Fabulous Miss S.

Let this be a lesson

At about 4:30 today I noticed this all-too-familiar stain on my pants and realized it was a battle-stain from Noah's uncontainable poop about 2 o'clock today. 
I been walking around like this for almost three hours now. 
Great!

Also note: Girth of thighs. Also Noah's fault. Shit.

Mission: Idle

A few other bloggers who also recently had babies have written about some of the struggles of motherhood.  Linda wrote about how with a million and two things on the To-Do list you can't seem to get one thing done even when you have hours laying before you but babies need to get fed and then changed and somehow nothing gets done and you start feel like you are running on a treadmill at six miles per hour and can't jump off.  Sarah is wondering if her feelings are postpartum depression.  And that is the post that got me thinking and writing about myself.

I think it is absolutely great that there is such increased awareness and decreased stigma about postpartum depression.  I think, however, the increased awareness is due to some higher profile cases we hear about; women committed to a psych ward for a few days to get a handle on medication and of course those horror stories like Andrea Yates who killed her children one by one, but in her case she was suffering from the extreme and rare condition of postpartum psychosis.  Everyone knows now that if their wife, sister, mother, girlfriend acts crazy and talks about killing her children then she must have PPD.   What about the massive numbers of new mothers who are just a little, oh, blue, and can't seem to shake that heavy feeling, or the increasing obsessive-compulsiveness? 

I have been depressed before, once during the winter a few months before I got pregnant with Noah, so just a little over a year ago.  I took medication and had never been so content, so happy, so NOT at all OCD. It was great. Then I got pregnant three months later and went off it immediately.  I am not depressed right now, I think. But there are some dark days.  There are flashes of anxiety and a lot of aloneness. I know where the doctors are and I know there are medications and group therapy but they are not proven safe for breastfeeding or anywhere near my home.  So I go on. For now.

Then, Noah was born and my life had purpose. It was like being hired for my dream job with an annual salary of five million dollars.  I came home from the hospital and my C-Section scar hurt like a motherfucker and my inlaws were here and I never slept again, the end. Or so it seemed. 

But actually, it got easier and more routine but only after getting so so hard. I got over the 2-3 weeks of "normal" baby blues when your "adjusting" hormones leave you peeing and sweating out gallons of excess fluid. I am not going to lie or sugar coat this: it was rough.Lots of yelling at Marc and lots of crying at anything and everything.  It did get better.  I actually felt my mood levels getting better by the end of that first month.  Blah blah blah some time passed and Noah slept through the night solidly for about five weeks and then he stopped sleeping at around 17 weeks old and then he returned to better sleeping patterns at around 20 weeks old, WHICH WAS LAST WEEK.

Being a mom, a stay at home mom, is something that I have always wanted.  I also think I am a good mother.  I love Noah so much that it makes me dizzy.  I choke when I think about what he will face in our unfair and cruel world.  When I hold him at night before he goes to sleep I think about the women he will love one day and the things he will choose for his life and I can actually feel pain and joy for him.  I spend hours staring at his soft supple skin, I rub my fingers up and down his round rosy cheeks and I bury my face in his neck and inhale so deeply that I hope to burn his milky baby-smell into my brain.  Some nights after I put him to sleep I actually miss him and I wish he was right here with me smiling and cooing - even though I am staring at him on the video monitor.  I miss his physical presence; his body weight on my chest, drooling on my neck.

Each day with Noah is pure joy.  Our days are painfully similar and routine but vastly different too.  Motherhood is lonely.  I only know a few other mothers who have babies Noah's age.  Contrary to the way I represent myself on this here blog, I am a nice person who does not say FUCK in regular conversation unless you give me large quantities of red wine or gin.  But these mothers have not returned my emails and several of them have gone back to work and I find myself hoping that my mother will stop by for fifteen minutes to say hello and drop off a wholesale-size bin of cat litter just so that I can say something other than did you make a poopie?  a stinky stinky poopie?.

I love every minute with Noah. Each day he comes alive even more. He makes sounds and babbles at me and laughs and coos and cackles when I sing the Blue Bird song and blow on his tummy.  He looks deep into my eyes when we nurse and I cannot stop staring at him because when I look into his eyes I am looking into my own and it absolutely boggles my mind.  I am proud of course of how I have taught him to linger in bed and cuddle and nap until ten o'clock each morning.  If nothing else, I am thrilled to have passed on my beautiful eyes and my ability to excel at utter laziness.    

Giftcards

I am trying to get better about using my giftcards because, dude, you have to go and get the gift that you want! 

I got this for Mother's Day:

And used it to buy this:

And this for Noah:

And, no, the gift card didn't cover it all. Not by a long shot.  But I haven't bought books in a very very long time.  So I deserved it!

The hazards of picking up after your dog

It has been said that some things just beg to be written about and I have a, um ... neighborhood situation that meets this criteria.  We have a neighbor who knows LOOSELY that I have a blog but she is a little older than me and isn't involved in this online community sharing thing we have going here so I take my chances and hope like hell she does read this and wonders who, WHO am I writing about. 

I am a bit ashamed to admit that this conversational transaction did leave me battling a fierce episode of anxiety-fueled diarrhea and panic-attack symptoms for about two hours.  I do not like confrontation.  If I feel I was wronged I can stand up for myself without problem.  I can stand up for myself with great stubbornness.  However, when I find that a friend or acquaintance acts like a bully I usually let the friendship go because I don't like to waste energy on these sorts of interactions, they are negative and unhealthy and life is short so I let those relationship ... dissolve. 

When you have a neighbor who calls you from the cell phone when she is walking by your house and when you don't answer, she rings the bell, just in case you can still hear it from your hiding place behind the toilet in the basement bathroom.  As I type this I have vivid images of the cringing that was brought on by Steve Urkel's annoying presence and Harriet from Small Wonder.

Tonight, Marc and I took a quick jig around the neighborhood, me with Hines and he with Noah in his arms.  This was a walk mainly to get the dog to poop.  No more. No less.  It was nearing Noah's bedtime and nerves were shot from a long day of absolute routine and monotony and fabulous wonder.   I reached down to pick up after my pet using a newspaper bag and there is no delicate way to say this: there was a hole in the bag. 

After quickly discarding the poop we were walking briskly back to our house because I had wipes in my car to remedy my POOP HAND.  I was walking with my left hand held out like a claw with the dangerous and horrific notion that it had gotten too-close-for-comfort to dog poop.  As we rounded the last corner and my car, ergo, an antibacterial wipe was within sight, we were accosted by our friendly-ever-full-of-material-to-blog-about neighbor who when told about the POOP HAND chose to ignore that fact and the hideous looking CLAW that I was sporting to stand there in the middle of the sidewalk and talk to us for way longer than one should talk to anyone when sporting a POOP HAND.

During this time I was made to feel worthless and chump-ish for spending what we did on a backyard fence because she got a much larger fence at her new home for much less; I am clearly abusing my child and subjecting him to pollen-induced allergies by not using my air-conditioning in MAY when it is a heavenly SEVENTY DEGREES outside; and, why in the blue fuck did I allow my neighbor to put a piece of fresh sod on my property in place of my problematic weeds because it actually looks like hell from the recent seven inches of rain?

I still had the POOP HAND.  It was all clenched like a claw, held as far away from my body as my short little arm would allow and she. just. kept. talking. holy. fuck.

Hines' Trifecta

Last night Marc and I went up to bed a little early to catch up on some sleep.  I totally pooched this notion by spending two and a half hours reading a really good book.   

I am thanking my lucky toenails right now that I DID stay up that long reading because I was able to witness the live Hines puking in my bed show at about 12:15am.  When this dog barfs he doesn't give you the typical cough, cough, gag, harf-prelude that most of his species prefers.  Rather, he just sort of makes a delicate little cough that usually lends nothing gross but on occasion leaves a pile of dog harf.  And on this occasion, there was a pile of harf. IN MY BED.  DIRECTLY BETWEEN MARC AND MYSELF. 

Hum, GROSS.

I shook Marc awake and cleaned up the barf an ever-handy baby wipe.  All day yesterday when I let Hines into the back yard he sat under the deck and ate bird seed.  Revenge came at 12:15am.  Bummer.

Two hours later Hines jumped up from a dead sleep and ran across the bed waking the people in his trail so that he could protect us from the evil horror of a C-A-T sitting quietly and calmly on the end of the bed. 

I'm a bit protective of my sleep these days.  Pretty much since Christmas I haven't gotten much of it so when I do get it, I get pretty fucking mad at anything that happens to interrupt a few consecutive hours of sweet slumber.  I yelled at Marc to get them all the hell out of my bedroom.

Hines and the cats spent the rest of the night in the house but outside of my bedroom.  I would have thought that he would have gone to sleep in his dog bed in the dining room but I would be so wrong to believe that.

Turns out that he spent a few hours eating the cat food and licking the bowls clean, peeing in Marc's office and pooping on the living room floor. Twice. 

And this is what the little shithead had to say about it today: