Ghostwriting for My Kids (from the Momplex Blog archives)

April 26, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

As a reader and writer, I feel a bit bad that my kids can’t yet journal their lives. I know if I don’t write things down, I tend to forget them. Think of Poor Christina Crawford! Imagine all the counseling and regression therapy she must have needed to tap the source material for her memoir, to really remember the details of those wire-hanger moments with Mom. Because I am a better woman (I think) than Joan Crawford, I thought I’d do a little ghostwriting for my kids alongside my own entries for today — save them some future legwork, you know?

Ghostwriting for My Daughter, “E,” Age 5 Years
Today I got in trouble for not taking a bite of peanut sauce. We were at Aunt K’s and Aunt C’s house, and they’d ordered something called Tie Food. Mom said my dish was called chicken lollipops. It looked suspiciously like chewed meat on sticks to me. But did I complain? No. I ate it. But then Dad insisted I try the peanut sauce, too. (When will they learn that I am never going to love anything anyone tells me I’m going to love?) Mom got all bent out of shape and reminded me that I have to take one bite and then if I don’t like it, I can say no thank you. She said this like it was The Law. When I refused, I had to go upstairs. She said I had to think about it, that I couldn’t play up there and couldn’t come back down until I was ready to have my No Thank You Bite. I hate when she calls it that. It should be called a Forced Feeding. I held out for a whole 45 minutes, and then she came upstairs and tried to be nice, gave me some big lecture about how I can’t know what food’s going to taste like just by looking at it. I told her I don’t like sauces. She said gravy is a sauce. I told her I only like sauce that goes on potatoes. She said I could stay in the room until the next day if I liked, but that I was eventually going to get hungry, and the very next thing I would ever eat in my life WAS GOING TO BE THAT PEANUT SAUCE. Of course, I had to eat the peanut sauce. I licked a speck of it with the tippiest tip of my tongue, and she crossed her arms and rolled her eyes at my dad and insisted a lick isn’t a bite. God, she’s a control freak.

P.S. I figured out how to read today, all by myself!

Journal for Myself, Age Withheld
E figured out how to read! I am so proud of her! She read two First Reader books to me this afternoon, and I could see her eyes twinkling with pride as I turned each page. How did she figure it out on her own? I kept looking down at her little legs and grubby toes, at her lengthening fingers, and the licorice she was kneading like a stress ball as she sounded out the words, and I almost started to cry, it was so exciting. She looked so small and so big at the same time. I was just thinking last night how she seems to be growing out of something old and into something new I can’t quite identify. We’d been sleeping in the same bed, since we had a big family slumber party over at my sister’s. B was downstairs sleeping near his daddy. When I woke around 2 a.m., there was a wild and wonderful thunderstorm going and so many frogs singing in the prairie across the road. Our window was open, with the white curtains blowing and rustling. I can’t believe E slept through it. After I got up and shut the windows, I laid down and ran a hand over her hair, burning that moment into my memory: her small, warm legs next to mine, the peacefulness of her breathing, the way her cheeks still have a bit of baby roundness to them. I picked up her little fingers and stroked the backs of them. I kissed the fingernails and wove my own fingers into hers. I touched her freckled nose and felt the warmth of her brow. Then I took her close into my arms and fell back asleep. Who knew that I’d be waking up to a kid who is that much closer to being a big girl, a girl who can suddenly READ!?

Ghostwriting for My Son, “B,” Age 8 Months
Mom wouldn’t let me eat a Kong today. She also wouldn’t let me go up the stairs or pull on the skinny wooden dividers on Aunt K’s and Aunt C’s windows. She said they’d break. She is always worried something’s going to break. She also didn’t let me at the toilet. What’s breakable on the toilet? I was not allowed to eat several electronic devices or any of the books on the coffee table either. Why do they place these tasty-looking items where I can reach them? She must have stuck her salty finger in my mouth FIFTY TIMES today, which is how she managed to scoop loose a deliciously fuzzy yum-yum I had been enjoying and, later, a piece of cheese she herself had given to me, like, 15 minutes earlier. Indian giver!

P.S. I think I stood by myself today. Can’t be certain.

Journal for Myself, Age Withheld
B stood on his own today for a good 10 seconds! He’s going to be walking before we know it. I love to watch the look on his face when he realizes that nobody’s holding onto him, and that he’s not holding onto anyone or anything either. The concentration and delight in his eyes are just contagious. Whenever he’d start to teeter, one of us would catch him up under the arms, and that would send a fat little giggle up through his fat little body. He’s such a happy little guy. He’s also terribly curious, particularly about the bathroom. What is it about the toilet? I’m afraid he’s going to fall into that thing. And the mouthing! Aside from the fact that everything really does go into the mouth at this age, he’s constantly grinding his top two teeth against his bottom two teeth, so even when his mouth is empty, it looks like he’s chewing. I keep swiping out his mouth, just in case. Among other things I found in there today? A disgusting old matted wad of dog hair the size of a Tootsie Roll. Bleck.

It’s funny how I’m not as relaxed with this second baby as everyone said I’d be. I’m still a micromanaging worrywart. There’s just as much anxiety about his wellbeing, just as much worry-filled hope for him as I felt for his sister at this age. Today I stood with him by the back door and watched the rain falling. He was mashing his face to the glass, slapping at it, cooing at birds, and looking so entranced by the dribbles of water on the pane. That’s when I took a moment to really look at him, at his fat thighs sitting in my palms, and appreciate this little person to whom I am Mom. I brushed my lips along his cheek, and I remembered such tender moments with his sister, how I used to smell and smell and smell her in hopes that I’d forevermore be able to call up that scent, the feeling of her skin, the aching love for a vulnerable babe-in-arms. Which I can barely do, because every day with her is still full of more things I don’t want to forget. With them both, I keep trying to remember the Buddhist way: live in the moment. And you know what? My right now is pretty darn good.

babies · Lazy posts · motherhood · teething

Live, from the Teething Colosseum (from the Momplex Blog archives)

April 15, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

First there were larvae. They came in a cup in an envelope in the mail. The cup was full of some sort of food, and the larvae ate it, night and day. The composition of what was in the cup slowly changed over a couple of weeks, until we saw less and less food, bigger and bigger caterpillars, and more and more pink balls of caterpillar poo. After weeks of eating, the caterpillars crawled to the top of the jar and created their chrysalides. We watched and waited, waited and watched, knowing it should take about a week for the final metamorphoses. Today, our butterflies emerged: six painted ladies, with wings of orange and black and white. I even got to witness one emergence from the very start to the very finish, how the butterfly poked its head out of its chrysalis, then did a sort of sit up to get the rest of her body out. Her wings were stunted and dark and wrinkly, but as she filled them with blood, as meconium (yes, meconium! bloody butterfly meconium!) dropped out of her, she grew wide and lovely.

Ever read When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd? It’s about the author’s spiritual crisis at mid-life. At the beginning, deep in distress over a seeming loss of faith, she snagged a cocoon she saw on a nearby tree and brought it to her home. She kept referring back to that cocoon throughout the novel, making it a metaphor for the spiritual catharsis she was experiencing. Eventually the butterfly emerged, and the author went from faithless to faithful again.

You know what I was thinking the whole time I watched our beautiful butterflies emerging? Despite my own spiritual troubles, I wasn’t thinking about metamorphoses. I was realizing it took LESS time for Sue Monk Kidd to find God again, took less time for freaking larvae to pupate, grow wings, triple-double-quadruple themselves in size, and transform into completely new incarnations of themselves than it is taking for our baby’s top teeth to cut through. ‘Cause I’m glass half full like that, babies. Seriously, the little dude began teething his first top four teeth around the time those larvae arrived. I’ve seen the blisters and the little white spots for weeks, gone through a fair share of Orajel and Tylenol and mad crying at odd hours of the night, but only one tooth has busted through, and just this morning at that.

Other things that have taken less time than this teething episode include: the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the entire Greco-Turkish War, the papal conclave’s full deliberation over the most recent papal successor, and the writing of Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road. Oh, and the construction of ancient Rome. Well, never mind that last one. It just feels that way. We all know Rome wasn’t built in a day. I guess toothy smiles aren’t either.

bah-dum-bump

babies · colic · motherhood · sleep

Infants are Such (Sun)Downers

April 11, 2009April 9, 2014 Jenny4 Comments

It’s 10:20 p.m. Both my kids are in bed. But really, they’re still running around in my head, one of them saying, “Mom! Watch what I can do! Look at me! Look at me!” and the other just going, “Waaaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah!” I’m not sure which one makes me want more to crack my head open against the wall. It’s sort of a dead heat for now. No, wait. It’s definitely the infant, because while my preschooler’s incessant need for an audience has been quelled by the sandman for the night, my baby is now going on hour four of fussing and fighting sleep. (I have been lying down near him, patting, shusshing, breastfeeding, rocking, blah, blah, blah — for most of that time, and now my husband’s on his shift, because I’m near my breaking point.) The baby does this every night, and every night as we tag-team him through the colic, it drives my husband and me to the brink of insanity.

Why are some babies’ witching hours so much more horrendous and long-winded than others? And more pointedly — a question I intend to ask the Creator when and if we get the chance to meet — why were we blessed with two babies that don’t know how to fall asleep?

Barring any late-night visits from the big J.C. to put things into perspective for me, I have an observation I’d like to have checked out by somebody over at the National Institute for Health:

Alzheimers and dementia patients commonly experience an agitated state in the evening hours — sometimes lasting through a fat portion of the night — that keeps them from falling asleep. As with colic, nobody knows for sure what causes this troubling phenomenon, but its existance is well documented. Called sundowning, the behavior is widely believed to be linked to end-of-the-day exhaustion. Several articles I’ve read say the agitation and sleeplessness associated with sundowning may also be linked to the following:

– an upset in biorhythms, causing the patient to have day/night confusion

– reduced lighting and increased shadows

– disorientation due to the inability to separate dreams from reality when sleeping

What’s equally compelling to me is that the nighttime restlessness associated with sundowning typically peaks in the middle stages of dementia and diminishes as the disease progresses. That’s interesting, considering that the phenomenon of late afternoon and nighttime fussiness that strikes most infants, hitting colicky ones particularly hard, also peaks in the middle stages of infanthood and diminishes as they grow out of the disease that I shall heretofor refer to as Womb Exodus Syndrome.

At any rate, I think I’m going to start telling people that my baby is suffering from the effects of sundowning associated with infant dementia, or I.D. for short, because nobody takes colic very seriously. I’ll just coin a new term to amuse myself through this hideous, hideous stage where nothing, and I mean nothing, soothes our baby to sleep at night. And while I’m at it, I’m going to start calling dementia geriatric colic.