The Resentful Mother--the trials of a stay at home mom

It is Christmas morning, 3am. I am wide awake after 5 hours of sleep. I need more, but my mind is full of all the things that need to be done. All the things I'm not getting done while I sit here in bed and soothe my restless son.

Motherhood is tough. Being a stay at home mom is tough. It is hard work. It's my little, incredibly active baby boy dismantling my home bit-by-bit. I find myself cleaning up one mess while he makes another mess. Or two. Or three. It's being behind on laundry, on taking meds, on brushing teeth. It's needing a nap when your child is still running around and jumping off furniture. It's trying to listen sympathetically when your partner has a rough day at work. It's seeing the dishes piled up because it's hard to do them when you've got a baby on one hip. It's not getting to shower unless you want to have a child playing in the water at your feet. Ah, yes. Motherhood.

Women aren't meant to raise children on their own, home alone.

Let me say that again. Women aren't meant to raise children on their own, home alone.

Raising children is supposed to be a group effort. Family, friends, neighbors. Community. I remember growing up with my mother's friends and their kids around all the time. With the neighborhood kids playing in the front yards and sidewalks and streets. I remember when 10 year olds used to babysit, no problem. When putting a baby on a blanket in the front yard with a dog to watch him was perfectly ok, because there we people around. I remember my uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins coming and going. But this is America in the 21st century, where kids grow up in a culture of fear, and the nuclear family, as horribly dysfunctional, isolating, and destructive as it is,  is the rule, not the exception. The American penchant for mobility, for chasing the dream, instead of staying near one's childhood home (assuming ever there was one)is destroying the fabric of our society. But that's another post entirely.

My family is over 200 miles away. My partner's family is 2000 miles away. My primary core of friends is 700 miles away. And I've got some wonderful neighbors, but they're either working or elderly and frail. I've tried connecting with other stay at home moms in the area but we are all so... busy. It's tough to make the time just to get together. And then there's always the kids to keep an eye on. So it's just me. Well, not just me. It just feels like just me.

Little Man's father is a wonderful man. He's kind and gentle and generous and tries to be emotionally and physically available. But he works a lot, supporting our family here in the Bay Area on one income so I can stay home with the baby. He gets stressed and tired and needs his down time, here at home. So I try to balance my need for a break from unrelenting motherhood with his needs, which means I put his needs before my own. And with the baby come first and him second, I'm running not just third, but last. And I'm tired.

I try to remind myself that in order for me to take care of them, I have to take care of me. But I don't have the time. Especially not since I've been handling my Uncle's Estate and my Grandmother's Trust. Getting the hoarder mess cleared out. Putting the house up for sale. Putting on a new roof and fixing termite damage and getting the plumbing working again. Realizing with horror that the conditions my uncle lived under were so much worse than I'd feared when he stopped letting me into the house. Oh what a mess. It was so bad I put on protective gear before I entered it, and the main bath had to be gutted to the studs just to get the smell out, never mind the biohazard filth. That bad.

So much to do, and my Little Man needing me. Constantly. It started wearing me down, eclipsing my enjoyment of him, interfering with my ability to feel maternal. Resentment blooms in my heart when I think I've got him settled down for a nap and he wakes up when I'm in the middle of something I've put off for hours, days, weeks because he comes first, and there isn't anyone else to help. It tears at me that I'm feeling resentful, that I'm getting short with him. This isn't the kind of mother I want to be. This isn't the kind of mother Little Man needs me to be.

I don't have the energy for Christmas. I got as far as putting up a little tree. I haven't bothered wrapping any presents. I've given M his gifts as I've gotten them, and the Little Man has been getting his gifts as they come in. At 18 months he's too young to understand Christmas, or any of the fuss. So I'm sparing myself the additional stress. I'll make a nice dinner and we will stay at home and it will be just the three of us. And it will have to be enough. Because I can't do more.

In desperation, I looked for drop-off daycare facilities. Nada. You'd think, in such an urban, affluent area as the Peninsula, there would be facilities that provided as-needed daycare. Nope. Not a one. I searched from SF to SJ. If I want to join a health club or visit a shop, I might be able to find child care for an hour or two. But if I need to go to the doctor, see a dentist or a lawyer, I have to bring the baby or arrange for his father to be at home. I'm supposed to be doing physical therapy for cervical compression due to carrying the baby around so much. Yeah... right. If I want day care I have to pay $250 for part time slots with very set hours (8am-12pm) or full time slots at home daycare centers ($400-$500) that will allow me to drop off as-needed.  Or, I could pay $25-45 an hour for a sitter/nanny to come in. For a 3 hour minimum.

I need a break! I told M as I cried on his shoulder, struggling just to take a deep breath. I need a break. So he took over the baby for a few hours. A few times. He really makes the effort. But it's not enough. It's too late for an occasional few hours to make a dent on this crisis brewing inside me. I spent precious sleeping hours thinking about the problem. Honestly evaluating where I'm at, what my needs are, what solutions are out there. What I need, I recognized, is a few weeks off from being a full-time mom. I need to farm the little guy out to someone else for a little while, so I can get centered again, and hold there. And to get centered, I need to get all the other stuff handled -- the estate paperwork organized, the investment property renovation work on track, the house cleaned and organized and re-baby proofed to take a climbing toddler into consideration. Oh, and the site for the spa we bough each other for Christmas prepped before delivery on January 3rd. The messy state of my house has quietly eroded my ability to find inner peace. I have no sanctuary. No where to go to relax and go 'ahhh.... home'.

I seriously considered enrolling my son full time in day care when his father put his foot down. The Little Man has been raised in the attachment parenting style, he's used to co-sleeping even for naps, he's had very little interaction with groups of kids except for the few hours a week at the local indoor playland -- tossing him into daycare where he's one of 5 or 7 or 10 kids per adult isn't going to be good for him. It's going to be a big shock. Are we really going to risk making matters worse, risk him being more clingy, risk having to do months of clean up work with him, just to give me a few weeks off?

He pointed me to Care.com and UrbanSitter.com -- Find someone, he said. I'd looked at Urbansitter.com and I just couldn't see paying $25-45 an hour to have someone come in and babysit, especially when most of what I need to do is here at home. I need him out of the home. At Care.com I posted a job. Got a half-dozen responses from people willing to sit for me for at target rate of 4 hours for $50. And then I struck gold. A stay at home mom with two kids contacted me, saying she didn't run a day care per se, but she did babysitting for other stay at home mothers, and some after-school daycare, too. Cautious optimism sputtered inside me. Wouldn't it be nice if someone offered as-needed daycare? I contacted her. Explained my needs. I need 3 weeks of 4 hour blocks of day care on W-Th-F, and then I've got family visiting. After that, I'm hoping to go more to an as-needed, drop off care, maybe a day or two a week. Was this something she could accommodate? It turned out she's less than a mile from me. I visited her home (so clean and organized!) and met her two children. Let the Little Man play with them for 45 mins or so. He was very active. I made sure she knew how active he is (so active that other mothers say "My! He's...busy!") and she said she had a nephew like him. And of course, while we were there, he jumped off a little chair in her daughter's room and hit his head on a toy. ("This happens all the time," I explained to her. "He's a climber.")

She agreed to take him for 10 days, for 4 hours, for $50 a day, starting this Friday.  I'm calling it my Christmas Miracle.

I'm really hoping that this will be enough. That I'll be able to get everything I feel I need to get done, done so I can enjoy my son again. So I can stop feeling resentful when he reaches for me, can stop feeling angry at myself when he cries and all I want to do is walk away. I know that when I feel this way he picks up on it and it makes him clingier. It's a cycle of negative reinforcement and it needs to stop. And I think, I hope, that this will do it, that three weeks and $500 will buy me time enough for me. Time enough for love to replace resentment again.

Here's to a better, less eventful, less stressful new year.  Bring on 2014!

Eudaimonia -- Well-being and The Good Life

I am the first to admit that I have a good life. A beautiful home, a generous and loving partner who is an excellent breadwinner, and a healthy, adorable baby boy. I'm lucky and I know it. Some days, as I'm doing the mundane household chores or consoling a teething baby, I am visited with a sense of the surreal.  Never, in a thousand imaginings of how I wanted my life to be, would I have imagined myself being Susie Homemaker balancing a baby on my hip as I see my man off to work.

Sure, I enjoyed the kept-woman period and did my best to enjoy being freed from a 9-to-5 job even as part of me resented being dependent and without enough income to support myself. My partner assisted me in growing my internet storefront business as best he could during the economic crash, and he was incredibly supportive as my family went through one health crisis after another. But finding out I was pregnant, well, that was a huge life-changer. And now, as the Little Man reaches the 8 month mark, as my body still recovers from the effects of pregnancy and childbirth, the reality of my life as an unintentional mother is both incredibly real, and incredibly surreal.

Little Man's milestone last month was cutting two teeth. This month, it seems to be locomotion. He started off with the military-style forearms and toes crawl at the beginning of the month and this week he's crawling on his hands and knees. And really getting around. I went to brush my teeth and freaked out when he wasn't anywhere near where I left him. He's also figured out how to pull himself up to a standing position. The first two days he fell over whenever I wasn't watching him like a hawk, but today he's stable on those sturdy little legs. He's falling on his face when his arms give out, but the thunks on the hardwood floor aren't quite as alarmingly loud. I'm kissing and rubbing boo-boos, mostly on his head. It's time to take the next step of child-proofing the plugs and adding baby-gates.

The benefit to all his physical exertion is he's finally napping for about an hour twice a day. The drawback is he's gotten very clingy -- perhaps from the pain / discomfort and the scariness of falling. He often cries when I put him down, so I basically wear the baby carrier 16 hours a day and carry him around in it until he pushes at me to let me know he wants out. If I put him down and move too far away, he starts to cry. Finding time for bio-breaks has become a challenge.

Solid foods are hit and miss. There are days when he won't eat cereal or pureed foods at all. Since my milk dried up he's been on formula, so his poops are really stinky, but less frequent. I worry that he's not getting enough calories, but whenever I pick him up he feels very solid. He's not a chubby baby by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is he a skinny one.

It seems like I'm never alone anymore. I am a person who enjoys my solitude. I think that has been the most difficult adjustment. I'm starting back to the gym, though, and my neighbor is coming over twice a week in the morning to give me a chance to workout, so Little Man is going to learn to adjust to not having me around all the time. I hope.

The acid reflux still gets away from me about once a week. I'm managing it with eating a boring diet and medication. I've also had a half-dozen spastic colon episodes. Very painful. Like labor pains. I'm trying to reduce the amount of time Little Man spends on my chest and belly, since his 20-plus pounds pressing into my body seems to aggravate things. I've had the x-rays and CT scan, the upper GI imaging, and over 30 different blood tests and aside from exceptionally large ovaries (courtesy of PCOS) there is nothing unusual. I'm in excellent health, though borderline anemic. I had eliminated all supplements when I noticed that pills weren't resting well on my acidic stomach, but now that it seems to be (mostly) under control, I'm taking them a few times a week. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

At present I'm 75# lighter than I was the day I delivered Little Man. I'd like to drop another 30 this year. We'll see. I think I can manage 3 pounds a month. I'm wearing large women's tops and extra-large bottoms. Right now my excess weight is all below the belly button, courtesy of 10 years of sitting at a desk. I'm looking forward to focusing on my abdomen and thighs at the gym and getting my upper and lower body in better proportion to each other. Given that my mother and sister both were mermaid-shaped, I'm thinking I'm probably going to be bigger on the bottom no matter what I do, but my doc thinks the softness of the muscles in my lower abdomen has something to do with the spastic colon problem, so it's important to get that area of my body back in tone.

Through it all, M has been wonderfully supportive. He knows this isn't the life I'd imagined for myself, and he checks in with me a couple of times a month to make sure I'm doing ok. Believe it or not, the life I was building toward was living in a small house on the coast or in the mountains, alone, with lots of books and paper and time to meditate and garden. I'd imagined my various friends and partners visiting me, but never staying for long. For all my capacity to be a social person, I'm a hermit at heart. He's such an introvert that he considers me an extrovert. Heh.

It's all good though. I'm happy and pretty much healthy. The baby is happy and healthy. So is M. There are things I want to do, and they'll wait. Right now, it's important to be there for the Little Man.

End surreality check :)

Nearly 8 months old!

Wow, where did January go?

We got back from Canada and the Little Man had a cold for a couple more weeks. I was just getting ready to tell the doc he had been sick for 7 weeks when he suddenly stopped coughing and sneezing. No more suctioning and irrigating sinuses, no more need for benedryl in his bottle.

Middle of the month he decided to cut two bottom teeth at the same time, and after a week of dealing with a crankety baby, I was ready to run away from home. Or perhaps it was the disarray of the house after a week of being too tired to clean up that had me ready to run screaming from the building. Either way, M took a work-at-home day when I reached the end of my rope and I got to sleep. Sleep. It's amazing how much the lack of it impacts. Like, oh, everything.

I've started meeting with a mother's group here in town. I feel like less of a shut-in now, and it is good to hear other women's experiences with infants. Being able to speak candidly about breastfeeding and milk dying up, lack of sleep, and the ordeal of teething making me want to run away from home is nice. They don't squirm like M does when I get too... graphic... for him.

Little Man is doing the military-style crawl around and over things these days. He's only taken one tumble off the bed (once was enough) so far. He's still a sweet, smiling little guy. And boy does he love his daddy. He just lights up and his whole body trembles with joy when he sees his father first thing in the morning, or when he comes home at night. He's starting to 'talk' more, and I can hear him trying to sing along to the melody of the music I play for him. It's hard to believe he'll reach the 8 month mark soon.

I start back to the gym in February. It's been nearly a year since I was there last. I need to work on my abdominal muscles south of the belly button.  I've got six-pack abs above, since carrying a baby around really works my core, but my lower abdomen is still too loose after being stretched out by the baby. And I'm going to drop 27# more pounds this year. Hopefully more, but 27# is my minimum goal. I figure after dropping 70# last year, this should be achievable. I'm hoping Little Man will be good for the sitter. He's just not used to being apart from me for more than an hour. Fortunately, he knows her, and she'll be here at the house in the mornings, so if she can't console him, she can resort to waking M up -- if a fussing baby doesn't wake him already. We'll see how it goes.

Holiday travels, losing weight, and my sweet baby boy

A month has passed since my last post. It's been a busy month.

Little Man and I came back from Puerto Vallarta with colds, but by the 20th of December it looked like we'd kicked them. Then the cold virus caught a second wind and we were both feeling lousy again, just in time for the trip to Canada.

It was below zero on both the C and the F temperature scales in Winnipeg. I wore Little Man in the Baby Bjorn most of the time, with my coat pulled around us both. He stayed warm, though his poor face got chafed from rubbing against my sweaters. Most of the fabrics I wear are soft and light so they don't bother his skin, but fabrics I can wear year-round in California can only be worn there in the summertime.

The change in climate really created sinus issues for the Little Man -- saline drops weren't working to clear him up so I ended up giving him benedryl so he could drink his milk. To make things even more interesting, my breastmilk dried up shortly after we got back from Mexico, so the poor little guy was on formula. Stinky coming out, formula is.

The visit with M's family was great. Little Man is blessed with an easy disposition so he didn't seem to mind being passed around between the 20+ people at the gathering on Christmas Day. He just needed to spend a few minutes with me every hour to re-charge and he was good. His great-grandmothers were over-joyed to see him. I'm a bit of a sap and cried when they held him.

We were inundated with gifts for the Little Man. Fortunately, we had a second suitcase that was lightly packed so we could bring most of it back with us. Lots of toys and cute little outfits. We were there a week and nearly every day we were off somewhere doing something -- Boxing Day at the Mall, seeing The Hobbit, dinner with Cousins, making sure M's mother got her fair share of time with her grandchild, etc. The nice thing about all the spare adults around was that I got some baby-free time and much-needed naps. Best of all, M's father is even better with the Little Man than he is, so I felt comfortable leaving the baby with him for a couple of hours while M showed me some of his old stomping grounds and tourist sights. I told him he was very fortunate to have grown up in a population center rather than in some small town on the Plains. The capitol of Manitoba had the financial resources to fund the education of a child prodigy, and he had access to universities and college-educated people in far larger numbers than he otherwise would have.

Thankfully, the trip home was a lot less eventful than the leg to Canada was. No cancelled / redirected flights that meant hours waiting for standby and then traveling a day later -- no, just a plane that wouldn't start because it was too cold outside. We left Winnipeg an hour late and had to run to catch our connecting flight in Denver: 40 gates wearing a baby and two shoulder bags! M waited to get the baby seat and the rollaway bag. Fortunately, the airline held the flight for 15 minutes so that we and 40 other people wouldn't be stranded. Little Man was an angel on the flights. Once again he charmed everyone around us, and he fussed very little.

It was nice to get home. My old friend Dato and his partner took advantage of the house-sitting offer which got them away from the rain and cold along the Oregon coast. It was mostly sunny and dry here, so they got to spend a couple of days exploring San Francisco. The weather in SF is always better in winter than in summer. Funny how that works :)

Now that we're home, I want to start working on getting my milk production going again, but before we do that, I need to tackle the intra-abdominal pressure that is giving me both acid reflux and constipation. It really sucks that I'd never had a problem with either until Little Man was born and now the problems are big enough to affect how I sleep, how I eat, and what medications and supplements I take. I'm pretty anemic these days, but I can't take iron or even just a multi-vitamin with iron because it really binds me up and even stool softeners and milk of magnesia can take 3 days to produce a bowel movement. I saw the doctor and we're trying a week of really upping the fiber in my diet to see if that produces desired changes, otherwise, it is on to scanning or scoping. I've a feeling something is going on in my colon -- literally -- whenever I bend over I can feel something move inside me, like the kick of a baby or the snick of a ligament being pulled and then settling back into place.

That, and I've dropped nearly 15# since Thanksgiving, without trying, and much of that time with reduced or no breastmilk production. Call me silly, but I think the milk drying up is a sign something is going on.

With regards to weightloss, I've been really good about watching my portion sizes. I ate my fair share of Christmas treats -- but not too many. A sweet-tooth was never my problem, nor was junk-food. No, I was a gourmand with portion-control issues and a serious hormonal imbalance.  Lovely enough, having Little Man seems to have balanced out a lot of the hormonal weirdness of PCOS, which has made losing weight the past 7 months much easier than the prior few years. So I'm down 70# from my pre-pregnancy weight. My goal is to drop another 30# in 2013. That should put me solidly in the size 12 to 14 range and my BMI in the 20s, where it belongs, and down 160# from my highest weight in 2007. After that, it's all maintenance. I've three very good reasons to keep my weight down and be healthy and fit: me, Little Man, and M. I want to be around to see Little Man grow up and help M raise him, and given that I'll be 45 in a couple of months, its important that I take my health very seriously. I'm not 30 anymore :)

Once Little Man is over his cold I'm going to get us both on a sleep-play-feeding schedule. He's dabbling with solid foods, but I'd like to get him eating more. He's not crawling yet, but he does wriggle himself around pretty well on his belly. He's getting close to cutting a bottom tooth, I think, and he's chewing on everything he can get his hands on. He's passing things from hand-to-hand now. He knows his name. He's babbling more, and he's getting good at vocalizing when he's unhappy (grumbling) as well as laughing and cooing when he's happy. He's a fun, sweet baby, and most days I feel incredibly blessed.

2012 was an amazing year for me. Lots of changes. I've got high hopes for 2013.

Processing Motherhood

It is good to know that all the feedback I received about mother-in-laws mellowing once they meet their grandchildren is true. The visit from M's mother went very well. Better than either he or I expected, based upon her previous visit and comments regarding the pregnancy. Unfortunately, I had a GERD episode in the middle of her visit so I didn't get to do much with her, however, it was a blessing that she was here to take care of the Little Man while I spent the day in bed running a temp and coughing up aspirated stomach acid and phlegm. I've a feeling that my LES valve has been damaged somehow either during or after the pregnancy, because I can't lay down with anything in my stomach or it will come up. The back of M's head can testify to that, poor dear. I'm waiting to hear back from my doctor as to what to do next.

I've been (loosely) following the Dr. Sears approach to Attachment Parenting because it makes sense to me. My goal is to foster a strong sense of security in the Little Man, the kind of security that comes from trusting that the adults in his life will meet his needs. It is my hope that I'll never lose that trust, because one of the things I've been processing as I've been caring for my son are the early memories of my own mother, and my lack of trust in her.

I should state that my mom wasn't a bad mother per se... she just wasn't a good one. She wasn't very maternal or nurturing -- I recently confirmed this with her best friend from my childhood years, wanting to make sure my child's memory and Reality squared-up. Getting married and having children was, for her, the cost of freedom. Being a wife and mother, however, was not terribly interesting to her, and she put both roles behind her when I was 9.  I chalk it off as a Me-Generation thing.

Anyway... I can remember as early as 4 or 5 not telling my mother about an injury because I knew she'd hurt me in the process of attending to it, and knew she wouldn't provide any comfort to offset the pain. It was not an isolated incident, either. I should have gotten stitches on that occasion, and still have the scar to remember it by. Even today I am convinced that the ugly scar is better than the care would have been.

As a consequence of my lack of trust in my parents (my VietNam Vet father was a whole other story), I had trust issues until I entered grief-therapy in my mid-Thirties. Since I know what lasting impressions parenting styles can have on children, I'm determined to create and maintain a sense of security and trust with my son -- even if it means less sleep for now :)

Several times a day, Little Man meets my eyes and smiles this special smile that causes something inside me to flutter. It's a bit like the tearful-wonder feeling I get when my milk lets down. That smile lets me know I'm doing it right, this motherhood thing. Evolution at work -- the maternal instinct is alive and well in me.

This weekend is a just-us weekend, except for a BBQ at a friend's house, and the following weekend M's father and sister arrive for a week-long visit. Fortunately for them, there really isn't much work left to be done on the house, so they'll actually get to enjoy a California vacation with the newest addition to the family. Then a week later it's my step-mother and step-sister. My step-mom is willing to stay for several days, if we want. M seems to be pretty comfortable with her, her nursy-talk about illnesses notwithstanding.