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.

babies · breastfeeding · mood issues · motherhood

Suck It, La Leche League (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 1, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

My breasts are founts of liquid gold. At least La Leche League thinks so, and my baby boy seems convinced. Perhaps that’s why I love breastfeeding. When nothing else is going right with the baby stuff, breastfeeding buoys us. Even if I can’t figure out the source of a given problem, nursing almost always works, so much so that I sometimes feel like a one-trick pony. Hungry? Have a nip! Tired? Latch on! Hurting? Take comfort from one of these! Angry that your arms are shorter than your torso? Suck on this!

And now I might have to wean. I even hate the word: wean. To my ear, it sounds like some sort of conjugate of wimpy + mean. The problem is that I have been struggling with erratic moods. In a single day, mine can go up and down more times than a big booty at a hip-hop party. This is the nature of cyclothymia. Inasmuch as a person can be diagnosed on any sort of mental health matter, I was diagnosed with this disorder (sometimes called “soft bipolar”) about two years ago. It made sense of some really idiotic shit I have done since my early 20s — buying goldfish, for example. But it’s never been quite so drastic in the past as it’s become since my son’s birth.

With my firstborn, I felt so level during most of my pregnancy and for the duration of the time she nursed. Menstruation kept at bay, I sort of rocked steady. But in the months since our son’s birth, I’ve felt like a big puzzle come apart. If only I could put a handful of the pieces back together, the rest would be easier. But so far, I’ve had minimal luck. The psychiatrist listens and says, “Ohhhh. Uh, huh.” The psychologist suggests massage and sensory-deprivation. My own experience tells me earlier bedtimes and better rest, less wine and more exercise, more natural light and less sugar.

Some of these natural fixes are doable, but others, with a baby and a preschooler in the house, are not. Kids are a banquet of sensory input: screaming, crying, repeating your name ad nauseum, asking for snacks every 15 minutes, hurting themselves in the most unlikely ways. I can’t count how many times my daughter has fallen up into things and hurt an earlobe or the crevice between her toes, then proceeded to scream as though she were being attacked by hornets. While her brother can whine endlessly, she can entertain herself for hours repeating the same annoying made-up word. (“Ahhh-pee-YAW!” is her perennial favorite. I have counted, and she has repeated it more than 30 times in a single car ride.) The noise! The input! The lack of sleep!

Medication is not an option, as anti-depressants make me manic. (This is not a spontaneous-trip-to-Vegas Fun Jenny kind of manic either. We’re talking the kind of unfun mania that leads to screaming over mismatched socks, or obsessively yammering for hours at bedtime.) Mood stabilizers — the drug of choice for cyclothymia — are contra-indicated for breastfeeding moms. This is kind of a scary reality for me. What if this depression doesn’t lift on it’s own? What if I get worse before I get better?

Which brings me back to La Leche League. Those crazy, flippin’ nuts. If weaning becomes necessary before my baby or I are really ready for it, I want to make sure I do it as gently as possible. I thought the Milk Mavens over at LLL would be an ideal resource for guidance on that front. Surely there have been other moms who’ve had to wean for medical purposes? When I go to the LLL website, I follow a FAQ link labeled WEANING. I won’t quote it in full or even in part. I’ll just give you the gist:

Thinking about weaning? Let us tell you more about the benefits of breastfeeding! Are you tired from waking to feed at night? Try cosleeping! Feeling strapped down by a breastfeeding baby? Take him out on your date with you! Stressed? Nursing releases relaxing hormones, so do it more often! Having chronic breast infections? Don’t fail your baby over a little ouchie! Older members of your family pressuring you to quit? Poison them, bury the bodies, and nurse your toddler in a sling while you burn the evidence!

Eventually I did stumble across some links to essays and articles written by people who’ve had to wean their childen, rather than let their children wean on their own. But my god, I had to dig. And my god, did it make me feel like I’m looking for help deciding whether to perform an assisted suicide. Thank you, La Leche League! It’s simply poetic, such literal splendor, how much you suck!

babies · daughters · manipulation · military life · motherhood · sleep

Not Enough Mom to Go Around (from the Momplex Blog archives)

December 17, 2008February 27, 2023 Jenny3 Comments

From the Momplex Archives:

My better half (and I really mean that) has been gone for almost three weeks, working on getting a bunch of soldiers ready for deployment. He’s in the National Guard, and what’s normally a two-week annual training in the summer turned into a three-week annual training in December. I miss all heck out of him, and not just because he makes a mean meatloaf and thinks I’m cute. It’s just been such a juggling act trying to take care of a restless 4-month-old and a 5-year-old who’s still trying to figure out how to share Mom. I was right to have dreaded this training for all the months leading up to it. During his absence, I have had at least one veritable nervous breakdown. Tonight I thought about having another but then decided I could instead just bust out the Redi-Whip and eat all the fruit in the house with whipped cream on it. Ah, self-medication.

The thing that’s eating at me is what I heard my daughter saying over the monitor as she was getting ready for bed in her room. Well, it actually started a bit before that, when she came home from the neighbor’s house to the sound of her baby brother crying (again) at bedtime (again) over his monitor (again). First, she sort of retreated to a corner behind the Christmas gifts. I am sure this is because I get so short with everyone when the baby’s crying. She didn’t want to deal with That Version of Mom. But as all kids her age seem to do, she also just couldn’t seem to resist the temptation to poke the rattlesnake with a stick. “Mom,” she said. “I have to tell you that I’m always hungry right now.” Ye Olde Bedtime Procrastination trick. So original.

“Sorry for you,” I said. “But we don’t eat at bedtime, and it’s time for bed.” I told her to get going upstairs and get ready for bed, and she snapped something snotty back at me. I think it was “FINE” or “WHATEVER” or something equally ‘tweenish. At any rate, it cost her a piece of our usual bedtime routine.

“No book tonight,” I answered. She knows this means she’s crossing the line. She turned on the ball of her foot, nose up in the air, and started stomping theatrically away from me. “No story either,” I then added. “You need to change your attitude before you lose songs.”

Yes, I know: We have an elaborate bedtime routine. It consists of all sorts of rituals that must occur in exactly the same order each night. Potty. Toothbrushing. Flossing. Mouthwashing. Jammies. Book. Prayers. Spoken-word improv performance by Mom or Dad. Songs. It seems like a lot, but it does the trick for us, and I totally enjoy that quality time we get together at the end of the day. Parents out there, I know you’re feeling me on this one, right?

Anyway, as she was upstairs putting on her jammies, I heard her say that she wishes she had a different mom. That she doesn’t get any time with her mom, “not one speck.” She started whimpering, “I love my baby brother! He just gets all of her time. I will go away and never see her again, and she won’t even miss me!” Poke a butter knife in your heart and turn it five times to get the full effect of how this made me feel. Because I totally miss my time alone with my daughter. I miss having quality time with her at all. Particularly with my husband gone, she has gotten the bottom of the barrel in that department. It flat out sucks.

When I went upstairs, I asked her if I’d correctly heard her say she didn’t want me to be her mom anymore. She said, “Yup” and when I nodded, she said, “But I was saying it because I feel like you don’t have time for me anymore. I feel like you’re always taking care of the baby, and I don’t even have a mom anymore.” I pointed out that we always had good time together at bedtime, and she retorted, “Yeah, but that’s the only good time I really get with you.” She’s right. Her eyes were full of held-back tears, which started spilling down her nose as she tried to raise her quivering chin in a show of fortitude. What could I do, but scoop her close in my arms and hold her tightly in the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must feel terrible to feel like that. You are so important to me, and I’m sorry that this hard time is going on for so long.” Words don’t go very far with a kid her age, though. I know I have to carve out better time for her. I know that my world needs to quit revolving around the baby’s sleeping skills, or lack thereof. Which makes me all that much more obsessed with getting him to sleep better. For the love of all that’s holy, can this baby please learn to nap alone?

It’s amazing, how my daughter asked me today to explain what “below zero” means as well as asked me who made God. These are high-minded questions for a kid her age, and they bend my brain into a pretzel. As complicated and layered as she can be, nothing she says or asks fazes me quite as much as this recurring theme of Not Enough Time with Mom. How the hell did Mrs. Walton do it? Pleeeaaaze, Mr. Walton, come home!