Karma Is Trying to Help

My mother-in-law has an almost pat response whenever I marvel at life with Fynnie, "That's why you have to have more kids, otherwise you just don't know."

She could not be more correct.

As a mother of one, I felt the weight of my lack of knowledge.

Adding Mad to the mix was ridiculously easy. Everyone should have their second kid 15 years after the first and have her be independent, a great sleeper, happy and well ahead of the curve on milestones.

But you know what a kid like Madelyn does to a mom like me? Makes me think I know more than I do. Turns me into an asshole when people ask my opinion on things like sleep training.

"Best thing we ever did. You just have to be consistent. Pick something that matches your parenting style and stick with it. We did. By choosing the Sears method over Ferber, we picked a good match for us. And us sticking with it led to Mad successfully being sleep trained before the first night was over. And her naps were instantly resolved the next day, too! Just pick the right method. Stick with it!"

Yeah. Fynnie will be three years old in one month and two days. I have been getting mostly solid nights of sleep for about a year now. When she was several months old (I have no clue exactly how old, but the first six months of her life I recall occurring mostly at night), I had to hunt down some poor woman's blog and apologize for being such an asshat when she was looking for help getting her son to sleep.

I can give you an example for almost every single major milestone that I somehow managed to take credit for when Mad hit them early.

"Probably that great, mostly organic, minimally processed diet I maintain during pregnancy. I don't make those jelly babies who are all floppy at birth."

To which Fynnie replied, "Oh, re-he-heally? Check this out: Not only am I not going to be holding my head up and trying to look around at birth, I'm going to have a hard time turning my head at all. We'll practically live at the chiropractor my first four months. And that "look, she's practicing standing!" shit you did with my sister and brother? Yeah, I'm not having that. Although I will roll over three times at just a few weeks old, do not hold your breath for it happening again for months, like half a year or more. I will be the last baby among your circle of August 2010 babies to roll all the way, scoot, crawl and walk. Here's a pin for your ego. It's starting to look infected."

Do you remember a year ago when I thought potty training was going to be so easy? And then Fynnie didn't poop willingly for months. The girl is here to teach me, I tell ya!

A couple weeks ago we were at a party at Kidspace for the girls' friends. Part of the time the girls were splashing in a little pond in swimsuits. Fynnie clearly needed to go, but was just as clearly anxious about using the "weshtwoom." Faced with the choice of a diaper (and no more water play) or a trip to the restroom, she opted for the potty. Following a monumental success, she announced, "I've got to tell Daddy I got this all under control." And that was the end of diapers during the day. The following night she gave them up at night, too.

I am secretly waiting for the urine-soaked shoe to drop.

She is becoming accustomed to me calling her such a strange little bird, although she laughs whenever she hears it.

One of the things that has always left me in awe with Madelyn is the way she knows exactly who she is, what she needs or wants and what's happening around her. Mad, at five can give you at least five options for getting to Grandma and Papa's house almost 50 miles away. Her way of knowing who she is has a familiarity to it that makes it easy for me to understand. She is not like me as a child or young adult, but make no mistake, she is like me.

Fynnie has her own sense of self. It is no less well defined. I just don't understand her like I do Mad. I adore her. I'm grateful for her. But where the hell did she come from?

I, the woman who could live in jeans and long ponytails, have a daughter who has chosen her own short hairstyles for several months now. Fynnie is currently sporting a pixie. She chose this photo of Anne Hathaway and then had to wait almost two full weeks because I got sick days before we went to get her haircut.

My friend who cuts her hair expressed reservations about such a short style and, when we arrived for the cut, offered up her own photo of a cute woman with slightly longer hair. Fynnie saw it and immediately began shaking her head and frowning.

"No. I want the picture I already choosed from your comcuter."

Nothing could make her happier than not having hair touch her face.

I am off for most of the summer. It occurred to me a few weeks before my year ended that I have spent the past two summers just trying to catch up on sleep. This year I have a calendar and have scheduled adventures out of the house for a couple days each week. Thursdays are reserved for the farmer's market and a trip to the local used book store, where the girls can pick up a book for fifty cents to a dollar.

Madelyn's selections have included a book on potty training (she is a very supportive big sister who takes her role seriously) and a Bob the Builder Christmas story.

Fynnie's first book was a teen mystery. Girlfriend isn't backing down. Here's what she chose when we went yesterday.

We read a few chapters this morning. Shoot me now.

So here's what I think: Having one child only taught me what I didn't know. Having two made me think I knew more, when I really had no clue. Having three has brought me back round to realizing, with absolute clarity, that I do not know a damn thing. It's a land of strange, beautiful birds, but it's where I belong.

Mother Letter Project

I just learned of this project through one of the commenters on Lady with a View (yeah, it makes me feel kind of like a lurker, but now that it's out in the open, I feel a little less dirty). I'm submitting my own letter to the site, but I'm also putting it here. Take a moment and check it out. If you're a mom and you contribute a letter, I'd love to read it, too.

Dear Mother,

I don’t know anything about you, but in my mind, you are just starting out on your journey into motherhood. This fits well for me because I am just starting out again on my journey into motherhood. So I will sit here and reflect on what I've learned and what I wish I’d known more than 15 years ago when I became a mom.

The first thing I wish I’d known was that you have to choose an amazing person to be the father of your baby, or babies, as the case may be. My first husband was not amazing and we did not share a great love. He and I got along well enough… until we didn’t. Halfway through my pregnancy, I realized what a poor choice I had made. Understanding I made the decision, nobody forced me into marriage or pregnancy, I never really blamed him for the hard times I later had, raising a son alone. Not being burdened with those feelings was just about the only gift I had to offer myself at the time.

I have since remarried, to a man I recognized early on as the person I should have been waiting for all those years. He and I have an infant daughter. She is, at nearly eight months old, already older than my son was when I started making plans for going home to my mom’s. Unlike my son at this age, she has never ridden in the backseat of a police car to a women’s shelter. She is surrounded by love.

The second thing I wish I’d been able to grasp the importance of and to do is finding other moms who have children around the same age. Oh, I had friends, but not very many and none who were close, geographically. Having friends to share the journey, the laughter and the tears, could have helped me to be a better mother to my son. Once I was back home, I had friends whose children were all older and not so interested in a “baby” to play with. The neighborhood kids (also older) really just wanted to play with his abundance of toys, so I eventually shooed them all away. I see the effect of these choices in his difficulty making and keeping friends.

During my pregnancy with my daughter, I tried feebly to connect with other moms in my Lamaze class. It didn’t pan out because we were all too shy, and I was older than everybody there except my husband and one other dad. But when a new mommy group came around, I joined. Two of my Lamaze class “pals” were there. We still see each other at least monthly, and sometimes we’re joined by other moms from that group, as well as some of our personal "new mommy" friends. Having a mommy community means having someone to turn to for advice or reassurance (my husband is fabulous, but if he just spent the same long night trying to soothe our daughter, he probably doesn't have any more answers than I do). It means sometimes being able to share what has worked and to tell someone else that everything will be okay. And, while it’s too soon to tell if any of the babies will be lifelong friends, they have that chance. For now they are friends from life.
The third thing I wish I’d been able to do better for my son is to become really informed. Sure, I read a few books and took a prepared childbirth class, but the class was so large it was hard to get any answers. Plus, my life was so hectic it was hard to focus. The class was seven or eight weeks long; my husband attended three of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to get into an argument with the Executive Officer of his ship more, apparently, so I spent a couple of very pregnant months home alone while he was basically grounded to the ship. (Feel free to refer back to the first thing I wish I’d known if you’d like.) With my latest pregnancy, I signed up for a couple of different email services that showed the baby’s progress and development. Many similar services are available for the first year, too. I offered to retake Lamaze “for my husband’s sake.” Being in a room with only seven or eight couples and an experienced and knowledgeable instructor – who taught to the dads as much as she taught to the moms – made a huge difference in how my labor and delivery went the second time. Reading those weekly emails, along with the development and parenting books I prefer, has given me a sense of how wide the range of normal is, and where we fit in relation to it.


Item number four on this list of choices and opportunities is all about routines. Maybe it’s because I had my son when I was practically a wee babe myself (age 22), but I didn’t understand the parents and grandparents I’d met who seemed to know all too quickly what the likes, dislikes, needs, wants and personalities of their little babies were. It struck me as the worst kind of know-it-all behavior, pigeon-holing a baby like that, and I avoided it completely. The upside? I wasn’t a know-it-all. The downside? Well, I didn’t know what I needed to know. When does he need to sleep? When does he need to eat? What time should he go to bed? How is he going to learn to get himself to sleep? Which stuffed animal or toy is his favorite? What does he like to do? After floating through his first year or two, I eventually came up with answers for most of those questions, but at 15 years old, he still has a very difficult time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.

On the flip side, every night, my husband, son and I devote about three hours to our little girl’s bedtime routine. Even when someone in our family is upset with someone else, we put it aside until we finish her night with family story time. My husband and I agonized over how and when we’d teach her to fall asleep on her own. Once we found a method that closely resembled our parenting style, it was pretty easy to do. And when we did help her learn to fall asleep on her own, we also found that she napped better – twice a day for up to two hours at a time, instead of 5-10 minutes if I dared to put her down at all. On the weekends, errands and visits are scheduled around her naps. It turns out that knowing things about your child is a doorway to honoring their needs and who they are as a person. I wish I had known that for my son.

Here’s a little thing I learned just before my daughter was born: Babies reflect their parents’ faces. Infants react to smiles and frowns and deadpan expressions. I always made sure I wasn’t scowling at my son during the falling apart days of my marriage. I also always said about him, “He wasn’t a happy baby, but he wasn’t unhappy, either. He was okay.” I spent the first two weeks of my daughter's life remembering to smile, even though I was distraught that she had to start out in the NICU; even though I was exhausted; even though I was struggling to manage my son; even though, even though, even though. My daughter is the happiest baby. Oh, she’s like me in her need to get things dealt with immediately, but once the problem is resolved, it’s behind her. Sometimes she will try to smile while she’s crying. Last night she laughed through her little bitty, tired tears just because I came closer.

And the last thing that I wish I’d known? The importance of making a parenting plan. Oh, it’s not that I was just winging it, willy-nilly style for my son. But the extent of my plan, had I written it down then, probably would have been “don’t do what Mom did… and when he acts up, deal with it immediately, unlike those annoying parents I see at McDonald’s.” I’d say that, in general, I did accomplish that. Great.

Remember that new mommy group that I joined? One of the jobs we were given was to identify and write down our mission statement for raising our children. Most of the moms wrote beautiful, well thought out letters to their sons or daughters. My husband and I collaborated on ours after ruminating about it during the five weeks between the assignment being given and the date it was due. (Read: I told him about it after the first class. We talked about it once or twice over the next five weeks. On a humid early summer morning, on my way to the last class, while driving from flower shop to flower shop to find just the right plant for the instructor, I frantically called my husband’s cell phone until he picked up and we talked about what to put down on paper. At red lights, I wrote my own shorthand version of whatever he said. In the parking lot, 10 minutes before class started, I cleaned it up and rewrote it.)

*Ours
*was
*a
*bulleted
*list.

It’s not as beautiful sounding as some of the other mom’s. One of my friends just took that same class and her letter made me cry. Last weekend we ran into the instructor and her husband, and she told him about my friend, "This is the mom who will always be the familiar face that reminds her son of home." All the same, in reading and re-reading our plan, it’s a good one. It says what we mean to do. I carry it with me wherever I go. I should have it memorized by now, but more importantly, I have it. We have it.

As I see the differences between what my son experienced and what my daughter’s life is like, I feel sorrow for my son. He is just as good and important and lovable a person as she is. She is going to know her place and her worth in this world. I am still working to help my son find his place.

So it's pretty simple really (ha!). All you have to do is choose the right father, find your place in a mommy community, educate yourself, accept and honor his or her routines and other needs, smile and know what you want the outcome to be for your child. I hope that these (to me) monumental lessons are valuable to you. It’s hard to say how much a person can learn from being told versus experiencing something. All the same, I wish someone had told me these things back when I was starting out.

Warmest regards,

Shan :+)

Mother Love

My relationship with motherhood is ever-changing. When I was newly legal I thought that a large family was definitely the way to go. Maybe this is understandable since I grew up living with three siblings (plus two more who lived elsewhere). Maybe it's not since I remember feeling stifled and worn out, especially when a lot of people had been around. Also, unless I'm at a club or concert (which happens less than annually), I much prefer quiet to loud and small to large when it comes to groups. These facts and my memories of childbirth helped me rethink my position. I have been a mother to one for nine and a half years. 

Yeah, sometimes I've thought about having more, but there have always been reasons not to do it. Getting divorced and taking several years off to lick my wounds and tend to my very young son were a couple. Dating freaks and psychos was interesting, but did not make me willing to procreate. Having a son with emotional and behavioral problems has also mellowed that desire. Although I have learned enough about my ex-husband to understand how his genetics may have been a factor, I also know that my own family has some interesting codes to share. And, as if all that's not enough, being a family of two is really hard on both of us and I never want to put another person through my single parenting, especially because of another error in judgment!

Nonetheless, every once in awhile I get the baby tingles. You know that feeling? I try to ignore it, mostly. Then somebody mentions that they love babies, the way they smell. I start thinking about that soft, powdery scent and the feel of a baby's skin. The sound of a baby crawling around in a diaper. The sounds a baby makes when it's nursing, sleeping, exploring, learning. The weight and the warmth of that baby. The look in the eyes that seems impossibly beyond the ken of a child that young. Ahh, baby tingles. I battle them with heavy doses of reality and logic, and that's usually enough to make them go away for a time. But lately I find them fighting back. The baby tingles' weapon of choice? Ticking clock - what else?

Who would have believed I'd be hearing that? Or caring if I did? There are times when I'm completely certain that I wouldn't want and couldn't handle another child. I still have that, mostly. Behind it there is ticking. And a voice saying, "You're going to be 32 soon. When are you going to have that child? Maybe a daughter? How about another son? You were never going to just have one child. When? Your clock... it's ticking!"

One of the major factors in not letting the baby tingles take over has been the lack of a viable partner - not because the guy said he couldn't make babies (never, never believe that one). But for almost three years (how it does go by) I have been dating a really cool guy. Perfect? Hardly. Funny, caring? Absolutely. Responsible? In his own way (makes you go Hmm, huh?). Patient with my son? Often more so than I am. Good father material? Maybe. Ready? How do you figure something like that out?

I can't even decide that about myself.