Pregnant, are you?
Until recently, I was there myself. And every time I see a woman whose skin is stretching to accomodate the miraculous, alienlike being inside of her, I feel a twinge. A twinge of horror, but of hope for her that I desperately want to convey.
Do you feel awful? I want to ask. If so, it will end soon!
But chances are good that she doesn’t feel awful. Or that she doesn’t need me approaching her in public to suggest to her, in as supportive a way as possible, that she might appear to the naked eye as if she feels awful. Not everyone responds to insults, be they the physical insults of pregnancy or the verbal insults of cheerful well-wishers, in the same way.
But chances are also good that the poor wretch does feel awful. Waiting in line for her — jeesh — decaf latte — she questions whether it was worth it, and whether she is up to the tasks ahead.
Her back is aching, she is resenting her partner, and she may have forgotten for the moment that veins are swelling out of her legs and dare I say butt, but they are: veins are probably popping out of her butt. She is concerned about finances. If she is a professional type, she fears brain atrophy when a newborn comes. If she’s like me, she is worried about sleep deprivation, about labor pains, about not having packed her bag for the hospital, about whether she has the capacity to love a baby like you are SUPPOSED to love a baby.
If it is not her first, she is concerned about integrating a baby into the family. Will she love it as much as the first? How could she? Will she ruin the first one’s life and the pleasant balance of her existing little family?
Will her milk come in, and will there be enough of it? Are hand-me-downs good enough for her kid, if they allow her to spend as much time as possible with the baby rather than going back to work?
When I was pregnant with the baby who is now snoring sweetly next to my bed, sweating in her fuzzy green swaddle, tucked into a fleece-lined carseat like a bright-eyed angel who really could use a neck bath, I worried. And I was flustered beyond compare, physically.
I showed my flustration by spitting into a Gatorade bottle. From mid-July until one week after my daughter was born in January, I spit into a towel or a bottle or a sink. If you are nauseated enough that you cannot swallow your own saliva, then the last thing you need is to be catching whiffs of it wafting up through the wide mouth of a Gatorade bottle. And do other people want to see this drama playing out? No, they do not.
I teach and for months, I had to do crazy things like eat Korean fried chicken during the break. Smelly, delicious, hot and oily Korean fried chicken with kim chee coleslaw. I had to drink hot decaffeinated tea, constantly having the tannins strip my mouth of extra saliva so that I didn’t have to spit it out. For every swallow for every class, I needed to have tea in there with the spit, so as not to gag and vomit. How convenient!
Once, in the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy, I lost my spit bottle in the toy aisle. As Henry wagged his head drinking in visions of the toys he coveted, I wagged my head around seeking out my bottle. Where was my bottle? Would I have to spit on the floor in the toy aisle? I didn’t think I could make it to the bathroom. Or would I swallow it and throw up on the floor?
Pregnancy doesn’t leave a lot of good options, at least not if the pregnancy is anything like pregnancies can be.
It can be hard. Hard. Hard. Though I was blessed—blessed—with reports of a healthy gestating baby, I myself was a mess. I experienced dehydration, heart palpitations, faintness, confusion, anxiety, extreme irritability, vomiting, nausea, and embarrassment. It made me feel unattractive, like a needy whiner, and awfully lonely. Spitting into a bottle? I had never heard of that. Very few people had ever heard of that. It made me question my sanity. Did you see that movie where the super athletic guy trapped down in a cave drinks his own pee and eventually saws off his hand or is it his arm in order to escape?
That was a reasonably accurate cinematic facsimile of my pregnancy.
But I am here to tell you that it ends.
I am also here to tell you that now that my baby is here, I think about her a LOT. Aside from my son, she is mostly what I think about these days. But even this overwhelming love, this big project of totally stewarding a human into life, this 24-hour post and all-consuming relationship of the new mother, requires less effort and brain space than my pregnancy did.
It’s different for everyone, but if it’s bad for you, please know: it will come to a joyous end, and you will tumble deeply into the well of delighted love.
You will fall so far and so fast that you may even think about doing it again.
Happy Birthday to Henry, Happy Time to Us
A little more than a year ago I wrote a post called “On This, Your Last Night of Being One.”
Henry turned three a few weeks ago — well, slightly more than a month ago, but I’ve been occupied with other things — and I want to memorialize this period of time in a similar way.
I cannot believe how much a kid can change in so short of a time. I also cannot believe how much cake he believes he deserves on a daily basis, regardless of birthday status.
Ivy was born in late January, and while we were in the hospital, Henry, who has a great passion for cooking, made a birthday cake for his gummy, squealing, 3 days old sister. Chocolate with white icing and a big R written in dried cranberries on the top. (The “R” stands for Rainbow, which is what we called the baby when she was gestating. It is also admittedly what we often still call her. (What’s the baby’s name? someone will ask Henry. Rainbow and Ivy, Henry will reply.)
He and his grandmother made the 2 layers of the cake into 2 cakes, actually: one had an R and one had an H: Henry’s own birthday would be coming in a few weeks. We sang to a dozing Rainbow and Henry blew out the candle. I figure that any celebration that your new sibling is alive should be seized upon.
Henry, at 3, sweet and stompy and bursting with stories and new vocabulary words and some misused vocabulary words, makes me happier than I would otherwise be every single day.
Lately, he’s faced his new challenge with real grace, knock on wood. Becoming a big brother has been, in a way, a pile of presents and praise and pancake breakfasts during which we all wore crowns we’d made, but in another way, it means that Mommy has other priorities and is generally sleepy and bleary. Recently he climbed on top of me one morning when I was sleeping and said “Mommy, can you have open eyes and be in the kitchen now?” A reasonable request, but no, not really, I’ve been up all night with your sister, who sleeps in a carseat stuck in a cosleeper facing me so she can be sure that I am there, at her service, all night. She is a dear baby but a noisy one, and the sounds of her underdeveloped trachea make her hick and hitch and whistle and wheeze. Her father clamps an extra pillow over his head. I sit bolt upright and worry.
We’ve divided childcare by gender. Matthew has been doing the lion’s share of the care of Henry, and Rainbow is like a new appendage for me. Henry goes to bed early but gets up early, too. Rainbow will sleep in if she goes to bed late, and I put her to bed when we go to bed because it’s what is working for me, and this time around I am less concerned about what baby books say and how we will almost certainly ruin the baby if we don’t do what they tell us.
And should we ruin the baby, I feel more confident that we will be able to fix her.
We realized at a certain point, though, that Henry became hysterical if his father so much as held Ivy, and he was downright rude to me if I tried to come into his room with her.
“DO NOT COME IN HERE WITH MY BABY.”
Or, “DADDY DON’T HOLD MY BABY: GIVE HER TO MOMMY!”
He had written me off as a parent and was depending wholly on his father. It hurt my feelings, and made me cry to have him say “don’t come in here with my baby.” But we fixed it, I think:
You see, we were granted the gift of an amazing paternity leave. My husband was able to take eight weeks off. It’s almost like we are happy go lucky Canadians. Oh no wait, they get two years. Not quite Canadians. But still, for Americans, what a cozy time we’ve had! It’s allowed me to have a lot of alone time with Henry, once we realized that we really needed me to have a lot of alone time with Henry, just like he has been accustomed to. (And frankly, just like I have been accustomed to.) Trips to Fairway, the playground, errands, lunches out after I pick him up from preschool: just like the good old days. We even went to a marionette-style puppet show together, though we left 10 minutes in after an ogre scared him sufficiently.
Today will be my husband’s first day back at work. After school pickup at noon, I’ll be alone with a threenager and an often smiley but just as often colicky seven week old until after bedtime.
Clearly, I can do this. Lots of people do this. But with a young baby who won’t consent to be put down and a three year old who is used to the undivided attention of one (or more) parents, I am gearing up for it to be like when I was a receptionist at a huge architecture firm when I was right out of college, responsible for I think it was 27 phone lines, and sometimes the entire board would be lit up with flashing, every line either on hold or ringing, and I needed to just take a moment and take a breath and take in the lights and laugh about it all, knowing that I would screw some calls up but that I’d just try to keep my cool and apologize when necessary.
I often joke that I was better at being a receptionist than I’ve ever been at any of my other myriad jobs. I act like I’m kidding, but I’m not really kidding. I really was good at that job. I begged to be transferred to something editorial at that company, something with more status, that required more brain power, and that would yield higher pay. But it was hard to get someone to fill the desk well, and they gave me the pay I wanted in order to keep me there.
It will be my strategy to think back on the pressure of the flashing switchboard and laugh when everyone at once is crying. I know I’ll lose my cool sometimes, but I am prepared to apologize when necessary. I can do this.
Just About As Easy As Tracing Your Own Hand: a Valentine’s Saga
At first, it seemed like I’d gotten off pretty easy for Valentine’s Day.
My good friends from high school had been complaining about the Valentine sweat shops that they were forcibly running for their own children who are slightly older than Henry, but it was seemingly going unnoticed in our pre-school. All I did was order a heart-shaped stuffed pizza for my Chicagoan mate, and have it shipped on dry ice. Baby Ivy and I brought home a dozen hot pink roses for the y-chromosomes in our lives.
It was about all I could muster at this juncture: Ivy was only 3 weeks old and Henry’s 3rd birthday is the day after Valentine’s Day. In other words, in addition to the Valentine kerfuffle we were trying to celebrate in other ways. Low key ways, perhaps, but ways.
But then, one of the parents from one of the other preschoolers in my son’s class emailed the class on Tuesday or Wednesday night of Valentine’s week and suggested that it would be fun to bring in Valentines on Friday, and did anyone else want to do that?
Many of the crafty mommas in our group replied and said yes. Everyone is so much more cheerful and together than I am, I grimly thought. I didn’t respond, but it’s not like I wasn’t going to do it. It’s not like I wasn’t worried about getting it done.
A few days pass. Thursday night after a family trip to the Brooklyn museum, the Valentine deadline looms closer and darker than ever, like a storm two blocks over but cruising quickly towards our building.
It was clear that we needed to start. I’d been thinking that we just needed a stencil of a heart on some construction paper and that we could fill in the inside with glitter glue, but then a more involved idea started to develop.
Perhaps inspired by our trip to the museum, I decided that we should cut out cardboard hearts out of a corrugated cardboard box we have, and then glue colorful tissue paper we have in the recycling bin to the hearts.
Surely some lightly decoupaged cardboard hearts made from recycled materials would be acceptable Valentines in this DIY, green, and Etsy-ish era, right?
So while we are all at the kitchen table that evening, me sitting around nursing the baby, Matthew paying bills, and Henry futzing around with Legos or playdoh or something else I don’t remember, and no one at all making dinner, I look up decoupage on my old friend The Internet.
I quickly find a pdf that explains the procedure. I was nearly ready to steward the Valentine-making project, but I needed some tips.
I had only managed to read that decoupage was a process whereby a person could afix some things to some other things when I started to share my ideas out loud, an act which I would immediately regret.
“I looked up decoupage,” I say to my husband. “I’m thinking of doing decoupage.”
“I saw that you looked up decoupage,” he teases.
When he says it, it is in italics, just as Montclair effortlessly becomes well-pronounced when we talk about visiting our New Jersey friends. This is because he is French speakinger than I am. For the record he is also Spanish speakinger, German speakinger, and if we run into someone from Ancient Greece, it is he who will be able to give them directions, not I. To be fair I have a bunch of French, I can count to ten or something in Italian, I’m better able to decipher a Glaswegian accent and I minored in Japanese, but these things don’t tend to come in quite as handy in daily life. To return to our story:
“But is decoupage a thing you really need to look up?” he continues. ”Isn’t it sort of like looking up tracing your own hand? Or making a stick figure?”
I gaze at him, weighing whether I should point out that it lies wholly within the realm of possibility that I would look up tracing my own hand on the Internet, realizing that such information might cause me further trouble.
In terms of my own childhood Valentine’s Day experiences, I’m sure that some were more complex than others, but I remember sitting at the kitchen counter and filling out cards that we’d gotten at the store, public-school style. I don’t remember being four and giving dissertations — probably in French — about decoupaging and how easy it was to the rest of my worldly classmates, which is what he may have done. (Because we are married homo sapiens, some of the things that are the most charming, funny, and distinctive about my husband, for instance his suggested expertise with Florentine-style crafts, are just the ones that make me roll my eyes when I set out to make the world’s best Valentines on the clock with my tired three year old on an empty stomach with a baby in my lap.)
Anyhow, while I am plotting the Valentines but have a suckling Ivy in my arms, my husband decides that he will grab the reins and start to make the Valentines out of construction paper, running with the original glitter glue idea, sans the heart stencil, forgoing my complex and yet somehow delicious plans of decoupage.
But I don’t want construction paper valentines anymore. I want good ones.
I will settle for nothing short of Florentine-style crafts made from locally sourced recycled materials.
The hardest part about decoupaging Valentines turns out to be cutting out the corrugated cardboard hearts. The 3 year old is really happy to tear up tissue paper and smear glue around. The baby is happily oblivious enough to marinate in a thin coating of Elmer’s; in the way of newborns, she is, quite frankly, always developing some sort of white crusty stuff all over her, anyhow. And after an initial tug of war over who will do the Valentines, the husband is willing to let me torture myself and Henry while he heats up the leftover Chinese food for us.
I finally have enough cardboard hearts cut out. We make a few Valentines and it works out well. I love the way they look.
A challenge comes when Henry decrees one Valentine to be for the tooth fairy rather than for the classmate we’d set out to make it for. And then the next one we make, he likes so much that he refuses the idea of giving it away.
He also screams about it a whole lot.
The one we couldn't give away.
And then we get into an argument about whether he will get up and hand me the next heart to work on.
And then dinner is ready and my husband wants to clear the table.
But there aren’t that many kids in the class and we get them done.
And the next morning when I get up and wander blearily into the kitchen, baby (still? again?) in my arms, it is my husband sitting at the table decoupaging the world’s most perfect and lovely Valentine, far nicer than the ones I’d thrown together. And who is it for?
I will let you guess.
Being valentines: it can be just about as easy as tracing your own hand.
Epilogue: The people who suggested that we make Valentines for school? They did not bring Valentines.
Hola Ivy! Wherein I Introduce My *Daughter*
This brief post will not nearly capture all of the awe and coziness and exhaustion and delight and fear and everything else that we feel when we consider our new and lovely and velvety soft and sleepy little star, Ivy Elizabeth.
She was born nearly three weeks ago at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital — my favorite hospital for getting babies; you should try it! — after a scheduled C-section.
Pregnancy cripples me. However, I make fantastic babies.
But instead of deciding they are ready for their debut and that it’s time to come out, these babies cling to my ribs like stubborn monkeys, never descending into my pelvis to be delivered in the old-fashioned way. Well, thank goodness that Caesar and his mom shot us forth into modernity, what with unusual surgeries and delicious salads and snippy snip snipped haircuts named after him.
Ivy was born without complication, thanks in part to a fantastic obstetric, anesthesiology, and nursing team. She was held up for me to see doing her first little lion roar and oh how I laughed and cried to see her out in the open for us to get to know for real, rather than getting to know just through the knees and elbows and hiccups!
One distinguishing characteristic of this baby is her petite size. Her fabulous bruiser brother was nearly 9 lbs, which may have been slightly exaggerated because he’d been pumped full of liquids and pitocin while they tried and failed to induce him out of me in the more typical way, but still: big.
Ivy weighed a mere six pound and five ounces, a fuzzy headed blue eyed slip of a thing. But she’s a super eater — constant, efficient, happy — and she’s gaining like wildfire and pleasing her mother no end.
She doesn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows, in stark contrast to her brother, who was born in high definition, looking manly, like a captain of industry. This is my sweet delicate little baby baby baby, sleepy and squinting and meowing questions about why she’s been brought out into the light.
More Ivy trivia: her toes and fingers are extraordinarily long. She might be a pianist, everyone says. With her hands and with her feet, is what they don’t say. If you want someone to grip your finger with their toes, Ivy is your gal. She already has talents!
We took her to the doctor and this was certainly a freak accident but she rolled over on the table. When she was less than a week old, she rolled from her tummy to her back. Great: tiny or no, we wish for her to be strong and healthy and stubborn.
Welcome to you, our new and beautiful little love!
The Weird Sandwiches of Youth
In second grade, my favorite sandwich was a peanut butter and cherry: peanut butter spread with sliced maraschinos. I think that my dad might have made it up when my mom was out one day, and for an entire year, that is all I wanted to eat. And then, just when I was starting to glow from the inside out, I tired of it.
My husband, at unpredictable intervals, acts like it is acceptable to eat peanut butter and cheese sandwiches. I have never seen him do it, but regularly he’ll stroll into the living room late at night claiming that he just ate one. It is possible that he does this to push my buttons. He has also mentioned putting strawberry jam into an American cheese omelette. He is quite possibly a gastronomic enemy of state: not to be trusted.
Our son’s favorite sandwich is called a “prune quesadilla.” Like the peanut butter and cherry, it was created in a moment of parental desperation (my own) and has caught on like wildfire. I know that a quesadilla, by definition, implies cheese. But peanut butter can make tortillas stick together as well or better than cheese, and so we use the term loosely.
Unlike the sandwiches of our youth, or my husband’s current roster of sandwiches, it has a pretty good nutritional pedigree.
Prune Quesadilla
Ingredients
2 corn tortillas (Though, who is to stop you from using flour or some sort of hybrid? Not I.)
Peanut butter (Do everything in your power to get the kind that is ground peanuts and a bit of salt without sugar or replacement oils. If you are used to the processed kind, it will take next to no time to get readjusted to the good kind.)
Honey (We prefer the kind who lives in a bear, naturally.)
Prunes (There have been leaps forward in prune technology, and they are actually a moist, delightful, iron and potassium rich food. And it’s not like their sole purpose is improved gastric motility, so don’t be afraid of prunes.)
Procedure
Take 2 corn tortillas. Moisten both sides before putting them into the microwave for 30 seconds.
Transfer to a clean plate (one without condensation on it).
Spread with peanut butter. Drizzle with honey. Using poultry shears (or prune shears or a knife) snip bits of prune onto the peanut butter. Top with the other tortilla. Clap the quesadilla from hand to hand until it’s cool enough for a child to eat.
Slice, present, and wait for him to demand one the next day.
