I Hate Christmas

I actually had the above thought at the moment this picture was taken on Christmas Eve. And it's not true. I love Christmas in many ways, but this part of the day symbolized That Which I Hate Most About The Holiday Season. And it is this: Christmas is hyped up to be the hap-happiest season of all, yes? It is supposed to be magical. Glitter is supposed to be mixed in with the snow, reindeer are supposed to fly, laughter and love should thicken the atmosphere. Nothing is ever supposed to go wrong during the Christmas season. When I was a little kid, it was like that for me. Completely magical. The feelings, the smells, the excitement, the magic. But as I've grown older, I've learned that, for me, holiday happiness increases in direct proportion with a decrease in holiday expectations. But I goofed up a little this year and allowed myself to have a Christmas-related fantasy, a fantasy that harsh reality immediately snatched up and smashed to bits over my thick skull.
In my family, a long-standing Christmas tradition dictates that Christmas Eve be spent sledding. First thing in the morning on Christmas Eve, Dad would faithfully pack us four kids into the Jeep Wagoneer and drive us into the foothills of Idaho Falls; Mom would be left at home to perform any panicked last-minute Christmas tasks that had yet to be completed. We would sled until we'd worked ourselves into a complete state of exhaustion and hypothermia and then return home to feast on pizza and hear the final chapters of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" read aloud by my mother. It was wonderful. It helped Christmas Eve pass quickly and therefore hastened Santa's arrival. In recent years the tradition has petered out some, but seeing as how this year is the first year that I've had a child of my own, I started getting a little excited about the prospect of the Christmas Eve sledding trip again. I imagined my son, who enjoys being spun, twisted, hung upside down, and bounced vigorously on my leg, getting an enormous kick out of the sledding experience. I imagined his uncontrollable giggling as the sled carried the two of us down a hill. I imagined him grunting and groaning with the desire to go down the hill again and again. So Christmas Eve morning rolled around. We'd made arrangements to go sledding on the hill near my sister's home in Shelley at 10:00, so right after breakfast I made a last-minute trip to Wal-Mart to purchase Soren some tot-sized snow boots. The appointed hour drew nearer, and I forced a very sleepy Abraham out of bed, demanding of him, "Would you rather sleep, or would you rather be there for your son's very first sledding trip?" We stuffed Soren into a hooded jumpsuit, a pair of his dad's socks (which doubled as leg warmers), his oversized snow pants, his gigantic coat, and his beanie cap. I put a pair of socks on his hands for mittens and then began attempting to shove his feet into his brand new boots. I couldn't make it work. I'd think that maybe I'd gotten them on, but then he'd pull them off. I tried to get him to stand in them to force his heel down, but he would not stand in (or for) such strange accouterments. So I rubberbanded some baggies to his feet ("I look like a welfare baby!" said Abe, in his best Soren voice), strapped him unwillingly to his car seat, and we were off.
Off to experience the joy and magic and wonder of the Christmas season.
Anyway, this is running on for much longer than I had anticipated, but suffice it to say that it was Soren's naptime, a barrier which I had believed would melt away in the face of such merrymaking as a trip down a hill in a sled, but which did not; it was cold, a thing which was most displeasing to the little prince; and it was not pleasant at all to slide down an icy hill in the midst of a snowstorm, a condition that elicited from my son, not coos of joy, but moans of discomfort.
I sent Abraham after the camera, which was in the car about 50 yards away, and tried to show Soren how fun sledding could be. I took him down the hill again and laughed loudly all the way, so as to cue him into the fact that we were participating in a fun activity that might be enjoyed if one adjusted one's attitude. I tried pulling him around on the flat ground to get him accustomed to the sled. I tried letting the neighbor's dogs lick his face to see if their cheer might rub off on him. Through all of these fruitless efforts, it quickly became apparent to me that Soren was not going to produce the squeals of joy my imagination had so lovingly lavished upon him for this occasion. I admitted defeat and decided it was time to go. But I was not going to go without some sort of photo documentation to help make all our efforts on this occasion seem a little less vain. Where was Abraham with the camera? I looked over at the car to see Abraham, who had been gone for five minutes of uninterrupted Soren misery, to see what in the world could be holding him up. As far as I could tell, he was being needlessly slow. And indeed he was. He was piddling around the car, moseying around it, kicking at some ice chunks hanging from the side here, scraping some ice off a headlight there.
Let's just say that our Christmas Cheer might have dissolved into some Christmas Yelling At Each Other While Photographing Our Extraordinarily Miserable Child. So as soon as the dirty deed was documented, I scooped up my tired, be-baggied son and declared, "I hate Christmas. Let's go home and put this child in bed."
Abraham concurred.

Biting Baby

I know I'm having a bit of a posting binge, but I've got one more thing: do any of your mothers out there have some wisdom about teaching a baby not to bite? My little one seems to find biting to be quite a delightful activity. He'll bite anything: a hand, a leg, a neck, you name it. At first I tried yelping, then I tried giving a little spank, then I tried looking at him sternly and saying, "No." He found all of these responses amusing and thought that we were playing a little game. So then I tried setting him down of the floor away from me, but he didn't seem to notice that it was a punishment. These days I mostly just detach him as quickly as possible and tell him in a very calm voice, "Don't bite. It's not nice." But the biting persists. Any ideas?

NoNoWriMo, Day 6

I must confess that I gave up on my novel after only two days.

Before you all heave a great sigh of disgust, however, let me say that, while I'm not working on a novel, I am writing 5 double-spaced pages every day. I decided to make the switch because I was absolutely dreading my nightly sessions with the computer, dragging through painful hours of horrible writing in order to complete my nightly goal. Now I look forward to writing time, sit down, blithely type for an hour, and feel much better about the quality of materials produced. A lot of it is just random and gibberish, practice in expressing ideas and describing sensations, emotions, conversations, places, but I've also nearly carved out a short short story from the mess. So I'm producing more, moving toward my goal of become a bona fide writer, and feeling happy while doing it. I think it's a win-win.

Here is a sample of the more freestyle writing that I've been participating in as of late:

Words are the things that are supposed to come out of my fingers when I sit for thirty minutes every day with my eyes closed and write. Today I am thinking about motherhood, and how good it feels, after a long day of cleaning dishes and cuddling with a golden gleam of eyelashed light and doing such ordinary things like browning beef and singing silly songs and going for a walk down the road a little ways and back. I rock my boy at night and think the most cliché things: how glad I am to be a mom, because it is the job that entails doing everything: I am director of creativity, of human resources, of housekeeping, of meal planning and preparation. I am the interior decorator and the laundress and the cook (oh dear, I just remembered the laundry that needs to be done) and I am a lover of a little soul and the giver of baths and the organizer of time and the creator of fun things and the scrubber of toilets and the sweeper of floors and I am a little piece of God in all of her divinest and most beautiful majesty that climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs and takes the old man with the smelly sweatpants and the long gray beard in hand and holds him and rocks him and tells him that it will be okay, it will be okay, it will be okay. I never knew how painful an infant’s cry could be the the human soul, how it would tear into the flesh like a knife that punctures the tender tissues of a lung and takes away your air, the air that you breathed once just for yourself and maybe a little for your parents and your siblings and your sweetheart and your friends but now that you breathe mostly for this little creature that is a part of you and yet so separate, so distinct, so magnificently and radiantly and exquisitely distinct.

NaNoWriMo, Day 1

The beginning of a race. The gun is fired and suddenly your legs and arms weigh a hundred pounds a piece. Your lung capacity has been cut in half. You don't want to run a race anymore. You start wondering why you signed up for such a silly thing anyway. You had expected to sprint for the first portion of the race, but right now it's all you can do to keep up with the scragglers at the back of the pack.

In two hours I have written five anguishing and mediocre pages, the bare minimum for me to keep up with a pace that will help me reach my goal of a 150 pages by the end of the month. I'm experiencing huge quantities of self-doubt. I want to quit already. What was I thinking? I don't really want to be a writer. I can't do it. I can't. It's too hard. I think I'll pick a new dream.

Sleeping Handsome

So. I have vascillated wildly on the cry-it-out issue. I've listened to Soren's doctor's lectures about how it's something I must do; I've read Dr. Sears' indictment of the whole idea. Some moms have told me that letting their baby cry it out was the best thing they did; other moms have said that it absolutely didn't work for them and was, in fact, a rather traumatizing event for the whole family. I finally decided to go with Elizabeth Pantley's gentle sleep-through-the-night program and began her regimen.

Then Soren had a night in which he awakened TEN times. Simply waking would have been OK, but the little guy was also crying his I'm-feeling-whiny-and-mad-not-hungry-or-in-pain cry. And I decided perhaps Dr. Baker was right. Maybe it was time Soren learned he isn't entitled to anything he wants anytime he wants it. I finally decided that it was time to let him cry it out. For reals this time.

And I braced myself for horror.

Thursday night we went through our usual bedtime routine. Then I put Soren in his crib, handed him his stuffed monkey, put a plug in his mouth, kissed him, and left. He cried. After five minutes I went in and patted him, gave him back his binky, readjusted his blanket, told him I loved him, and left. He cried for two more minutes and went to sleep. I fairly danced around the house. That was MUCH better than I'd been expecting. But I braced myself for the nighttime, expecting that perhaps horror would ensue then. And he did wake up a lot. But each time he'd cry for no more than five minutes and go back to sleep. It was a miracle! And that's how it's been ever since. He'll wake up once or twice in the night, cry for a minute or two, and then go right back to sleep. That I can deal with. My only complaint now is that his new morning wake-up time is 5 am.

Well, maybe that's not my only complaint. I do have another one. I actually miss getting up with my wee one at night. He was always so sweet and limp and heavy and warm. He would reach up with his sweet little hand and play with my hair while he nursed and we rocked. When he was done eating, he would cuddle against my shoulder and sigh so sweetly and I would smell his hair. I miss that. A lot. During the day he's just so much more active and playful. He doesn't have time for cuddles.

I guess there's just no making me happy. But, you know, I might get accustomed to this whole eight-hour block of sleep thing.

True Confessions of a Compulsive Mother

First of all, before I complain, I shall post a really, really ridiculously cute picture of my baby.

I just want to get some worries out on paper so that I can stop churning them around in my mind:

I think I must produce bad milk. Soren seems to have 5 stomachaches a day. Also, he spits up a lot. I occasionally think about switching to formula so that I won't poison him anymore with my horrible poisonous breastmilk.

I let Soren cry himself to sleep tonight. He only cried for 20 minutes, but it was a very long 20 minutes and I felt like a horrible louse. But he seems to have discovered recently that he gets to stay up later if he cries when I put him in his bed. And that's no good. I gave him a massage, I played him Enya, I read him a story, I swaddled him, I rocked him, and I put him in bed. And then he cried. And I let him. This doesn't make me a bad mother, does it? This won't cause him permanent psychological damage, will it? I'm also planning on letting him cry if he wakes up in the middle of the night. The child weighs 20 pounds. Surely he can sleep for twelve hours? Or will he waste away? Will he fail to thrive? Will our mother-son bond be broken forever?

Along these lines, my little guy has been quite cranky as of late. If things don't go JUST HIS WAY, he lets me know. Loudly and with passion. Many times a day. He's a little young for the terrible 2s, but sometimes I feel like I'm living with an onery little preschooler. And I worry and worry. I worry that I'm not filling his needs; I worry that I'll be encouraging whining if I do whatever I can to make him stop crying. I wonder if he needs to be held more often; I contemplate the possibility that he needs more opportunity for independent play. I think perhaps he's understimulated; I wonder if I've overstimulated him.

And now, as I type, an hour after he finally stopped crying and went to sleep, my baby is crying again. And now I'm faced with the awful dilemma: To go comfort him? Or make him go to sleep by himself? He sounds so sad. And I wonder if something's hurting, or if he's got a dirty diaper, or if he's terribly hungry. Maybe I should go feed him.

OK, I'm back. I lifted my baby out of his crib and kissed his salty tear-stained cheeks and smelled his beautiful baby smell and nursed him until he was limp in my arms. There's a red scratch on his cheek that he must have inflicted himself while flailing his arms around. (It's really difficult to clip his nails, so they become clawlike at times.) Now I feel really awful. I just don't think I have the stomach for this if there are other alternatives. Perhaps I will go to Amazon.com and order "The No Cry Sleep Solution."

Nobody ever told me how hard being a mom would be. Probably because it is impossible to express in a way that an inexperienced person would understand. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just me that finds it to be the most excruciatingly difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Give me 48 hours of labor any old day. That's a cakewalk compared to being a 24/7 Mom. Here I am, the owner of a hand the rocks the cradle and therefore the world, and I feel so inadequate to the task. This is part of the reason I hide in an office for several hours of a week. I'm good at organizing and counting and compartmentalizing. It's very straightforward. Nobody's emotional health hangs on the decisions I make at work. I just keep the books and do a darn good job at it. It's a heady release from my other job, my real job, the one in which there are no straight answers, from which there are no real breaks, and from which spring very real, perhaps even eternal, consequences.