Day 1 of the Hostage Situation

July 1st.

I am writing this from my kitchen table. The dog is barking. The kid is sticking his head in a box of sand on the floor. I have afternoon nausea. It’s fucking hot. And I’m regretting this whole “let’s save money and not have me drive 1.5 hours a day to get kid to daycare and back everyday. It’ll be fun,” I said. Besides, now with a new baby on the way, we gotta save money for the crazy expensive daycare. And six months of me not working. But I digress.

School ended for me two weeks ago, but with some work from home, and a meeting to go to, I’ve been shlepping Potamus to daycare four days a week. Which has left me time for myself, even if it’s just a haircut, or lunch with my sister-in-law, and some time to write. I’m in a manuscript writing class, so trying to get my words on paper is best while listening to a podcast, instead of listening to a 3 year old declare “look at me mommy, look at me,” as he climbs onto the windowsill.

But it’s now summer break. Day 1. Normally we have Fridays off together, so I figured this would be fine. We’d sleep in. Dink around. Get groceries. Watch a show. Play some games.

Instead it was watching shows and whining. So much whining. Our easygoing grocery shopping took 1.5 hours thanks to a question about every damn thing I put into the cart. And asking why I didn’t put other things into the cart. Seriously. “But why mommmy?” “Because I don’t need soap.” “But why?” “Because we already have enough soap.” “BUT WHY MOMMY?”

The highlight of the day so far was getting my kid to eat foods he normally doesn’t eat for me. English muffin pizza and cherries. It felt like a dissertation victory, which then makes me feel like a fucking idiot who has already lost her standard for self congratulations. Yay my kid ate 8 cherries. Big fucking deal. Last year I managed to teach a heroin addict.

Oh comparisons. My work self. My mom self. My self who wants to just watch the Kardashians uninterupted.

The pregnancy hormones are insane this go-round, and “keeping it together,” looks like sobbing. And yelling.

Why did I want another baby anyway?

My “saving grace,” is going to exhaust me even more I’m afraid. I signed up to counsel from 8-6 on Thursdays through the first week of September. I’m excited because the money, paired with the money saved from daycare, is going to be about five thousand dollars. Not something to scoff at. But working 10 hours in one day counseling students isn’t exactly a break in the way I like breaks…ya know?

I know I’ll get in the groove. Already this afternoon I’ve enjoyed some time weeding the backyard, and reading some stories while he sits on my lap. I am sad for these moments already as I experience them, for this time next year, there will be two grasping at me for everything.

Alcohol as Mindfulness?

When I met my biological mom, she was wearing a bathing suit and a skirt. It was 10am and she was clearly drunk and had a beer in her purse. I had been warned that she was an alcoholic, couldn’t function without it in her system, and hadn’t held down a job forever because of the detoxing seizures and her inability to drive.

Last year my biological dad got a DUI, and felt shitty about it because I had recently told him that I was so glad that he was a ‘normal’ grandparent for Brewer. His daily drinking of a few beers was more on par with a blue collar norm than a ‘problem,’ though maybe there’s some justification going on…because anyone can have a problem once and not have an overall disease. But, I digress.

They say alcoholism is genetic.

I didn’t drink until I was 21 because of my ultra religious upbringing and my fear of the adoption unknown. I actually remember telling someone when I was younger that the reason I wouldn’t do drugs or alcohol is because I think I would like it too much. That’s deep for a tween, ya know?

All across time and space, people have been using substances to alter their experience. Beer has been around since cavemen, and has its place historically in so many ways. Little kids spin around and get dizzy, altering their experience, and we daydream or smoke pot or take peyote or chew chat or sniff poppies (yes, I know that’s not exactly how it works) to alter our experience.

And then there’s mindfulness. Meditation. To alter our experience of the moment, our relationship to the future and the past and our thoughts. It’s a mind altering way of being in the world. And one that I really intend to embrace in my life.

But can I be honest here? It’s busy season in the accounting world, and I haven’t seen my husband for close to 8 weeks because of it. He leaves at 6:30 and gets home at 8, except on Saturdays when he’s home by 6. I’m exhausted. And with only 1 kid, and a full-time(ish) job, I am often one straw away from the camel’s back breaking and crumbling all over itself.

The other day, Boof was teasing me about all the mimosas I’ve been drinking. And I got butthurt. Because it’s a sore spot for me. When I started drinking in college I had zero tolerance and would get blackout drunk. But I hated the feeling and so it only happened a handful of times. It’s been years trying to figure out how much is enough to just have a buzz and not obsess about wanting more and more and more.

His comment hit a nerve. I don’t like that I am excited to pour the OJ and champagne on a Friday morning with Potamus. I know enough about mental illness and alcoholism to know that I should be careful. And I am. I think. The nervousness and monitoring of my level of tolerance, desire, defensiveness as a coping mechanism are healthy. But it’s hard. Because alcohol is like mindfulness. There’s that sweet spot, when I haven’t overindulged, and I can focus on the present moment. I tell my students about the ‘beer goggle’ effect, and how more suicides and other issues happen under the influence, because we don’t have the ability to long-range think. But honestly, that’s kinda what I’m going for. Because I don’t want to sit on my couch watching another episode of toddler TV and think “3 more weeks of this.” That’s so fucking overwhelming to me. The fact that he was running 45 minutes late last night was so fucking overwhelming to me.

And mindfulness is good and all, but honestly, alcohol is quicker. Maybe someday I’ll be a mindful yogi who doesn’t have a glass of wine, or a few beers, at night to try and hang on for the next few hours until bedtime and daddy’s home. I know I’ve been there before. I know this is a difficult time for us as a family.

Drinking is a hot topic among the parenting community. Do you imbibe? Know others who do? What influences your decisions to drink or not?

Mom friends or friends who are moms?

I always cross my fingers that Friday morning will be sleep in day…but Potamus usually has other ideas. And so I trundled out of bed at 6:15 this morning for a hungry boy who wanted to watch some Jake & the Neverland Pirates like he does everyday before school. I tried to curl up on the couch and sleep, but between episodes ending and the dog barking I was barely successful at even resting.

So I decided to bundle him up to get some errands done, and hopefully get a chance to run off some of his energy at the mall’s play area. I was sitting there getting him acclimated, facebooking my friend Mari, and hoping that he’d stop CLINGING to my leg and go run around, when from across the play area I hear “Monk-Monk!” and I look up to find my college acquainted, her daughter, newborn son, and another acquaintance from a mommy group I attended on maternity leave. I hadn’t yet managed to align my schedule up to meet with Christy, since her son was born, so I rushed over to hang out with them and catch up. It started off well, the small talk pleasantries, and a wee snuggle sesh with her son, but then I started to feel…awkward.

Mostly I started to feel awkward when Christy announced that our other acquaintance was going to have another baby…because whoa nelly that’s personal, and she’s not due until this summer, which makes her not that far along and maybe doesn’t want the news to just be announced from the rooftops. At any rate, the thing I realized that I was supremely uncomfortable about was that what we were relating on was…being moms. And the emphasis on having TWO kids, and how TWO kids is more of a deal than having ONE kid (like me), and I felt less-than. I also think that the fact that I’m a working mom set me apart, too, and I left the interaction awkwardly after about 30 minutes and had to text Mari to make sure that I wasn’t going crazy.

Holding that newborn I felt repulsion and jealousy. I know that I want to at least try to have another kid. But I also know that I am also really really loving being a mom AND a person. I was reminded at how overwhelming the whole early breastfeeding experience was, and the total consumption of ALL THINGS BABY was, and I didn’t like talking about it and didn’t fit in, either. Because so much of my world is about being ME, a person who happens to also be a mom. But my identity is multifaceted, and Ijust cannot seem to relate to stay at home moms who appear to have lost any ability to talk about anything except poopy diapers.

God I feel so conflicted, and left out, and trying to remember that my path to motherhood is valid and my own, regardless of how it looks or doesn’t mesh with other people’s path or experience of motherhood.

But it’s hard.

While they were talking about how bad they felt putting their kids in a home daycare for 1 day a week in order to ‘get some stuff done,’ I was sitting there feeling ZERO guilt for the 4 days a week of daycare that Potamus goes to…and ZERO guilt for doing yoga 3-4 times a week, and ZERO guilt for having a job and friends who drink and managing to shower every day since his birth. I think that the issues might be that when I was first a mom I met mom friends…friends where what we had in common was being moms of newborns. And now…now I have this desire to have friends.

Friends without kids, who appreciate kids and are okay with Potamus coming along.
Friends without kids, who don’t like kids, and are okay with me only sporadically being able to hang out when my schedule permits.
Friends with kids, who are friends…with kids. Where we can talk about being parents, but mostly we can just hang out and do fun stuff and have our kids come along, like last weekend where we went to a brewery with kids in tow, after having them run around at an indoor playground.

It’s okay that my life and priorities are different than other mom’s lives and priorities…and just like when I didn’t have kids, it’s okay to be friends with people I click with, rather than trying to force myself to be friends with people who I don’t feel like I click with…right?

How do you handle the mom friend dilemma?

Babysitting

My tranquil night plus long stretch of sleep left me slightly crazy. Crazy, as in, I accepted the last-minute urgent request to watch my friend’s daughter. She’s a work-from-home mom who does some financial consulting and clearly her husband couldn’t get off work in time for her to make it to a client meeting. If it hadn’t been last minute I wouldn’t have said yes, because, let’s be honest…I don’t really like kids all that much. I mean, other people’s kids are cute to look at, but they’re pretty exhausting, and come with a whole other set of rules and expectations that don’t always fit into my schedule.

So, my friend shows up in a dither, clearly already late for her meeting, and drops her daughter off without even so much as a goodbye snuggle. Whoa. Stressful for baby AND for babysitter. I did the “look at the balloon” method that I see the daycare teacher’s use, and it worked…for a few minutes until mom came back inside to drop the carseat off. Whoa, set off a whole extra set of crying and tearfulness that lasted on-and-off for about twenty minutes. No big deal in the grand scheme, especially since her cries were WAY less nerve grating than my own kiddo’s cries, but still, we were heading into the witching hour and one toddler crying on my lap was bound to be two.

Potamus was so cute. He clearly has developed some baby-empathy, because he was hamming it up for her. He appeared to be trying to cheer her up…doing a little dance…bringing over all his new toys and wanting me to hold them and show them to her…and when she finally still wouldn’t calm down, he lost it. Which meant two toddlers crying on my lap. I think the glass of wine helped me to not totally freak out, and so I ended up mostly going about my evening routine…watering the yard, straightening some dishes, putting some toys away…

Potamus figured out shortly that being held by mama was boring and so he went off to play. Little Miss decided that playing, and having animal cookies, seemed fun, too, and so she toodled off to play with Potamus. They had a good time inside and then went to explore the backyard where full-on-witching hour reared it’s ugly head.

sharing is hard

Let’s be honest, sharing is hard. Sharing when you’re a toddler and it’s almsot bedtime is even harder. When I told Potamus that it was Little Miss’s turn for the cart, his face looked so crushed. His feelings were SO hurt. And then he made that face. But not to be outsmarted by this, he went over to some random toy item he found on the back deck and got Little Miss’s attention. He then threw it into the flowers, distracting her enough to steal the toy back. While it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to happen, I was pretty proud of his problem-solving skills. It was cool for me to observe this interaction and to see, so clearly, his intention and smarts written all over his face.

Our crazy adventure only lasted an hour and a half. Dad swooped in as fast as mom had swooped out and tried to juggle the screaming kiddo while putting in the carseat (that he had never done before). It was quite the circus, but I’m trying to not judge, because it all seemed stressful and I had managed just fine. Potamus was wiped out, and fortunately fell asleep quite easily after all of the commotion. And it helped me to have another TV/media free night (with the exception of instagramming these adorable pictures).

Bonus. Today is my last day of work for the summer. Booyah!

Lean In…it’s not what you think…

I was pretty appalled when Boof presented me with a book he bought off Amazon: Lean In. I even believe the words out of my mouth were, “What, you think I’m not handling the career/motherhood balance enough? You think I need to work more? Work harder?” He was flabbergasted, as he had done this as a sweet gesture based on the fact that a) I love reading, and b) had been discussing some gender discrimination that I was witnessing at work. In fact, my pre-conceived opinion of the book had been based on some bloggy articles reviewing the premise, and now that I’m 3/4 of the way through the book I assume that those individuals who made critical write-ups of Sheryl Sandburg’s philosophy had, themselves, not actually read the book, either.

What I thought was going to be the idea “lean-in to your career, get ahead at the sacrifice of your family,” is actually a well-thought-and-lived out manifesto for how strong women are and how they can be even more strategic both at home AND at work to get the maximum out of their life. It was like a breath of fresh air, particularly because I am surrounded by women who have chosen to stay-at-home full time and I often feel that I am a crazy person for LOVING my job (or, on most days, liking it about as much as I like my husband Boof whom I’m committed to forever…which says a lot more than shmoopy ‘ohmygawdmyjobisthebestest!sqeee!). I though it was going to tell me that I need to strive for high paying executive jobs (of which I have no desire…at this point), but instead it was about making myself open to the possibilities that lie before me without being afraid.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was this idea of the ways that women prevent themselves from the success they want by making sacrifices for family…before they even HAVE a family. Whoa, that hit me in the gut like a punch. Because here I am, at a job I love, but thinking silently and secretly to myself in my heart of hearts “well, if I don’t do that good of job at my administrative stuff, it won’t hurt so bad when I have a 2nd kid and either I need to take extended time off or they don’t renew my contract and find someone else.”

Um, what? The potential for getting pregnant sometime in the next 2 years has been influencing whether I do a top-notch job in the here-and-now of my job. Whoa. That’s powerful. While not going into statistics (yawn), she does say that many women begin making these type sacrifices (not going for promotions, or switching companies/jobs to something more lucrative or desirable or challenging) years before they even begin having a family (one funny anecdote was a woman doing this before she even had a boyfriend! imagine that!). But that there is an inevitable time when mothers will take some time off (be it maternity leave or extended family leave) and if they haven’t set themselves up to be where they want to be, they tend to be dissatisfied when they come back after 3 months, 3 or 10 years later. Yeah. These women feel undervalued and underpaid BECAUSE THEY ARE. They look around and see, “dang, those that weren’t parents, they took risks and now they’re getting XYZ salary, why am I still at this piddly level?”

Now maybe that’s extreme and doesn’t apply to everyone, but I sure as hell know that if I hadn’t gotten that new job (coincidentally the day that I learned I was pregnant), I wouldn’t have left that previous company because of fear of being able to do anything else while pregnant or with a child. Despite the toxic non-profit environment I was in, I would have sucked it up and likely would have had a slow soul-death in an un-fulfilling dead-end job that served me well for the first 7 months post-graduate school, but wouldn’t have sustained me 3 years later.

This book validated my desires and reminded me not to feel bad for the 3 jobs in 2.5 years that I took because I was career advancing and now I am in my “dream job,” though I know that there is so much more that I want to contribute at the collegiate level in different capacities. It might mean more schooling or moving colleges, but it certainly doesn’t mean willfully sitting on pinterest for 8 hours a day to set myself up for handling the rejection if I can’t come back after a hypothetical 2nd kid comes along, ya know?

Now I haven’t agreed with everything she says, but it has given me a lot to chew on and has validated my experience as a working-mom, or, as she says a ‘career loving parent,” because that’s the truth: I absolutely adore and love Potamus, and I also know that I am built to be leaning-in to a career that fulfills me, too!

Up. Down. Round and round.

Yogurt cracker snot barf does not make the car smell good. In case you’re wondering.

Oh hai Target!

we’re a badass mom and baby team

There are weeks where motherhood feels like it might kill me. I have been up at 4am this week with a fussy kiddo, and it turns out that it wasn’t just teething. Mother’s intuition wins again as I had to go round and round with Boof to convince him that Potamus was sick and it wasn’t just teething and that I wasn’t just trying to take a day off from work because of anxiety. Turns out he has a double ear infection and some sort of trouble breathing requiring a 1 dose steroid and an albuterol inhaler at night. And, because he’s had so many ear infections in his short life, we’re having him on a stronger antibiotic. Awesome.

Friday rolls around and I decide to get Mr. Fussy-pants out of the house, because I was going insane and he is way better when he can be distracted by shiny things. So we headed off to our rainy-day playground KidsQuest, and  I thought nothing of him occassionally coughing and sneezing in the backseat.

But yeah, let’s talk about how fun it is to clean up yogurt cracker snot barf…especially when it is pouring and I’m bent over the carseat with my buttcrack hanging out for all the world to see. Thankfully I had packed some extra pj’s, otherwise we’d have to have run naked baby into Target to get some replacement clothes. And I just didn’t want to deal with THAT humiliation. And yes I am the terrible mom who still brought her kid to the playground because he was feeling much better after the whole barfing incident. And, turns out, amoxicillian used to give me bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, too, so my parents think that he’s not sick…though he barfed and crapped through his jammies later in the day, and my hands and hair cannot quite get the smell of barf out.

So there were ups and downs and he went down for bed at 5:30pm and slept solidly until 11…not a norm for this week, so I’m hoping that he’s on the mend. And thankfully my parents are in town, so I get to sleep in…otherwise I might have spent the weekend crying into a bottle of wine…

Summertime SAHM

I tried to cheer myself up today by taking a walk around the neighborhood. We got half a mile before it started to sprinkle and we headed back inside. Rather than use the stroller, which Potamus rejects most often (and when he DOES ride in it, he often falls asleep and we’re not wanting that too early!). Instead, we did a little bout of toddler-wearing, which stopped a car with some lovely ladies who wanted to chat and admire my child and a-hole dog. I guess the site of a 6’1 mama carrying a large toddler is more reserved for the pages of National Geographic, but at any rate ,the walk was to get my mind off the day’s activities.

Because, today was the last day of class. My students did their final presentations and we had some yummy food and handed out certificates. It was lovely and just right, and then, when everyone left, my boss told me that the funding for the summer program isn’t happening, and so I don’t get to teach the 2 days a week that I had been asked to, a few weeks ago.

I’m super bummed.

Teaching two days a week would have been the perfect opportunity to get out of the house, keep working, and have Potamus keep a daycare routine…and one that’s not too out of my way, since I’d already be commuting that distance to work. Not having a job means $5,000 less over the summer and no real need to keep him in daycare, except my desire for him to have routine and for me to not be at home every-single-day with him.

So, my options are to spend the $ and keep him in daycare and spend those 2 days a week doing random non-mom things, or doing housework or whatever. Or send him to daycare and try to get another super part-time job. Or… be a full-time summertime stay-at-home-mom.

What’s hard about this decision, and one I’m not making overnight (because, fingers crossed the funding might get approved and I’d be able to teach the class…or find another on-campus class to teach), is that I had been excited about being a full time summertime stay at home mom (though I did still want him to go to daycare) . And then I was offered the job and realized that that was what I really wanted to do. So to have that taken away from me…I had gotten my hopes up and disappointment isn’t something I really like to deal with. And not just disappointment, but the though to of having to re-identify myself internally during the summer months to embrace a full-time with toddler routine.

Sigh.

The walk was lovely, though. I know it’s not the worst case scenario, but it was still pretty bum-tastic.

 

How do you deal with disappointment? How do you deal with changing roles or identities in parenting?

Why we chose a daycare 5 minutes from my work

Today, mid evaluations with students, I receive a phone call. I declined to answer because I didn’t immediately recognize the number. Fifteen minutes later I get another call, from a very similar number and it clicks in my head, that it’s the daycare calling. I excuse myself from the evaluations, letting my co-teacher know that it was the daycare, and I stepped out.

“Monk-Monk, Potamus has had 3 loose bowel movements in the past hour. We have to send him home. It’s policy. He doesn’t have a fever, but we do know that a bug has been going around.”

I hope on the phone with my mother-in-law and she said she could arrange some things to pick him up, but I decided that I would do it. A sick toddler, but not THAT sick, and to save my emergency card for a later date when I knew I would REALLY need her to pick him up. Stepping out, leaving my co-teacher to cover for me, I headed to the daycare.

And five minutes later he was in my arms.

According to his favorite teacher, Miss Sarah, Potamus had started whining/crying as soon as I left (something he never does with her) and then had proceeded to have such explosive diarhea that she had to change his clothes and take the garbage out because it was stinking up the joint. While he seems okay to me, no explosions since we’ve been home, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

And so, mid-week, I’m finding myself working on my resume while my little smooch is sleeping peacefully (well, after bouncing him over 900 times on the exercise ball). It’s why we chose a place so close to my work. Because he needed me, and I could be there without delay. The peace of mind is totally worth it.

What motivates you?

There have been times in my life where I have been more or less self-motivated to do a lot of work. Most of those times where I was overly motivated, it was because a lack of self-confidence in myself and a worry that I was going to be canned at any second. Times where I have been less-than motivated have usually been out of rebellion because of micro-management. I don’t always like to be told just to DO something, just to DO it. Ya know?

But in this job, I have quite a lot of autonomy and am able to do a lot at my own discretion. There are a few tasks when I am in the office on Mondays/Wednesdays that I am supposed to get done, like advising students and getting progress reports done, etc. The challenge is, I am working mostly alone, which isn’t my strong suit. I like doing things as a team, or at least being around others to bounce ideas off each other. Sitting alone in my office (yes, I’ve graduated from cubicle to my OWN (shared with my co-teacher) office), which is sometimes more isolating than helpful (except for student meetings). The challenge with this job, though, is that there is also not a lot of direction. I don’t actually have a job description, per se. The way I was hired was all sorts of weird (the job was posted for Tues/Thurs teaching. Then, when they offered me the job they told me about the Mon/Wed advising for hourly. Granted, because of my friend I HAD known that would be the gig, but still, it all seems shady to me).

I have drive and ambition and when I get to work I get overwhelmed with the different things I could be doing, and end up facebooking or looking at pinterest, or mostly just surfing around getting distracted. I don’t necessarily know what to do. At home I talk with Boof about it, and I get super excited and motivated to do things, to make a plan or a proposal for a method of advising or do something, but at work I slide to the lowest common denominator, which is pushing the food around on our plate pretending that we are eating. It was like this in sports, when I played on a team and we were playing a good team, I would rise to the challenge. But if we were playing a sloppy team, we tended to play less well. Now I don’t give myself enough credit, as I did see about 7 students today, even if only for a few minutes at a time, and have been prepping for class tomorrow, but I wish I was working on some type of project, and that I could be motivated daily to do it!

What motivates you when those around you don’t seem to be doing anything? I don’t want to be an overachiever or put so much on my plate that I am overworked, but I don’t want to just sit around doing nothing.

Thoughts?

Stay at home dad time lapse video!

Want your daily dose of awesomeness? Check out this time lapse video created by a stay-at-home dad for his wife. It is seriously sweet and awesome at the same time!

Makes me melt, and helps me know that Potamus has been in good hands with Boof all this time. Now to have a time lapse daycare video showing such love, and I’ll be set! 🙂