I totally stole the idea for this post

from Christy.

When I have post ideas but not the time or inclination to write a whole post, I will jot a note and save it as a draft with some pithy title. Later it is not always entirely clear to me what I was talking about so these potential gems just go, um, I don’t know, uncut? Even if I can guess my point, oftentimes I just don’t care about that topic anymore. In the interest of clearing out my draft folder, here some are:

Title: My favorite chicken
Text:

Title: Antarctica is not one of the states
Text: Also, there are only 50 states. Hawaii, yes, is one of them. No, Alaska is not part of Canada. Mexico is not in the southern hemisphere, sorry. [FYI I guess?]

Title: It sucks to be a penguin [I was really affected by the March of the Penguins movie]

Title: AWWW
Text:

Title: Sick as a cat
[no text, but I am going to assume it was to be about cat vomit]

Title: Snack station
[God, this one is so old. Back when Baby was just starting to walk, she liked to take snacks at a step stool in the kitchen. Well she sometimes still does it. BORING.]

Title: Bad dog
[no text--I think this might have been intended to be about the time one of our dogs kind of snapped in Baby's direction. That sucked.]

Title: Preposition proposition
Text: We have been working on prepositional phrases. Under the basket! In the box! Out of the tunnel! Over your head! [still true]

Title: Veto power
Text: My father [What on earth?]

Title: The language of word verifications [I've seen some dirty things]

Title: Please try not to pass out from jealousy [the backyard???]

Title: I bite my nails for the good of the family
Text: It’s true! [I think because otherwise I injure them? But it's not true now. I stopped biting altogether suddenly with no cause. Still have to keep them cut.]

Title: I wasn’t a virgin pumper
[This was going to be about the time when I was working at a farm and this goat had triplets and the mama goat didn't want to feed one of the kids so I milked other goats and fed that third goat milk in a bottle. Not a bad story but also not all that long.]

Title: Talar du svenska?
Text: Last week in class I taught a lesson in Swedish.
[This is fully a year old. I can't imagine what interesting I could have said about this. Hence the unfinished draft.]

Title: Everything is a pumping metaphor
[Back when I was exclusively pumping, I would relate a lot of things to pumping. Can't get the job you want? It's like not being able to make enough milk. And etcetera.]

Title: Creams for baby
[Since birth: anti-yeast, estrogen, anti-eczema, triple ointment, and many more; wish I'd posted about it so I would remember them all]

Title: It’s like a playdate that I don’t attend
[Baby's in-home day care experience--she plays with other one-year-old girls, runs around, etc.]

There are more but I will spare you. Do you have drafts sitting around?

Therapy

I’ve had a lot of therapy and I don’t think any of it really has anything to do with my current level of happiness, which is high. If there were coping tools it gave me , or realizations that altered my worldview, or subconscious changes that came about as a result, I don’t know what they might be. No, I think it’s all circumstance. These days I have exactly what I want (by this I mostly mean a baby), I am doing what I like (largely whatever I want), and I am getting lots of fresh air, sunlight, exercise, socialization, and healthy food. Simple as that.

I don’t mean to minimize depression; it was very defeating and self-perpetuating for me and I know how debilitating and painful it can be. I am simply not convinced that, for me, living more healthily wouldn’t have been just as good a solution as therapy and medication, if someone could have gotten me to do it at the time.

I first visited a therapist shortly after my parents divorced, when I was five. I remember it quite well. The woman, who was affiliated with my mother’s church, became excessively concerned when I told her that one of the many fun things I enjoyed doing with my father was playing horsie (you know, he would get on all fours, I would ride on top–I do the exact same thing these days with Baby; it’s all fun and games). A sensitive child, it was clear to me that she was getting the wrong idea, though I couldn’t conceptualize exactly what she was thinking, and I became quite anxious about talking to her. My mother didn’t make me go back.

When I was in college I was quite depressed (I think all it was was my super-dark room and my melodramatic long-distance relationship with my now-husband) and ended up in talk therapy twice a week. What we talked about, beyond my complaints about my mother, I can’t recall at all. Really, I didn’t have a lot going on at the time. I think once when my husband bought the house we live in now we talked about real estate in New England as compared to the Southeast. There was some more serious stuff I certainly could have benefited from airing out, but I never felt comfortable enough, or motivated enough, to do so. My main recollections revolve around the time I saw my therapist at the mall with her two small kids. At our next session, I asked her her children’s ages, just being friendly, really, and she wouldn’t tell me, wanting, instead, to know how her having children made me feel. I quit therapy shortly after that.

Finally, when I was going through my several years of infertility, I entered therapy again. I knew something like nine pregnant people, including many at work, notably two supervisors in succession, and was just miserable at my job and had developed some obsessions about making sure stoves were off and curlers unplugged, things like that (if I couldn’t control my ovulation, then by golly, I was going to control something). I started seeing a very smart woman who turned out to be a lesbian who repeatedly expressed her confusion about why people want children, and kept trying to talk me out of it, telling me about studies that showed how marital satisfaction decreased greatly upon procreation. Still, we had a good rapport, and we spent a huge amount of time talking about my tortured girl-crush on my then-supervisor, and she encouraged me to apply to grad school, which led to all kinds of good things for me. Eventually I visited a psychiatrist who prescribed an anti-anxiety medication which I took, with great results, until I found out I was pregnant a few months into grad school, at which point I quit the medicine and the therapy both.

Once while pregnant, and shortly after Baby’s birth, I did go visit the psychiatrist, who specialized in “women’s issues,” but it wasn’t because I felt like I needed it; I just felt like I should, to be on the safe side. And I visited my anti-baby therapist when Baby was six weeks old, bringing her along, struggling to feed her by various methods during the whole visit, unable to converse really at all. Given my nerve-wracking pregnancy, scary birth, miserable breastfeeding, and agonizing cold-turkey weaning experiences, combined with my history of depression and anxiety, I kept expecting to have some serious post-partum problems in that area, but no. Maybe all that therapy did fix me up, possibly getting treatment for my PCOS helped thus leveling out some crazy-making hormones, or the medication rewired something, or, and this what I think, my life and my psyche are finally in harmony. I think that was my problem all along.

Reproductive skill

This morning my best friend D. gave birth to a healthy baby boy who weighed nine pounds. Labor and delivery took less than two hours from when her water broke, with no time for the planned-for epidural. They are both doing fine and the infant is nursing well.

+++

Yesterday my sister-in-law in Sweden announced her first pregnancy. They’d been trying for a month or two. She missed her period two days ago, so of course it was high time she made sure everyone knows. Anyway, she had told me last summer she was planning on having her first baby when we had our second, though I told her that kind of organization is difficult to orchestrate. Perhaps she got tired of waiting for me (we’re not even trying). When I was pregnant, and told her our baby name ideas, she insisted we relinquish the boy one as she wanted it. If it’s a boy, I bet she won’t even use it.

+++

I’m sounding a little bitter. Really I’m not. While I am happy for these people, yes, extremely, I can’t help but be struck, though: so many other people seem so much better at reproduction than I am. Well, good for them! It’s just as well somebody is! Congratulations.

A trip to the park

We met my friend D and her little boy Z at the park. There was climbing and sliding and swinging–you know, the usual. There were two teenagers canoodling at the top of out of the play structures, lying indolently on the platform and blocking it off from children. Pissed (I just started my period; that’s my excuse) I climbed up there with Baby on my hip and gave them an earful. I said things like “you aren’t between the ages of 2 and 5 at all, and that’s what the sign says this playground is for!” and used the word “inappropriate” an unaccountably large number of times and I think I once paired it with “behavior.” I’m surprised I didn’t conjecture anything about what their mothers would think. After they skadoodled, one little girl told me plaintively, “they were here for an hour!” That’s me, a crazy and apparently quite aged lady who enjoys yelling at innocent teenagers just looking for a shady place to flirt.

This park is also frequented by a chubby, red-haired little boy about eight years old. He always wears black shoes, black pants, a black Batman T-shirt, and, oh yes, a black cape and mask. He talks a lot about bad guys and carefully selects various sticks to pretend they are some kind of weaponry associated with his craft. He would be a lot scarier if he weren’t constantly nibbling on a drooping corner of his mask like a little bunny. My friend’s kid thinks this kid is amazingly awesome (he calls him “The Man”) and follows him around. And of course Baby follows him around, so they formed this little duckling-like parade today while Batman brandished assorted bits of tree detritus and ate his costume.

Next to the park is a library where we later went to get new books and return old ones. As we were walking out, I ran into the woman (with her kids) who was the leader of my local La Leche League back when Baby was a newborn. I said hello, she didn’t recognize me, I didn’t expect her to. I told her it had been a while, I asked her was she still leading, she responded, we bade each other farewell, and that was that. I didn’t feel the need to regale her with tales of all my insane pumping (though if she could have placed me, I’m sure she would have wondered what happened with that) or justify my stopping or anything like that. Refreshing to consider how far I’ve come on that.

And nice to feel like a member of a community–involved, familiar, cantankerous.

Neighborly

At least twice a month the ten-year-old girl who lives next door comes knocking on my door, having somehow been locked out of her house upon her arrival home from school. She uses my phone, some relative zips home and opens the house up for her, and that is that. Sometimes I give her a snack while she waits.

When Baby was very young, these intrusions used to drive me batty (especially if I was pumping), and I spoke with her mother about leaving a key with us (she never brought one over). But they don’t bother me now, especially since we have gotten to be friends with this girl and Baby loves to see her. Invariably when we are out in the front yard reading the mail or doing yardwork she will pop by to play with Baby, and sometimes when we’re in the backyard, too. She once helped me immensely while I was picking up downed branches by keeping Baby busy doing the same with small sticks. Sometimes we’ll chat about topics like the inadvisability of kissing boys. I think she does all this because she wants me to ask her to babysit, but judging from her inability to keep herself from being locked out of her house I don’t think she’s quite responsible enough.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear pounding on my door around three thirty this afternoon. I asked her and the buddy she had with her if she needed to use the phone, but she surprised me by saying no.

“Because I’m wearing pants.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m only supposed to wear skirts.”
“Skirts? It’s cold outside! Why can’t you wear pants?”
“Because I’m a Christian” she said with exasperation, flapping one hand dismissively.

Apparently, her mother doesn’t want her to wear pants (which I see her in all the time, which made this exchange even more confusing) because of their religion (they’re members of some group that spends Saturday night at church and doesn’t celebrate Halloween). After she explained that if she called her mother, her mother would see her wearing pants, which she said she wore for PE (I told her she didn’t have to justify her pants usage to me), I offered her the use of my phone and a skirt. I dug up a size 4T skirt I had gotten secondhand for Baby a few months back, and the skinny little thing managed to put it on.

“Won’t your mother wonder where you got this new skirt?”
“Oh, I’ll just tell her she bought it for me and if she forgot it’s because she’s old.”

And just think–one day Baby will probably lie to me just like that! So much to look forward to. Shit, I hope I don’t have a neighbor like me who helps her, though. But I didn’t want her to get in trouble for wanting to wear pants to PE on a cold day!

What do you think I should have done?

Privacy

Recently, a Real Life friend of mine discovered my blog (hi B!). When I realized this had transpired, I had a little freak out, and then I wondered why. I’m really basically the same on this blog as I am in Real Life; it’s not like I, in actuality, am a 66-year-old ranch hand who likes to skeet shoot and speculate about government conspiracies. Those of you who have met me (hi C!) or talked to me on the phone (hi a different C!) or emailed with me (assorted) and so forth can attest to that. Though I don’t use our names, I do (uh, obviously: see below) post pictures with no compunction, and so haven’t made this blog especially anonymous.

And yet I enjoyed the pleasant division between blogging life and Real Life (why I insist upon capitalizing that phrase I don’t quite know) that I had cultivated. Husband does know I have a blog, but (claims) he doesn’t read it since he’s “sure [I'd] tell him anything important, and besides, it’s not like [I] share my innermost feelings on the internet.” I don’t know about that, but at any rate, no one else knows about it; most notably, my friends are/were ignorant. In fact, I originally went public with this blog in an effort to have an outlet for my endless need, at the time, to ruminate about pumping and breastfeeding issues, so as to reduce the burden of my friends who otherwise kept having to hear about it, so it was explicitly intended to be a separate, supplemental part of my social life. And so it continued until recently.

It’s been a few weeks now since B may or may not have started reading (I know she knows the address and has visited, but I don’t know how much reading she has done, and we haven’t really talked about it yet). Before posting about this development, I gave myself some time to see if my blogging would change in some qualitative or quantitative regard, and it hasn’t. My interest in blogging has not been affected, and I’m glad. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to start telling all my other friends about this space (and I swore B to secrecy as though we were still in the sixth grade). Sometimes a person needs some kind of private life, I suppose. Though I guess it’s rather ironic to think of a public journal as a form of private life. How very modern.

What’s the status of your blog with regard to friends and family readership? How do you feel about it?

Does this child look too skinny to you?

The answer is no, no she doesn’t. She looks perfectly fine.

Unfortunately, Baby’s pediatrician does not agree with you. She wants us to fatten her up significantly. The pediatrician argued at Tuesday’s 18-month well-check that since Baby, at 21.5 lbs., is in the 15th percentile for weight (75th percentile for height), while at 6 months she was in the 50th percentile for weight, that therefore she is not gaining enough (she nonetheless gained one pound and one inch in the last three months, and stayed in the same percentiles from last visit).

I ask you: do 6-month-olds move around as much as toddlers? Why, no. In fact, toddlers are quite active whereas six-month-olds can barely SIT effectively. Particularly mine, who spends hours a day outside throwing balls and dumping sand and rearranging rawhide dog bones and whatnot.

The pediatrician further argued that Baby really needs to drink more formula (she has some issues with regular milk so we spend a huge amount of money on toddler formula). The pediatrician suggested she drink at least 18 ounces a day. Well, doctor, I don’t see how she will drink that much, since she barely took that much when she was eating nothing BUT milk, which I know since I was exclusively pumping and kept obsessive records, but why don’t you talk to Baby and see if you can convince her to drink more? Hm, what? You can’t force toddlers to do anything, like drink more milk than they want? Surprising.

Look, I feed her every 2-3 hours during the day. Usually real meals, too; even snacks are normally more than cereal or fruit. She is offered milk (formula) throughout the day and takes a bottle at bedtime (and on the occasions she wants some in the night); she also drinks water (rather a lot of it on the nights she bathes). Most of her fat intake comes from avocado and dairy and nuts and seeds (i.e. almond butter and tahini) and some oils used in cooking. She eats pretty much any damn thing–e.g. raw spinach and broccoli, bok choy and carrots, sweet potatoes and peppers, lots of beans and lentils, all manner of fruit, any and every cheese, whatever grain we come up with, really, a vast variety of cuisines. People who witness her eating are invariably amazed by her delight in it, the breadth and depth of her gustatory enjoyment.

Here is videographic evidence:

She eats just what we eat, and we are the kind of people who take three types of cookbooks to the grocery store with us to figure out dinners for the next few days and then wander around buttonholing confused stockboys to ask where the soba noodles are. And she eats her fill and when she’s done, she’s done; I don’t argue with the bowl she proffers for me to take to the sink. Often I’ll then bring her subsequent courses until she is clearly uninterested.

Personally, I think she’s fine. Plus, what more could I do? Besides feed her deep fried lard with peanut butter and honey?

Analogous

As you might expect, Husband pees standing up. Not surprisingly, at least I hope, I pee sitting down. I am encouraging Baby to pee sitting down–further, to pee sitting down on the potty. Under the theory that she might be further persuaded to do this if there is more uniformity in the house on this issue of standing versus sitting to pee, I suggested to Husband that he sit to pee and let Baby see him. He refused! Upon further questioning, I was informed that men can also “take hormones to produce breastmilk” but that he’s “not going to do that either,” that indeed, “it’s just not going to happen, so close the bathroom door already.” How many other husbands would know it most apt to get a point across by drawing analogies to medicinally-supported lactation?