To coin a term

My husband and I have a term that we use to describe a certain state in which a person has had so much interaction with the baby that you begin to check out and/or get resentful.  Baby-ed Out.  You are in overload and the only remedy is to be away from your baby.

This weekend we were with our toddler and he was at full-strength.  I am not complaining in any way that he was healthy.  Make no mistake.  But full-strength also means that he was moving and touching and picking things up and turning over glasses and knocking over the lamp and throwing things.  He was in constant motion from the moment he woke up.

The good news is that for two nights in a row, he slept the entire night.  I never thought we’d get to a point where we’d have two consecutive nights of sleep.  Or mostly, I waffled between not believing that I was going to ever get sleep again, and the hope, the fable that I would have full nights again.

Yet again my husband and I are partaking in the magical thinking associated with this strange occurrence.  Perhaps it was the pajamas, maybe his old pajamas were keeping him up at night.  Maybe his diaper was itching him.  It causes us to put him in the exact same pajamas night after night, trying to replicate our initial results.  The truth is less superstitious.  He’s just gotten older.  He sleeps through the night sometimes.

He’s 23 months now.  Old enough to have a regular bed, if we needed to make it happen. Thankfully, he’s not a climber (yet) we’re not making any plans.

I’m not planning on having another baby.  I get a little sad as I’m selling my baby bjorn, or the swing with the little duckie on it.  A little sad, but I am able to sell them all the same.  My son will be an only child, because I am barely cut out for this.  It’s become clear to me that my tolerance level for kids is pretty low.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but there it is.

She Wears Many Hats

My son is almost 2 years old.  He walks.  He says funny things.  He has opinions.  He has preferences and can name all the colors.  He can count to 14 and express himself in 2 to 4 word sentences.

I am grateful that he is getting older, that he is developing.  I am interested to see what kind of person he is becoming.

My work, although difficult, has suffered by being a Mom.  Not just a little bit, but a great great deal.  It’s no coincidence that my business has experienced a deficit since around the same time that my baby was born.  The fish stinks from the head down.

I’m still doing it wrong.  And when I say “it” I mean “the balance.”  I still feel like I’m not doing anything well.  My house has mold in the basement.  Do I do anything?  No.  I just ignore it.  I’d rather spend the brief moments I have at home to watch reruns of Arrested Development and eat leftover Easter candy.  My bathtub has a ring of pink crud growing in the grout.  My carpet is so dirty that I’d rather walk around barefoot in a manure field.  The 30 second rule has ceased to exist in my house.  The terrors in my carpet and flooring negate any such ruling.

I still let my son sleep with us.  I know this is “bad parenting,” but I still can not seem to manage letting him cry it out.  At around 1-3 am, my son gets up and calls for us.  Either my husband or I get him into the bed with us, out of exhaustion.  It’s easier to have him in bed, than rock him for 45 minutes.  We’re teaching him bad sleep habits.  I lamented to my husband that he’ll be in college and  we’ll have to go to the dorm to rock him to sleep.

I wish I didn’t have so much stuff.  We have way too much stuff.  We have things that I want to throw out, but can’t because I might need it.  And there’s stuff that my husband’s family and my family has brought to us because it’s important to the family, but it takes up room.  Do we need a cheese plate made by my husband’s grandfather when there are dozens of other heirlooms that make more sentimental sense?  My house is a dumping ground with layers of detritus.  The bottom layer is stuff that I had before I became a Mom.  Fashion magazines, makeup coupons, movie ticket stubs, mementos from dates, art I meant to frame.  The second layer is stuff from when the baby was born.  Breastfeeding pamphlets, diaper coupons (expired), bibs, burp cloths, pictures of baby.  The third layer is all just shit that our families dumped on us because they didn’t feel they could get rid of it.  Things their parents made like lamps and tables, old books, old license plates, art supplies that we won’t use, tools acquired from years of garage sales, sports equipment.  The last layer is the saddest, because it sits on top of all this stuff.  It is what we live off of.  It consists of bills and NYTimes magazines, candy wrappers, notifications from daycare, tax notices, offers to repaint our house, children’s books, stuffed animals, empty lean cuisine cartons.

I want to escape for awhile.  This is terrible to admit, and I may have admitted this before in a previous, much older post, but sometimes I daydream about buying a plane ticket and taking off somewhere.  I would just disappear to everyone that depended on me, and go to somewhere tropical.  I would sit on the beach in my business suit, and squish sand in my toes, and eat fish tacos.

Of course, the fantasy is better as a fantasy.  I end up missing my family after they are out of the house for more than 3 hours at a time.  And they come home and I am relieved.

Across the vast emptiness

It’s been a really rough couple of days.

My business has been tanking.  Things are getting worse financially, and no matter what changes I make, improvements are slow or nonexistent.

My husband and I are fighting a lot.  I’m too wrapped up with my job, and it’s effecting how we interact.  Everyday, I’m just so close to having a major meltdown.  I’m truly failing at my job, and that’s a terrible feeling to have, especially since it once came so easily to me.

Then, suddenly, I found a possible job in Tucson.  I flew there to interview, and it went well.  They said they would get back to me the beginning of this week.  I am watching, waiting.  Can we move from this cold place?  Can I just leave the troubles I created here?  Start over?  Sell our house?  That in itself, seems like an impossible plan.  But people do that, right?  Is that what I would do?

I’m on the brink of a huge change, or a major meltdown, and I’m not quite sure what kind of post-interview phone call will elicit which response.

I made the Northwoods my home.  I’m curious to see if I can make the exact opposite climate my home.  I wonder if I can live without trees, or snow, or cold rainy days in March.  Will I miss it?  Will I even have the chance to consider it?

The merriment

Okay.  I get it now.  I get why X-mas is so fun when you have kids.  Before it was an obligation.  It felt empty.  Even last year when we had our son, who was 8 months old or so, it still seemed that way.

But now this year is different.  Our son loves Santa and trees and lights.  He gets excited to talk about presents and how he will get to open things.  Granted, he’s only 1.5 years old at this point, but he’s involved enough now that X-mas has gotten fun again.

I think the Oatmeal has a comic that alludes to this, which is pretty damn awesome.

We took our son to see the Holiday Parade in our town.  This was significantly disappointing for my husband and I.  It was approximately 12 degrees, and the parade took an hour to really get started.  Then the “floats” were just business vehicles with a string of lights haphazardly strewn on them.   So if you have a pickup truck you use for your contracting business, throw some lights on it and you have a “float.”  It was so disappointing and so long that my husband turned to me at the end, tense and tired from shivering in the cold for an hour while holding the toddler, and lamented that he thought that there would be no Santa at the end of the parade.  To him, the hope was gone.  The parade was so bad that he questioned the very fabric that X-mas parades are made from, the one constant, that of Santa.  I had promised our son that he would see Santa, and I was dead set on it.  Our son, however, was so bundled up that only his eyes were visible, and had no peripheral vision.  He was quiet to the point of worry, and a racing anxiety built in me.

What would win, my competitive drive to beat the cold to see Santa, or my anxiety about making sure my son and husband were safe?

Thankfully, the parade ended after the news trucks with blue lights passed, and there was Santa.  We all went home and hid our disappointment from each other on the parade itself and focused on how we survived the holiday parade in such weather.  Living in the northwoods, I’m sure it’s not going to be the last time that I worry about my son getting frostbite or frostnip.

The weather has been so much colder this year, that I am looking forward to spending X-mas in Arizona with family.  At least we can go outside and have our son run around and get some exercise.  I would love to see a little sunshine right now.

What I miss the most

I always feel that I have to preface these posts with this message: I love my son.  He is magic and my world, and I love him completely.  I may complain, but that is my nature, and I’d rather it be on an anonymous (or mostly so) blog than to my friends or family.  Their response would be appropriate and harsh.  Oh you have a beautiful healthy son and a loving doting husband, oh poor you!  You have a steady income and gainful employment, I feel so sorry for you.

BUT I miss having weekends to play video games for hours.  I miss being able to turn on Dexter while I folded towels.  I miss having night after night of uninterrupted sleep.  I was up twice last night.  One time for hours.  He was just not sleepy.

I miss not having to worry each moment about whether I’m babying him too much, or spoiling him, or not giving him what he needs.  Or whether the world will be too populated in the future that he will be unable to live happily.

Living with a toddler is a little like living with someone who is bipolar and drunk.  Every minute you’re a little on edge.  What’s going to set him off?  He’s emotional and prone to falling.  He’s sleepy and giddy one minute, and then lethargic and moaning the next.

I worried that this was going to be the hardest stage for me.  I always had trouble dealing with toddlers, so much so that it almost became a deal breaker for me to have a child.  So far, things are going okay.  Weekends are less about relaxing and preparing for the week, as they are long sessions of trying to keep him occupied.  It’s especially difficult to get him exercise when it’s so cold outside.  We’ve taken him to the playland in the mall, and it just depresses me.  There are kids playing, and their obese parents just play on their phones and ignore them, even if they plead for attention.

Single Parenting: Lite

I survived my first night alone with my baby.  My husband is away on business, and it was the first night since our son was born, that I was the sole caretaker.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself this morning as I hoisted my son onto my hip while balancing an impressive bag of diapers in my other hand, my cell phone, his daycare sheet explaining how his night was (not great as it turns out), and an extra outfit in case he gets hot or dirty or wet.

I always dreaded having the single parent experience, because I do not feel confident with him.  There are times I get too tired to entertain him, so I just turn on the TV.  Or I don’t know what he wants or what he’s asking for.  Or I know what he’s asking for, and it’s ridiculous or unrealistic (really?  You want to go on the other swing again?  But you were just on that one, and made me move you to this one!

I am crazy tired today, yes, but I have also accomplished something that I didn’t know I could do.  And yes, I may go to bed immediately when I put him down tonight at 7:30 pm.  It’s going to be restful and lovely.

The Change of a Year

My husband celebrated his one year anniversary of being sober.  It’s weird to say it like that.  Because, you see, he was sober a lot.  I never really saw him drunk, so the fact that he’s “clean” now just presents itself in some second-hand ways.

I can’t begin to explain how happy I am that he is able to speak about it a little more easily.  I was in his office the other day, and there was an empty wine bottle.  It was dusty and I asked him about it.  He admitted that he used to drink whole bottles of wine after I went to bed.  He would stash the empties in there so that I wouldn’t find them, so that he could take them to the recycling when I wasn’t around.

Finding that out hurt and I couldn’t help but choke back feelings of betrayal.  Focus on the positive, I thought to myself.

He got his one year token, and when I tried to talk to him about it, about his meeting with the others, he was cagey, and I realized that I had no place to talk about that with him.  I wasn’t in the group.  He was doing the work without me.  That was hard for me to realize.

And I also had to figure out that I had to do it on my own.  My work was mine, I could not share it.

I have mentioned on this blog before that I like to go on travel web sites and look at vacation packages as my escapism.  I had a moment pause when I realized that I will never have a glass of champagne with him, that we will never travel to Napa, that he will never be able to have a beer again.  There’s a romance to drinking that we don’t have access to anymore.  It was never a big part of our relationship, but it was available.  It was an activity.  It’s hard for me to understand how he was out of control, because I never actually saw him out of control since college.

I’m beginning to see how he used to self-medicate when he had troubles though.  He never really learned how to deal with them as an adult without substances.  Lately, we’ve been sniping at each other.  It’s been difficult to find common ground, besides the baby.  We both love the baby.  On the bad days, sometimes that can be enough.