I want to kiss our pediatrician

 

This summer has been ROUGH in the sleep department. Partly the sunshine streaming in the window until well past 9pm, partly an attachment toddler who wants his mama thisclose to him all.the.time when he’s sleeping, has led to a spiral of sleep deprivation that was just not working anymore. Potamus needed a good 2.5-3 hours of me laying in his bed with him before he would fall asleep. We’d start bedtime routine around 7, and it’d be close to 10 every.damn.night before he’d fall asleep. We tried mixing it up, doing really active things before bedtime routine started (running, wrestling, playing hard). We tried quiet activities before bedtime routine (reading stories, turning off all electronics, warm showers). NOTHING worked. Not only did it take that long to fall asleep, he’d only stay asleep about 1-2 hours at most, and then want Mama. Which meant, in my exhaustion, he was coming into bed with me before I had really even gotten any sleep for the night. 

Now, I’m not opposed to co-sleeping…when it’s working. But his restlessness would continue, even after he was snuggled in bed with me. He’d kick his legs and twiddle my neck, digging his fingernails into my chin…all night long. I would wake up crabby and exhausted and frustrated that it wasn’t going well. 

So I made an appointment with our pediatrician. I thought maybe it was growing pains? Or after a quick google search I saw things like Restless Leg Syndrome, or iron deficiency, or all sorts of other ailments. But I love our pediatrician and figured he’d be able to help. 

His diagnosis: poor sleep hygiene. 

What I love about this guy, is that he has a way of saying things in the kindest, gentlest way, while also sharing about his life. He said that the only way to get Potamus to sleep differently was going to be making the behaviors go extinct, which means, not reinforcing them, which means…not laying next to him for 3 hours to get to sleep. But then he told me that it’s not something I HAVE to do, but told me how to do it, if I wanted to do it, in a way that I would feel good about. And then he divulged that his family co-sleeps, and his son is almost 10 and ‘really small and immature for his size, and he comes into our bed every night to snuggle. he just needs to sleep next to a human being for awhile to feel safe.’ 

Yeah,  my pediatrician co-sleeps his older elementary school age son. So he’s not just telling me to leave a 3 week old in a crib to cry it out. I felt hopeful. He said it’d be hard, but it’d work. 

And so that’s what were doing. We read stories, and snuggle, and I give unlimited hugs. I’m still in his bed until he falls asleep, but I’m no longer laying next to him. And until 2am (ideally around 5 would be best), if he wakes up crying, I go in there and snuggle him, and put him back in his bed, and wait until he falls asleep. The first two nights were brutal. It took him awhile to fall asleep, and then he was restless for a good hour in the middle of the night (aka midnight). He’d fall asleep, but as soon as I’d creep out he’d wake back up. He’d want 4 more hugs and then he’d go back to sleep. 

My goal is not to eliminate co-sleeping for good, just alter it a bit so we’re all getting sleep. Because work starts back for me in 2 weeks, and he can’t be going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 6. He’ll be a crabby zombie. 

We’re at 4 nights this week, and last night he fell asleep ‘on his own’ (with me there) relatively easily. And at midnight he woke up crying, but in the time it took me to pee, he had soothed himself back asleep. I went in there and checked on him…zonked out. He came into our bed around 3am. Already he’s getting more sleep in a row than before, AND when he does sleep next to me there is snuggling, but no twiddling, kicking, tossing and turning. He reaches out to touch me, then curls into himself and passes out. Exactly what I hoped for in our sleep relationship. I like having his little warm body next to mine, but I also like sleep. 

I’m so thankful that I have a compassionate pediatrician who listens to my life and helps create a plan for making it fit into our lifestyle. I feel like I’m able to do a modified ‘cry it out’ (without any crying?) that suits my attachment parenting needs, without going to an extreme that doesn’t feel congruent with my values as a mom. 

So here’s to a few more hours of blissful sleep…for all of us. 🙂

 

Moments of Engagement

Potty Training Bootcamp

Last week Potamus leveled up to a new classroom, and while my head was still spinning at that transition, his teacher said “just so you know, I’m ready to potty train him whenever you are.”

Gulp.

Potty training. 

Potamus is only 2 years and 8 months old and a boy, which I naturally assumed meant he would potty train later, because that’s what everyone and their great aunt/second cousin/hairdresser said. Yeah, I figured potty training wasn’t going to be on the radar until Christmas or later. But with the teacher’s insistence that it’d be a good idea, and his friends are doing it too, I gave in to the peer pressure and rolled with it. 

Mari suggested doing the 3 day bootcamp method she used, which was 3 days off (which I happen to have built into my schedule every week regardles) filled with juice boxes and snacks and shows and running around naked or only in his new superhero underwear. It didn’t sound so bad, and so I headed off to the store to get supplies and get my head on straight about this whole business. 

Because once we decided to go for it, we weren’t going back, which was my biggest fear in the whole thing. Yikes. Commitment isn’t my strong point, really. And here I am, a baby led weaning, free range hippie dippy attachment type who still co-sleeps who let Potamus self-wean from nursing and I was…gulp…indulging in a potty training bootcamp. 

But, we forged on. 

Day 1

He loved his potty prize box. I had found some toys at Value Village, and every time he sat on his training potty he got a prize from the box. Sometimes it was a toy. Sometimes it was an orange or chocolate chips or a few coins that he’s obsessed with. Mommy Slot machine at its finest. He loved it. He dinged the kitchen timer that Mari had loaned us shouting “potty prize time!” in his cute little voice. It was adorable. And somewhat messy. There were moments where I was like ‘um, this is insane,’ but went with it. Total for the day: 2 big pees in the potty, 2 accidents, & 1 poop in the underwear episode. 

Day 2

He woke up and went on the potty like he had done the day before. He took a potty prize, but didn’t seem interested, He seemed annoyed by my potty dance in glee that he had gone. I don’t know if it was the dynamic of having Daddy Boof home, or what, but he spent the rest of the afternoon reluctant to go on the potty, refusing all things related to the potty, and just generally seemingly annoyed by my mere presence. My mind went into a panic and so of course I went out and bought 30 more pairs of underwear (which Boof said was funny that I ‘commit to something and just go with it full force’ because it would have equaled to 8 pairs of underwear a day if we only did wash weekly. haha). I figured I was a huge failure, that my kid wasn’t ready, and that I was doing everything all wrong. Wah wah wah. Total for the day: 2 pees in the potty, lost count of all the accidents, including a poop in the undies episode. 

Day 3

I guess it clicked. All the little dribble accidents went away. Sure he peed in the house once when he was watching a show and didn’t want to go on the potty. I get it. He’s still learning. He also peed outside once, but I didn’t count that as an accident, more like a perk of being a dude with a ‘magic penis’, which is what I started calling it. Saying, ‘can you do the magic penis trick of peeing in the potty?” And away went the potty prizes. He was done with them. So noncholant about the whole thing. Like, dude, mom, chill out, I got this. Though he protests a bit in being asked to go use the toilet, he does so rather easily now. We even braved two hours over at my in-laws and he made it through that and used the travel potty! 

Day 4

School. 

He did it. All day. Same clothes when I picked him up that he went in with. Teacher said he even woke up dry from his nap and made it to the bathroom to pee. So proud of this little munchkin. While he hadn’t been showing INTEREST it didn’t mean he wasn’t READY.

 

But now, we need to get him to poop, ya’ll…ugh…it’s been 24 hours and counting…

How Boyhood the movie is changing my life

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the incredible feat of a movie in Boyhood, which was filmed with the same actors over a period of 12 years. Having simply seen the previews, and hear a review on the radio, I decided to take myself out to see this 2 hour and 45 minute film that is being touted as an award winning movie with very little action. It, by all accounts, has broken many cinematic rules. There’s no plot, besides simply watching a boy grow up, and the actors (Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke) committed over 12 years to make this film. The main character, Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, was only 6 when he started the project. 

So there I was, sitting in a dark movie theater for a matinee showing with five other people. A young couple, who I judged to have no children yet, and older couple who seemed like grandparents, and a guy about my age. The five of were there to see the magic. 

But it wasn’t magic. Not at first. It was cute seeing the six year old boy’s antics, and how he related to his older sister, and his mom, and the scenes from life that unfolded before my eyes. Halfway through I felt bored. There was no action. Tiny episodes of drama, but mostly interpersonal relating. Scenes from year to year were marked by Mason’s haircuts. I was sitting in this theater thinking “what? what? this is it? this is what I paid good money for? Really? This is all there is? The cinematography isn’t even that spectacular. And the soundtrack? Is there even a soundtrack?”

These thoughts were much like the thoughts I have when meditating, or halfway through yoga. Monkey mind. I sat back for the rest of the film, followed the loose plot, and then BAM. (uh, spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the film…do not read on…)

BAM

Mason graduates from high school. His mom, played by Patricia Arquette, is sitting in her new apartment with her now-grown son, in that awkward teenage-almost-college-student-scruffy way is packing up his belongings. And she starts to cry. She says, “I just thought there’d be more.” At least that’s how I remembered it. She might have said “I just thought there’d be more time,” but nonetheless, I started to cry. Little tears rolled down my cheeks, not a full on sobbing mess, I can keep it together of course. 

The final scene is Mason hanging out with some of his new college buddies, and he has this conversation about the idea of ‘seizing the moment,’ rephrasing it by saying, “I think the moments seize you,” and suddenly the movie was spectacular. I think that was the magic in it. That I couldn’t tell how beautiful it was until it was over and I looked back, remembered earlier scenes and saw how the tied in to the ending. That life was unfolding and no matter how mindful in the here and now, there is something powerful in that moment of reflection, introspection, nostalgia. It was pure magic. 

And would it be crazy to say that a movie could influence me to want another child? No, that’d be totally daft, right? But I found myself, as I was watching the scenes unfolding, and the nostalgia I felt at the end when she said ‘I thought there’d be more time,’ that the reason I have only wanted 1 kid is not because I am afraid another will distract me from BIG life goals like curing cancer (or travelling to India) or doing a career I love…but that it will distract me from doing things like Buzzfeed quizzes. Now that might sound silly, but it’s true. When I get angry with Potamus for ‘interfering’ with my time, or not going to bed because I ‘just want a fucking minute to myself,’ It’s not because I want a minute to myself to do art or yoga or spend time with friends. Because I manage to find time to structure into my life to do those things. It’s that I want him to ‘go the fuck to sleep’ so I can scroll, scroll, scroll through Pinterest on my phone. 

I was asked once if I would get to be that 80 year old woman if I would regret not trying to have another kid. And I know the answer would be ‘no,’ if it meant I could be the best parent to 1 kid while pursuing my amazing life goals. I will regret not trying for another kid if it’s because I wanted to pin recipes to pinterest that I know I’ll never use. You know? 

Parenting is my mindful meditation. I get to drop into something deeper beyond buzzfeed quizzes and the monkey chatter of my thoughts. This isn’t a pregnancy announcement, or even an announcement that we will be trying any time in the near future (soonest will be next summer), but something settled in my body and heart when I watched this film. I realized that it is hard, and amnesia sets in at some point and I will say to myself, “I just thought there’d be more time.” 

I am Jennifer Huston

“Did you hear? They found her body today,” I said as I was laying in bed with Boof last night. While I don’t normally like to talk about, or even watch, the news (especially when I am in the throes of crisis counseling), I felt particularly drawn to this case, to this smiling blonde woman in the pictures plastered on the news. I had just spent time in Newberg, Oregon, and her face just looked back at me from the TV and the internet news media.

I am Jennifer Huston. I could feel myself empathizing, putting myself in her shoes. And while the police haven’t yet confirmed the cause of death, and she wasn’t found in the San Juan islands like some people thought, I resonated with the mythology around her disappearance and subsequent death. I don’t know what actually happened, as the articles said she complained of headaches in the days before her disappearance, but what I do know is that there is a mythology surrounding her disappearance and death. Suicide. Maybe they will come out with this confirmation today, maybe not at all, and my heart hurts for her family and her two kids who will grow up without her.

Regadless of what happened, the story in my mind is one that mixes with my own story. My own emotions. That feeling I get inside when it all seems to much and I just want to run away from it all. As if taking off on a full tank of gas and $40 in my pocket will solve the big life problems of being a wife, a mother, a worker, an American, a person with mental illness, an adoptee. As if running away will solve any of it. Will give me a break, at all.

Lying in bed, Boof said, “I’d hope that if you needed to leave for awhile, to clear your head or get rest or whatever that you’d tell me.” And I said, “in a good  moment I would. In a sane moment I would, you know? I’d schedule it and go and get some rest, but in my crazy panicky moments, you know, the ones where I’ve found myself driving 45 minutes north only to end up at the doorstep of my childhood home? In those moments I would want to escape, leave it all behind, reinvent myself in a world without responsibilities. It crosses my mind, and I hope it’s not something I ever do.”

I’m not talking about suicide. Just leaving. Escape. That blessed freedom on the road of nostalgia to a time when I didn’t feel so tied down to it all. That feeling of the woman in Kate Chopin’s Awakening, who simply walks into the ocean and drowns in order to escape. Because sometimes it feels like it’s all too much. Though, not right now, I just know that feeling. Of wanting to leave and take my green SUV and trail mix and sleeping pills to the San Juan islands for a retreat. And I could see not wanting to come back, not wanting to face the embarrassment of a country-wide manhunt, having to explain that “I was just tired y’all, I just needed a break.”

I had hoped the story would end differently. That after a week of missing mom reports we’d learn she had checked herself into a remote spa for some downtime, or a hospital for an evaluation, or that she was camping by herself and emerged stronger and healthier. Instead we hear a story of a life lost, without a cause given (yet), and two boys and a husband who are left to pick up the pieces. I think that bit inside me, that wants to leave, is outweighed by the thought of Boof and Potamus left to pick up the pieces. My heart goes out to the family, her boys, her husband, her friends. And maybe, just maybe, a story like this can help mom’s get the rest and relaxation they need, without resorting to disappearances, or suicides, or leaving families to pick up the pieces.

 

Introverted Adoptee Parent

I was sitting on the couch talking with Boof about my being an introvert, and how it effects me as a mother. And he said, “I can see it. I can see when he’s sleeping so close to you, touching you all the time, how it effects you, how it drains you.” We had been talking about our space bubbles, and how children don’t seem to have a space bubble, which he so beautifully described as:

This kid was just inside you a few years ago. He doesn’t have a concept of your own space, that you have your own space. He’s starting to have a concept that he has HIS own space, meaning there are times when he doesn’t want us in his space bubble, but it’s not going to be until he’s like…a pre-tween…when will realize that you or I have our own space, too. That we need to have our own space. For now, our space is his space, but his space isn’t always our space.

I loved that description, though it doesn’t make the physical nervous system overload that I experience as an introvert any easier. But there’s been something more than being an introverted biologically, and I was talking with Boof about how, now, as a mother, I am never alone. I know that this phenomenon isn’t uncommon to motherhood, this feeling like once you’ve born a child you are connected to them. The worry, and love, and thinking about their every little move. And I guess it bothers some women, and others not so much. Maybe it’s a neutral energy. But I was explaining to Boof that it feels like my soul, or psyche, is introverted, and that there is the lingering energy of Potamus that is within my psyche. I can’t escape this energy. And therefore, my soul is never alone. My soul is never alone, and that sometimes makes me feel agitated on an energetic level. I can’t escape. I feel agitated on the soul level, because my soul is not alone. 

My girlfriend Anne hypothesized that perhaps this feeling comes from being adopted. That since my connection to my biological mother happened so early on that my soul has felt alone since. That this connection to Potamus is one that is foreign to me, and it’s good, and beautiful, but unexpected and could feel agitating because I lived for 29 years without that feeling. Because I had talked to Boof about how my fear of adding another child into the family someday is not only due to the logistics of having another kid around, as an introverted parent might be afraid of that, but that my soul would then energetically be agitated by two soulish energies existing within my psyche. 

I was telling Anne that I feel this need to expand. I used this motion of pushing out a bubble from myself, that I wonder if I am able to expand my soul energy, to not be so close to my body (at least that’s the image in my mind), that I could maybe feel less agitation, that I would somehow be able to expand and find that I was big enough to hold not just one soul energy, but another as well. That the connection is okay, and good, albeit uncomfortable sometimes, and that I am big enough to handle it. 

From a Distance

Our 2nd annual Cama Beach camping trip was well under way, and I realized that over the past 5 weeks (4 of which have been spent in some fashion with my parents) that I have been somehow softening toward my parents as people, and possibly even experiencing some softening of memories of childhood. I blame this softening, in part, by the joy my parents had in meeting Mari and her husband and their kids when we all went there for the weekend to wine taste. And the joy my parents had in meeting my friend Amelia as she came up for the day to Cama Beach. They want to know my friends. They want to know my life. 

Memory is a strange thing. Because, if I squint hard enough, soften into a deep breath and let my muscles relax, I can remember the feeling of childhood. I might have been an anxious child in ways, but I was also blissfully carefree in other ways. It wasn’t until we moved in adolescents, and I began to feel awkward and misunderstood and took a cynical look at my parent’s parenting. And then there was the un-diagnosed depression and anxiety that clouded my mind. And in college, and young adulthood there was a VERY cynical look back, seeing my parents in all their faults, how I would do it differently, how very misunderstood I was and how much I felt I had to hide to receive their ‘un’conditional love. 

And there I was, sitting on a log watching my parents play with Potamus on the beach and I just felt soft toward them, toward my memories of them growing up. I haven’t gone to the extreme of saying that everything they did was right, or that nothing they did hurt me at all, but there was this settling in to the gray. That my parents annoy me sometimes AND they love my son (and me, yes, I’ll even go that far). It was really a sweet feeling to just sit and be and not feel all this leftover angst that I usually feel when I’m with them.