P is for Play

As I write this my child is getting bored by the same old toons on the T.V. and emptying my wallet of its contents.  I will be scouring the house later for the whereabouts of my insurance cards, credit card, and driver’s license.  I will waste at least a half an hour of my nonexistent time trying to make up for these moments of neglect.  If my cell phone turns up in the process, I will be pleased, but no more whole feeling than I am now,  during one of the countless times when the phone is MIA.   It is safe to say that I am not a Type A mom.

But I do, in my B or C or X-Y-Z way, care deeply about what my 20 month old needs.   Structured playgroups seem like a great idea, in theory.  Cayce certainly enjoyed his time at the last play group, and lord knows that our Thursday mornings at Let’s Get Messy helped get us through a long winter on an island thirty miles out to sea. 

But in many ways it seemed to me that the time at the play group was so structured that the kids didn’t really get a chance to get to know one another.  Of course they got to know one another much better than they had prior to the group, but I find myself wondering whether, had we included more free time and less story time, singing time, and craft time, they might actually feel yet more comfortable with one another.

The principal behind a structured play group for a tot is to give the tots a chance to socialize.  To learn how to play together, and share toys, and take turns on the slide.  It’s a beautiful concept.  But it won’t work if we parents don’t relax a little bit and stop micromanaging their every interaction.  The time in which Cayce had the greatest opportunity to play with his friends was in the free time after the play group was over, but many parents were quickly ushering their kids off to another structured group at the library.   

Even when you think about the name of the group, you understand how far away we’ve come from things that should be natural to us.   We need a class to teach us how to loosen up and have fun?  It reminds me of one passenger I had in my taxi when I was pregnant with Cayce, a young caretaker of a home in Pocomo.  He cackled heartily at the sight of  The Pregnancy Book by Sears and Sears.  You need a book for it? he cried, incredulous.   

I have just started Cayce in a new group, and the change has refueled my reservations.  First of all, there is the way that I project my performance anxiety onto him at the start of each new session.  A new teacher, a new set of people, and suddenly I have forgotten that my little boy is just a little boy who wants to follow the beat of his own drum.  Deep down I have forgotten that this is okay.  I think I must corral him, reign him in, make him sing when the teacher says Sing!  The room is chock full of toys to play with, a climbing structure with a slide, a play kitchen.  Is it really fair to place all these distractions before him and then expect him to focus on the story?  It seems to me he is more focused at the library galley movement and singing classes, where there are no toys around except for the antique dolls in the window.  Here at the ECC my child moves from play station to play station.  I go back to being that little girl breaking out in hives every Sunday night, before the start of every week at a new school. 

But compound my own personal anxiety with the anxiety of all the other mothers.  A strident, nails-on-blackboard motherese in stereo.  It’s not pretty.  All these mothers of small children that are enough just as they are were suddenly mothers of very small children that have to prove themselves in some way.   Names were sung in the most saccharine sounding high pitched voices as very small children were ushered from what they were doing on the stairs or the slide and lured into finding their name cards on the rug in the circle.

I heard myself doing it too, and was horrified.  I balked at the specter of an eighteen year molding process.  What we were doing in that moment didn’t feel like it was for the benefit of our kids, as much as for each other.  And certainly our kids could see through this crap?  I mean, this was not the way we behave at home.  We don’t ask them to perform on the spot at home, do we?  It seems to me my son just charms us and shows us what he knows naturally, when the moment inspires him.  Not that I don’t show him off a bit for Grandma on Skype, or for friends who haven't seen him since he started stringing together sentences and little expressions.  

I’m sure tensions will ease as this new grouping of mothers and their children get to know one another.  I wish I could kill the fluorescent lights that give the room an institutional feel.  But we can make up for that with our human warmth.  Whether it’s competitive or nurturing, freeing or stifling to our kids is up to us. Will it be a place where each child is encouraged to be his or her full and unique self? Or will there be a hierarchy, where each child is ranked against the other?  Will it be a place where the children learn to trust one another, and themselves?  These are the things we determine each moment, in our actions, in what we do with what we’re given, and in what and how we give to our children. 

Stolen Moments

Oh to see
my little boy
crouching
bent knees
stooped at the waist
nose deep
in the tulips!
Or grinning
in his swing
as bluejays sing
between wind
splintered treetops,
his shining face
tilted upward
sky the truest
of sky blues
on a spring
morning
bursting
with color
and music.

NURSING TODDLER TAKES ON TOWN MEETING

Cayce for Bell Ringer 2012

So the upshot is that baby and I did make it to Town Meeting on night number two, the night we really needed to be there to cast our vote on Article 59, an article that, had it passed, would have kept any plans for such a dramatic alteration of downtown Nantucket as the building of a four story parking garage in the hands of the voters. 

There were many moments during our lively stay when I seriously questioned my choice to bring him.  He was of course the only small child in attendance, and the moment his bright voice began to percolate out over the dour, over serious air of the meeting’s formalities I thought, oh dear, we will be taking many long walks down the Hall of The Whale. (This is the main hall of the high school building, where the full skeleton of a right whale is hung.) 

The article was said to be arising an hour into the meeting, but of course, as is typical of Town Meeting, the prior articles were also argued over at great length, so the wait until the article that we were there for, that really needed my vote,  was much longer than hoped.

Many people in attendance were unbothered by Cayce’s amplified chatter, which seemed to interject a sense of levity into the proceedings.  But there were a few old timers who were already hard of hearing and did not like the distraction.  We got more than a few hostile glances.  But I think I did quite a good job of staying on my toes and keeping my son out of peoples’ hair without completely stifling him, which he would have loudly protested, anyway.  We sat toward the back with some friends, and there was a partition wall, behind which we could go to nurse in privacy and relative darkness while still being able to hear the discussions.  There were also some chairs, and stairs, and various things for Cayce to explore back there out of view of the audience and the moderator and all the sitting members of the various boards which run the town. 

Cayce hung in with me long enough to cast my vote.  Having a small child did not keep me from performing my civic duty.  Okay, we didn’t get to go to all three nights and stay for all of the articles, but we managed a great deal very well, considering our current situation.  While there were some disapproving looks, I overall felt the support of so many of my friends and community members.  People later commented on how well my one and a half year old handled his early exposure to civic participation.  

It makes me think about my mother’s recent comment, after Cayce and I had traveled to the mainland and back and accomplished getting Daddy’s truck fixed as well as a day packed with shopping.  She said she never could have done that with any of us kids as babies.  I think about our easy flights to New York last summer, and easily getting around the city, and my child’s incredible adaptability anytime we bend our routine.  What makes it work, what makes him go with my flow, no pun intended, is nursing.  As long as I am willing and able to give him that mama’s milk at regular intervals he is a happy camper.  It becomes a mutually agreeable give and take.

So, while a continued commitment to nurse can be quite demanding, it can also really make life easier

I wish I could say we were going to Paris or Utah, like some of my friends with nursing toddlers, rather than a night at Town Meeting.  Maybe next year for us.  But I am certainly inspired thinking about the adventures,  both serious and wild,  possible with a secure nursing child.

A Toddler on The Boob: Notes from One of the Few Five Percent

I never thought I’d become a righteous nursing mom of a sprawling one and a half year old.  I really never thought twice about how I would mother, or the fact that such a major choice in both substance and style would be left up to me.  I never understood that the important discussion of how I would feed and nurture my young would take place largely within the closed doors of La Leche League meetings in church basements and rec halls.  I never knew that I would become part of this secret society of women that make up less than 13% of mothers who nurse their babies beyond the first three months, let alone representing the scant 5% or less that continue nursing their young beyond the first year.  (In fact, according to KellyMom, there are no recent studies offering an accurate count of women that nurse past one year of age, that’s how unpopular it is.)    

But here we are.  My son is happy and healthy and adventurous and smart.  He nurses when he wants to take a break from his broadening world, when he needs a little reprieve from his constant observation and chatter.  Yes, he has a mouth full of teeth and his legs dangle out of my lap, but when he nurses he is just a gentle and soft babe fueling up on love and nurturance that he has not stopped needing in steady supply.  That is, when he's not being a multi-tasking nurser doing the Downward Dog or climbing back and forth over my torso while fastened securely to his milk supply.

The reason I’m a tad righteous about it is because it’s hard to be in such a minority in the most important job of my life.  And it’s hard to feel the increased judgment about it as my son gets older.  I’m sure the judgment is just about people’s lack of exposure to the image of a nursing toddler mom, and yet it is strong enough, and loud enough that I feel I must fight for my place.

I remember a few years back when I was still childless and visiting a mom friend in NYC.  We were at the Whole Foods on Houston, walking into the second floor food vendor area in search of the restrooms.  Directly in front of our path a woman was nursing a two-something child at a table.  The mom shot me a hostile glare and said with that talk-to-the-hand attitude you can only find in  NYC, “It’s called BREASTFEEDING!”

Had I been leering?  I looked away, and was grateful when the path took me away from her.  How could I not look, when she was right in my line of vision?  I certainly was not uncomfortable with the sight, it was more a matter of curiosity.  This was not something I tended to see in my humdrum little childless life in Nantucket.  The idea that women even breastfeed was somewhat of a surprise to me. 

Now that I am nursing a toddler, I’m beginning to understand why it’s something you don’t see very often.  It’s not just that such a small percent do it.  An even smaller percent do it in public. 

I thought I was going to be the miracle multi-tasking modern mom last night and attend Nantucket’s Annual Town Meeting with my nursing toddler.  I thought to myself, well, bars at night may be out for us, but who could fault me for nursing at Town Meeting?  I was doing my civic duty.  I would sit in the back somewhere, and no one would really notice, except those sitting right beside me and behind me.  Then I thought of the scarcity of seats, and the fluorescent lights, and the idea that if I sprawled out with him in an aisle, as I did the last time I attended, two years ago, when I was six months pregnant, people would be struggling to get by us.  I couldn’t guarantee that the nursing would go well.  That we wouldn’t call attention to ourselves.  I couldn’t risk being that mom nursing in the Whole Foods in front of so many people in the town all at once. 

In short, I caved. 

The same old friend who shared my pre-mom experience at Whole Foods recently sent me an email comment on my blog, which I had shared with her.  The particular post I had sent her was The Forty Factor, in which I explore what it means to be an older mom.  The only comment said friend had was a reference to my statement in the sidebar of my profile page, where I claim that I intend to nurse my son for as long as he wants to.  Her mind leapt to the image of a five year old “on the boob.” 

“Do you mean to tell me that Cayce is five years old and still on the boob?  That’s

boob-a-rific!”   

It was an awkward mixture of shock and feigned support.  “Boob-a-rific” felt pretty put-on and disingenuous, and I could help but feel that she was so deep down uncomfortable with the idea that it deafened her to any other aspect of my described experience.  Her response was the definition of, “She couldn’t get past it.”

So I am now aware of new mountains arising before me in my path as a mother.  My strength will be tested not in my ability to surmount the small hills.  Jeeze… nursing in the Nursing section of Barnes & Noble is small fish to fry.  But if next year I can muster the courage to nurse my 2 ½ year old at Town Meeting (if indeed he is still “on the boob” by then), and if I can teach my friends and family not to be embarrassed by us, then I will be able to  say I’ve climbed the highest and hardest mountains in Momdom.

Fear of Floods: Finding Freedom in Motherhood

Becoming a parent for the first time is terrifying.  This teeny tiny life is placed into your hands and you and you alone are responsible for it.  Everything that you acquire to keep your baby safe comes with a warning label screeching the danger of child injury or death.  You decide to co-sleep with this tender little life rather than leave it alone in a crib.  You get a bed rail when he begins to roll that’s covered with labels forewarning you against putting a baby in an adult bed.  Other parents say, Aren’t you afraid of rolling over on him?  I think, Aren't you afraid of alienating her?  You navigate your way amidst this sea of dangers. 

Whether you take all the alarm bells in stride or whether you fret and worry will depend largely upon your nature.  It will also depend upon experience.  I have become more relaxed about certain things now that I’ve been at this for a year and a half.  If my son drops his apple on the supermarket floor I pick it up and give it back to him without wiping it off first.  Once I was scolded by a West Indian grandmother for not having my boy’s ankles covered in the winter weather.

But appearances can be deceiving.  Your level of anxiety over your child’s safety also depends on what may have happened to you in your life, or what happens along the path of parenthood. 

When my baby was eight months old, my sister took her own life by jumping from the roof of her Brooklyn apartment building.   It was like the earth cracking open beneath my feet.  The whole family was deeply shaken.  I was overwhelmed with the trauma of sudden loss, with guilt over not having saved her, over the possibility that she had become more sad in juxtaposition to my joy as a mother, (she was 47, and had never born a child), and with an immense and complicated grief.   The lifelong wound of having lost my father to the effects of bipolar disorder as an eleven year old was reopened in addition to the new wound of losing my sister Gaby in our forties.   

My generally optimistic nature, and my child’s contagious happiness, along with a strong and supportive family and weekly therapy have helped me to rise above the sorrow and focus on being a strong and positive and nurturing mother.  Being able to look at myself and the situations in which I find myself with a sense of humor has been an essential tool in my survival kit.  Writing also gives shape and voice to the anxieties that grip me, and in so doing releases me from them. 

But still there are times in life when one’s psyche has to work overtime to make sense of things.  The week before the perigee moon would loom huge above our dazzled, moon-swept faces, massive earthquakes struck Japan.  The subsequent tsunami swept away whole villages in the blink of an eye.  Then, more locally, in our sleepy little town, a three year old girl died, allegedly at the hands of her own mother.  Let’s just say that my trauma sensors were on high.  I went to a Women’s Gathering on the night of the full moon to hear Joan Borysenko speak and I wore my sister’s four hundred dollar Thierry Rabotin pewter dancer’s shoes for the party afterward, one of several pairs she bought in the height of her psychosis when she probably wanted nothing more than to dance her ass off to the Talking Heads, commune with the angels, and get her six figure job back.

I didn’t get to dance in my sister’s shoes for her that night.  I did get to hear most of Borysenko’s interesting  talk, entitled “Rising Tide of Light: Developing Resilience in Times of Change” before the hubby called me at 8:20, after I had been out of the house for four hours straight, a big record over our previous two hour record, with baby wailing in the background.  “I think he’s had it,” hubby said. 

The sound of the baby crying over the phone flooded me in Cortisol.  Within three minutes of getting off the phone I scooped up my purse and turned on the car.  Seven minutes after that I was pulling into our driveway.  The baby boy had a big smile on his face.  He also had a very wet diaper.  Ten minutes later, after changing him and putting him to my breast, he was asleep. 

That morning as the last of the moon’s milky light bathed our side of the planet I had a terrible dream.  I was at an enormous indoor swimming pool with my new family.  I was on the deep end, contemplating the diving board, and I had left my one year old on the side of the pool behind me, between his father, who was on the shallow end, and me.  I had turned my back for one moment.  When I turned back to Cayce, pool water was lapping up onto the side of the pool and covering his face.  When the water pulled away from his face it was blank, motionless, and unresponsive.  I ran to him and picked him up by his feet and hung him upside down but no cough came.  No water sputtered out of his mouth.  He was as still as a statue.  “Help me!” I cried.  “He’s not breathing!  Help me!”

When I woke up, my one year old was breathing steadily beside me in our bed, the moon was gone, replaced by a brilliant sun.

There are a couple of things that strike me about this dream.  The pool, first of all.  Womb water, a force of creation, also with it’s power to destroy.  And the fact that my partner, Cayce’s father, was there with me… that despite his presence, Cayce was my responsibility.  I carried my child into the world, and whatever happens to him falls at my feet.   And the feeling that if I turn my back for one moment something terrible might befall my child.  So the dream is a dream of a woman who feels she must remain ever vigilant.  A woman who can’t let go.   Who waits for the shoe to drop and the sky to fall. 

I know I must deal with this or I will become one of those merciless helicopter moms, hovering, not living.   Those dance shoes still fit, and there happens to be a very good funk band playing at The Chicken Box tonight…  

             

Mom Material: The Forty Factor

Mom Material: The Forty Factor: "Women who are over forty having their first child represent a growing demographic of women bearing children. Fewer women are having ba..."

The Forty Factor

Women who are over forty having their first child represent a growing demographic of women bearing children.  Fewer women are having babies in their twenties and thirties these days, and more women are having babies in their forties.   Despite the fact that we women over forty having first children represent the highest risk category (in fact, the American Medical Association puts any women thirty-five or older into that group), we are braving the odds and utilizing the advances in modern medicine to pursue the dream of raising families late in life.

I guess you could say that I am a righteous older mom.  I get a little proud and indignant whenever anyone suggests that I am in any way disadvantaged due to my age.   Yet at the same time I often question whether my maladies suggest that I am vulnerable to the age factor.  But it’s sort of like, I’m allowed to say something about it, but nobody else is, unless you too happen to be of my forty-something subset.  Sometimes I entertain such discussions on Facebook, and am usually enormously gratified when younger moms write posts to let me know that they too have had issues with their hips, or with fatigue, thus putting the age myth fully to rest.

Then usually some older mom decides to chime in and kill my younger-feeling mom buzz.   She says being an over-forty mom of toddlers is exhausting and that she has only had two nights of sleep in three and a half years.  Now, since she did just turn forty, she’s entitled to her point of view, and I can’t take that away from her.  I’ll just sort of sit back in the sidelines and wait for some young mom to blow that notion out of the water with a story of more extreme fatigue in her twenties or thirties.  (One thing I am learning is that no mom likes to be outdone in her level of exhaustion!)  I can reign victorious again in my need to believe that I am perfectly well equipped for this job.  Despite a missing molar, despite hyperparathyroidism, despite sun-spotted skin, and hair that goes gray if I don’t color it, despite laugh lines and frown furrows, I can still keep up with my one year old on the “shtair” and the “shlide”, wiggle through the tunnel, and nurse throughout the night.  If I was on an episode of Mom Survivor, I wouldn’t be likely to get voted off.  I’m that good.

Nearing forty-five now, I can still put a hundred percent into motherhood.  I can’t do it, however, if I don’t also take care of myself.  A younger mother might be able to subsist on a diet of candy bars and diet cokes.  I, however, require foods that are rich in calcium and iron.  I require a daily Rainbow Light prenatal vitamin, calcium, and Omega 3’s.  I require a vigorous walk with my son in his stroller at least three or four days a week, when weather’s permitting.  While one disadvantage for older mothers is the necessity to work harder at self-care, the fact that older mothers tend to be better at taking care of themselves works in their favor.      

But I’m not going to lie.  I worry about my mortality.  When I see younger mothers I see just that—younger and more beautiful and yes, sometimes more energetic mothers.    I am continually becoming aware of my age.  Other mothers think about having a second and even a third or more children without blinking an eye.  I have to wonder whether I would be so lucky the second time around, in terms of having a healthy child.  I remind myself that I got pregnant easily, and handled the pregnancy well, without complications or need of bed rest.  I have been successful at breastfeeding and have fully enjoyed raising my little boy into a toddler…But I’m conditioned to think of myself as old.  I imagine that in the minds of other people my having a second child would be—well, pushing it.    

And yet, when I look at how well my first child is turning out, how healthy and happy and engaged with the world he is, I wonder why I don’t feel more confidence in my ability to have a second child.  In part it might be due to K and the fact that he insists another child wouldn’t be economically feasible.  And there’s truth in that.  But as we know, economics don’t deter most people, or most people in the world would not have children.  So it has to be something else… a nagging deep down fear of failure, a fear that we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves and our children.  That this baby soft-faced child of ours who adores us so will one day realize that we're growing old.

*   *   *   *

  

Being an older mom means having to scrub hair dye off the bath turtles.  It means being mistaken for grandma by inner city TSA workers in airport security lines.  It means viewing portraits of creamy skinned younger moms and their babies with a wistful sense of envy.  It means running out of time to have a second one.  It means watching my son’s first white teeth come in while I work to keep from losing mine.  It means being susceptible to older person’s illnesses like hyperparathyroidism and diverticulitis.  The older you get, the more syllables are in the names of your illnesses.  It’s an unfortunate phenomenon. 

But being an older mom also means being a mom with wisdom.  It means being a mom who came very close to not getting the chance to become a mother at all.  It means being a mom with a deep sense of gratitude.  It means being a mom with perspective, who isn't upset by spilled milk.  It means being a mom not easily embarrassed and perfectly willing to act goofy for the sake of entertaining my little one.  It means being a mom who’s willing to keep on nursing him.  It means being a mom who sang to my son from the moment we first came home, between our first bonding moments nursing on the sofa, and then as we strolled up and down the bike paths, and whose son now at the age of one sings “LA! LA! LA!” at the top of his lungs.   It means not really giving a crap how I look or weather I’ve lost all my pregnancy fat or even whether I’ll ever get to go out ever again in my life.  It means being willing to give up everything for my child, and yet feel as if I’m receiving the greatest and richest gift under the sun.   Being an older mom is not for everyone.  But despite the fact that I’m growing older, I am feeling younger all the time.  And even though I’m an older mom, my little son wouldn’t want any other one.