic. Because anytime we think dogmatically, we think un-critically, right? I mean, that’s sort of the point of dogma. This is true of religions, and it’s also true of political stances and movements like vegetarianism. But what I want to teach our son is to make decisions thoughtfully, not based on black and white conclusions he’s drawn up ahead of time. If I’m out celebrating, and I want to eat dessert but it’s been made with conventional butter, I want to do it anyway, and I want to do it guiltlessly. Then I want to come home and eat only local/ethical dairy for awhile. I want to support my community’s farmers most of the time. I want to impact animals and workers alike as positively as I can manage while still staying joyful and unobsessed. So that’s how we’re approaching this new no-soy, no-dairy, and no-gluten diet. And on that note, if anyone has recipes that might work, I’d love them! I’ve almost never cooked meat in my whole life, so this is all new to me. So far, I’m mostly eating chicken and wild caught fish. Tell me what to do!
the photos:
B visits mommy at work (and is smitten):
Bram and mama greet spring:
See those active arms? That’s our boy. His legs usually move that fast too! Gods help us when he’s a toddler:
This face:
Since R’s last post, Bram’s seemingly painful digestive issues have gotten worse. He often cries out during/after feedings, he’s spitting up much more frequently (and projectile vomited once last Thursday), the sleep “routine” that he had been in since coming home from the hospital is now disrupted, and he will no longer lay on his back for naps during the day (he never did this well, but he would occasionally). Also, he has a red, splotchy rash all over his face, scalp, and neck. When it first appeared, we assumed that it was the onset of baby acne. However, it quickly became quite inflamed and spread beyond just his face. After a good bit of research and a call to our lactation consultant, our hypothesis is that he’s having an allergic reaction to something in my diet (most likely dairy). It seems that allergies can actually induce reflux. On top of that, my oversupply of milk and overactive letdown are compounding the issue, making feedings that much more unpleasant.
As of last Thursday, I cut all of the dairy out of my diet in the hopes that it might resolve the issue. I’ve also eliminated or moderated some of the other “colic” culprit foods, though I’m not doing the full elimination diet at current (out of the hope that it’s simply a dairy allergy). We’ve also been keeping him upright for at least 30 minutes after each feeding and we raised his changing table to a 45 degree angle (since this was a place he was spitting up frequently). Because of the overactive letdown, I’ve already been feeding him exclusively upright (in the “biological nurturing” position). Still, he seems to not feel good during most of his waking time these days. It just breaks our hearts to not be able to take his pain away. He cries real tears and screams out at a high, warbling pitch. We’ve tried infant massage, baby yoga, playtime sitting up in the boppy, allowing him to take all of his daytime naps laying on us, etc, but nothing satiates him for more than a little piece of time. We also ordered a Mamaroo swing through Amazon yesterday, which is supposed to mimic parental movement. We’re hoping that if he’s comfortable napping in the swing, we might be able to put him down for stretches during the day. As it stands, it’s hard for us to get much work done. This is especially difficult for R, as she has grading, prep, and writing to do. Not easy tasks while holding (and trying to only jostle just enough) a 10 pound baby on your chest.
We’re planning on making an appointment with our FNP early next week to get a professional opinion. In the meantime, though, we’d love to know if anyone in blog land has dealt with these sorts of issues. We know that they aren’t major issues, but it would be great if anyone had any tips or tricks that made this time more bearable for Bram and for us…
It recently occured to me that I have done a subpar job on this blog of acknowledging the complete rockstar that my wife has been during this entire pregnancy. Over the course of the last twenty-two weeks, R has worked through feelings of grief, loss, and insecurity in order to be the most incredible partner to me and the perfect mama for this Rabbit. She has singlehandedly cooked almost every meal we’ve eaten for nearly six months. On top of that she has pulled way more than her fair share of the housework and yardwork. She’s handled all of the cats’ needs, registered the Saab’s never-ending litany of complaints, and cleaned up projectile vomit (mine) on more than one occasion. She’s done our laundry, planned our nursery, and organized our registry. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have had all of the vitamins.water.nutrients.exercise that this Rabbit needs to grow. She stayed on me about baby names for years, so that we could come to some consensus about our perfect name. R offered me unconditional support and confidence throughout my four months of unemployment. And now that I’m waking up at 6am for work each day, she’s up with me, making my mornings run so much smoother. And, on top of all that she does for us, she’s also teaching and writing a dissertation at top-speed. She is truly the bedrock of our family and I cannot imagine going through this experience with anyone else. Thanks, love!
