30 Years in 30 Seconds

Tags

age, ageing, getting older, life, life story, time, timeline

1 day old

0. Born, squall, learn to move my own body parts.

1. Learn to walk and talk and swim. Realize that the reflection in the sliding glass door is actually how other people see me.

2. Get toilet trained by a visiting aunt. Now, whenever I use the potty I say, “Auntie Helen happy?”

3. Learn to read, which means that I no longer have to pretend to read magazines which fooled no one anyway because I often held them upside down.

4. Attend pre-school. Learn that when someone asks you “how are you, today?” you aren’t actually supposed to respond honestly – just say “fine, thank you”. Learn through teacher’s example that guinea pigs should be fed foods fresh in vitamin C and not left out in the sun for prolonged periods of time.

5. Start kindergarten. When a family friend picks me up at school because my mother was in a car accident, I worry about the safety of my Popple who was in the back seat (said Popple turned up yesterday during a purge of Owl’s closet and I vetoed throwing it away). Come down with chicken pox that same night, because my mother’s day was clearly not difficult enough. Accidentally kill my goldfish, Fred and Frieda, when I fail to alert my mother that their cage is due to be cleaned.

6. Start as a “full day” instead of a “half day” student at my Montessori school. Develop a crush on a boy called Michael who has red hair and spits when he talks. Get a puppy.

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In Which Carol Contemplates Turning 30 And Makes A Desperate Plea For Help

Tags

age, birthdays, cleaning, organization, turning 30

I am nearly thirty years old.

That’s WEIRD.

30 has never been a scary age for me. 20 freaked me out, because I always thought of myself as child-like and 20 was a decidedly ADULT age. But once I had hit that ominous level of adulthood, 30 just seemed like a minor transition.

It helps that I feel like my life is somewhat on track. At this age I hoped to be married with a child, and I am. I hoped to be a dog trainer, and I have not only trained service dogs, but have just started my OWN DOG TRAINING BUSINESS.

But I’m still leaving my 20s, and there are some things I haven’t done.

Some people make a “30 things to do before 30” list. I didn’t do that, mostly because I:

a) couldn’t think of 30 things

b) never got around to it

c) knew that I wouldn’t be able to achieve them, anyway

I would have included items such as “become a published author” and “find a hair style that doesn’t make me look fat or like I have no ears” and it’s hard to achieve the near-impossible within a limited time frame.

So then I thought I’d do a “30 posts til 30” thing, where I reflect on various aspects of my twenties, getting older, etc… but that would have had to start on Dec 30th.

But I DID make posts on those days, so maybe it still counts?

Anyway, today is a combination of New Year’s Resolution/Nearly 30 post.

I decided what I wanted for my 30th birthday. 

A CLEAN HOUSE.

And I don’t mean just a newly-scrubbed house. We’ve done that before. It just gets dirty again.

Our big problem is that we have a small house and a lot of STUFF. We also have very few ways of organizing that stuff. Hence our entire house has basically turned into a disorganized heap, with tunnels cut through it for us to be able to pass from one mess to another.

I may have some slight hoarding tendencies.

I also have difficulty with making somewhere LOOK clean. I understand the concept of CLEANING. I rub it until the dirt comes off. I can CLEAN.

But I can’t seem to make things LOOK clean.

Meanwhile, there are some people who walk into a room, rearrange a few things, and presto! The place looks immaculate. I watch and gape and am like “SHOW ME YOUR SECRETS.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a teachable skill. When I ask people how they did their magic they just say things like “I moved some stuff”. I posted the question on message boards and got useless answers like “make it part of your routine to do certain things daily”.

So the only answer I can think of is to just get rid of the stuff that’s making my place messy.

Really, what I need are shelves and storage containers (we have limited floor space but a lot of unused wall space and a big storage area under the stairs), but we’re tapped out for money right now. My work has now cut me down to 17 hours a week, which doesn’t even really cover daycare. I’m the ONLY one with cut hours, too.

That’s so good for my self esteem.

ANYHOO,

I need to declutter and organize.

What better time to purge my life of old things but the time before my transition to age 30? Like a butterfly crawling from a cocoon I will shed the detritus of my 20s and emerge as a totally new and tidy self.

Or something.

The only thing is that this is a completely impossible and overwhelming task to contemplate, so I will have to enlist some help from friends.

I hope there’s somewhere out there who wants to go through my old clothes with me. Preferably one of those magic poof-it’s-clean folk.

If any of you have organization tips, now would be a great time to share them. 

Did I Miss Something?

Tags

abnormal, age, alertness, babies, comparisons, development, mothers, normal, parenthood

Every now and then someone says something to me about young babies that  goes right over my head.

For example, when Babby was small(er) they would give me strange assurances that I did not understand.

just under two weeks old

“Don’t worry, it gets much better when they get older. They don’t spend so much time unconscious and they get much more interactive!”

…More?

“Oh, flying with them this young is easy, because they still love their sleep!”

…They do?

 

“You can cut his nails while he is sleeping.”

…But then he wouldn’t be sleeping any more…

I had no idea what they were talking about. Babby has always fought going into that good night with all the rage of Dylan Thomas and spent all of his waking hours demanding constant interaction.

Then I saw a baby at a restaurant.

babby at 12 weeks old

Over Christmas, I left Babby with my mother and went to dinner with some friends.

A lady at the restaurant had a tiny baby girl.

She still had that floppy, wobbly, curvy look that new babies have, and her flimsy neck was carefully supported by her admirers as they passed her around.

She mostly slept or squinted into the middle distance and was about as interactive as a potato.

I felt like an experienced women at that moment.  This lady had just entered the wonderful and exhausting world of motherhood, with her newborn and I felt worldy by comparison with my ancient twelve week old, who was so insistent on standing all the time that you couldn’t fold him, let alone cuddle him floppily.

“How old is she?” I asked the proud new mother indulgently.

“Nine weeks,” the woman responded with a glowing smile.

…

…?

…?!!

Babby at nine weeks old.

I just managed to prevent the look of shock from spreading over my features.

Nine weeks? NINE EFFING WEEKS? She was only three weeks younger than Babby was at the time.

This baby, at nine weeks, did not remotely resemble my baby at that age.

That was when the comments of strangers and the perplexing references made by other parents came rushing in at me, and this time they carried a different meaning of what “normal” might mean.

It’s such a flood of mixed maternal emotions when one surreptitiously compares one’s own baby to someone else’s. Everyone secretly wants to believe their baby is advanced, smart, more special than other people’s babies. But at the same time, no one wants to feel that their baby isn’t “normal”

…and there’s a fine line between “good different” and “BAD different”.

Looking at that dozy, uninterested, spineless nine week old, I found a little senseless pride that my own baby was so much more advanced (and I felt heartily ashamed for feeling proud of something so meaningless) but there was another emotion there, too:

I felt cheated.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore my baby. I miss him whenever he isn’t in my arms. I love his big smiles, and I am proud of huge eyes, and of his sturdy little legs, and his indomitable spirit.

But.

I feel like I missed a whole stage of babyhood – one where two month old babies are still floppy lovebugs who get passively passed around in public and can even go to a restaurant and sleep through the meal.

It’s better now. He can go to a restaurant without screaming. He sits and looks all around and grabs at the forks drops Sophie on the ground and looks to see where she went and then tries to eat the napkins.

But that feeling of envy keeps coming back, sometimes when I least expect it.

For the last three weeks, I have attended a “Baby Bonding Group” at the Women’s hospital where my shrink is. A girl there had a 10 week old. Guess what she was complaining about?

“I feel like I never get to spend time with my daughter. She’s only awake for a certain amount of time each day, and then everyone passes her around and when she comes back to me, she’s asleep again.”

…She is?

There was that feeling again. The feeling of jealousy. Of confusion. Of realizing that a mother with a baby younger than mine was experiencing things I had never experienced. Sure, there are clearly downsides to her experience. But it seems like hers is more… usual. More normal.

A friend of mine has a newborn baby, and has posted adorable pictures of him slumped over and sleeping in everyone’s arms, curled up like a sweet little bug and people were like “I love that stage!”

…and I realized that I never really had that. I tried to take pictures of him being all cute and curled up in my arms. But they never looked right.

10 days old

He was always holding himself stiff, and straight. The legs always dangled down, often stiffened like tent poles.

The cute Anne Geddes style pictures other people get of their baby adorable curled on a furry rug in the fetal position, or snuggled into their mother’s chest in a bug-like ball or cupped peacefully in loving parental hands… just never happened for me.

It’s not that he didn’t want to be held. He insisted on it. But he has always seemed to be in a battle. A war against sleep, against the environment, against his own body. Even when he slept, it was stretched out, or tightly swaddled.

Ever since he was born – even now – the first thing anyone says about my baby is

“Look at those eyes! He’s very alert for his age!”

Seriously. Every. Time. I was out with him yesterday. Three people told me that he is very alert.

4 weeks old and still damn well alert

I’m sure alert is good. I’m glad I have an alert baby.

“Has it occurred to you that he’s just very, very bright?” asked the leader of the post partum group when he was three months old. Sure, it has. Babby’s father is a genius. I’m sure my baby is bright. But my mother in law says that PH slept great as a baby, so there goes that theory.

While everyone else’s babies (geniuses included) were curled up all cute and sleepy, mine was alert. Alert and screaming, or alert and interactive, but always alert. I have sleep logs to prove it.

I’m happy. I’m happy with my son. But when I see small babies doing things mine never did, and I hear parents talking about things I never experienced, I feel a little sad, too.

It makes me wonder if I did something wrong. People in non-Western cultures have never heard of colic, and consider it strange for a baby to cry for more than a minute or so at a time.

WHY AREN'T YOU A BETTER MOMMY TO ME??

I carried my baby, I wore my baby (more so after my mother left) and  I breast fed him on demand. But still he was always awake, always screaming. Could I have done something differently?

Is my baby born different or was I not satisfying some inner need of his biology?

I wonder… did I mess up my chance?

Youth vs Stability: Let the Battle Begin

Tags

age, children, fertility, finances, pregnancy, youth

The first blog I ever started reading was A Little Pregnant back in 2004. A friend sent me the link and I found the blog additively hilarious and for some reason, it hit me close to home.

I don’t know why I read infertility blogs, or why I identify with people who are infertile. For some reason, on some level, I counted myself as possibly being among them.

All my life, growing up, my mother would apologize to me that she couldn’t give me brothers and sisters. My birth date is a good eight years after my parents’ wedding day, and while I know they didn’t start trying right away, they did tell me that they had to seek professional help to conceive me. My mother had me the day before she turned 33, and she never produced another child. I know, without ever being explicitly told, that my mother meant to have multiple children. She didn’t think it was healthy for me to grow up without siblings.

They’ve never told me why they had trouble conceiving me. Was it my Dad? My Mum? All I know is, I was concerned that I might have fertility issues too. I grew up knowing that some babies have to be really worked for.

Today, Julie made a post about “Preservation IVF”.

Essentially, some cock-sure 30 year old has decided to have IVF and store the embryos so that she can have kids whenever she wants in the future, instead of feeling the time crunch. First of all, I don’t understand – producing eggs is not the only aspect of pregnancy. You have to  be able to carry those embryos. You can’t stick ’em in a 50 year old and expect them to implant. Menopause is still a barrier, frozen babies or no.

But even if she could do that successfully, is it wise? It made me think of a rant I heard when I announced my pregnancy at work.

“I’m so glad you’re having kids young!” burbled a permanently youthful volunteer who doesn’t seem old enough to be a grandmother already. “I really don’t like all these people who wait until they’re forty to have kids. Then they discover that they can’t get pregnant any more, they panic, adopt, and then they find out that they are so set in their ways that they don’t like parenting. The kids exhaust them and disrupt their lives. The generation gap is so wide that it gets in the way of having fun.  You need to have kids when you’re young, and flexible. There’s a reason why women are fertile at 20, and not 40.”

I know she was thinking of some of my coworkers, who are in their forties and adopted their children after battles with infertility. While they love their kids, they don’t seem to enjoy their company. One told me that she dreads Friday and looks forward to Monday, when the kids are in school. It made me sad to hear that. I remember one day when I was little, there was a snow day and my mother and I danced with joy at getting to spend an unexpected day off together. That’s how it should be.

Maybe this volunteer had a point.

I know that I’ll find my kids exhausting at times, and that there will be moments when I will rejoice in being free of them for a bit. But I certainly can’t imagine that waiting until I am older would make things easier in that department. I won’t have more energy, more patience, or more flexibility when I am forty. Then again, maybe some people just enjoy their children more, and age has nothing to do with it.

Is it smart to hold off having kids, or are women waiting too long? This doctor thinks we are. He says that women need to be convinced that earlier is better. If you do have an actual medical condition like PCOS or endometriosis that reduces your fertility, starting young gives you that many more rounds of IVF. If you are healthy and fertile, and assume that this gives you the gift of time, you may discover one day that the time is gone.

Then again, we’ve been told that you should wait for your career to be well established, your finances to be stable. Babies are expensive, even in Canada where medical care is free. Nor do I like it when I see people who have children thoughtlessly, without realizing how much their lives will change or how much effort is going to be involved. That’s sad, too.

Is there a balance between job/money and youth/energy? Where do we find that balance?

Are babies being over thought, or is financial stability worth the risk of infertility?