Genius quote o’ the day

Somebody said this to me today:

“What others think is none of my business and what others expect is not my responsibility”.

I don’t know if it’s paraphrased from something else that is widely known, but it’s new to me and I like it lots.

Just what the frack is it

I think I am supposed to be doing? We were all set to go to the food store this morning (when you usually get groceries delivered, food shopping is a novel outing) but were waylaid by tornado-ish windstorms. On the walk toward home, I took us through a sheltered street and ta-dah, there was a petting zoo. The winds died down enough for us to enjoy Bean’s first in-person roosters, goats, and rabbits. We ran around a park for a while, had a lovely walk home, then played inside before nap. Afterward, we walked to the bookstore, picked out a couple of supercuties I so should have written myself (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and Baby Loves Jazz) and meandered our way through the neighborhood, stopping to chat with strangers, look at dogs, climb some things we shouldn’t have, and take a peek at a new art installation. We came inside, ate dinner together, read our new books, listened to CDs and danced, and Bean had his puttering around alone time before his bedtime routine.

Doesn’t this sound grand? I mean it, doesn’t this sound phenomenally grand? And it was. It IS. It’s a gorgeous privilege. So why do I feel like I am supposed to be doing more?

Am I a person with such an overactive mind and body so accustomed to the worrying and hurrying and scurrying around I did pre-bambino (as well as for the 8 months or so of insanity that followed his birth) that I cannot just be satisfied with now providing my kiddo the calm days I wish I had as a child? By the way, my time is not all about Bean, I don’t want to give that impression so don’t give me the whole pitfalls of sahmhood schpiel. I write, I move, I create, I read, I live in a kickass neighborhood, I talk with grownups…I am deeply happy. So wtf is it I am seeking, other than compulsively acting like the trained monkey that I clearly am? What more am I expecting of myself right now?

Hrrrrmmmmmmmm.

One of the Beavers would say it’s “blue-collar guilt”. She wasn’t raised with much in the way of money or stability, either, and her current contentedness and ability to be so autonomous, rather than constricted by financial and familial circumstances, freaks her right out sometimes. Maaaaybe…I dunno. Of course, it is a textbook response of an acoa to panic when things are too calm (hullo, #6). 

I wonder how I can expect others to value my contribution to society during this phase of my life when I can’t even seem to entirely do so.

Motherhood is quite an education, far beyond actually taking care of the Bean.

Blah.

Blech. Blah blah. Blech.

That’s all I’ve got to say about Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven sending Bean a belated first birthday card with a message written solely to him inside saying “tell your parents to send me your social security number so I can set up a college fund for you.”

Passive aggressive, much? A man who didn’t do a whole lot more than make his own kids want to apologize for breathing his air wants to set up a college fund for the grandson that for mysterious reasons he’s never met?

I have no words. Besides, there’s a major flaw in his masterful plan: Bean can’t read.

Reframing trauma

So last night I went to a session on reframing trauma in order to move past it and remove the residual scum of it that may be blocking me from feeling/doing/wanting things in the healthiest way possible (that’s my synopsis of it, anyway). I wasn’t sure what to expect but the guy running it has an extensive professional background so I figured it would be worth the $35 for a two-hour lecture from him. It was. It’s not just because I have an affinity for ex-Catholic middle-aged gay men, either. That was just the black truffle demi glace of the experience for me.

I’ve written about the whole re-parenting thing and how I try to remember to do so every time I hit a wall, as I recently did. The cognitive strategy of re-parenting helped, but it was incomplete. The guy I listened to last night gave me more to do than go back and get me-then, but even though I now have more to think about, it’s made the whole reframing process a hell of a lot easier and more effective.

Anyway, I won’t get all looly-looly on you about trauma, psychic blockages and how negative experiences continue to manifest themselves in the most fucked up and unexpected ways. You know all that. I will tell you that if talk therapy bores you to death and/or hasn’t worked for you because who does that therapist think s/he is anyway, this whole advanced reframing thing may help. I am a work-in-progress, but even my dreams last night were affected in a positive way. I won’t get into what Chris Kattan was doing in them (wtf?) but there were breakthroughs and I am feeling happily buzzed today. It even turned the 4am crazies into something constructive (I no longer wake at that time in a panic; the dog woke me up and my brain aaaalmost got going but I was able to reel it in). Write me a note if you want to hear more about it. It may work for you, it may not. But if you’re like me, almost anything is worth trying once.

I’ve worked so hard

to create a life devoid of the drama, violence, lies and alcoholism that are the legacy of acoas, and all it took to destroy my painstakingly crafted (albeit lonely) peace was a family member to move up here, ostensibly to help me. I am seriously depressed, peeps. No foolin’.

Thank God/dess it is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Hard to sink too far down when I am encouraged to growl and shout:

“Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

I would need to enter the contents of my entire blog

in the comment section at Ask Moxie to really respond as clearly as I want to under this post. Or I could just simply say

HELL YES.

I’ve talked about it before but saying it again feels cleansing, in the same way peroxide on a cut stings like crazy but you know it is going to make it better faster and prevent any festering goop: having Bean and seeing how unbelievably straightforward his needs are, even at his most challenging and exhausting, made me unable to speak to my father. Of course, the whole not-making-it-out-here-to-ever-meet-him and that do-you-feel-like-a-lesser-woman-because-of-the-c-section thing, among other behavioral gems, added to my decision. I just can’t be in contact with him. I can’t because I don’t want to. And at this point, not being in contact with him hurts a lot less than trying to be.

My peeps have got me thinking

Oh, favorite bloggers, I love you but you challenge me. You make me think on days that I don’t want to but I just can’t quit you.

You’ve got me thinking and wishing about things to do with family, specifically, Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven (when I was little I thought those were the words to that prayer). I wish I could say that having Bean brought me closer to my father. It has actually separated us more, which was no easy feat, considering how separated we’ve been thoughout my life. I wish I could say that becoming a mom made me understand the challenges he faced as a parent and that I am now able to forgive him for wounds inflicted long ago. Instead, it has torn them wide open.

Having Bean opened a world to me that is complex and difficult at times, but more often, it is supremely simple: he is my child, I love him, and he comes first. Huz is with me on this. Our marriage is essential, our individuality and personal satisfaction are as well, but nothing is more important than Bean’s wellness.

Knowing what it means to be a parent has now angered me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined while I was just someone’s daughter. I knew that things my father said and did hurt deeply, I knew that they were wrong, but I was able to ignore and forgive a great deal up until now. I was raised to make excuses for horrible behavior. I was raised to treat my father like a petulant child whose tantrums were to be avoided with careful words and tiptoeing. When we heard his car in the driveway, we would drop whatever we were playing with, run to our respective rooms and shut the door. When home alone with him, we knew it was just a matter of time before we woke the beast, and we never knew what was going to provoke it next. The simplest of things would enrage him and put us front and center in a barrage of insults and aggressive physicality. When out with him, he walked away and smoked, always at a distance from us, perhaps on a bench or pacing on a sidewalk, always looking like he wished he were anywhere but where we were.

There were random times of daddyness which made it all the more confusing. Like when he coached my pee-wee soccer team and we lost every game we had, but he still wore out the car horn on the way home from every game, shouting my team’s name out the window to everyone we passed, including the cows in the New Jersey fields. Or the time when I was seven years old and got the highest score in the history of the Black Cat Kempo on my yellow belt test (my katas rock); you have never seen a father beaming so brightly as when my score was read aloud and my new belt was issued. He looked as though he would burst. There were other “daddy” times, too, some small, some big, but they were always punctuated with a slap or an insult, so I could never really trust that the good feelings were going to last for long.

I call what he did after he drove us down to Florida and left us there when I was 11 “fair-weather phone parenting”. He couldn’t understand why we were so angry and sad when he visited, so he eventually stopped. He then only wanted to hear good news over the phone, and he only wanted to show up for the happy stuff, like driving me to grad school and attending my wedding. Everything else was met with silence, and perhaps the sounds of smoking, on the other end of the phone. Offers of money were always conditional, and if accepted, held up as proof that we only loved him when we needed something. Shamed, always shamed, if we needed him in any way. We were supposed to be strong, we were lions, we were tough. Let me hear you roar. I am not getting off the phone with you until I hear you roar.

We do not visit him because the last time we did, there was so much drunken drama between he and his wife and his stepdaughters that Huz lay down on the sidewalk outside the house and asked beseechingly, “What just happened?” My father has not visited us since my wedding three years ago. Not when Bean was born; not when he was kept in the hospital for 10 days and I was the human equivalent of a dried out corn husk, all crackly and empty and shocked to my core. Not after the time he “wanted to give us to become a family” before he planned a visit. Not the month after that, or the next, or the next. I continued to invite him despite his treatment of me, my mother, my sister. I invited him despite being asked if I felt like less of a woman because of the c-section, and despite having my pregnancy, my labor, and my child not discussed but held up to that of a stepsister’s with whom I have no contact. There was always an excuse, always a promise to visit that would placate me so I would stop asking.

I stopped sending photos at around month seven. I was making it too easy for him to feel involved from a distance. I stopped cashing gift checks for the same reason. I refused further boxes of plastic toys. None of it is you, I told him. None of it is good enough. He now doesn’t call or send anything. It hurts, but it is easier this way. Better for me to face one big rejection than continue to endure a million little ones over time. I am certain he is telling anyone who will listen that I am keeping him from his only “real” grandchild, that it is his heart’s deepest wish to be near us. He will tell people these things, he will tell himself these things, but somewhere inside he knows that he cannot emotionally handle meeting his grandson. Still, in my father’s mind, he is Bill Cosby, all laughs and tough love for his brood that he tells people he raised. Life is a beer commercial filled with good friends and good times. Why don’t we want to hear about his boat club or how he rehabbed our stepsister’s condo for her, or rebuilt her car engine? Why do we act so nice to him sometimes but then get so angry and cry over nothing? What is wrong with us?

I will never understand how he is able to justify (forget?) treating us the way he has. I thought I could once I had a child. I thought I would see how complicated it all is and understand why he couldn’t figure out how to parent us in a way that was less damaging. I don’t.

chaos brings up an important point

in her comment on my “oy, the guilt” post. She didn’t intend to, but she did. My responses to a lot of things are dysfunctional ones.

Like many people, my responses are deeply affected by having a rather hateful person as one parent and a blindly loving enabler for the other. Some of my earliest memories as a very little child are of being told I was bad, hated, a liar, and disgusting; of being treated as a deep annoyance and as though I should apologize for breathing air. I believed these things for many years.

On a subconcious level I still struggle with not believing it’s all true. I imagine that is why I ended up in police cars by 12, already heavily alcohol-dependent and on drugs, then pregnant at 16, and when I got past those things found myself in more than one abusive relationship over the years. I hadn’t yet accepted that I was worth something as a human being. When I finally did, it was under the belief that I had to be perfect, to show myself that I could rise above all that crap and I could matter.  I am still learning to accept that I do not need to be a supastah or Mother Teresa to be a person of value. So when I am confronted with something that I do not excel in, or something I cannot control (like, oh, say, parenting a colicky baby, not having that work at home job I was expecting, experiencing loneliness yet pushing people away, etc etc etc) it does not take much for me to start thinking veeeeeeery negative thoughts about myself.

So. I am parenting me-then by going back and getting her in my mind (it’s a mental exercise I learned about somewhere along the way). I go back and get her and bring her here, to where everything is alright. She exists out there still in the space/time whatchamacallit, that wounded-me, and I have to make her know she is safe and good. I have to pick her up and hug her and say, “Come with me, I am getting you out of here right now, you do not deserve this.”

But even when I do go back and get her all those times, which is mentally exhausting but necessary, what then? My family life taught me how to get through the day, how to bear things, how to put my head down and be sad and keep it to myself. They didn’t teach me how to have joy, how to feel calm and secure, how to have a hobby, or how to feel worthy of love and respect. I am figuring those things out now as I go.

Someone once said to “strive to be the parent you wish you had”. I am doing just that, for myself and for Bean.

Anywho, just wanted to clarify that I’m fucked up in some ways and these posts are going to reflect that.  But I am good and kind and getting better all the time.

Oy, the guilt!

So I am finally reading Our Babies, Ourselves and it’s led me to review every moment I can recall of these past 10 months that have made up Bean’s life outside the womb. I do wish I had read it before he was born. Now I am obsessing. Did I hold him enough? He practically lived in the sling…then why all the crying when he was outside of it? Did I let him cry too much out of my exhaustion, my near total isolation in caring for him, and my ignorance as a first time parent? It seems like the answer is yes.

There were four episodes in particular where I remember just giving up for a while. Two times I left him in his crib to scream his head off while I walked out of the room to cry, and two times I swaddled him and placed him next to me in the co-sleeper to scream right alongside him for a few minutes. There were plenty of other times when I would be wearing him or sleeping with him, and he would cry and I would cry because nothing I offered him seemed to help. It scared the crap out of me (and him, too, I bet) to be so ignorant and alone. Where was my mother’s instinct? I wore him, I co-slept, I responded as best I could. I sang, I cooed, I massaged. Why were there times when nothing worked?

He was never a “take him anywhere” baby; it was a choice to stay at home with him or bear the wrath of the Bean. Bright lights at stores, too many people and too much conversation, being held still for too long; all of it made him flip out. I remember a woman at Target telling me she missed how easy it was to go places in the newborn days, because “they need so little and sleep so much”. I swallowed hard and gave her a weak “yeah” while I tried to get the hell away from her before Bean started wailing. I had a baby that couldn’t be taken places in those little car seat carrier things.  He would fight the straps and arch and scream.

I called my mother, then I called my friend Jess, and told them I was afraid God was going to punish me for not enjoying my baby’s infancy like I should. I consulted the interweb endlessly. I left messages with our former pediatrician, saying “His stomach is hurting, he is gassy beyond belief, something is not right” and all I got back was “All babies are gassy and fussy” which made me feel like a whiny, incompetent asshole for expecting things to be a little easier. I asked if probiotics could be helpful and I was told that I would be using them at my own risk, that they weren’t studied or regulated. Needless to say, I was too afraid after that to try them.

I know now that there is merit to the idea that his belly was just not right; there is a theory that c-section babies aren’t exposed to necessary bacteria present in the vaginal canal that helps regulate gut activity. Add that to the fact that he was put on three propholactic IV drugs to ward off possible infection after his birth (overmedicalization, anyone? I wonder if they would have bothered if we weren’t so well insured?) which killed off all the good stuff in his gastro system. You know how upset your stomach can get on the average antibiotic? He was on two, AND an antiviral, all for nothing, it turned out. Better safe than sorry, they said, but how safe was that, really?

I had a baby who needed to be held to me, belly to belly, at all times, one who woke screaming when he did manage to sleep for 15-30 minute intervals. He slept so little that I feared for his development as much as I did my sanity. I remember telling my mom he wouldn’t sleep. Her answer: “Why?!?” Others asked, “Are you sure you aren’t waking him up because you are hovering over him?” I had a baby who startled at every sound and movement around him for months. Swaddling helped but the pipes banging and the non-stop construction around us in our ancient building, which we could not escape from due to the frozen temps, woke him continuously and almost did me in (of course, as soon as the weather warmed, the noise stopped).

I had a baby who hit me and kicked and cried while he nursed every 30-60 minutes. I had no idea he would nurse so much and I thought I was doing something wrong. He lost weight, then gained, then stayed even. I was doing everything I could possibly do to nourish him, still I felt like the “well baby” check-ups were performance reviews with an employer that wasn’t on my side.

I didn’t call him colicky until it was all over at about 5 months old. He was just my baby. I had nobody to compare him to. I knew it was an extremely hard time, and I knew that nobody else in my circle of mom aquaintances seemed to have such trouble. I blamed my inexperience; I blamed myself. I pored over books and articles to see what I was doing wrong. According to Sears, he was a classic “high needs baby”. That label is debatable, the time is long gone and Bean is now the most sunshine-y little person I have ever encountered, but I can’t help but think, “What could I have done better? How could I have made that time easier?”

Okay, I’m done.

I am not going to look back anymore. I am not going to regret anything. I have a happy, healthy baby and I did the absolute best I could with the knowledge and (little) support I had at the time. My hyperactive self-doubt reaction to this truly engrossing and worthwhile book is just my acoa need for superhuman-perfection. I am putting this out there as a way to cleanse myself of that tension once and for all, and also in case there is someone else struggling like I did, someone who is doing everything she can but nothing seems to be working and so she is searching for answers online. I’m here and I know what it is like. It does get better. Actually, it gets GREAT.

Hang in there, cry as much as you need to, be nice to yourself, and write to me whenever you want.

The times I have felt the best in my life

are the times I’ve given up on you.

My dad has always been a dull, relentless ache in my brain and body, ever since he drove us down to Florida and left us there when I was little. Before that, he was more like a knife wound.

I am giving up on him now, and it hurts, but it feels good, like when a bad tooth that has been killing you is pulled out, and you know that you are going to feel better soon. I am even back to dancing again (no, not THAT kind). I changed my living room around so there is a better flow and the focus of the furniture arrangement is not on the t.v. (which somehow happened despite my efforts for it not to) and it has opened up a big space in the middle of the room. I put on some Delerium and I am back to dancing. Something needed to break in me for me to do it again. Bean is enraptured with his momma’s movements, just laughing and laughing and talking in Beanese. It is a good feeling.

God/dess bless, people. I hope your day is a good one.