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.