It is 5:10 a.m. on Sunday morning. This is the second night in a row I have been unable to go back to sleep after Eric's early-morning meal. This is incomprehensible to me. I haven't had more than four hours uninterrupted sleep in five weeks, and today when David and I did the co-op shopping I was so spacy I was wandering aimlessly, putting things randomly into the cart, and striking up barely-coherent conversations with strangers in the dairy aisle. How is insomnia possible?
Perhaps the problem is that I need a brain discharge. I am feeling a great deal of stress about the painting of our house--the two college kids doing the scraping annoy me by their very presence, as well as by their habit of leaving their cars in our driveway and piling gear in the drive in such a way that we can't get a car into the left half our garage. And the boss of the painting company is annoying me by, for instance, knocking on my door on Saturday night to say "I need to get my compressor out of your garage," the compressor being in the garage despite our having told them not to put gear in our garage. Never mind that three days into the project, we have already run into cost overruns on a job whose estimated cost still makes me hyperventilate, coinciding as it does with the pay period when we get no paycheck because two weeks of David's parental leave was unpaid.
Eric is sleeping in his sling on my chest. I've owned the sling all of twelve hours, and am still trying to figure it out. I haven't run it through the wash yet because I can't decide whether I bought the right size--I have veered from thinking I bought it too big to thinking I bought it too small, and have not quite gotten all the adjustments right. But it feels pretty comfortable and Eric seems to like it very much. And here I am typing while my baby sleeps contentedly on my chest. Not too shabby, if my back can take it.
We introduced the pacifier to Eric earlier this week. One afternoon, as I was soothing the sleeping baby by letting him suck on my finger, David asked if I was ready to give Eric a pacifier. I said that, although I am not opposed to the use of pacifiers, there is some Perfect Parent vision I have of myself saying six years from now, "No, we had no trouble getting him to give up his pacifier, because he had never had one." I would then have had to add, "Of course, the decision not to give a pacifier meant I spent the first year of Eric's life sitting around with my finger in his mouth." Eric likes his pacifier; non-nutritive sucking is one of his favorite pastimes.
I have this desire to introduce Eric to people like he's a game-show contestant or beauty-pageant semi-finalist. "Our next contestant is Eric Dierauer. When not sleeping, Eric enjoys arm-waving, gurgling, and non-nutritive sucking. He's very fond of a good warm bottle, and has recently taken up head-lifting as a hobby. Please give Eric a warm round of applause!"
Enfamil continues to offer me breastfeeding support, most recently in the form of a nice letter reminding me that breastfeeding can be hard ("Don't give up! Your doctor or the hospital where you delivered the baby can recommend a lactation consultant"), accompanied by a coupon for $4 off my next purchase of Enfamil with Iron. It's so strange, and so transparent as a marketing ploy, and yet I suppose they must do it that way. And it's not just them; David brought home a package of spare nipples for our bottles the other day, and the package read, "Designed for breastfeeding babies!"
Speaking of breastfeeding being hard, I was on-line the other day at BabyCenter to update Eric's birth date. I am still getting weekly e-mail newsletters from them, but they have segued from "your pregnancy" to "your baby." They were running three weeks behind because Eric came before his due date, so I was getting all this out-of-date information about my two-week-old. Anyway, while I was on the site I saw a link "Unable to breastfeed?" so I clicked it. It was a short article offering advice for women who tried but couldn't. It was fine, and had some good tips. For instance, it said, "Don't waste time second-guessing yourself. Don't ask yourself, 'what if I had tried at one more feeding, or for one more day.'" This was good advice for me because I do ask myself that: What if I quit putting Eric to the breast one feeding before he was suddenly going to figure it out? What if my milk might have rallied had I pumped one more day? These things are both unlikely in the extreme, and it's not productive to worry about it now. So I thought it was good to be reminded. But the article went on to say, "Don't second-guess yourself this way. Some women have a lot of stick-to-it-ive-ness, and some women just don't." Not, "don't second-guess yourself because a different outcome was unlikely, or because once the decision is made, it's made, and it's best to get on with your life," but "don't second-guess yourself because you have this character flaw." Thanks. Women like me really need a good dose of judgmental b.s. along with our words of comfort.
I'm actually thinking about starting a message board for women unable to breastfeed. I am still feeling quite sad about it, as well as struggling some with feelings of failure, and could use some help working it all through. I also feel like it would be nice to offer other women some non-judgmental support, some nice words without the "you lack stick-to-it-ive-ness" or "you didn't pump enough" kicker.
All baby gear comes printed with multiple scary warnings in three languages. The car seat, for instance, warns against using it in the front seat with an airbag, and includes a graphic of the airbag deploying and cracking the car seat in two. The baby is shown flying out of the seat with big drops of what must be blood spurting from its head. Eric was in his seat at the Ethiopian take-out yesterday, and I was doting upon him, when I realized that this warning label is right next to his head, so that every time I, or anyone else, look at him, we also see this gruesome graphic and, in big letters, the words DEATH OR SEROUS INJURY. No wonder I'm anxious.
The Pack-n-Play (our portable crib/playpen/changing table unit) is printed so extensively with warnings that they are like a mural on one side of the darn thing. I don't know why they bothered printing the fabric with little teddy bears; they might just as well have repeated the baby-death-warning motif over the whole thing. The yellow-triangle-with-exclamation-point that accompanies each warning is bright, cheerful, and gender-neutral, so why not?
Some of the warnings are funny. On the bed rail I installed earlier this week for safer co-sleeping: "The product cannot prevent all accidents." Darn, and I was about to cancel the homeowner's coverage. We also have "Do not fold stroller with child in it," and the baby bathtub practically gets down to "Do not place baby in water head-first as drowning may result."
David and I were on the way home the other day and saw a panel truck printed with the name of a company (just three initials, something like RDS) and the following motto: "Integrating today's office workforce into the mainstream of competitive progress." It's like they picked buzzwords out of a bag and painted them on the truck in random order. David says it's so completely meaningless he's sure the company is a front for drug runners. We wanted to try and figure what the company does, but David said, "Of course, we won't be able to find them in the Yellow Pages."
I read a book by Miss Manners earlier this week, and one construction she decries is "I need" in place of "please." For instance, "I need you to fill out this form," instead of "please fill out this form." I thought, "Hey, she's right!" and one of the things that ticked me off about the contractor knocking on my back door on a Saturday night was that he said, "I need you to open your garage for me" instead of "will you please open your garage for me?" He has a sense of entitlement about our house and the space surrounding it, when what I want from him is constant acknowledgment that the presence of his crew is a nuisance they should be actively working to minimize. I only regret that I wasn't more direct with him about how much I don't want to see him at my house outside of working hours (especially when I am just up from a nap and have to answer the door in my pajamas), but I think I will mention it when I see him next.
My first week home alone with Eric went very well, though I was tired by the end of it and happy to go to bed at 8:00 on Friday night while David dealt with the baby. I like being home, and I like being with Eric. I even managed some housework this week, and may cook a dinner this coming week if all goes well. I'm pretty tired in the evenings, so not managing much quality time with the adult members of my family, but I think that will come in time.
I'm finally getting tired, and with any luck Eric will sleep another 90 minutes (and when he wakes up, it may even be possible to foist him off on David for the first morning feedings so I can sleep through), so I am going to crawl off to bed on the theory that an hour of sleep is better than none.
Posted by Su Penn at July 1, 2003 08:42 AM | TrackBack