In Which My Birthdaycation Is Somewhat Interrupted By Motherhood

Tags

birthdays, motherhood, mothers, parenthood

My mother is down visiting for our birthdays (I was born the day before her birthday, possible the only time in my life I have evinced great timing) and it’s been nice.

Owl is completely enthralled with her/her Samsung tablet, and demands her constantly, leaving me free to move about the house unencumbered in a way that I have not experienced in two and a half years.

I took a couple of days off of work, which was nice because I’m just SO TIRED. Now that I am working five days a week AND the post-Christmas puppy season is at its height, I had been really scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy lately.

I’m not feeling overly rested, because Owl has taken to waking up at five forty five in the morning lately, but I have at least had time to sit and not work and not train. It’s a really nice change.

My birthday itself was not all it could have been, though.

After three straight days of Owl in the house, even my mother was beginning to get her fill of “MORE PUZZLE, NANA. WATCH DAT VIDEO, NANA!”

We planned to drop him off at daycare and have a mother daughter day shopping.

It’s not that I didn’t want Owl around on my birthday. I love him and his company. But motherhood and fun birthday celebrations don’t really go together well.

Yeah, about that…

Twenty minutes after I dropped him off, Daycare Lady called and said that Owl was crying for me and she thought he might have a fever. Since Owl NEVER cries for me at daycare and since Daycare Lady hardly ever calls to ask me to come get him, I went right out there.

So we lugged Owl to the mall with us. He seemed perfectly fine, if clingy, and the thermometer didn’t register a fever. But anyone who has tried shopping with a toddler will agree with me that it is not the same experience.

Twice I had to leave my mother in a store to guard the things we had set aside in a change room for me and carry Owl halfway across the mall to one of the TWO restrooms.

We had to interrupt our shopping for his midday nap, and then wrestle him back into coat and shoes to continue it once he woke up.

The simplest exchange between my mother and me sounded like this:

“Oh, dear, I think that looks, Owl, don’t do that, come over here please, thank you. Yes, dear, I think that it looks, Owl, don’t pull on your mother like that.”

“Yeah, it feels comfortable but the material is, no, Owl, honey, I can’t pick you up right now, Mommy needs to take this shirt off. Here, do you think I should try the, no, honey, fingers aren’t for eating.”

“Do you want me to get a larger Owl, stop that, you’re going to knock me over.”

and so on.

By the time we got home, I had a new outfit and an ottoman that would double as a toy chest for Owl, so it was ultimately a successful day, but we were so wiped that PH and I cancelled our plans to go to a movie.

Taking my exhausted mother and saying “Okay, can you put him to bed for us, thanks, bye!” seemed a little too cruel.

So instead we stayed home and went to bed early.

That’s a MOTHERHOOD birthday, that is!

The next day was my mother’s birthday, and it went better. I dropped Owl off at daycare again and he was just fine. Mum and I registered my business license at the town hall, went to Chapters, went to lunch, downloaded and played my cousin’s game Diamond Find (a fun little speed-reading choose-your-own-adventure which is filled with his quirky humour).

We organized Owl’s toy chest, and put on a load of laundry.

It was a good day.

I like this not working thing. Yes, it’s exhausting dealing with Owl all day, but it beats trying to meet people’s expectations in the real world.

Mum leaves tomorrow. Next… Disneyland!

The real world can suck it for ONE MORE WEEK.

Happy Mother’s Day! Look, I’m all wee and stuff!

Tags

childhood, home videos, mother's day, mothers, parents, videos

In honor of Mother’s Day, and Babby turning eight months old, I present this video.

Now I will return to being coddled and pampered as I so richly deserve, because I happened to give birth last year.

The money in my pocket bit is sort of a lie. I have poop bags in my pocket. That’s similar.

The Motherhood of my Bones

Tags

anthropology, babies, babywearing, child rearing, culture, ethnopediatrics, feminism, modernity, motherhood, mothers, nature, parenting, simplicity, society, village life

In my heart and bones, there is a village.

The smells of wood smoke and cooking fill the air as a new day begins. The women of the village join each other in the morning sun and start their work, all the while breastfeeding, chatting, laughing, arguing. Their children play around them as they grind grain, weave baskets, and stretch leather. They chat about their work, the weather, their men, their children. They gossip and scold and sing as their breasts swing and sway to the rhythm of their toils.

The one thing they don’t talk about, however, is how to parent their children. They don’t discuss the pros and cons of breast vs bottle feeding. They don’t fret over co-sleeping or how to stimulate their children’s cognitive development. They don’t dicker over methods of discipline, or the latest research on child psychology, because here in this place, they do as they have always done.

We have children. We raise them. We bring them up to share our values. When a child misbehaves away from his mother, his aunt or his grandmother or his neighbour will step in, because the rules are the same for everyone.

Parenting, here, is just an organic part of what is.

where he belongs

Here, women don’t wonder how to divide themselves between their roles as parents and their roles as members of the community. There is no need to choose between motherhood and productivity. Your children go with you, because they are a part of you. Motherhood is not a sideline, or an interruption of one’s career. Nor does motherhood define you. Motherhood is blessed, and womanly. Motherhood is life.

The village is filled with helping hands who will hold your baby, teach your toddler, and chide your cheeky child. There are no play groups: just step outside and your child’s siblings, cousins, and friends will go running by.  There are no “Mommy and Me” classes. Every woman is a mother, here.

In the village, children are valuable resources, not expenditures. There are no diapers to buy, no bottles to fill. There are no strollers, no toys, no music lessons, no college funds. Children cost next to nothing, and they can herd the cattle, sweep the hut, and watch the younger children. When they are grown, they will provide for their ageing parents. Children are a retirement fund. Children are gifts, never burdens, even as they ride on your back, or hang on your hip, or lag behind and try to snare your shadow with stomping feet.

Here, babies curl into their mother’s bodies at night, nursing as needed all night long. Sleeping through the night is not discussed or thought of. If he wakes in the night, you can sleep longer, or go to bed earlier, because here there are no alarm clocks. In fact, there are no clocks at all.

…Now, I know, intellectually, that this village comes with a price. There is no medicine, no clean water, and no birth control beyond breastfeeding. There is sometimes famine and hardship, and often babies die. There are no books, no movies, no video games. There is no take-out for when you are too tired to cook. There is no warm bath to soak in after a long day. There is no room for people who are different.

I believe in medicine for the sick and that everyone has the right to clean water. I am grateful for antibiotics, and epidurals, and sterile suture stitches.  I revel in science, and children’s literature, and Nanaimo bars and diet Pepsi. I believe in women’s rights, and children’s rights, and marriage for homosexuals. I believe transsexuals deserve sex reassignment surgery, and that religion is a personal matter that has no place in government policy. I believe in multiculturalism, and social programs, and anything starring Hugh Laurie or Colin Firth.

But my bones believe in more ancient things. They don’t understand about science, or social freedoms, or new episodes of Glee. I am controlled by genes that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years; antibiotics and astronomy and A.A. Milne are but tiny blips in the time line of my ancestry, and my DNA knows them not.

I believe in vaccinating my baby, and baby-proofing my house. I read him books and give him toys that beep and dress him in cute outfits. I will put him in daycare and go back to work when he is a year old.  I own a crib, and a stroller, but neither of them gets much use. I prefer to carry him on my hip in a wrap, and I fall asleep with his head pillowed on my breast in the middle of the night. I don’t want to leave him with a stranger. I want him by my side.

My brain is at odds with my body. I know I am fortunate to have clean water, and low infant mortality rates, and electricity and indoor plumbing and chocolate. I know that day care and milk pumps and traffic jams are a small price to pay for a life of such immeasurable luxury.

I know.

But my heart and bones remember a village, and that part of me will always be homesick for somewhere I have never been.

Thanks, Mum

Tags

gifted children, memories, moments, mothers, parenting, parents

My mind reminds me of a bog, or tar pit. Memories of days gone by are sort of mummified in the depths, forever preserved, and every now and then a bubble of shifting gas brings something long buried to the surface.

Okay, that metaphor needs work.

My point is, I was watching Babby knock blocks together and then suddenly laughed out loud as I dredged up this old memory:

I am a bored teenager, pawing through my parents’ bookshelves for something I haven’t read a zillion times. On a high shelf I find a book about how to raise and nurture your gifted child!

I walk around feeling good about myself for a while, and then casually mention it to my mother.

Me: “Hey, Mum, I spotted this book about raising gifted kids on the shelf. Why do you have that?”

Mum: “Oh! I bought it when you were little, just in case I ever needed it.”

Me: “Yeah?”

Mum: “I didn’t.”

Hugging Mrs Jumbo (or, explaining why I read infertility blogs)

Tags

blogs, dumbo, infertility, mothers, movies, parenting, women

This is my first month joining ICLW and I’m loving getting to meet all of these amazing bloggers. However, whenever I read a blog like A Little Pregnant or Stirrups Queen, or Built In Birth Control, I feel like an imposter. I feel guilty when people find my blog from comments left on those blogs – and are confronted with pictures of my smiling baby. What am I doing, reading and commenting on these infertility blogs, when I am not (as far as I know) infertile?

I read infertility blogs because I feel a kinship for these women, even though I have been spared their struggles.

I grew up knowing myself to be a child of infertility. My parents were married for eight years before I was born, and I was told that they “sought professional help” in order to have me. My mother would occasionally apologize for not giving me siblings (one of seven children, my mother has always felt that you need siblings to be normal).

As a child I assumed that the problem lay with my father, because they would never go into details. I thought that my mother may not have felt comfortable discussing sperm counts and testicles with her 10 year old. As I grew older, I began to get the sense that the problems laid on my mother’s side. But I didn’t know, because my mother got vague and changed the subject whenever I asked about it. Could this be something I might inherit?

In other words, unlike many women, I never took it for granted that I would be able to have children with ease. I grew up being aware that some people struggle to have their children.

I can only think of two children’s movies that portray infertile mothers, and those are Dumbo, and Pixar’s Up. If you haven’t watched Dumbo since childhood, it’s time you did. It’s heartbreaking to watch Mrs Jumbo reach hopefully for each bundle of joy, only to see it drop into some one else’s arms. Voiceless, wistful, hoping, waiting, she longs for her own baby and wonders why he is so long in coming.

When he does finally arrive, he isn’t perfect. Though he is beautiful in her eyes, her friends see him as a freak: worse than no baby at all.

How many mothers have adopted a child over seas only to find that their friends don’t throw them a shower, or that their parents don’t treat the child like a “real” grand child? How many mothers have held their precious Down Syndrome baby, only to recieve commiserations instead of congratulations?

Then, when she rises up to protect her son from the cruelty of the world, he is taken away from her entirely. She is declared insane, locked away, and her little baby that she longed for weeps alone with no one left who loves him.

Tell me, what mother in the world wouldn’t weep over Mrs. Jumbo’s experiences? Do you need to have been infertile to imagine the yearning? The love? The loss?  I didn’t. Even as a child, I felt the pain of Mrs. Jumbo’s story.

I believe infertility and child loss are topics that belong to all women. It could strike any of us, any time, but we keep it shrouded in secrecy and shame. While Michael J. Fox speaks out for Parkinson’s Disease, and Michael Douglas goes on talk shows to discuss his throat cancer, 45 year old movie stars pop out sets of twins and insist that conception was totally natural. They surround infertility with shame when they could be spreading awareness.
The desire to become a mother, the physical need to have a baby, is something that cannot be described to someone who has not yet felt the urge. Anyone who has felt the urge can comprehend the pain of an infertile couple who are still waiting for their baby.

I have felt the urge since I was 17 years old and fell in love with my Baby Think It Over. He was supposed to teach me about the horrors of motherhood, so I would use birth control (hardly a worry since I had never even been kissed at that point, and wouldn’t be for two more years). Instead I named him Jan Sebastian, cuddled him as much as possible, dressed him in a very cute sweater, carried him instead of lugging him in his plastic car seat, and asked the teacher if I could keep him.

She rolled her eyes. “There’s one in every class…” she laughed. Everyone else hated the damn thing.

In university a friend gave me a Baby Chou Chou doll, and I would cuddle her in her terry cloth footie pyjamas when I felt especially sad. The curve of a baby’s body on my shoulder satisfied some inner yearning that I could not explain.

Then, after university, I went through a serious breakup with my boyfriend of many years, and started over again with Perfect Husband. Even after we got married, that bout with depression held off my reproductive aspirations for another year. I wanted my children. I physically missed them – people I had never met, but whose projections followed me everywhere, asking me why water boiled and marvelling at statues in the Louvre.

On my 27th birthday, a coworker who was only two years older than me gave birth to her second child. Instead of a birthday lunch, we went to see my coworker and her new baby in the hospital. That night I wrote the following in my journal:

There’s just something about holding a newborn that feels… right. Like having PH at my side or a dog at my feet, it makes me feel somehow more whole. I marvel at the tinyness, at how someone born just yesterday, with barely one Earth rotation under his belt, can have such perfectly formed finger nails. Holding a newborn baby should have been a special birthday treat for me, but it really felt more like a cruel tease. I nearly wept with jealousy.

… it makes me ache that even though PH and I want desperately to start our family today… all “logic” says that we should wait, enjoy our freedom, pay off student loans and improve our careers until we can afford more happiness to sacrifice.

In my heart, I feared that infertility would prolong my wait for babies. I was afraid that I would become a Mrs. Jumbo, always reaching out to hold someone else’s baby, and always wishing I could be holding my own. I was so sure that I would have fertility problems that it took me a while to really believe that I was pregnant when it finally happened.

I am grateful for my son every moment of every day. Even when he’s screaming. Even when he has a poosplosion. I hold him close and kiss his tiny mouth and feel so grateful that I finally got my baby… and every day my heart aches for the women who are still waiting for theirs.

When I sing to him, I sing him “Baby Mine”.

and I read infertility blogs so that I can tell them that I understand… as much as is possible for someone who is not, herself, infertile.

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?

The Mother’s Escape, or, Daddy’s On Duty

Tags

babies, babysitting, breastfeeding, cultural expectations, family, fathers, mothers, night out, relationships

Last night, for the first time, Perfect Husband took care of Babby for an entire evening by himself.

Note that I do not just say “took care of Babby by himself”. Perfect Husband has taken care of Babby on his own many times – if it’s a weekend and Babby has had a bad night, he’ll sometimes take his son downstairs and even give him a bottle of pumped milk so I can sleep in and catch up on some lost sleep.

But the option of booba, if it is needed, has always been there.

Some friends were going to see “The King’s Speech” (awesome movie, I highly recommend it) and I was invited along, so I went. I left PH with 5 ounces of pumped milk and a slightly stressed look on his face.

Babby has been babysat often. We have a wonderful rota of friends who practically fight each other for the opportunity to sit him while PH and I go out to dinner or a movie. But I have never gone to a movie or dinner without one or the other of them! So last night, I did.

‘”Why is it that if a man goes out at night and leaves the mother at home, that’s normal, but if a woman goes out and leaves the father with the baby, he’s ‘babysitting’?” someone said when I arrived at the theatre triumphantly. People often do make this observation, and it’s true. Now, PH would never call taking care of his son “babysitting”, nor would I ever apply that term to my husband caring for his own son. It’s insulting.

But the spirit of the word persists.

Why is this? PH loves Babby as much as I do. He never complains about caring for him. He has given a bottle numerous times.

But when you come right down to it, I have boobas, and he doesn’t.

I think this leaves him with some deep seated feeling of inadequacy. I have the ultimate comfort at my disposal. I’m a manufacturing plant for the magical booba juice, and bottles simply don’t have the same warm, cushiony, human feel of a real breast. Every now and then Babby will latch onto his father’s bare chest, suck for a moment, and then cry in disappointment, and I think it breaks his father’s heart.

Moments to cherish

In a way, it’s not right to tell people that men should be equal partners. Not when there’s a baby involved, and the woman is breastfeeding. When you’re breastfeeding, which is the natural, instinctive, and doctor-recommended way to feed your baby, mother and baby simply ARE a unit. Until men learn to lactate, that’s just how it is.Telling us that it should be a different way just creates feelings of inadequacy on one side and resentment on the other.

I try to recognize my unique relationship with Babby, and I cherish it. I love snuggling with him at my breast, smelling the honey of his breath and feeling the tickle of his nursing lips. I love that I’m the first thing he smiles at in the morning (if you consider my boobas to be “me”, anway).

But there are times when I wish that I could focus on one thing that isn’t Babby for more than ten minutes at a time. Having an awake baby in the house is like having ADD. You can’t focus on anything else. There are days when Babby is in arms all day and I can’t even do a load of laundry or some dishes, let alone a blog post.

Time has suddenly become much more valuable.

When one only has an hour or so during the day to get EVERYTHING done, which does one do first? With a baby like mine, who rarely naps during the day for more than 20 minutes at a time and even more rarely without me snuggling him, a girl has to choose between personal time (a blog post? Checking other blogs? Facebook? A shower? FOOD? FOOD!) and productive time (a blog post? Laundry? Dishes? DISHES!) and rarely gets to complete whatever her choice ends up being. Food is warmed, and then cooled on the coffee table, and then eventually eaten by the Inexplicably Loved Cat. A plate is scrubbed, and then at the sound of a long, demanding wail, clattered back into the pool of soapy water where it will soak in  its own filth for the next three hours.

Suddenly there is more time for reading (breastfeeding) and watching DVDs of Sex and the City (breastfeeding) but less time for personal hygiene (I often realize I’ve gone three days without a shower) or leaving the house (an entire week and sometimes a week and a half often go by, when the only people I have seen in the flesh are PH, Babby, and possibly a neighbour).

Suddenly the time involved in doing things like scrolling through sites like Failbooking, or writing in your diary or verbally abusive dog training book or sleeping for more than an hour or two at a stretch… are no longer a realistic part of one’s life.

One finds oneself oddly resentful of minor things like Perfect Husband being able to simply switch himself over to the futon in the den when Babby gets fussy at night, or finding from Facebook that friends have been out shopping or to the dog park together.

Next thing you know, your baby is almost five months old and a friend invites you to a movie and you realize that you haven’t been out of the house without either your husband or your baby in, well, almost five months.

So I went to the movie.

As I left the house, Babby woke up from a nap with a wail, and I felt horribly guilty leaving PH to deal with it.

When I got home at 9:30, Babby was asleep on his father’s shoulder. PH told me that the night was fine, except for the last half hour (his bed time is around 9) when he was in complete meltdown, rejecting the bottle and screaming inconsolably and inconsiderately at his Daddy, who was so desperate to soothe his baby. Twenty minutes of swaying to music knocked him out, though, and then he slept until midnight.

I think that qualifies as a definite success, don’t you?

Miracle on Main St

Tags

Christmas, miracles, mothers, parents, sleep, snow suit, winter

When I saw the snowsuit my mother had purchased for Babby in celebration of his imminent arrival in the Maritimes, I felt bad that she had wasted her money. Not only was it mild and rainy outside, but the suit itself was clearly too big. She did purchase a 3 month size, but at 12 pounds Babby isn’t the biggest of three month olds.

Mum was disappointed when I didn’t feel the need to bury my baby in padding in order to carry him through fifteen feet of drizzle before we reached the airport parking garage. The next day when we went out, she fretted over my devil-may-care plan to just carry him to the car from the front door without the snow suit. To humor her, we put it on him anyway. His feet only went halfway down the legs of the suit, and his hands were swallowed by the suit’s arms, which stuck straight out. His eyes looked out anxiously over the neck of the suit, while the hood flalloped emptily above his head.

He looked like a cross between a headless plush bear and that kid in A Christmas Story who can’t put his arms down.

“I don’t think he’ll fit into the car seat with this,” I said diplomatically, “and he might get a little warm.”

Sure enough, he didn‘t fit in the car seat with the suit for much the same reason that I wouldn’t fit in the driver’s seat if I covered myself in sofa cushions, and after half an hour of struggling with the seat straps my mother called it quits for that particular trip.

The next day, though, she was at it again.

In the meantime I was bringing him in and out of the car wearing only a warm sweater and hood. This caused my mother great concern lest her only grandchild be chilly for a few moments. She kept pushing.

“Do you want to put on his snowsuit?”

“Don’t you want his snowsuit?”

“We’d better put him into his snowsuit.”

“It’s windy out there, shouldn’t you put him in his snowsuit?”

Perhaps she thought the snowsuit offered magical protection against the Wendigo.

Eventually she figured out a way to loosen the straps and I consented to putting him back in the snowsuit. My mother lay him down, stuffed him into the suit, and then went to put on her coat while he continued to lie helplessly on the floor like a beached starfish. His eyes found mine and seemed to be thinking “how can you laugh at me at a time like this?”

Wat go on??

We carried him out to the car, arms and legs akimbo, and with a little folding and tucking managed to stuff the suit into the car seat while little baby eyes peered at us from within the plush.

The return journey was similarly complicated. The wind was gusty and it was nice to have that protection, but the suit was so indubitubly large that I really was doing it more for my mother than for my child.

Until we got home.

He had fallen asleep in the car seat and strangely, did not wake up when I lifted him out. Since the suit prevented any bending of his body, perhaps he was not fully aware of the transition.

Despite the fact that the process of laying Babby down while asleep is only successful one time out of every ten, I still remain inexplicably optimistic and continue to attempt it often. With no real hope that he would actually remain asleep, I set him in a green rocking chair, which leans back a bit and therefore seemed like a safe place to put him. Legs stiff, arms held at ninety degree angles, Babby stirred for a moment, then sighed and settled back into sleep, pretty much standing up in the chair.

It was a minor miracle.

Unfazed by the fact that he resembled a propped-up teddy bear, Babby continued to sleep in that ridiculous get-up for over two hours. I was free! Free!!

It happened again the next day. He fell asleep in the car again on my return from lunch with a friend. I repeated my actions of the previous day, proving B.F. Skinner right about rewarded behaviors being repeated. Again, he slept for over two hours, leaving me free to have a fantastic chin-wag with my friend in my old room. We felt like teenagers again.

The next day he was fussing in the afternoon, as tends to be his wont. My father lit a fire (Babby enjoys watching the fire) and my mother suggested putting on his snowsuit, since he had slept in it so well the past two days.

It may make no sense to think “well, he dozed off twice in the car and continued to sleep while inside, so let’s dress him in the same gear just to see.” But it this same logic that leads Baseball batters to wear the same socks again and again. Again, B.F. Skinner could explain.

Babby sat propped up in the green chair, arms and legs held in place by layers of polyester, and watched the fire uncomplainingly. His eyes grew heavier and heavier and heavier…

And he slept.

He slept without the help of a car ride, being carried, or the comfort of booba. He slept without wailing or thrashing or screaming.

He just dozed off where he lay.

In that snowsuit.

Miraculous and Hilarious, together at last.

That, my friends, is a miracle.

Today he is again sleeping in the snowsuit after a car ride. He hasn’t eaten in over three hours, but still he sleeps.

I have learned several things from this experience:

1) Christmas miracles still abound

and

2) Mothers are always bloody right

Run from the paint, children, RUN!

Tags

decorating, floors, home, house, mothers, painting

Guess what! We got our house last Thursday. Isn’t that GREAT?

Except that the walls were painted a stark grey that made the place seem as warm and welcoming as Alcatraz. The kind of colour that the landlord clearly must have picked because he wanted to communicate to his tenants “THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME AND YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.”

INTERNMENT-CAMP GREY IS ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS, RIGHT?

The message must have been heard loud and clear, because the tenants had made their best efforts to scratch and mark and damage the walls in as many places as possible during their tenancy. One wall was SO marked and dented that all my friends exclaimed on it when they arrived. The greatest part of Saturday was spent spackling, sanding, and washing the walls. Friends who showed up to paint ended up having spackling trowels handed to them, and spent the subsequent hours on their hands and knees, trying to make the walls look more like walls, and less like swiss cheese.

As the day wore on, though, the dingy and unwelcoming house which we had just bought began to take on a new and cheerful feel. Slowly, my personality was spreading through the place, with tendrils reaching from the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedrooms.It was transforming from internment camp to… home.

From grey kitchen to sunny kitchen

Up the stairs...

Past the landing...

Then… everyone stopped for the day. People had to go home. Only half the painting was done. I had to teach a puppy class the next morning. Three people pledged to come back after I was done class, and they did. But when they called it a day, there was STILL more to be done. I began to fall apart. It was all so overwhelming. The flooring guys were due to come in that coming week. We had to move the next weekend. There were still some Alcatraz walls and I wanted them gone. The only room I had given permission to ignore was the future baby’s room – decorating a nursery in advance of any kind of pregnancy seems like counting chickens before they hatch. The painting jobs stretched on and on… I would never be done. One day, old and toothless, I would totter into the bedroom and announce

“I finished painting the bathroom today.”

“WHAT?” Perfect Husband would holler, adjusting his hearing aid.

So Monday night after work, Perfect Husband and I went back. I started on touch-ups downstairs while he gathered up drop cloths from the stairs to move into the bathroom. He found green paint spots on the stairs.

“Fuck!” he said, “how did that happen?”

He ripped another drop cloth off of the floor. “FUCK!” And another… “FUCK!”

They were everywhere. Paint splotches on the stairs. In the upstairs hall. The master bedroom. The computer room.  Yellow and green.

I once had a dream that shining yellow paint was oozing through the ceiling, landing in splotches at my feet. I knew that if it touched me, I would die. I ran to my parent’s room, seeking safety in my mother’s arms.

“It’s too late,” my father told me, “it touched her. She’s dying.”

Now it seemed like it was back, magically appearing under drop cloths, poisoning my new home. The downstairs floors were all slated to be replaced, but I had preferred to leave the carpet upstairs, so that little sock feet could run down the stairs in future years without slipping. Perfect Husband scrubbed grimly at the stairs while I miserably touched up thin spots on the walls downstairs. The paint didn’t want to come up. I faced the horrifying realization that we might have to redo the upstairs floors, too. Another two thousand dollars. A rush to either pick up new carpet, or a last minute decision to risk small people tumbling down the stairs by extending the laminate flooring up the stairwell. Then we would have to get the guy in to measure it, and convince him to install it before we moved in on Saturday. It was too impossible, too terrible for words.

“We’ll look up a way to get it out,” Perfect Husband assured me.”Now let’s paint a bathroom.”

So we did.

The next night I called my mother AND my decorating-expert friend and moaned to them for a good hour and a half. Finally I had to face the fact that:

a) I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I KNEW that I could get the paint splotches off the carpet

b) that it was becoming ridiculously late and

c)… I wanted my mommy. If Mum were within 500 kilometres of me I know she would have been there, armed with special paint removing solutions and a scrub brush, got down on her knees, and not risen until my carpet was saved. But she’s SIX THOUSAND KILOMETRES AWAY. I’m married and a homeowner. I’m supposed to be all grown up, but once again I just wanted to run from those paint splotches right into my mother’s protective arms. For the first time it really hit me how badly I miss having my mother at my beck and call.

But my mother couldn’t come save me, so instead, I set out at ten o’clock at night armed with nail polish remover, oxyclean and rubbing alcohol (all scrounged from the bathroom cupboard) to try and remove paint from carpet. Perfect Husband stayed behind to continue packing. Alone in my new home that night, I learned two more things – I may not be my mother, but I could get paint out of a carpet and… hire professionals next time.