Monday, September 06, 2010

the beginning of september

holy eff, it's already september and it's already our family fall.* this past week has felt especially fallish because the weather has turned much cooler — particularly the nights. the hubby and i just sat outside in our driveway looking out over our nice view of the neighborhood, enjoying the weather and talking. it seems like just yesterday we were sitting out there watching the fireworks on the forth of july.

yesterday we celebrated labor day at the lakehouse with the in-laws and my mother. it should be a much more fun time than it is, but unfortunately you can't choose your family. at least grandpa and the kids had a great time, which is definitely important. it was probably the last day of swimming outside for the summer which is going to bum out munchkin for sure, but at least we have 9 more weeks of swim school.

saturday we watched the first husker game of the season, and munchkin played quite well by himself which helped us enjoy it.

friday night i went to a surprise birthday party for a dear friend of mine who lost her baby boy. her birthday was earlier in the week, and her baby's due date was friday. i can't imagine how weird/hard that milestone must be. i really hope she had a good time. it was such a sweet thing for her hubby to set up for her.

thursday night we actually had a kid-free night at the lakehouse so we tried to invite people out to watch the first night of football with us, but unfortunately everyone else has real jobs and bosses and schedules that they have to abide by, so only two people could join us. we definitely made the most of it and had a really good time regardless.

this upcoming week is munchkin's 2nd birthday. i can't believe how old he is and how much he knows and understands. i also still can't believe i'm an effing parent.



*our family fall starts the monday of the week of the first college football game. 

Saturday, August 28, 2010

week of aug. 23rd, 2010



to start this new commitment
, i'm giving myself a small, attainable goal by taking a bare-minimum approach. it's tough to find time to write complete (concise) sentences and thoughts, but i can effing find 15 minutes a week to jot down some bullet points, right?


fun times this week
  • lunch with my hubby at old chicago, sitting outside in the beautiful fall weather. followed by the built to spill concert downtown outside the slowdown with a.rem. 
  • shooting the alcoholic vampire at scotty's 
  • taking chase to dave & crystal's to swim and play


looking forward to
  • labor day at the lakehouse
  • husker football!
  • potential vegas trip


current munchkin highlights
  • he says lots of words (up to about 5 in a sentence)
  • he just started 2nd (10-week) session of swim school
  • i love the way he says "Ls," they're pronounced like "Ys" so "yellow" is "yeyo" and "starla" is "starya"
  • he loves the movie cars — especially mater
  • he tells us stories, and uses sound effects like fake crying
  • he knows his colors
  • he loves telling me what kind of truck we see (ie. semi, cement, dump)
  • he's still in his crib, but his mattress is on the floor so i can climb in with him in the mornings or after a nap. he smiles at me as soon as he opens his eyes. 
  • he still sucks at walking
  • he is a little ocd with lining up his toys
what i'm working on
  • blue cross blue shield video animation
  • tiffany & co. sales handbook*
  • sublime couture branding
*eff yeah!

for myself

my memory fucking sucks. i wish it were laughable, but it's just sad, really. i used to have some decent short-term memory, but that disappeared when i got knocked up and never returned. lately i've been feeling that what little memories i do have slip away by the second, and as i notice the voids, i feel a tightening in my chest — an anxiety of losing parts of myself forever.

in this world of information-on-demand, i'm horrified by the realization that there's no google in my mind. there's no way to search archives that have disappeared. so i'm trying to make a commitment to myself to blog again — not to really entertain anyone, not to expose myself (i honestly don't give a shit if anyone reads this again ever.) i just want need a diary of memories that i can search through and read as time continues to fly by, because in the end i feel like experiencing moments and creating memories are what life is all about.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

what i never knew i never knew about having a baby...

i recently had a discussion with my dear friend amg about the past year-and-a-half of my life — from getting pregnant to being pregnant to giving birth and now being a mom — and we decided that as someone completely baby-illiterate, it could be potentially beneficial to others like me if i shared my thoughts about this unimaginable new experience.

i think what has shocked me the most is that i consider myself a fairly well-educated, well-prepared person, and over the last 18 months, i have never felt more clueless and helpless in all my life. no amount of reading or "learning" could have ever prepared me for this. i can only imagine that if i had been around a baby for more than a minute or two while growing up, then i wouldn't have felt such anxiety, failure, pressure, fear and lonliness, but i can never really know that for sure.

oh shit, there are two lines on the stick
finding out i was pregnant was both exciting and terrifying — mostly terrifying. i remember comparing it to being strapped into the front car of a roller coaster and realizing that there's no longer any chance to run through the chicken exit. i mean, theoretically i could have unbuckled the safety belt and jumped out of the moving car, but what would that really have got me besides a lot of bruising and potential permanent damage. so as i slowly clicked my way up the hill, glancing back at the safe, stable platform i had just left, i faced the open sky above me as i wondered what the drop would be like on the other side. would it be completely terrifying, fun, easy, hard... would i survive? i wanted answers so badly, but i had to wait until i got to the bottom of the hill before i could know anything, and my patience was so thin — this was my life, i needed to know what lay ahead.

there's a human being growing inside me?
being pregnant was a very lonely experience for me, and i even had the benefit of one of my best friends being knocked-up at the same time. i had so many racing thoughts, questions, fears and feelings that i felt nobody could understand, and i just had to keep living with them inside me. i continued to see my psychologist, but even that could only help so much. i have struggled with depression in the past, and the cocktail of crazy prego hormones plus chemical imbalances plus my general fear of the unknown provided a perfect recipe for a depression daiquiri. to top it off, i didn't really have the option of taking anti-depressants while pregnant. in fact, i realized that one can't do a whole lot of anything while pregnant, and i think that was a huge contribution to the loneliness.

my biggest fears during pregnancy were basically:
• hating motherhood and regretting having a baby
• not loving my baby
• making my baby feel unloved or unwanted
• ruining my baby's life

i remember actually having the thought, "what should i do when my baby gets here and i realize that motherhood is not for me?" i went through various scenarios of leaving the baby with his dad and moving far away to start a completely new life. i figured that if i was having such serious feelings of doubt at the time, why would they go away once the baby got here?

although my husband would understandably disagree, i think i did a fairly decent job of keeping myself in check. i really only let out about 40% of what was actually in my head. scary, i know. i hit the peak of my anxiety the day of our first childbirth class when i went through a complete outer-body experience. i felt like the real me was watching the prego me go through the class thinking, "that's not me. i don't get pregnant. i don't have babies. and yet i'm due in a few weeks." i couldn't get my head around it at all, and everything started to visibly look unfamiliar. my husband of 4 years seemed like a complete stranger while he held me and helped me practice breathing. i didn't recognize anything. it was like i had amnesia.

after the class we went out for lunch and i had to ask my husband if he was still interested in having three kids. i couldn't imagine going through any of this again — heck, i still wasn't sure i could handle the rest of my current pregnancy. when he said that he was fine if we only had one, i remember letting out an enormous sigh of relief. at the time, it was the best thing i could have heard. the fog began to lift and i felt like i could breathe a little easier.

maybe these consecutive contractions don't mean i'm going into labor
for the last few months of pregnancy i slept downstairs on the couch because i could no longer get comfortable lying down. sleeping by myself didn't really bother me at this point, and i tried to make the most of it because we didn't have a tv in our bedroom so i would stay up and watch some shows. the night i went into labor, i was getting ready to go to sleep and i felt an overwhelming sense of fear, loneliness and anxiety. i didn't want to be alone and i couldn't figure out why. i started having typical braxton hicks contractions and thought nothing of it until they kept coming. i tried to go upstairs and sleep with my husband, but that didn't help. i tried walking around and that didn't help. finally i realized i was probably going into labor, so i called the doctor. she told me to keep track and if i have contractions for an hour less than 5 mins apart, i should go to the hospital. an hour later, that's exactly where we headed.

the following 15 hours were not fun. there was nothing fun about childbirth. it was painful, unknown, scary, and again, lonely. the epidural helped, but was terrifying to get in the first place, and it's not enough to keep the pain of those final contractions away. what really didn't help was that i wasn't sure i would even like the end result of all this anguish i had been experiencing over the last 9 months.

i remember the nurse being so excited for me to start pushing, but i didn't share her enthusiasm. for one thing i didn't know how much it would hurt, but also i knew it was the final stretch of the pregnancy journey. at the end there would be this baby that i hopefully liked and would have to start learning about. i wanted the end of pregnancy to symbolize a return to normalcy, not a beginning to yet another completely unknown life.

the pushing went pretty well, and before i knew it, my baby boy entered the world. as soon as he came out, i bawled. hard. not because i was so happy to see my baby, but because i was so happy it was over. in fact, when i first saw him i was disappointed. he looked so unfamiliar and uncute. it's not like i knew how he was going to look, but to me, this wasn't it. there was no hollywood-like moment of overwhelming joy. there was no "click." he was just there and it was over and — oh my god, am i still being stitched up?

funny, i didn't realize i was making a career change
from what i could tell, my new job in life was to keep this tiny baby human alive. i couldn't really think about anything else. well, except for the ridiculous amount of discomfort and pain that lingered around the lower half of my weird-looking body. i had decided that i wanted to breast feed him, and that was actually going pretty well, but i still couldn't handle the pressure of knowing that this life was now in my hands. forever.

i really wasn't looking forward to leaving the comfort of the hospital with all it's life-saving equipment and brilliant nurses who actually knew stuff about babies. the second night, amg stayed the night with me so my husband could go and get some sleep. this was beyond helpful, but equally depressing because she knew way more about my baby than i did. she did everything so effortlessly, like she was born to be a mom. and i wasn't.

taking my baby home and starting to permanently integrate him into my life didn't seem possible. i didn't have a vision of what that new life would look like, nor did i know what i wanted it to look like. all i really knew was that i was supposed to feed him, change him, burp him and try to get some sleep. and yet the one goal i had stuck in my mind was that i didn't want my child to ever feel unloved, abandoned, or unimportant. but how would i actually achieve that?

months went by and it seemed like my job went from keeping him alive to keeping him from crying while keeping him alive. it was all a sleepless blur and yet somehow, without my knowledge, i began to fall in love. i started to get to know my little munchkin man, and with each passing day, the dread of having to take care of him forever turned into an acceptance of my new life, then turned into comfort of being a member of this family, then turned into excitement of what will come next.

and then he smiled at me. my little man smiled at me. his mom... he smiled at me because i am his mom.

i never thought this day would come. i never thought i would be happy to consider myself a mom. i never thought i would be so excited to see a baby and hold him and snuggle him and kiss him and make him giggle, and yet here i am, blabbing on about my little munchkin man. so is motherhood for me? who knows. does my child feel loved and wanted? i sure hope so. do i regret having a baby, especially after knowing how hard it truly is? not for one second.