I Learned that in Mommy School

We’ve spent a lot of time at the park this weekend, trying to burn of some of Potamus’ energy, and today we had the pleasure of meeting up with Mari and her two kids to enjoy the sunny Seattle weather! As Potamus was running around, playing with his patriotic balloon, sliding down the slide, and climbing on anything he could find, he managed to get a nasty scrape on his leg. He was running helter skelter, balllon flying behind him, and he tripped on his too-big converse sneakers. The pavement was bumpy, and he skinned up his knee pretty badly. A few mama kisses set him right, for the moment, and he went back to play.

A few hours later, in the car, he noticed the skinned knee again and started crying. I told him that when we got home I would do work some mama magic to make his knee feel better. And I did. With my mama magic kit that I learned in mama training school: band-aids, neosporin, kisses.

He was thrilled with the process I used. He sat on the counter patiently while I washed my hands, and washed his knee, and dabbed a little neosporin on the wound. And then I showed him the bandaid, and we put it on, and he was thrilled beyond measure. He ran out to Boof, shouting “band aid” in his toddler babble, and I wish that I had a cool spiderman bandaid to put on, but he was pleased with the regular old one nonetheless. It’s one of those motherhood rites of passage, and I somehow managed a tenderness I don’t often feel.

Is Love Enough?

A few years ago I was taking a counseling Ethics class and had to do a paper and presentation on an ethical dilemma. I chose International Adoption, posing some questions like:

• Adoption…or baby buying?
• Is it ethical to adopt a child from a different culture than your own?
• Is Love Enough?

These provocative questions got the class thinking, and discussing, adoption from a different point of view than is traditionally upheld. Each point could be its own entry, but I want to focus on this question about love being enough.

In my time as a crisis counselor, I worked with MANY families who had adopted: domestic infant, international, or from foster-care. And all of the families I met were dealing with some major issue (duh, it was a crisis counseling service), that stemmed back to adoption and adoption trauma…yes…even the families with the children who were healthy white children adopted as infants. While certainly other families had issues, there was something unique about these adoptive families, where they would mention things like, “but I love her, I didn’t realize that this could happen, I took her in, I showed her love.”

I keep thinking about the stories we hear, about Russian adoptees being sent back by their parents after being a handful, or even here, in Washington, so many stories of Ethiopian adoptees being starved and whipped for “bad behavior,” and ending up dead or in foster-care because of the abuse/neglect from their adoptive parents. Certainly those are extreme cases, but even the loving families that I saw, were struggling to make sense of why their child was so fucked up (to use a very non-clinical way of describing it). There was this overwhelming sense of naivete, that because these children were loved, and saved from a life of living with a crack-whore birthmom or in a foreign country (a dominate narrative told in adoption-land), that they would grow up to be okay.

But IS love enough?

For children who were raised in orphanages, who might be struggling with Post-Institutionalization Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or any type of physical/cognitive delays, is simply loving them going to fix it? Standing from this perspective, the answer is clearly NO! But for some reason, families who desperately want children, who go to such great lengths to obtain these children, still operate under the belief that love is enough. Their love is going to fix everything.

But, who would tell a soldier’s wife that her love is enough to fix her husband’s PTSD from serving 5 tours in Iraq? Nobody I know would. And even, on a less-extreme case, when Potamus is sick, or if he broke a bone, or seemed to be suffering from depression, I cannot imagine simply trying to ‘love’ the pain away…ya know?

These questions were meant to get my fellow counselors thinking about working with families from a new perspective. Because, for so many, the myth of adoption being a miracle, has clouded over the fact that an adopted child is wired differently because of their experience, and simply loving them is not going to fix things…it will help, but there are many other things that need to happen to help the child be successful.

In my crisis work, I was fortunate to be paired with a 67 year old adoptive mother, who “got it” and had lived it, and was able to connect to many of these adoptive parents in a way that I was not. And I was able to connect to these children/teens in a way that other therapists were not. And adoption was discussed (because most often others hadn’t even recognized where the pain/dysfunction was stemming from).

It started as self-care…

As part of my decision to buck up my self-care regimin, I have begun to re-read one of my favorite books: Trauma Stewardship. Reading this in not just a backup justincaseidon’tgetthejobthatireallywant anxiety push, but because it’s good and important to take care of myself ESPECIALLY since I have a young one and still want to work with at-risk youth (even if it means I don’t want to do CRISIS work anymore).

I saw the author, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, in a workshop a few years ago, and found the material to be AMAZING, like aloe vera to a nasty sunburn. So I picked it up, and one of the first things that stood out to me was:

There is a Native American teaching that babies come into the world knowing all that they will need for the rest of their lifetimes-but the challenges of living in our strained, cofnusing world make them forget their innate wisdom. They spend their entire lives trying to remember what they once knew.

This quote stopped me in my tracks. While I had read it before, and even read up and believe in past lives and lives between lives (aka, the soul realm), it really hit me in a different way this time…because of Potamus. He is such a kind and sweet and loving soul. Yesterday I yelled at Boof on the phone, not because I was angry, but because his phone wasn’t working right and he couldn’t hear me. Potamus started crying, like a hurt crying, but like a combination hurt/scared cry and he looked at me like, “what is that noise coming out of your mouth?!”

In a flash I flew back in time to all those conversations my mother would have about my using that tone of voice and how I just couldn’t understand what she meant (or I didn’t want to understand).

But in another instance, today, when trying to get my mother-in-law’s attention in the other room, I yelled again and BAM we had the same crying uncontrollably episode as the day before.

Hmm.

So here he is, sweet Potamus, born with everything he needs to know to navigate the world. All the trust and sweetness and love and innocence. And the world is going to try and take that away from him, and it will be hard and beautiful all the same. But I am learning something…my child is affected by moods…very much so. I’m trying to get ahead of this burnout so that I can learn to deal, in whatever situation I’m in, so that I can calmly, peaceably deal with my baby’s needs.

 

Baby Reiki

Something wonderful happened after our last crying filled reiki session. While lying on the table with Potamus, as he cycled from being relaxed and alert to fussy to full blown screaming and finally to calm rest. I have been seeing Courtney for four years and know that it is a safe place for whatever emotion that comes up, but I noticed that my thought patterns went toward anxiety, embarassment, guilt and frustration during those crying moments. I tried to breathe through them and tell myself “he is a baby, it is okay for him to cry,” but the other voice in my head kept saying, “you’re annoying her, you shouldn’t have come today, this is a waste of money, why can’t he be calm he was so peaceful last time?!”

Since I only had a few moments of incredible depression filled rage, it’s hard for me to remember that I AM still suffering from postpartum depression, and that it is the medication (and reiki) that is allowing me to be in a place where those negative thoughts are not taken as the absolute and automatic truth. I was able to breathe and process with Courtney the anxiety in my heart about wanting to calm the Potamus down and feeling completely helpless to figure out what exactly he needed.

But the shift that happened after that session has been life-changing (or perhaps, on a smaller scale, week-changing). Potamus has had moments-to-hours of fussiness, and I have noticed a difference in my heart and mind during these times where I want to scream ‘tell me what you need! i don’t know what to do!” I have noticed myself slowing down, breathing, not beating myself up about being a horrible mom who doesn’t know what her kid needs, and realizing that I have already experienced an “embarassing” moment where he cried and I couldn’t do anything about it, and we both made it through just fine (and still bonded).

This shift has rippled out into other areas of my relationship with Potamus, as I have begun to enjoy the sudden shift to him latching perfectly and not needing the nipple shield, to late night feedings because he is growing again, to experiencing his first pacifier and first bottle moments. When I went to our session today, she asked me how the evenings have been going (since that was my initial crazy anxiety/depression time) and in looking back over the past two weeks I was amazed…night times are actually becoming my favorite time with Potamus. We’re sleepy and it’s dark and warm and snuggly. He nurses and then we both fall back into dreamland…him in his co-sleeper and me right next to him in the bed. These moments of sweetness are the result of these reiki moments, where I asked to recieve what I needed most, and while it wasn’t what I asked for verbally, it clearly was what I needed on a different level.

If you haven’t had a chance to experience a reiki session, I highly recommend it!

Little Red Squirrel

This is not how Baby Boof looked at our last reiki session. Fortunately, Courtney is lovely and not disturbed by his hollering, and I found myself loving the moment of learning to breathe, in a safe space, through the crying, processing with her the feelings that come up inside of me when I can’t figure out how to help him go to sleep peacefully or get comfortable.

I’m getting to learn how to embrace the present moment without judging it or comparing it to other moments. I could easily have gotten embarassed by his crying this last session because our first session was so swaddled in peace. She sensed that his hips were bothering him, not acutely, but that he was, indeed, growing. And at the end of the session she gave him an animal card reading, and she landed on the Red Squirrel, as the one with a message for him. How appropriate, since it was all about storing up food and preserving energy. I had to laugh since that’s exactly what he’s been doing lately (eating every hour for 8-10 hours at a time), which is hard on my body, but I know he’s going to shoot up soon.

At the end of the session I felt incredibly relaxed and ready to face the rest of the day, which was surprising since I had just spent the better part of an hour with a crying baby!

The Sweet Spot

Boof rolled over a few nights ago and said, “I appreciate how sweet you’re being to him right now,” which was heartwarming to hear, even though I hadn’t even realized that there had been a noticeable shift in my ability to handle the nighttime clusterfeedings/crying jags. My medication is still ramping up, so I hadn’t expected to feel any different for awhile, but as I’ve told many people before, that family members tend to notice the difference long before the ‘identified patient’ notices a real change in mood.

But there have been moments in the past week, where I find myself lost in the smell of his babyness, have stroked his cheek and gotten simply lost in the moment of connection between the two of us. Perhaps I’ve slowed down a bit, especially at night, not frantically reading facebook or online forums, and simply allowed myself to drift in the moment, even when I can’t seem to figure out why he wants the boob AGAIN for the 6th time in an hour.

My midwife, at my follow up appointment, was very supportive of my choice to seek medication. She even disclosed that she had struggled with PPD, and so she understood the irrationality of the feelings and how isolating it feels. I couldn’t be happier with how she has handled my post-natal care, and it was nice to report that I could see myself heading back into the light of the sweet spot.