Month: September 2017

WOOH! Being a tiny baby parent is a non-stop emotional roller-coaster.

Last weekend my partner’s back went out and he was pretty useless.  By Monday morning the no sleep since Friday, with constant baby-care while simultaneously working led to tearful result.  Luckily, his back continued to improve, and by midway through the week he was working really hard to get me enough sleep to function at work.  Also luckily, I have an amazing family that has been stepping up to help!

Finally getting enough sleep led me to stage 2 emotional fallout – Holy Fuck I’m going to get fired if I don’t start doing my job like…a LOT more (plus more tears! Maybe I’m not quite as not-tired as it seems).  I mean, I’m doing it.  But there is not a single thing I am not behind on and nothing feels organized or in control.  So now during my little sleep times I am having work nightmares.  Which is not actually THAT helpful to our overall life.  And this is something we just have to figure out. This is what we are doing, this is how we chose to do it.  Some day, I’m going to adopt a baby, and I’m going to take my freaking maternity leave, and it’s going to be the most beautiful few weeks of my life (probably I’ll be really stressed, and feel not entitled to that time, and we will take a trip and somehow fight the whole time. Building up future experiences never turns out well!)  But until then, I have to find SOME WAY to make this work. Mostly, to make ME work!

It’s really hard not to feel stressed about our gender-reversal household and not to think that things would work better if we were going the other way. I seem to find it easier to fulfill baby’s needs over long stretches of time and have trouble letting baby-care be provided by substitute caregivers in order to focus on work – while my partner seems more in need of breaks from baby-care and more stressed to not be able to get his personal work-projects done. But I’m the breadwinner and he is the full-time caregiver and it really seems like we somehow fucked up this plan! But presumably, if we reversed we would probably still be exhausted, stressed, and mildly resentful of each other that way too.  Maybe I need to ask 500 same-gender parents about their emotional status during this time to resolve this internal debate – I’m sure they’ll love that! OK, instead, new plan: stop taking on his jobs of problem-solving as well as my own – a super-hard thing to do, because I am a problem solver.

On the other hand, I managed to make muffins the other day! WHILE wearing a baby! And a good thing, because I’m pretty sure they were the only thing I ate for a few days.  Hard to say, life’s a little blurry right now.

On the other other hand…I am surprisingly into the whole being a baby-mama thing.  There has been a long-term concern that once bab(y)(ies) arrived I might not really be that into it, because I’m not really into babies generally. I remember a pregnant friend looking down and saying “I sure hope I like this thing” – a sentiment I super-get.  But my baby is totes excellent! It’s a lot like a slightly less cute slightly less independent puppy! I love puppies! It has a big round face, is gaining weight and getting bigger, and makes cute sounds, and is a warm cuddly puddle of snorfle and snug.  It’s pretty great and it’s pretty great that it is pretty great!!

And the big pre-placement concerns about the emotional disconnect of “I can’t  believe how hard I am working to take care of a baby and it’s not MINE” is surprisingly non-existent.  This baby IS mine unless and until it’s not.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! Remember when I was going to go to work with a 6 day old baby on Labor Day?  Yeah.  That did NOT happen. I remembered I have a tiny baby, and it’s actually a freaking holiday, and sometimes, you just have to admit you cannot do everything – particularly if you are really, really, really tired.

Inability to push through tiredness is my greatest weakness.  I can handle just about anything else, and I mostly say “cool. let’s just get through this”.  But…not if I’m really tired.  Then I sort of turn into a puddle of can’t.  Luckily, my partner, who has a hard time with lots of other things, pretty much just rocks it out while being tired! But still… figuring out how to balance two hour feedings 24 hours a day and still be, like, actual people, has been a bit of a struggle.

I did get back to work, a couple hours in the evening Tuesday (7 day old baby) on Wednesday for a 1/2 day (8 day old baby), and then full days Thursday and Friday. I am a little ahead of 50% of my required hours and I’m feeling like that’s pretty doggone amazing for having our first ever newborn baby at home.  We aren’t those people who have big families and have been raising babies forever – we are just barely figuring this out as we go here!

Baby is doing great – and I was thrilled that the pediatrician we selected is a black man and, in fact, every single person working at the clinic we chose was a person of color, from the nurse, to the technician, to the doctor.  My baby is not going to see a lot of pigmented skin at our Scandinavian/European heritaged household and I need to find every opportunity to make sure she sees and retains that people of color are everywhere, in every walk of life, doing every job.  I live in a community with significant racial diversity – but studies show that babies start to prefer the skin color of their primary care givers within the first few months of life.  I literally need to find someone that I can say, “hold this baby and stare at her while being black”.  NOT something I can say to any person, even if it is for a really important develop for this baby.  I’ve been looking into local ECFE classes, but it’s hard to sign up for parenting classes when you don’t have any idea how long you will have a baby…

The two hardest things of new momming for a foster newborn are exactly what you would expect: the need to work and the difficulty of uncertainty with regards to the length of time baby will be in our lives.

Work is work. It’s hard to be smart and focused when you are exhausted. It’s hard to be away from the baby all day.  Then I come home, snuggle a sleeping baby, try to take my share of the feedings, try to squeeze in some hours of sleep, and try to stay on top of deadlines and colleague expectations in a fairly demanding profession. We are definitely eating one full meal a day at our house – with high hopes to up that to TWO by the end of the weekend.

But emotional expectations and uncertainty…those are killer.  People LOVE babies. Like, I knew this, but until I started wearing a newborn out in public to do things like grocery shop, I did not know HOW MUCH people LOVE babies.  And that love, while well-intentioned, is so intrusive! Everyone is asking about age, status, etc.  And at some point, some question happens (like when the 25 month pregnant woman at the store accosted me and asked “WILL THIS THING EVER COME OUT AND BE CUTE LIKE THAT?) where I have to say “I did not grow this baby myself.”  Which, people actually take pretty well, a little taken aback, a little rearrangement in their minds…but it is inevitably followed by “Congratulations on adopting! That is amazing! Blah blah blah”.  And then what do you do? “I’m babysitting?”; “I’m fostering”; “yes, thanks”.  Really, what/how/when is no one’s  business – but when we are in limbo, HOPING to adopt one day, accepting people’s accolades and the moment of joy/hope that comes with their expressions of excitement is not only dishonest (although I do not owe them honesty), it’s emotionally painful (and I do owe myself the minimization of pain in an unusual and hard situation).  There is no way to keep an emotional barrier while fostering a tiny baby – you love it and spend 100% of your attention on it – but at the very least I can keep an intellectual barrier that this baby is NOT mine forever.  But I HATE sharing with strangers that this tiny baby is in foster care – the looks, the thoughts rolling across their faces, the follow-up intrusive questions…I sometimes wish we had a more Victorian society where people could only talk to me about the weather and fashion and couldn’t ask my name.  It would make these lines so much easier to maintain.

Fostering is about managing a constant catch 22.  I want this baby to have the best life possible.  If her family is able to do whatever needs doing to take her home forever and give her love, and security, and hope, and joy, I want that for her.  If they can’t, I obviously want her (and basically every baby in the system.  We are very concerned there is a long-term potential for child-hoarding if we keep fostering long-term).  But I don’t want her to have all the pain and stress that comes from adoption, from knowing that you came through the system, from broken families and uncertainty about every step of who you are.  I don’t want her to have the cognitive dissonance that comes from growing up in a family that does not share your color and features and therefore can never fully share your experiences.  It’s so hard to even pick a path for hope – and to simultaneously hope for everything.  In the meantime, I just take 10000000000 pictures that I can’t share.  Wherever this baby eventually grows up, if she comes to me in the future and asks me about this time in her life, I will be able to show her how much this family cherished every second we had with her.  And yes, I’m wearing her RIGHT NOW and maybe a couple tiny tears fell on her snoring tiny head.

Two nights and three days with baby DOWN! Baby STILL ALIVE! Apparently thriving? It’s pretty hard to tell when thriving means “eat, sleep, potty, cry, repeat” but so far I’m feeling pretty good about the experience.

We have a whole changing table in the bathroom area, we have a bassinet next to the bed, we have a baby room with a crib and dresser and closet…and the whole family is basically living in the living room/dining room area, we’re changing the baby on a towel on the dining room table and baby is sleeping in a stroller bassinet (totally safety rated for early baby bassinet sleeping!). This is for general convenience of change and feed in quick succession, but primarily so that the partner not on active duty during the difficult nighttime hours can actually sleep uninterrupted for a reasonable number of hours in a row before tagging in for baby-night-nurse relief.  Babies definitely sleep every second except when you want to lay them down in their own bassinet and actually sleep yourself…they are VERY alert and needy when that time happens! The best thing about a house with a second story is the ability to go where you cannot hear the baby cry – if I hear it AT ALL it’s dramatic wake-up with adrenaline rush and no going back to sleep for at least an hour – even if the partner is on baby-duty and doing a bang-up job and it’s my limited rest time.  A small apartment would be hard in this way – and I bow down to any single-parent, it’s beyond me how they handle this early time.

Last night we went to our first party together – a very local burn-night party, featuring good friends in our burning-man-style fuck-all party-wear.  Not shown: my unicorn fighting a robot leggings! Baby is not super-stoked on costume parties yet and is too tiny to wear most anything, but we did our best – she’s wearing various ill-matching neon and polka-dots and has TWO different hats with ears…but mostly she was shoved inside the wrap where she sleeps so peacefully you actually have to wake her up to eat so her party-wear was less featured. 

Baby LOVES Moby-wrap (ours is a friend’s homemade one and it works ACES).  I am typing with baby in it NOW in preparation for the return to work tomorrow and it’s going pretty well.  I assume this is how very pregnant women feel – sort of unwieldy and very far away from the actual keyboard!  This baby is currently smaller than many newborns, so it’s hard for this never-preggers to understand how this ENTIRE THING could be shoved up inside a person!

I wish there was a newborn needs lending library.  Like, a bassinet and a Moby-wrap are GREAT for the beginning tiny baby time – but that’s a REALLY SHORT TIME.  We are so lucky that people have stepped up with so much we really aren’t having to buy much of these short-term items…but Craigslist is FULL of people trying to offload super-useful things with an incredibly short shelf-life and large cost.  In some ways, we are the best investment for your used items…we could do this stage a LOT of times in the next couple years!

Tomorrow we start stage two “make it (me) work”.  I’m literally just going to take baby with me…it’s a holiday so there will be few people in the office, she sleeps in the wrap or her stroller anyway, and it’s my awake hours so if I want to share in the parenting responsibilities, I have to find some way to work and care for baby… and really, at this tiny age, what’s the difference if I have her with me at work or at home? I guess we’ll find out!  My work includes paid adoption maternity time off, which is amazing…but we aren’t “adopting” right now – with fostering we could end up taking home brand-spanking-new babies multiple times in a year – so, with these life choices, and these goals, it’s time to Figure. It. Out.  This is, at least today, what it means to be this mother.

We’ve been living it up for the time without a baby – we knew it would be short.  I worked (boring) played (fun) and got my hands dirty working for two days at the Great Minnesota Get Together!I love the Spin Art booth and spending the weekend there was the best of all worlds – I got to help out the local artist owners when their weekend manager had an unexpected conflict, I got to be a part of the fair (I don’t go any more because I can’t eat any food and it’s real expensive! If it was just one of those two things, I’d still be all in!!), and I was making the most of my baby-free time! Meanwhile, my partner had a table at two comic conventions (MN Fanfest and Wizard World Chicago) selling his amazing art and hustling for that elusive work-from-home and make money doing art paycheck.

But…we got the call again!  Word is, there’s a very small baby in a hospital ready for discharge to a loving foster home.  It’s pretty terrifying and exciting – getting to do ALL THE STEPS from the very beginning! But…TINY, helpless, sleepless, baby.  Unsurprisingly, I used the time between the phone call (about 4:30 p.m. yesterday) and the call that yep, it’s a go, pick that baby up (about 12:30 today) to FREAK OUT at everything, change over everything from big baby to tiny baby (clothes, toys, sleeping areas), and do the grown-up things: shower, shave, clean up the house, do the laundry and grocery shop – basically, lay in supplies to make this next transition as easy as possible!  Unlike pupper, who can tell her life is about to get stressful again, Kitty is ALL IN on new baby plan!