Today is Darwin’s 9-month “birthday.” When Joe came home, he said “So, Darwin has existed for as long as we knew he was going to exist.”
Did I mention Joe had just come back from happy hour? That could have had something to do with it…..
Milwaukee July 20, 2008
So, Joe was really great when I dumped my issues on him about going to Milwaukee. Thanks so much, everyone, for your advice. Writing it for you made it so much easier to tell Joe something coherent, and getting other people’s insights really helped a lot. I was able to articulate to Joe that it wasn’t so much the leaving Darwin, because I’m fine with that, but rather the leaving him in addition to all the other changes going on at the same time. Joe was very smart, and we decided that we’d plan on going to Milwaukee for the party (and the $300 door prizes we could win!), but that if it seemed like Darwin was freaked out (“Where am I?” “Who are these crazy Asian people I’m suddenly living with?” “Where is my room?” “What weird place is this they take me to during the day?” “Who are all these other kids?”), then we’d just not go, and it would be fine. We can cancel our hotel room the day before. So, the plan is to go, unless adjusting to everything new seems hard for Darwin.
I’m really happy that Joe is good with flying by the seat of our pants. Especially since it seems like that’s about 80% of parenting.
Is it just me? July 17, 2008
OK, so I am faced with the mother’s dilemma of Leaving The Baby Overnight For The First Time, and I need you to help me figure out if I’m being one of THOSE moms, or if my concerns really are reasonable.
The background: Joe’s new job is having their summer work outing. In Milwaukee. It is on a Saturday, and Joe would like to go and then spend the night there, leaving Darwin with his parents. The weekend before, we will be at a wedding celebration for the better part of the evening, and the weekend after, I leave for 5 days, sans succubus, for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Oh, and also, the first weekend in August we’re moving to Joe’s parents’ house and starting Darwin in his new daycare (more on THAT sometime later. Eeesh).
My issues (in no particular order, and by no means a comprehensive list — who has that kind of time?): I think my biggest concern is that we’re uprooting Darwin to a new place, new daycare, new space for sleeping, etc., and then leaving him alone. The fact that we’ll be gone for the evening the weekend before is good (he can get used to Joe’s folks taking care of him) and bad (will Joe’s parents get tired of the babysitting thing? Are we just being lazy parents, leaving our child with caregivers every weekend?). I just don’t want to add to Darwin’s confusion and unhappiness in a new situation. Of course, it could be that Darwin will be perfectly happy and adjust like a champ, and this is a moot point. But I just worry. I’m a mother, that’s my job. I also worry that I’m leaving him alone too much — going away the weekend before, and the weekend after. I don’t really worry about him – I know that it won’t be some kind of permanently scarring thing where he has abandonment issues because I went away 3 weekends in a row once when he was 9 months old. I worry more about me. I will miss him! Strangely, I have no stress about leaving him for 5 days to go to Canada, but somehow overnight to Milwaukee is harder. I’ve had a lot more time to plan the Canada trip (and it is Canada, no Milwaukee), and I’m really excited to go to Canada. But this overnight is really stressing me out — maybe because neither Joe nor I will be there.
So, am I being a totally worrywart to worry about so much change all at once for him? I suppose I should get used to second guessing myself even more than usual, but this one is the first really hard decision for me. What do YOU think?
Why… July 17, 2008
…did I not see this article BEFORE registering for baby showers lo those many months ago?
http://www.cracked.com/article_16475_20-baby-products-great-traumatizing-infants.html
Reality Bites July 12, 2008
Just in the last week or so, I’ve seen a few articles that have made me realize how little people talk about the “dark” side of having kids. The side where both you and your spouse are sleep deprived, and one of you forgot to put the clothes in the dryer and now they’re moldy, and the other needs to wear those pants today for work. Or something. Totally hypothetical. There are so many things nobody tells you about parenting.
And, helpfully, the first article is called “The 8 Things No One Tells You About Being a Mom” (thanks for sending, Ann!). It lists things like “There’s no privacy” (citing a woman whose child saw her tampon string while she was peeing and said “mom, I think you sat in some gum”), and “Your baby will eventually insult you.” It does give you silver linings for everything, so you can feel lots better about being insulted by the fruit of your loins (the silver lining: “Repeated verbal stabs make you immune to them.” Thanks. I didn’t get nearly enough of that in high school).
The next article I read wasn’t quite so cheery — it’s an article in Newsweek about a study that shows that (gasp) having children does not automatically make you happy. As a matter of fact, it often makes you rather the opposite: “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” to quote one of the study conductors. It goes against everything we’re taught to believe — that children make life worth living, that once you hold them for the first time, you’ll realize how empty your life was up to that point, etc. The people in charge of the study received hate mail, even. The study doesn’t say that having kids automatically makes you miserable, but it just says it doesn’t automatically make you happy. Honestly, I am just getting to the point where I am not lying when people ask “But it’s all worth it, right?” I mean, you can’t very well say “No, not really. I’d rather be on a Paris vacation,” can you? But, the article does have a semi-silver lining — after telling you that people with children report lower marital satisfaction for at least a year, and listing how much it costs to raise a child to 18 (not counting college), the author does state that studies who parents have a greater sense of purpose that those without kids, and that there are other rewarding aspects “impossible to quantify.” And indeed there are (or were, until a study quantified them), as shown in this article, that discusses a study detailing how a baby’s smile and laughter trigger reward centers in the brain — the same reward centers triggered in drug addiction, actually. But sad or neutral faces don’t have the same relative negative effect. And I believe it. Baby giggles are the best. JoeKim and I have decided that if we need to conjure a patronus, we have to imagine a big Darwin giggle. That’s our happiest thought.
The last article, from Streetwise, actually, is a much much bleaker article — an interview with a woman who wants to raise awareness of postpartum psychosis. Not just the baby blues, or even depression, but psychosis. The moms you hear about who drown their babies, or jump off buildings. Her daughter killed herself because of postpartum psychosis, and so now she wants to make sure that people know about it and talk about it.
It’s amazing how much our society doesn’t let us talk about the bad things about parenting. Not the eye-rolling complaining about lack of sleep, but the days when you wish you had a do-over and had gotten your birth control prescription refilled. Maybe it’s evolution somehow, so people keep having kids. But for some reason, people seem to think (myself included) that you can’t complain — really complain — about parenting and still love your kids. Of course you can. You can complain about your husband and still love him. You can complain about your car and still not trade it in. You can complain about The Real Housewives of Orange County and still never miss an episode. But not kids. That has to be unambiguously wonderful.
And honestly, it does get better and better (or do my standards get lower and lower?). I had a day off today and spent it all with the Peanut, and had such a great time just crawling around on the ground, seeing what makes him giggle, listening to him babble. I guess those are the things that can’t be quantified.
But it will also be really nice to go to the Richard Cheese concert at the House of Blues tomorrow.
A fun activity for the holiday weekend July 3, 2008
If you’re looking for something to do at one of the BBQs you attend this weekend, make sure you sit next to the cooler full of ice and beer, and see what the pain of childbirth is like. Check out this blog entry on a great book blog for the full description.
