The fine art of forgetting

There is a name for this.

My sister called yesterday. She sounded tiny and tired and defeated. Before too many words were said, she was crying.

She had lost her wallet, and didn't even know it for three days. She was angry at herself and embarrassed and didn't understand how this could happen. She's a new mom, and this was her first time her Type A personality had crumbled.

Me? I'm used to this. After eight years I just assume that I will embarrass myself on a daily basis. I never know what form my absent-mindedness will take, but I know it will happen.

Like the time my husband was gone on business and not only did I leave the front door unlocked, I left it wide open all night long. In January, in Iowa. And yes, it was below zero that night.

Or the time I just forgot to go to work.

Or the time I remembered to go to work but couldn't because I could not find my keys anywhere. Couldn't find the spare keys, either.

Or the time I left the keys in the car and left the car running (unintentionally) while I grocery shopped, then proceeded to leave my purchased groceries inside the store when I left.

Or the time I forgot to renew my thyroid medication prescription. For an entire month.

Or the time I neglected to renew my driver's license for so long I had to take the written test and the driving test. Oh, and there's the other time I did that, too.

Or the time I sent Jensen for a week-long vacation at his grandparents' without his suitcase, which I had lovingly packed and placed carefully by the front door so I wouldn't forget it.

Or the time I permanently lost my glasses. The ones I didn't replace because I decided it's just easier to be slightly visually-impaired than to try to keep track of yet one more thing.

Or.... I have to stop now, before somebody comes and removes my children from my custody.

Smartest parenting move we ever made was deciding that the birth control pill should probably not be our contraceptive method of choice. Seriously: we'd have seven kids by now. At least.

You know the story: I'm relatively intelligent, relatively high-functioning, relatively organized. (Don't we all think these things about ourselves?) But on any given day there may well be no milk in the refrigerator because I keep forgetting to buy it. Or there may be four gallons of milk in the refrigerator because I keep forgetting that I remembered to buy it.

So, yes, there's a name for this phenomenon, but I don't like it: "mommy brain." I find it troublesome anytime an adult refers to another adult (or herself) as "mommy." But, more importantly, the term implies that there's something inherently wrong with a mother's intelligence. It's condescending.

Nevertheless. There is something that happens when we find ourselves permanently and irrevocably in charge of another human being. Something that leaves us mentally disconnected, grasping at cognitive straws far too often. No matter how well we plan, how many lists we make, how many times we check and double-check... sometimes we forget.

We are tired, chronically, from waking with babies and sleeping with one ear cocked and never really allowing ourselves to rest. We are responsible for something so big that we cannot wrap our exhausted brains around it, and we are distracted by being needed incessantly. And, maybe most importantly, our brains and our hearts are no longer our own. We are taken over by these little people who move into our homes and into our souls and make everything else-- wallets and glasses and keys-- entirely secondary.

Call it mommy brain if you must. I don't like it but I probably won't argue with you. Because it's true that something in me is just not quite capable of addressing life's pettiest tasks sometimes. I like to think it's gotten better, but I'm not sure the evidence supports that assertion. I've learned to live with it, Jeff has learned to live with it, and (aside from my occasionally-bruised ego) we are none the worse for it.

So, Ali, I can't promise you that it will get better, but I can tell you that you'll learn to accomodate your sometimes-slippery mental state. And if you can't take it anymore and need to talk to someone who understands, call me. If you can find the phone.

Motherhood is really hard, the weaning edition

Bony babies aren't cute. They look like scrawny birds. They look fetal, while at the same time looking eerily geriatric. But they do not look cute or cuddly or nurtured.

Caleb didn't gain weight for the first two months of his life. As a matter of fact he lost weight, and an alarming amount of it. It was only after we started "supplementing" breastfeeding with formula that he at least went into a weight holding-pattern. We never really figured out what was wrong. He fell asleep every time I put him to the breast. He didn't latch on well. He just didn't care.

When we poured formula down his little baby throat, he would accept it. This at least prevented the doctor from calling him "failure to thrive," which, despite my academic and clinical knowledge as a nurse, I heard as a criticism of my abilities. But I stubbornly would not give up the hope of breastfeeding. I nursed him every two hours, by the timer, around the clock. For sixty-some-odd days.

I cried. A lot. Every time I held his bony little body I felt a sickening thud of failure. Every time someone said, "Oh, he's so tiny!" I heard an indictment of my mothering abilities.

Breastfeeding had always come very easily for me and my babies. My first two babies were fat, pink piggies who nursed like champions, and I was a milk machine. This time, I felt dried up. Rejected. I did not recognize mothering from behind a bottle, but nursing, which had been the very definition of mothering for me, an act of nurturing, nourishing, and symbiosis, was failing. Nothing seemed right anymore. I didn't want formula to be the answer. But bottles were quickly becoming preferable to an exercise in desperation.

Then, he figured it out, almost literally overnight. His older brother was in the hospital, having had emergency lung surgery. I was at my wit's end, sleepless, worrying about two children. And he just started doing it right, and got fat and greedy and cute. Somehow, all those hours and tears and worries paid off.

And now? After all that hard work, the gratification of success, the struggle to define myself, yet again, as a mother, I'm weaning him. I am taking it away from him. After all that effort, I'm walking away from it.

Because I can't do it anymore.

Yes, breastfeeding is amazing. Beautiful. You know all the arguments. They're all true. And you know what else? It is one of the hardest things I've ever done. It leaves me exhausted, physically and emotionally. I can't eat enough to maintain energy for both of us. I'm still up at least once a night. I hate the way it makes my body look-- soft and matronly and indulgent. There are days when I just do not want to be touched, or needed in such a, well, needy way. I'm ready for Jeff to be the one who can make it all better sometimes. I want to recognize myself inside this body again. I am, quite literally, sucked dry.

So the weaning begins, hopefully to be done somewhere right around his first birthday next month.

And, as breastfeeding is a perfect metaphor for my mothering style, weaning is the logical extension of that metaphor. Where do I draw the line? How do I embrace the conflicting emotions that arise in this one parenting act? The wanting to be "free," the guilt associated with that desire?

I've done it twice before. This is the last time. One of these days, one of these nursings will be the last one-- the very thought leaves me feeling distinctly adrift. It's almost unthinkable that I will never do this again, that my little Caleb is growing apart from me, and that there will never be another little baby who needs me to give him sustenance. And yet. I am looking very forward to the liberation.

It's part of the complex balance that I must negotiate, measuring my impulses as mother, wife, woman, daughter, sister, me.... It's all in there, tugging at me, and none of it is black and white. I just have to find the best shade of gray that I can.

Small things

If you've ever lived with a toddler or preschooler, you know that they have control issues.

It turns out that living with a bunch of kids has also given me some control issues. (Just ask my husband.)

It's been a bad week on this front, mostly due to Caleb's two-pronged approach to Mommy Torture. Firstly, he has a cold. This means he's fussy, crying a lot, up every few hours at night, and wants to be carried almost constantly. Secondly, when he does allow me to put him down (only briefly, mind you), he's hell-bent on destruction: climbing bookshelves, shredding books, crawling into the dishwasher and then falling out, and so on. Even when he's not crying, I cannot leave him alone for a second.

I find this part of motherhood to be maddening: nothing occurs on my terms. I've spent the week staggering around in sleep-deprived, shower-deprived, out-of-control fatigue. I can't get anything done, quite literally. I've stopped trying. I ordered pizza for dinner last night. There are toys scattered on every horizontal surface in the house. Crazy-making, for me. When I have a free minute, for some self-defeating reason, I spend it on the computer reading about the disaster-formerly-known-as-the-economy, or this horrifying election season. Which makes me feel even worse.

This morning Caleb awoke at 5:45, ready to get up. Which meant for me: no shower, no breakfast, no sense of control or accomplishment. I had failed before I even started.

Except I didn't play along.

I calmly put him back in his crib, much to his disappointment. I happily made a pot of coffee. When I got into the shower, he was fussing. I let the hot water clear the cobwebs, and when I emerged he was still protesting (though not too forcefully). I dried my hair, and when I turned off the dryer he was still complaining. I made my bed. I picked up my room.

In short I did what I wanted to do. Those things that I used to do every morning, before Number Three came along. Those things that, even if I don't get another damned thing done this day, make me feel as if I've accomplished something-- petty as though it may be.

Then I went to save my baby from his crib-prison. He smiled at me, and I smiled back.

This is my life right now. It's a small world which I currently occupy, defined by bed-making and laundry-doing and child-feeding. Big Questions are beyond my grasp, which I sometimes find disappointing. But for now, it's mostly okay. As long as I can occasionally say that I've done these little things on my terms, I'm satisfied. For now.

No more tomorrows

The following conversation was a test. I failed. Miserably. Honestly, I don't know why I bothered answering, because I had failed before I even started.


Anyway, there I was, innocently changing the baby's diaper. Minding my own business. Then Evan strolls into the room, and...

Evan: "Mommy, is it tomorrow?" [He has an agenda. I can already tell.]

Me: "No, it's today." [Followed by an immediate sinking feeling in my stomach.]

Evan: "But yesterday you said that tomorrow it would be today. You did. You said that. So is it tomorrow?"

Me: "Um. Yes?"

Evan: "Well, is it? 'Cause you just told me it's today. So is it today or tomorrow?!"

Me: dead silence


I learned two things from this exchange. A) I can't win. B) I will never again use the terms "today," "tomorrow," or "yesterday." From now on, all days will be referred to by their calendar names. So: today is Wednesday (I think...). Tomorrow is Thursday (if today is, indeed, Wednesday). Period. (This is impossible. I've already broken my promise. Three times. And I'm not even out of this paragraph. Please refer back to point A.)

And now I need another quart or so of coffee to help me figure out if today is, well... today.

And now, Mommy needs a drink.

We really need to work on our stamina. Or else, if the past three days are any indication, we'll be dead by the time Caleb goes to college. Here's a thumbnail of 52 hours earlier in the week:

Sunday afternoon: Evan gets lost at a strip mall on the interstate, two hours away from home. Lost as in we call 911 and the police are out looking for him. He is found by a kind stranger, scared and disoriented, but safe.

Monday morning: Jeff leaves before 6am, to be gone until Tuesday morning. Jensen misses the bus. At the exact same moment the bus drives by, Evan (not the most graceful kid I've ever met) falls and gashes his top lip open and there is a lot of blood and screaming. I get a headache. By some minor miracle I get Jensen to school on time.

Monday noon: Evan goes to his first day of preschool. Surprisingly drama-free, but still a bit stressful.

Monday afternoon: Pick the kids up from school. This is NOT as easy as it sounds: turns out picking kids up from school is a contact sport in this town. Jensen is done at 3:40, Evan at 4:00. In order to stand a chance of getting Evan on time, I have to be one of the first parents in line at Jensen's school. Which means I have to be there at 3:10, at the latest. (Oh, and it seems parents who are supposed to be responsible adults have no compunctions about cutting in line, by the way.) So I wait outside Jensen's school, Caleb in tow, for 30 minutes, scoop Jensen up as quickly as possible, hope to make it out of the parking lot by 3:50, and then try to make the 15-minute drive to Evan's preschool in ten minutes. So I do this whole schtick Monday afternoon. And I still have a headache. From here we go to buy diapers, because I only have two more left at home.

Monday evening: From Target (diapers, remember?) we go directly to Jensen's football pictures. He changes his clothes in the van. Two hours of absolute chaos. We make it home by 7:45. I throw leftovers at the kids and toss them in bed. Then I curl up with my dinner of microwave popcorn and a juice box and watch the Democratic National Convention.

Monday night: Caleb gets up three (1-2-3) times. What?!?!

Tuesday morning: Jeff comes home. Jensen makes the bus. We're off to a good start. I have an early doctor's appointment, during which time I find out that my thyroid function is drastically low. (I could have told you that without having blood drawn, but it's nice to at least have a reason for being so immensely tired.) We're looking forward to a pleasant and relaxing afternoon.

Tuesday afternoon: Seems our hot water heater has sprung a leak. (Reminder: this is a brand-new house.) Jeff figures it out when he notices our downstairs carpet is squishy. He pulls back the carpet and calls our builder and a plumber. In the midst of this joy, I repeat the pick-up-the-kids exercise. Fun!

Tuesday evening: As soon as I retrieve the kids, we tear out the door to drop Jensen at football practice. Then we take Evan and Caleb to an early-childhood education program (check out Parents as Teachers-- very nifty program). After which Jeff whisks Jensen away from football to go to Cub Scouts. At 7:45, Evan and I (Caleb's still tagging along) eat a nutrient-devoid dinner at McDonald's. Yum-my. At home, Evan won't go to bed until Jensen's home, which doesn't happen until 9:00. (Evan's a bit skittish after getting lost Sunday.) I'm assuming Jensen and Jeff ate something somewhere, but am really beyond caring. Oh, and we forget to put out the trash. And we find out sometime in this craziness that our credit card number has been stolen.

So, by 10:00 last night, I couldn't decide which I wanted worse: a cigarette, a stiff drink, or my bed. But I don't smoke, and sleep trumps booze every time. (God, I'm old.)

I can hear all of you who have survived multiple years of this kind of activity snickering at me. It's okay; you've earned the right to laugh at my expense. But please, do NOT tell me it only gets worse from here. I know, I know.

That's what scares me.