Separation anxiety

I was apart from Kamal for three days last week, being with my dad in a hospice in Florida. Leaving him was agonizing for me, but seemed okay for him--he played at our friend Emily's house with her daughter Sage, strolled around exclaiming at holiday lights, and then hung out with Adam till I got back. Deprived of breastfeeding and never a fan of bottles, he ate lots of "real" food, managed to nap well without nursing, and, wonder of wonders, night-weaned and has been sleeping through the night. (I'm actually afraid to write that down in case I jinx it.)

When I got back from Florida, though, Kamal was all about hugs and kisses, which was so lovely for me. He was also all about nursing. Nursing, nursing, nursing: it was like he needed to catch up, not just on milk but on the bonding we do while breastfeeding. I think breastfeeding, to Kamal (and to me, too!) feels like an extension of hugs and kisses: it's a kind of loving physical closeness that carries intense emotional volume.

Miraculously, he's continued sleeping through the night since my return. You guys, it's a whole new world, for real. However, he will not let me put him down for a nap. At all. Right now he's dozing in my lap, which is actually really sweet even if my left arm is asleep.

He's also not really okay with my leaving the room at all for any reason without him, getting ready to leave the house, or sometimes even handing him to Adam.

I am pretty sure that he's concerned that my boobs and I are going to take off again. Before this trip, the longest Kamal and I had been apart was seven hours. Three days is a really long time when you're not even a year and a half old.

My left arm says this napping issue needs to be resolved immediately, but my mama instincts say it just needs a little time. For a long time, I was food, shelter, love, everything to this little boy. I was it. Daily I see him widening his circle of awareness, moving further and further into the territory of human experience. Sometimes being needed so much by one person feels impossibly exhausting; but then sometimes you see how beautiful being needed like that is, how rare and how fleeting. And then you know that the baby napping guilelessly in your lap, snoring just a little bit and clutching your shirt in one dimpled hand, is the kind of gift you savor while you can.

Up

Kamal pulled himself up to standing for the first time today! He used my hair to do it, which made it somewhat less awesome an experience for me. But he was pretty thrilled.

On taking the baby to work

I went back to work part-time when Kamal was 8 weeks old.  Last week I saw a patient that really needed to come back in no more than a week later--but I was booked three weeks out. I tried to figure out a way to fit her in to my existing appointments, and when that didn't work, I offered a compromise: I could see her today, but I had to bring my baby along. Would she mind?

She said she didn't. So today, full of trepidation, I prepared to bring my baby to work.

I put Kamal in his car seat and drove around till he was fast asleep. Then I parked as close as I could to my office--there's only street parking nearby, and it's pretty competitive. I slung one of those vibrating bouncy seat thingies across my back, hung a packed diaper bag on one shoulder, schlepped a bag full of work stuff on the other shoulder, hefted the car seat in my right hand and wielded my office keys in my left. I caught my reflection in a store window as I walked--I looked like the dogged, gimpy offspring of a toy store and a luggage shop.

My genius strategy for getting Kamal to nap through the appointment worked--up until I was ready to insert the needles. (You know, the actual reason people come to see an acupuncturist.) Then he woke up and completely flipped out. Screaming! Tears! I picked him up and said nice soothing things, and he quieted down. Then I put him in the vibrating bouncy seat thingy, and he looked pleased. Then I started to walk back to the patient, and he totally LOST HIS SHIT. 

So I ended up doing an entire acupuncture protocol on with a screaming baby strapped to me via Moby wrap. Holy moly, you guys. It was like working inside a hurricane.  

Fortunately my patient was remarkably, well, patient. And once all her needles were placed and I stepped outside to let her rest with them, I could give Kamal my full attention and he calmed and quieted--provided that I kept entertaining him. Gradually, my lovely, painstakingly decorated, tidily-minimalist waiting area devolved into something that looked like...my house.

This is my reception area without a baby in it: 

This is my reception area with a baby in it: 

Yup.

I apologized to the patient afterwards for all the sturm und drang, and she shrugged, cuddled Kamal for a bit, and then asked if we could do it again, with baby and all, next week.

The whole process was exhausting, but so many blessings have had to fall in my lap for this exhausting process to happen. I work in a field where I can make my own schedule; I have a partner both willing and able  to be with our baby for several hours during the week while I see patients, and I have enough wonderful patients to fill and spill out of  the hours that Adam can stay home with Kamal. And of course I have Kamal, my most miraculous of miracles, my most wonderful of wonders, my most treasured treasure, catapulting me at full speed into an unimaginably beautiful chaos.

Yay, Offbeat Families!

When we were planning our wedding, I was all about Offbeat Bride, and I was so thrilled to rediscover Offbeat Families when Kamal came along. After feeling hugely burned out on online parenting communities that I found cloyingly precious/anachronistically heteronormative/kinda judgey, Offbeat Families has been none of those things--it's just been a refreshing, faith-renewing reminder of why I actually really like the internet.

So this morning I was scrolling through OF's blog posts, and lo and behold: our very own Small Kamal got a little spotlight action on Offbeat Familes' Monday Montage!  Holy moly, did it bring me a thrill to see his little face beaming out at me from my monitor.


Check it out!

Offbeat Families' Monday Montage, 12/17/12

Email dated August 5, 2012 (two days before going into labor)

sent to my very dear friends Jenjen and Mayumi:

I am, at this moment, literally SURROUNDED by teeny-tiny clothes. This is a serious dose of reality. This is more laundry than I do for myself in, like, six months. This is a giant puzzle: why do clothes labeled "3-6
months" look sometimes the same size as newborn clothes and sometimes the same as clothes for nine-month-olds? For that matter, why are newborn clothes a separate thing from 0-3 month clothes? How do I figure out how many of these from each stage to keep? Everyone says you can't have too many onesies, but there has to be a
limit, right? What about hats, how many hats does a baby need? Does a baby need a balaclava? I don't know! I
have a baby coming any minute now and I don't understand anything about his wardrobe and clothes are, like, my thing.

I am in over my head. Almost literally, the way these clothing piles are growing.

Halp.

Love,
Relle

A little over four months in to the parenting experience, I'm a lot (a LOT!) calmer about the whole infant-wardrobe gestalt. Turned out to be quite a bit simpler once there was an actual small person to dress. And as it turns out, a baby DOES need a balaclava--or at least, as Kamal proved today, it comes in really handy on a long walk with a lovely friend on a very chilly day. 

Nap time

These are the good old days

Today Kamal and I danced to Rodrigo y Gabriela while Adam vacuumed the house and then took pictures of us.

Later, after a Facetime chat with Adam's parents during which Kamal giggled and burbled and then fell fast asleep, Adam and I stole kisses.

When you have a baby, everyone tells you to enjoy every second of it. And some days that's really hard to do; some days you're barely able to keep your eyes open or from bursting into tears. There are days where trying to enjoy every second just feels like one more task to complete, on top of and simultaneously with cleaning spit-up off of everything and changing a diaper and breast feeding and returning work emails and scheduling doctor appointments. 

Today was not one of those days. Today was an ordinary day, no more or no less sleep-deprived and spit-up-filled than any other, but today was golden. I was with my family, we are all healthy and safe and sound, and I know that one day, when Kamal is too big to carry while we whirl together around our cozy cottage, I will look back at Sundays like this with wistfulness. I will remember clipping Kamal's tiny nails while he slept in my lap. I will remember Kamal screaming with laughter while Adam nuzzled his chubby neck. I will remember Toby swiping his huge tongue over Kamal's face before I could intercept, and Kamal's little hands reaching delightedly for Toby's big, grinning, furry muzzle. I will remember dancing with my baby, the impossible softness of his hair under my chin, his fingers wrapped around my finger, his unique Kamal smell, like cocoa and violets and vanilla and lambswool. I will reach back in my memory for this golden day, and I will find it and know without a doubt that even if I had only lived this one day, more joy was mine in my life than I ever knew anyone could expect. 

A still, sweet, simple place

Last night, unbelievably, Kamal slept for eight hours straight. Of course that meant that after five hours I was startled wide awake by the unfamiliar sensation of not hearing fussing. I checked on Kamal, then tried to fall back asleep.

Instead, I started thinking about my father, and how difficult our relationship can be, and how much I want it to be easier. I thought about how my love for him is deep and loyal, but also muddied by guilt, tattered by anger, chewed by fear. Lying in the dark, I felt my love for my father fettering me to all those other awful feelings. I resented the fetters. I wondered why love gets such good press.  Thinking about how I love my father and what that love does to me, I got more and more agitated, and further and further away from sleep, and guiltier and angrier and more fearful. 

Then Kamal stretched and sighed in his sleep, and it was a like a door swung open to a clean, quiet room. 

Have you seen that movie, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"? In it, an entire town has nothing to eat except sardines, for years and years. And they're sort of okay with this, sort of making the best of it. Then one day, all kinds of delicious food starts raining from the sky, and the townspeople suddenly realize how hungry they are. 

That is how I love Adam. My love for Adam is the gluttonous, disbelieving hunger of someone who has always been fed enough love to live on but never, until now, given a good, square meal. Loving Adam is a gift instead of a sacrifice, as healing as bone broth, as decadent as truffles, as little-girl-hand-clappingly delightful as layer cake. As with any romantic love, it is sometimes haunted by the ghosts of past relationships, complicated by the catalysts of physical intimacy, clouded by the day-to-day realities of living a partnered life. Still, it is a perfect fit for two growing people. 

So if my love for my father is a battleground in a long and questionable war, and my love for Adam is an oasis from which I just barely glimpse the specter of a pitiless desert, then my love for Kamal is a still, sweet, simple place that I walked into before I even knew I was seeking it. Resting here, within this pure, easy love, my love for Adam rises up and away from the clutches of old irrelevant griefs, and my love for my father swells with the plausibility of forgiveness. Loving Kamal is the softest pillow, the gentlest bed, a blanket fort with room for all of us. 

Loving Kamal as he slept last night washed me clean of angst and sadness. I curled up inside that love and found a place to rest. 

Post-run refuel

After I came back from my run yesterday, Adam and Kamal were still, adorably, napping in the big orange chair. 

Kamal on a more active day in the big orange chair

So I took a nice long hot shower. And after I came out of the nice long hot shower, they were still adorably napping, and I was starving.

Since I've started breast feeding, protein is a really big deal. If I have a meal without protein in it, it kind of feels like I haven't eaten at all. This leads to situations like the time I put half a can of tuna on my plateful of Adam's amazing pasta alla vodka and completely scandalized him.

As far as I knew, I only had a few minutes before Kamal woke up and wanted to nurse, so I hustled to get a meal together. In a little bit of coconut oil, I scrambled an egg, a heaping tablespoon of live-cultured cottage cheese, and a huge handful of spinach. Then I cut a thin slice from a loaf of our homemade no-knead bread, cut that in half, and assembled a little sandwich. This is a meal that I make a lot; for its small size, it packs a whole bunch of protein--and it can be eaten with one hand, in case I'm breast feeding.*

*Sometimes I get crumbs on the baby.

Added a grapefruit, sprinkled with a teaspoon of sugar, from the orchard of our friends Ray and Barbara.

Kamal very considerately slept until I'd finished eating. Running, eating with two hands, AND blogging? This parenting thing is a piece of cake. Once in a while. 

Silly time is all the time

Somebody is stoked about wearing his onesie as a turban.

And is it just me, or does Kamal totally look like this (childhood-)self-portrait of Allie Brosh's over on Hyperbole and a Half?

from "The Year the Easter Bunny Died," by Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half

I read Allie's crazy-funny blog obsessively while I was pregnant. I'm thinking that might be a substantive part of the reason my baby resembles an ecstatic cartoon.

Ten years.

Saturday night, 2:00 A.M., 2002:  I sing my heart out and shake my booty on a stage at some club somewhere between Maryland and Connecticut; the crowd hollers and dances at my feet; the lights are hot and bright and I'm sure I'm the shiniest thing in the place.

Saturday night, 2:00 AM, 2012: Kamal vomits in my ear.

So, yeah. Ten years makes some difference. I'm proud, though, that the parts of me that really define who I am in the world are unchanged, that being a mama, while a profound life shift, still leaves me wholly recognizable to myself; that I'm me whether in hot pants and high heels or maternity leggings and Adam's old socks (or, for that matter, in my lab coat and take-me-seriously pumps). Resourceful improvisation; real interest and connection in the people around me; a perpetual readiness to view every unpackaged, unpolished and unconventional experience as an adventure and every difficult experience as the foundation for a fabulous joke; an unusually high tolerance for looking completely ridiculous: these qualities served me then and continue to serve me now.

This picture.

Our truly wonderful midwife, Colette, snapped this photo moments after Kamal's birth, and I'm so grateful that she did. It's only when I look at it that I really remember the breathless, astonished love I felt as he reached for me, wailing, like he was searching for something stable and familiar in the shocking new wideness he'd just found himself in.

With that memory, of course, comes a flood of other memories, all disjointed flashes. The exhaustion that pressed in on me after sixty hours of labor, so intense that I wasn't sure I'd remember how to eat or pee or even sleep. The metallic smells of the hospital stay I'd hoped to avoid by planning a home birth. The abject, shameful terror that surfaced whenever I thought about all the drama my lady parts had just endured, or wondered how on earth I was going to be a mother when I just wanted to sleep for weeks.

The vivid brightness and darkness of those early days seemed disconnected from any previously-known sense of time. I cried every day for a week, because I was fatigued, because I was afraid having a baby had been a mistake I couldn't undo, because I was frankly mourning the loss of our pre-baby life, and because I was deeply ashamed of all those feelings.

So, more than for anyone else, I'm writing this blog for the women in those first few days of motherhood. Those days are hard, and we don't talk enough about how hard they are, so when we struggle with them, we feel shame around that struggle. I had the great good fortune to be surrounded by a circle of other friends who'd recently had babies; when I reached out to them, they all assured me that I wasn't alone, that they'd all been where I was.

And most critically, they assured me that it would get better. It did, and that is the message I want most to  import here. I wouldn't want to repeat those first two weeks for love or money, but I wouldn't trade them, either. It was hard for all three of us, and bonded us in a way easier days couldn't have. It showed Adam and I how committed we truly were to the process of parenting and how committed Kamal was to staying and thriving in the world. Beyond the love we felt immediately for our tiny son, we learned respect for him in those hard weeks. We built a strong and balanced foundation for our new little family. And while our day-to-day lives with a now-fifteen-and-a-half-week old isn't what I'd call "easy," it's definitely easier--and it's really, really fun.

It does get better. I write here to show all the ways that it does.

Every day is a thanks-giving day.

Today feels like the right day to start a blog about one of the people I'm most thankful to know. Three and a half months ago, Kamal turned Adam and I from a happy, loving twosome to an even happier, loving-er trio. This small person and I have been heart-to-heartcore buds from moment one. We are on a journey together, one small, baby-socked step at a time, learning what works for us and ready to share it with you.

Happy Thanksgiving! May you have worlds and worlds to be thankful for. I know we do.