Month: October 2017

We took babyX(2) to a halloween party recently and it was great! If you are wondering, baby was Baby Groot in a pot, and she looked AMAZING (if only you could see her)! Then really she spent most of the night sleeping in a ring-sling on my front and it was ideal.  My partner was Baby Driver and I was nothing that had “baby” in the name at all, to my chagrin.

Wearing a baby at a party is … interesting. A more than negligible percentage of people asked, commented, mumbled, or whispered, “is that a real baby”?  Like, up through and continuing to ask four hours later as we were leaving…which would make sense if I had a costume that needed a baby accessory, but I did not.  It would be totally weird and nonsensical to be wearing a fake baby with a punk-rock Leia outfit!

Some people are TOO excited about the baby.  I can really only hold 2 conversations right now – (1) baby; and (2) work. That is literally all the hours of my day and everything I am currently devoting energy towards.  And I am SO BORED by this fact about myself! But some people REALLY want to talk about babies, to where I am talking about my OWN baby and I am STILL bored.  Some exits had to be made – graceful or not!

One (white, obvi) woman asked me about my baby’s clearly different race than mine.  I live in very diverse community and it’s been fascinating…not one person in my community has asked even one question about my baby’s race.  This woman was not ill-intentioned at all, she was just curious, and mostly that’s ok with me.  But sort of like the question “why don’t you have kids”, asking about a baby’s race being different than its caregiver is maybe just too invasive, even if it’s an obvious thing and normal to be curious about?  Because we adopted (for infertility, for love, for religion); because the baby is mixed-race and you just can’t tell and now I have to give weirdly personal information about my relationship; because baby is in foster care; for so many different fairly private reasons that just…maybe should not be asked of a stranger. I’m not sure!

Same party, a black or mixed race (it was dark at the party) man about my age saw the baby and just GUSHED about her, for like 15 seconds, and it was great! Super charming and sincere – but without any need to talk about babies WAY. TOO. MUCH.  An hour or so later, baby woke up for a bit and he happened to walk by when her giant eyes were staring around her, and he bent over and just spent like…a full minute just looking into her face, and sharing a moment with her.  He didn’t ask any invasive questions.  He didn’t overstay his time.  He didn’t even ask to hold her he just…had this very real moment of making himself available to her in a super open way.  I’m super grateful on behalf of my baby.

Overall, going to a party helped restore a really important piece of normalcy to my life – I got to feel like ME while still caregiving and storing up baby-time for my out–of-town trip; 3 whole days with NO BABY.

BabyX(2) is almost seven weeks old, and our lives are starting to be a little more…normal?  My partner and I slept in the same bed two nights in a row (as opposed to splitting the night each awake and downstairs for 1/2 night, with the other getting a whole block of sleep of like…5 hours) and our baby is sleeping 3 hours in a row!  It feels like big progress from basically unlivable to “breathe in. breath out. ok we can do this!”

Of course, baby is also adorbs and starting to do really baby things like say “gah” in a cute baby voice.  Both during the last night (when she was snorting and wheezing like a rhino in her bassinet) and during the day (when she was saying “goo” and “gah” like a movie-baby) I have been forced to ask baby if she is trolling me because it’s so “image of what a baby is/does”.  But so far, she appears to be sincere!

We’ve learned more about what is going on now with baby and her family of origin and all of the options for the future.  It’s so hard to watch the future and hope for and be supportive of family of origin and just also, really, truly, have every desire to keep this baby forever.  I love how easy it is to love her.  I hate how easy it is for me to be jealous, envious, and just sad, about the people in my life who are producing their very own babies and just get to KEEP THEM.  Getting babyX(2) definitely filled the void – it’s kind of absurd how much I’ve been enjoying having a small baby – even the boredom and exhaustion of it.  But people very close to me just had their own baby and I’m legit having a hard time with it.  I’m a comparer, and it’s just so. so. UNFAIR.  I just want to keep my adorable warm squishy good-smelling baby! It’s made me think about trying to get pregnant again, about IVF, about every option that has direct permanency.  But we stopped trying to get pregnant because the hopes and miscarriages were both physically and emotionally draining.  And we stopped considering just straight forward adoption for a lot of reasons. And IVF is real expensive, and has only 20% odds of success for my age range – maybe even less because I’ve already had more than two miscarriages.

And you end back where you started – at love this baby TODAY and tomorrow just happens.  In some ways, I think one of the reasons that I am adjusting to parenting so well (much better than any of us expected!) is because being with a baby forces you to be present In The Moment.  One of my biggest problems is that I often fail to appreciate the present because I spend so much time worrying about the future – even when it’s a waste of time and energy and I have already done everything that can be reasonably done to ensure security and desired outcomes.  Baby is helping me to be “IN THE MOMENT” all the time – even the times without baby, because each piece of time is finite and allocated to a specific goal.