BrooklynGirl

1200 Miles

I hated high school.  H.A.T.E.D it.  Not for any particularly original reason--I was a nerdy, broody adolescent who was at once  insecure and imperious.  I was sure there was life beyond the new, artificial southern city I called home, and I had nothing but disdain for the people who seemed happy where they were.

I moved away as soon as possible, choosing a small northeastern college my guidance counselor had  never even heard of.   I went back as infrequently as possible--the summer after my sophomore year in college was the last time I was there for any length--and when I looked for a place to live after college, I wanted to be as far from that high school and that city as possible.

Eventually, I wound up in New York.  I was more than 12oo miles away from my high school so I didn't think much about it much, but I was sure that I was living a life totally different from THOSE people.  But then I ran into one.  About a decade ago, one of the pretty, popular girls I couldn't stand submitted a resume for a job I was leaving.   It gave me no small amount of satisfaction when she didn't get the job.

Then I ran into another one.  Improbably, he was a resident in the ER I visited when I had my first miscarriage.  Mercifully, another doctor handled my care, but I met him again when we visited the ER for other reasons a year later.  He recognized me and expedited our care then showed me pictures of his children.  It pained me to admit it, but he was competent and kind.

Today,  I ran into someone else.  Back in the day, she was the poster child for my high school: perky, pretty, and (to my surly adolescent self) impossibly vapid.  Now, she's a mom at my local playground with a son not that much younger than The Boy.  She introduced herself to me, and I about fell over--so much of what I like about where I live is that it is the antithesis of the place I grew up.  But here this person was.  And she was me!  We both had Thomas the Tank Engine trains in our pockets.  We both had goldfish cracker crumbs in our hair.  Yes, she was thinner and better dressed than me, but somehow that didn't seem as threatening  as it had in high school.

1200 miles doesn't seem as far as it used to.

Two

I am the mother of a two year old boy. 

He is a bundle of will these days: he only wants to drink out of certain cups, eat a small selection of food (that shrinks a little more every day), walk on a particular side of the street, use a special kind of bubbles in the bath.  He has tantrums all the time, dramatically throwing himself on the ground and then slyly peeking to see if you have noticed and are bending to his will (and far too often we are).

He surprises me all the time--for example, recently saying "bless you" to his sister after she sneezed, not something my husband or I (both confirmed "gesundheit" fans) ever taught him.

There are times that I still can't believe that this is my life, when I have to pinch myself to prove that my husband, my son, and my daughter are real.  Even typing that sentence is surreal.  My husband.  My son.  My daughter.

Happy birthday, sweet boy.  Here's to many, many more.

A History of Violence

This week saw the first incident of Boy on Girl violence.  The short version is this: when I turned around to draw The Boy's bath, something he was playing with came into contact with The Girl's head.

Since my back was turned, I don't know if it was deliberate or not, but I think (and fervently hope) not. The Girl wound up with a small scratch, and though I'm supposed to be a calm and savoir faire second time parent, I still contemplated rushing her to the ER (and might have if I didn't have to worry about The Boy).*

The logistics of bathtime are always a challenge, but this was worse: I needed to get The Boy out of the way so I could take care of The Girl, and the most expedient way to do this would have been to put him in front of the TV, but in case he had done this on purpose, I was leery of rewarding him.   Instead, I plopped him in his crib with some books and toys.  He was not a fan of that decision and proceeded to try to climb out of his crib so I wound up sitting on the floor in front of the crib, nursing The Girl while simultaneously inspecting her scalp, flipping through the well-thumbed head injury section of Dr. Spock, and singing "Old MacDonald" to keep The Boy entertained.

Fortunately, at that moment my husband walked in the door. 

I was telling a friend about the whole thing and she said that some evenings, she said a little prayer that everyone was still alive at the end of the day.  Amen, sister.

*This is the section of my parenting book that freaked me out:  "Bleeding under the bones of the scalp can put pressure on the brain, causing symptoms that are not obvious at first but develop over a day or two."  How is this advice even remotely helpful?  Doctors, if you want to know why hysterical parents make unnecessary trips to your ER, it's because of books like this.

When Life Becomes a Sitcom

There are some things that my husband and I have not resumed since The Girl's arrival.  You know, private things that tend to happen alone in the dark.  Since The Girl still sleeps in a bassinet in our room, we are never really alone, but still: it's been awhile.

After a lovely weekend in a quiet and temperate city, it seemed like tonight could be the night to...resume.  But then as if on cue, The Girl who had been quietly rocking in her swing woke up, looked at us accusingly, and started to squawk.   We tried to calm her down, but it was too late: The Boy heard her crying and woke up hard, screaming the kind of screams that required attention.

We each took a child and rocked and paced and comforted, but when that was all over, it was clear The Girl was going to have to nurse again.   Ahem.

Finally, The Boy is sleeping and The Girl is sleeping and The Husband is sleeping, and I am too tired to do anything except end this post.

Made in Brooklyn?

Back in 2002 when I started trying to get pregnant, I was enamored of the "Made in Brooklyn" onesies being sold in the local shops.  We gave them as gifts to all our breeding friends (before we became too bitter to give gifts) and longed to buy one of our own.

When The Boy was born 3 years later, we didn't buy the shirt because it seemed like a cheat: The Boy wasn't made in Brooklyn, but rather in a lab in Manhattan.  I felt the weirdest twinge when I saw kids in the neighborhood wearing the onesies,  and I felt ridiculous for having the twinge  at all because a silly t-shirt was so not the point. 

*****

This morning I was out walking with The Girl when I saw the onesie in a store window.  My credit card was burning a hole in the diaper bag as my inner shopaholic trilled, "At last, the t-shirt will be mine!"  But then I had another twinge.  For me, the shirt celebrates details that The Girl (and  The Boy, for that matter) have no control over.  There's nothing more special about The Girl's conception than The Boy's  conception or vice versa.* 

And yet, the fact that there is a difference comes up with some frequency.  A friend recently asked my husband if The Girl had been conceived "naturally."**  Now I am a little prickly when people start throwing around terms like normal or natural so I was all ready to intervene when my husband responded, "We were unassisted," which made me want to marry him all over again. 

I will tell my children how they came to be when it's appropriate, but I hope they never have cause to feel unnatural or abnormal about anything.

*I doubt that most people who buy the shirt think of it as a statement about the place where their child was conceived

**Amazing the things people think constitute polite conversation, no?

Tug of War

Last week I cried at the playground.

The Boy just would not get into his stroller.  I had tried every bribe in my arsenal, but he was not tempted.  Even walking with me and pushing the stroller was unappealing.  What he really wanted  to do, it seems, was scamper into the swing area, run directly into the path of a swinging kid, and get knocked down.  Understandably (well, perhaps to the non-toddlers among us), I couldn't allow that.

So, after he had had tantrums in front of every occupied bench in the park, we were reduced to a tug of war: he struggling to get to the nirvana of the swing area, me holding onto his arm trying to keep him safe.  I had The Girl strapped to my chest in the Bjorn so I was physically incapable of picking up The Boy so we seemed to be at an impasse.

The Boy wiggled out of my grasp and, luckily, was distracted away from the swings to go play in the sprinkler.  I felt so defeated, so utterly at a loss about what to do--except perhaps to vow  never to set foot in the playground with two children again.

The Life of the Mind

As I think I've mentioned before, since The Girl's arrival, my husband has taken over the evening routine with The Boy: bath then books then bed.  Sometimes, I'm nostalgic for it (except when my husband isn't home and I have to do it), but one really charming feature of this development is how excited The Boy gets when his dad comes home.

Starting after he eats dinner, he jumps at any noise he hears in the hallway.  If a few minutes go by and Dad doesn't walk through the front door, he says, "Not Dad," and goes back to what he was doing.  Sometimes, what he was doing was standing at the front window, looking for Dad to walk  up  the stoop.

Yesterday, I happened to be holding The Boy by the window when Dad came into view.  His whole body started to vibrate with excitement.  He started to giggle.   When Dad saw him and waved, it was as if Dora herself had walked out of the television set to say hello.

With all this joy, then, it naturally follows that he gets a little sad when Dad leaves for work in the morning.  Today as Dad was getting ready, I asked The Boy where Dad was going.

"Going to the park," he said with some conviction.  Not a bad guess, I suppose, since that's most often where he and Dad go when they leave the apartment together.  But then I wondered: has  The Boy been thinking this all along?  That when Dad leaves the apartment he's off in the park having fun, fun, fun without The Boy? No wonder he's sad.

Wordsmith

Yesterday after refusing all of the usual breakfast options, The Boy toddled over to the fridge, opened the door, removed a carton of eggs, and asked, "Make eggs?"

Eager for an excuse to remove the carton from his hands, I agreed.  He pulled his stool up to the stove, helped me beat the eggs, and tried to put his tender hands on the hot, hot frying pan helped me cook them. 

With great ceremony, I put the eggs in a bowl and invited him to carry them to his chair.   He happily climbed into his booster seat (a struggle of late) and buckled himself in.  I attached his tray and re-presented the eggs.

"No eggs," he said as he waved them away.  He would not look at them again.

When I recounted the story for my husband, he said, "Well, he said he wanted to make eggs, not eat eggs."

Grrrr.

Boob Job

Earlier this week, NYC's Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) announced that, in order to encourage breastfeeding, they would no longer offer formula in gift bags for new mothers. Instead, new mothers receive "disposable nursing pads, a cooler for breast-milk bottles and t-shirts for babies that read, 'I eat at mom's.'"

I started to write a vitriolic post about how paternalistic and elitist I thought this was, but then I read the actual press release, and that let the wind out of my sails, a bit.* Free formula will still be available to women who request it, and more importantly, hospitals will make more of an effort to encourage rooming in and have lactation consultants available, and it's hard to be opposed to that.

Still…there's something about this that bugs me. Perhaps it's the fact that this program is in place in the city's 11 public hospitals whose patient population is likely to have the lower-wage jobs where breastfeeding and/or pumping is difficult if not impossible (The New York Times had an excellent article about this last year)—even with the cooler and free breast pump.    So, the message that good mothers breastfeed seems destined to make a lot of women who can't  breastfeed feel like failures.  As if those early days of parenting aren't hard enough. 

And the t-shirt, well, I don’t know. I do have a sense of humor (once upon a time, I wanted to get a Boob Man onesie for The Boy, but I never got around to it), but I don't love the shirt. First, by dint of the fact that women still do most of the childrearing, babies "eat at mom’s" more often than not, whether mom is using breast or bottle. Second, when babies don't "eat at mom's," it may well be because mom had a crappy maternity leave and had to go back to work so unless the shirt comes with some paid time off, it seems more likely to induce guilt than laughs.

As for me, I'm a big fan of the free can of formula given to me at my private hospital.  It enabled me to give my daughter the occasional bottle of formula when the breast seemed to not be satisfying her, thus preserving my sanity and willingness to keep nursing.   

 

*Except for this: the HHC is also distributing “free personal breast pumps to eligible moms who have no health insurance.” It’s not the free breast pumps that I object to, but the notion that breast pumps are typically covered by insurance. Was yours? Believe me, I tried; mine was not.