Eat of my flesh

I've been trying for sometime to write about my relationship with my body both during and after pregnancy. This is what I've come up with so far. 

My body is so different now. Sometimes it seems that the entire front of my body is tired, everything just sags a bit gives in to gravity, like a sleepy balloon. My nipples will never be the same, and I’m not even breast-feeding. There is a scar on my vagina. My anxiety lives in my shoulders and jaw, which I have to make actual physical efforts to relax. When I look in the mirror and I am fully naked it is always slightly unnerving. At first glance everything seems to be in order, but then the longer I look the less I recognize myself. But I am in love with the saggy bits and the giant nipples.

I feel…

My body is capable. Giving birth made me believe. I worship at the altar of my cervix. I have faith that my body can carry me anywhere. Moaning and dancing through 3 days of contractions converted me to the gospel of my thighs and I sing hymns in joyous rapture of my stretch marks. I can climb mountains, I can plow fields, and I am no longer intimidated by imagined physical limitations. Before pregnancy I believed that there were things I was just too fat to do or to broken too do. I do not think this anymore. I have pain but growing a person made me feel invincible. 

Oh man, the stretch mark thing is hilarious to me. I earned my first strips at the ripe age of 9 when my breasts came in and I could no more point out the ones Persephone brought me then tell you when a new dandelion grows in my front yard. 

My body still molds to her. When I hold Persephone or when I strap her to my a feel fuller, more complete. Almost as if she is a missing piece of my body and I am always saving space for her. 

Right Back Where We Started

A small note about this post, in it I chronicle what my therapist calls my, "big negative leaps." I am aware of how illogical they are, often while I'm making them. Anxiety is an evil monster that I struggle to keep from controlling my life.

There's something about being a parent that is totally ridiculous. Every time I slightly feel like I'm getting a handle on things, figuring shit out, it all changes. She changes so fast.

In Persephone's 4 month update I talk about how she sleeps awesome at night. Yet now, not as awesome. Last night she screamed for 40-ish minutes before she'd settle down for sleep. Every effort Alex and I made to comfort her made her scream harder. Frantic google searches have lead me to believe that my child's life will be ruined forever if I let her cry or if I don't let her cry, and apparently this is a sign that she will now start waking up every hour all night for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you googling baby sleep rescissions is not good for anxiety. I also spend a good 45 minutes blaming all of this on my inability to breastfeed as I often believe that breastfeeding is magic and can sooth any baby.

I've talked about this before but let me reiterate, I AM TERRIFIED OF NOT SLEEPING. So much so that I DON'T SLEEP. I hope in the future when I'm super internet famous this post will come up in google searches about the definition of irony.

She ended up sleeping for the night, waking up about an hour in and fussing for a few minutes to fall asleep. Unfortunately, the way my anxiety works is that I spent most of the night so scared she'll wake up that I wake up every hour listening for her.

So now we are at today. Persephone and I have struggled with naps for months. Eventually we got to the point where we could put her down and she'd fall asleep and reliably stay asleep for maybe 45 minutes. This morning she slept for 30 minutes, when this happened I could feel my heart start to speed up and my entire body tense. This seemed like a TERRIBLE SIGN. For her next nap she screamed for 10 minutes and then passed out. As we inched our way to the 30 minute mark I got more tense, and then a minor miracle occurred. SHE SLEPT FOR AN HOUR AND 20 MINUTES. That has never never happened before.

I was pretty fucking jazzed to say the least. Then I go to feed her and she will have NONE OF IT. She was waaaay to busy looking at shit and trying to roll around to eat a bottle. Most of it ended up on me when she learned a new trick of blowing air into the bottle. I of course now believe she will not get enough food resulting in needing hourly nighttime feedings.

So now I'm here trying to figure her out again. Will tonight be another screaming match and are we entering days, weeks, months, years of not sleeping? Or is all of this a fluke and she'll go back to being the same? Or will she adjust and I'll adjust and finally stop having panic attacks? Who knows.

I know that the way I feel isn't about her. I know that. It's about me and my brain. But I just wish I could get some kind of handle on all this. That I could know a normal for a little while. I want a normal. I understand that my normal will always be different from before I had a baby and my mom died, but let me have some kind of normal. Please.

4 Month Baby Update

So this is a thing I see on all the mommy blogs and as a way to procrastinate doing thesis work I needed a thing to write! For those of you who don't read a lot of mom blogs or aren't moms who recorded monthly updates this may look weird and you may not give a flying poop. Please feel free to ask for clarification or ignore the post completely!

As of March 1st Persephone is 4 Months old!

Hey ladies...

Holy crap, I did not think I was going to make it this far. My anxiety and depression are still around and still kicking my ass but in many ways things are looking up. I have to say a lot of what is making me feel better is the fact that my baby is awesome and now that she is more interesting and less lump like I can enjoy the crap out of her.

Sleep:

Effie is a damn good night time sleeper, however we have started to have some bumps which I believe to be mostly developmental. She stopped taking a binkie at bedtime which means she can take a little longer to go down. We have always put her to bed awake... we didn't actually know to rock her to sleep or feed her to sleep and so she's always kind of done it herself. However, now she fusses a bit before going down, not a full blown cry just a bit of fussing. She sleeps usually about 11.5-12.5 hours at night with no feedings. She will sometimes cry at 5ish without actually waking up. And then recently has started doing the same thing about an hour after going to sleep. She cries but doesn't ever open her eyes and will drift back to sleep only to cry 2 minutes later. This has been really hard for me as I get very anxious and I have no idea what to do for her. I try to go in and comfort her and nothing works, in fact it will make it worse instead. I'm hoping she grows out of it!

Alex is now in charge of bedtimes. I do stuff, but her determines how we do everything and is mostly on night duty but can wake me up if needed (I always wake up). But to help with my own night wakings and insomnia I have started wearing ear plugs, it helps a little. Alex also puts her to bed by himself at least once a week and we are increasing that to 2-3 times so that I have time to write my thesis. (He's the best)

Naps are pretty much the same and suck. She goes down for them but usually only sleeps for 45 minutes. Everything I've read is that this is just what they do. I have tried every nap extension trick ever and none of them work. However the friend that watches her on Fridays always gets awesome naps, which drives me nuts. She usually takes 4 naps a day.

We are leaning towards dropping the swaddle and I am scared.

She was fake napping in this picture. So was I.

Health: 

No sickness *knocks on wood*. When we went in for her 4 month shots she had a few really bad days after, sleeping and eating weird, fussy, and a low grade fever. I managed to get through that with only one panic attack (GO ME). Stats: 16lbs 1oz (82%), 25 inches long (70%), and some giant ass head measurement that I didn't write down. She is my giant rolly polly lovie.

Eating:

Persephone is formula fed. I might at some point write about breast feeding, but there are also a million people who have written about it before me. It's hard, harder with PPD/PPA and expensive to get help. She eats about 28-ish oz a day and is on sensitive formula (because that is what Alex bought when we first came home from the hospital).

Our pediatrician said that Effie has enough head control that we can start solid food at anytime. Then I read a bunch of articles that said DON'T DO IT TILL 6 MONTHS. So I think we are waiting, I don't see the harm in waiting.

Milestones:

Persephone rolled! For like a day and then a few times after that front to back, but she doesn't do it consistently. I got the first one on video! She can almost go from back to front but gets stuck on her arm. She smiles waaay more and has started laughing and vocalizing. It is my FAVORITE THING. It makes the days easier and so much fun. It also makes it harder to leave the house.

The first three months were super hard, both emotionally and physically. In many ways I feel like we are all starting to get in to our groove.

This is her 3 month picture!

On My Birthday

(This was written on my birthday January 27th 2015)

I thought that Halloween would be the hardest holiday. Everything about it has always screamed, "mom" to me. It was her favorite day, she got to scare children, play loud music, wear witchy clothing, and decorate the crap out of the house in purple and orange... I mean she did most of that year round, but on Halloween it was more, bigger, brighter, witchy-er.

Halloween was hard, but not really hard, mostly because I spent it moaning through contractions and leaking fluid while watching the second Scooby Doo movie. I was too distracted to grieve.

Of course Christmas was hard too. Christmas for us meant shortbread thumb print cookies, endlessly watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and getting messed up on egg nog. But I had lots of friends around the days surrounding Christmas, and I was starting to realize emotionally I wasn't quite okay with being a mom. So again I put off grieving and thought about other things.

Today is my 29th birthday. All day I've been looking at my phone, waiting. I didn't realize I was waiting until it rang and it wasn't my mom. I answered it, sobbing, and told the telemarketer that it today is my birthday and my mom is dead. They hung up.

Today is the hardest holiday. It's strange to think of my birthday as a holiday, I mean I'm not a president or Martin Luther King Jr. But mom always treated my birthdays like a big deal. She would throw the most awesome parties. One year she made me a cone bra like Madonna and we had a talent show in my living room, another time we watched Speed and The Evil Dead and then had a head banging contest to Green Day.

Once I got older so did the celebrations. I remember when we started living together again after I got out of foster care I would always wake up to flowers next to my bed on my birthday. When I moved out she would always call, usually in the middle of the night and then again during the day.

Today was the day without a call.

Now as a mom I realize that birthdays aren't only about the people who are born, but about the people giving birth. For me Persephone's birthday is the day my life changed forever. I know see the things my mom did for me as a celebration and confirmation of the way my birth irrevocably changed everything about my mom's life.

From now on I know I need a little extra time for grief and pain on my birthday. As it is the day we shared more then any other day.

I love you mom, and I miss you so hard.