I was determined to make it all the way to six months on breast alone this time, but like his brothers, he had other ideas. Ideas that involve wailing if left on the floor during a meal, lunging for wine goblets, pulling Mommy’s plate toward him, and grabbing my hand and when he saw a cookie in it and trying to get it in his mouth. (Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, he was much more insistent about that one than the others.) It’s bittersweet, passing this milestone this time. And I am really not looking forward to the pain in the neck that is having to prepare and feed and carry food with us wherever we go. Sigh.

But his godparents were in town this weekend, so we let them do the honors. I think I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves today.

Mmmm, sweet potato. Doesn’t that just look so appetizing?

So sweet, my soon-to-be-sweet-potato boy.

Are you ready for this, baby boy?

I do it myself! Or, um. Something like that.

And perhaps that last picture gives you the idea that all is not bliss in the era of new solid-food-eater. All the other kids have done quite nicely learning to, I don’t know, SWALLOW. Not this one. He pretty much lets it all come sliding back out the front, nicely juiced up with saliva. For the first three days I’m not at all sure he actually ate anything. On day four, I saw him eat the last three bites. On day five, I learned that I have to put a finger on his chin and close his mouth on the food, and then he’ll actually swallow. Sometimes.

Good thing I’m wanting to take it slow anyway.

]]> http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/05/24/bittersweet-till-he-brings-me-back-to-reality/feed/ 0 ckbasi Sweet potatoes Mothers Day, M's first meal 112 First Bite Mothers Day, M's first meal 125 Mothers Day, M's first meal 127 Motherhood Moments http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/05/23/parents-need-the-freedom-to-make-their-own-judgment-calls/ http://kathleenbasi.com/2012/05/23/parents-need-the-freedom-to-make-their-own-judgment-calls/#comments Wed, 23 May 2012 13:29:57 +0000 Kathleen http://kathleenbasi.com/?p=9912 ]]>

Chain Handcuffs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It began with my sister’s Facebook status: at the Steak & Shake where they were eating, a man was being arrested after leaving his baby sleeping in the car while the family, including grandparents, came inside to eat. I only had the sketchiest of details, so I tried hard not to get too worked up. I held my peace.

Last Friday, as we pulled into the field where we were meeting my parents for lunch, I realized Michael had fallen asleep. I knew if I pulled the car seat out he’d wake up. It was about 70 degrees outside, so I opened both sliding doors on the van and let the breeze blow through over him while we set up the picnic.

Seeing Michael in the car, my dad brought up the Steak & Shake incident. It turns out he saw the whole thing. The family had left the baby, who like Michael was around or under six months old (i.e. very distractable and hard to nap), in the car with the windows open. They were constantly turning their heads to keep an eye on things. An employee told my dad the family comes in every week, and when the baby was absent that day the manager asked them about it. And then promptly called the police. By the time it was over, the discussion was whether all the kids would be taken away.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Dad said. “I don’t think the family was right to leave the baby in the car. But the manager could have handled it much better. He could have gone to the family and said, ‘If you don’t bring the baby in, I will call the police.’”

My reaction to this whole scenario is gut-deep and powerful. But first, I need to be clear: I think the family’s judgment call was bad. If your child really needs a nap and can’t get it in a restaurant, don’t go to the restaurant. You’re the grownup; you have to place your children’s needs ahead of your desires. You can’t have everything. If you really think you have to have it all, go someplace like Culver’s where you can eat outside next to the vehicle.

Nonetheless, this whole story frightens me far more than any overstated danger of abduction, or of my child falling down stairs or getting into the cleaning supplies. Why?

Maybe it’s because I’m a fiction writer, but I can think of several realistic back stories that make these parents’ choice understandable. And nobody else but the parent knows that back story. Nobody else can make that judgment call. Parenting is hard enough without complete strangers calling the cops on you.

No, our judgment calls will not always be right. Every parent–every one–routinely makes choices s/he regrets. Here’s one of my big ones. Does that mean I should lose my children? What about the daily judgment calls that are mine to make as a parent? Should DFS swoop down on me because when my son turned five, I started letting him play with friends down the street without an adult outside? Because I occasionally let a baby sleep on my bed, when other situations aren’t available? Because we use a seat with a 3-point harness instead of a 5?

Every child, and every situation, is unique. You cannot make one-size-fits-all judgments, because they don’t allow for the specific circumstances of a given situation. Yes, there is a time and place when society must step in, but from my limited vantage point in this story, all society did was scar a family, frighten the children and tie the hands of parents, who will never again feel that they have the authority to parent their children.

A bad deal all the way around.

Dad chuckled. “That boy,” he said, “talked nonstop the entire time he was in the tractor, up until he fell asleep.”

I nodded. “That’s my life every day. It’s exhausting! Mentally exhausting, I mean.”

He nodded thoughtfully in turn. “Yes, it is. You could just let him talk…but the problem is, he expects a response!”

To get an idea of what Nicholas is like, the best illustration I can think of is that 1990s Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory. “Jerry” is a cab driver in New York who talks nonstop all day, even as his voice grows more and more hoarse, until by the end of the day he can barely talk at all.

Nicholas talks even when he has a sore throat. He talks whether or not he has anything to say. If he runs out of words, he simply hums or says nonsense syllables. And he virtually always expects a response.

I reiterate something from yesterday’s post: the word “noise” comes from the word “nausea.” This is what noise does to me. It unsettles me, sets me on edge, which is why I seek out stillness, and why I hardly ever play music around the house even though I have two higher degrees in music. So you can imagine the soul-growth my third child requires of me. Some time I should count how many times a day I say some variation of “Be quiet!” to him. Frequently I have to remind myself he’s not actually doing anything wrong.

He’s singleminded as only a three-year-old can be. For example:

N: “I want a movie.”

Me: “Finish your lunch.”

N: “I want a movie, Mommy.”

Me: “Finish your lunch first.”

N: “I want a movie, Mommy!”

Me: “Finish your broccoli right now, and then we’ll talk about it.”

N: “I want a movie!”

Me: “Look at me. What did I say?”

N: (A beat, then): “I want a movie?”

Julianna doesn’t talk much. Remind me why we’re pushing so hard for her to speak? …

(That’s a joke. Chill. )

Photo by prawnpie, via Flickr

The world is black and white and silver beneath the full moon as I stumble down the hallway and retrieve a hungry boy from his crib. It’s been weeks now since we’ve needed to turn on the light to help us latch, so as we enter the room, the nursing chair waits in a mural of interrupted white from beyond the window. As we step into range, zebra stripes rush up our bodies, disorienting, so strong they almost seem a tangible creature.

The baby settles in to his job with deep concentration, his free hand grasping, releasing, and grasping my finger. The strength of his grip measures his progress from wakeful hunger back to peaceful sleep. Strips of brilliance curve around the shape of his head. It’s so bright, as if something punched a hole in the universe, and all the light of Heaven now pours through a disc the size of a quarter hung in the center of the sky.

We switch sides, and the stripes curve the opposite direction. His hand still wraps my finger, but hesitantly, pausing longer between grips. Silver skitters over my face, making me aware of my own nose, my eyelashes–things I can always see, but never notice. I wake my brain, willing it to commit this moment to memory. So many beautiful moments have disappeared. I hope that once the clutter of early childhood’s constant need fades, my mind will be able to retrieve some of them, but I’m not confident. Christian remembers things I’ve already forgotten. This moment–this one, at least–I want seared into brain and body until it is a visceral thing, the pattern of light and dark disrupting normalcy with magic. Reminding me how close by the side of transcendence lies every moment.

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(Note: no, we do not have a full moon right now. I’ve been sitting on this moment for a couple of weeks.)

One Fear illustration from Book of Fears (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I sent my boys off on a trip this morning. For the next thirty-six hours, it’s just me, my girl and my baby. I’m not used to this. It’s always the other way around: me taking the whole crew for a day trip and leaving Christian behind. A few weeks ago, he took them all to a cousin’s baptism, leaving me to hold down the fort for weekend commitments we couldn’t escape. As the van pulled away I nearly dissolved into blithering mess of terror. What if something happens to them on the road? What if this is the last time I see them?

I’ve always prided myself on being a mommy who doesn’t cave to unreasonable fears. So much of child-rearing advice these days is based on fear: fear of SIDS, fear of power outlets, fear of stairs, fear of bicycle crashes, fear of abduction, fear of germs. Christian and I have always played it cool, believing in supervision and moderation over childproofing and overprotection. Our last doctor tried so hard to panic me over Nicholas’ slow growth. “Look,” I told her, “I’ve had a child with a disability who’s almost died. You are not going to get me to freak out because Nicholas refuses to eat what he’s given.”

I thought I was impervious to Mommy fear. But since Michael came along, everything’s shifted. I’ve found myself going in to make sure he’s breathing, and fighting unreasonable nerves as long as I’m not in the room. I’ve had to talk myself off a ledge when Julianna goes wandering while we’re outside, even though I know her top three favorite places to haunt. During pregnancy I had a recurring day-mare about crossing bridges. Every day when the bus pulls away, I blow kisses and wave at Julianna, and I have to squash the what if‘s.

It’s happened to Christian, too. All our babies napped on our bed at one time or another–Alex slept most of every night there for the first several months. But that news report about babies at day cares got under his skin. Has anything changed in the last couple of years? No–our children are no more likely to die sleeping on our bed now than they ever were. It’s the adults who’ve changed.

For me, the fear even reaches tentacles into the past. A while back I took the kids to visit my parents on the farm. The gravel was fresh that day, and I could feel the van tires slipping on the road. 35 mph felt a little too fast that day, and I remembered myself tearing down those roads in high school at 55 and 60. (I’m not kidding.) I got the shudders, as if somehow I was still putting myself and my kids in danger because I was an idiot when I was a teenager.

It seems odd for mommy fear to be more acute at this stage of the game. Shouldn’t an experienced mother be less freaked out, not more? Well, in some ways I am. But with more children, the stakes are higher, and I imagine they’ll probably continue to increase as the kids get older. So maybe it’s just as well I have plenty of practice learning not to let the fear rule me.

Happy Mother’s Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mothers Day is one of those holidays that bears the weight of impossible cultural expectations. I’ve had some doozies of Mothers Days in the past few years. There were three in a row, in the infertility years, when I tried to pretend the day didn’t even exist. But the mother of all Bad Mothers Days was the one I spent in the PICU with Julianna. She wasn’t in any danger by that time, so all my emotional energy went into feeling sorry for myself. After all, I’d asked for only one thing for Mothers Day: brunch at one of those wonderful buffets. Instead,  I was sitting under fluorescent lights being bored out of my skull and trying to keep a baby entertained while his sister slept…or didn’t.Since then, I’ve kept my expectations for Mothers Day pretty low. The whole thing is a crock, anyway. You should appreciate your mother all the time; this is just one more way to separate people from their money. As a stay-at-home mom, the best Mothers Day gift I can imagine is for someone to take them off my hands for a whole day so I can just relax! And, um, that’s not quite the point. Ahem.

This year, by the time the weekend rolled around, I was in not in a great frame of mind. Witness my Facebook status:

These are the days that make me want to engage in some serious theatrical drama. In an attempt to get naps coordinated, I force Michael to stay awake for an extra half hour till I get lunch on and the others are half done. Then I put him down, get them finished with lunch, and upstairs they go. Julianna goes in and wakes Michael up.

1 1/2 hours later, I despair of getting him back down by nursing, so I put him in his room and pray he’ll go down before he wakes Julianna up. After ten minutes of him crying, NICHOLAS wakes up wailing in the other room. I comfort him, tell him it’s not time to get up yet, and go back downstairs.

Ten minutes after THAT, Michael wakes Julianna up. I carry her into my room to finish her nap. Michael settles down at last. Three minutes after THAT, the @#$%^&*( neighbor turns on some jack hammer-sounding piece of lawn equipment…which won’t work. So he starts it again. And again. And again. And every time, Michael screams AGAIN.

Three minutes after THAT, Dish Network pounds (I don’t mean “knocks,” I mean “pounds”) on the door. “I’M NOT INTERESTED,” I say, and slam the door in their faces.

And Michael is crying again.

Michael did not sleep for FOUR AND A HALF HOURS on Friday afternoon. I spent the whole evening composing a long, foul blog rant in my head.

But Christian has been on a multi-year campaign to redeem my faith in Mothers Day. Last year, he took us all to a brunch buffet–quite an investment with our then-three children. It was wonderful. This year, he came home with a crabapple tree for me (I adore crabapple trees, and he hates them), and we bought a new outdoor table and chairs, which he and my parents put together at great inconvenience and time expenditure so we could eat our dinner outside yesterday. (Babe, you rock!)

It’s human nature to hug the extremes, I suppose. We get into a negative funk and look for things to get P.O.’d about, and then someone hears us and goes to the opposite pole: “Just enjoy it! It goes so fast!” I defy you to enjoy a baby who’s mad and refusing all forms of comfort for four solid hours. Please. Be real.

The reality, and it’s an uncomfortable one, is this: “Motherhood is the only time you can experience Heaven and Hell at the same time.” You can’t deny either part; to do so devalues the whole. In contemplating this humble post, less than a blip on the radar of the blogosphere, much less the sum total of human history, I traveled from borderline murderous rampage to blissful transcendence to grace-filled tolerance and back to pulling my hair out. (Fussing baby + preschooler who is physically incapable of closing his mouth while awake + clumsy daughter knocking over the marble run for the tenth time in half an hour = Mommy Meltdown.)

I think I would be less jaded about holidays like Mothers Day more if those trying to separate us from our money were a little less rosy about the whole thing and acknowledge how darned tough it often is. We all need affirmation. That’s why the card Christian gave me last night was so perfect:

The inside reads: “And that was all just since yesterday!” Did I mention my husband rocks?

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The answer is basically yes. He’s a very smiley baby, and if he isn’t it’s because he a) needs a diaper change, b) is hungry, or c) is tired. I credit the NICU. If ten days being poked, prodded, and forced to lie for hours on end on your tummy doesn’t make you easy-going, nothing will.

But on those odd occasions when Michael does get fussy, I know a sure-fire way to make him happy again:

Bath time in our house is not the parental activity of choice. We don’t bathe kids every night, not because we hate it (although we do), but because kids don’t need to be bathed every day. Bath time in our house involves lots of screaming and bickering and above all, a lot of WORK. The work centers, as you might imagine, around the middle two. Alex goes off and takes a shower. And Michael? The instant his feet touch the water, his eyes light up.

I love giving Michael baths. LOVE it. First of all, it takes about ten seconds to wash a baby. And second, it just makes me happy to see him play with such serious concentration.

Christian tells me the babies have always basically liked baths, except for Julianna, who was so terrified of the water I had to get in the tub with her, washing her on my legs to keep from traumatizing her. And I remember the kids liking baths, but I don’t remember looking forward to baby bath time the way I do now.

Doesn’t all that baby fat just make you hungry? Doesn’t that smile make your day?

You’re welcome.

“Yah!” she said happily, and Alex, beaming with pride, led his two younger siblings out of the church with the rest of the kids.

He returned fifteen minutes later, wearing that long-suffering expression that means little siblings are a pain in the neck. “Did Julianna try to run away?” I whispered.

“Well, a couple times. I had to take her to the bathroom.”

Oh, my. That’s way above and beyond the call of duty for a seven-year-old.

Big surprise: the next week, Alex decided he had outgrown children’s liturgy. So I followed the other two at a distance, giving them the space to go on their own. I sat at the back and kept an eye on Julianna. (Why the 5yo, and not the 3yo? Hm. Keep reading, and thou shalt understand.)

For a while, she did great. But then she saw two boys crawling under the TV cabinet and thought that looked like more fun than stories about Jesus. The leader redirected her, and she settled back down. Two minutes later, she clambered to her feet and began circling the outer rim of the crowd, bopping people on the head: duck…duck…duck…duck…

I intercepted her before she reached “goose.” I made her sit down, and I retreated…but not far. Three minutes later, she looked around, stood up, wiggled her bottom, and plopped down in the lap of some poor little girl two years younger than herself. By the time I got there, the girl had the shell-shocked look of one whose personal space has been summarily violated.

Julianna sat with me for the remainder of Children’s Liturgy.

Aside from the speech delay, the thing that sticks out the most about parenting my daughter with Down syndrome is how difficult it is to teach her limits. She doesn’t “get” it. No, I take that back. She understands that you have to take turns with toys. But when she sees something belonging to an adult, or something left unsupervised, she thinks it’s free for the taking. If she’s thirsty, she’ll go grab someone’s glass, even if it’s a complete stranger. If she sees someone’s purse (oh, how she loves purses…thank the Lord I don’t carry one!), she will stealthily and swiftly empty its contents to the far corners of the room. She chooses random people in any crowd and gives them huge hugs.

Adults deal with it well. They think it’s cute, and sometimes I think she has a sixth sense about who most needs something. How else to account for all those touch points?

But kids are another matter. Kids don’t have the understanding and tolerance their parents do, because those are learned skills, acquired values. I can hardly fault them for regarding with suspicion a person who steals their food, and then the adults yell at them instead of her. She doesn’t exactly fit in anywhere. She’s too old to play with the toddlers, and she can’t keep up with the big kids–those her own age. They tolerate her presence, they take her in stride…but she’s clearly not a part of the group.

It is sad, and unfair, that those I most want her to be able to connect with are the ones least equipped. Yes, it’s great that she creates warm fuzzies with people who can influence her larger future, but that’s a global thing. As far as she’s concerned, her peers are more important.

Understand, I’m not going for a “woe is me” theme. Yesterday I got to meet several self-advocates and teens with Down syndrome, as well as children of all age ranges. I’m still on a high, seeing the community I knew had to be in my area, even if we couldn’t find them for the first several years. But I have to keep it real, too!

Later this week, when I’ve fully processed everything, I might share more about our DS group kickoff event.

When Christian saw this picture, he shook his head and said, “I’m telling you, we’re gonna have trouble with that one.”

That was a year ago. When Nicholas was barely two years old. Now just imagine what life is like with this child at three.

“Mommy, I a goofball,” he says to me as I’m putting him down for nap, his eyes dancing. It makes me want to chew him to pieces, which frankly is a much nicer desire than the desire to pull my hair out, which follows me around most days as he refuses to eat and turns everything into a battle with me and with Julianna.

In the post-baby fog, we got to a point of running through rote prayers without catechesis or depth, and just this week, I’ve taken a deep breath and stopped settling for “good enough.” So we’ve been taking time to do petitions and thanks this week. Nicholas doesn’t quite get it. “I pway for Awex and Juweanna and Michael and Mommy and Daddy and the pwaygwound,” he says, pointing around the room.

“You want to pray for the playground?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, what do you want to say thank you for?”

“I want say thank you for my ear infection.”

(Um, kiddo, I don’t think you’ve quite got that distinction clear.)

And then, the Mischief Eyes come out. “And…I want say thank you for PICKLE!”

Christian, who is flopped face-down on the bed, raises his head and looks at me as if he’s not sure he really just heard what he thinks he heard. And then starts laughing.

Perhaps I need to explain. I’m sure everyone is familiar with this book:

Front cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The last page, with the list of all the junk food he ate? It takes us five minutes to finish that page, because the kids point at every food, sometimes in order, sometimes not, while I say them over and over. And I always yell “PICKLE!” because it makes them laugh.

Yup, that’s my son, turning bedtime prayers into an opportunity for clowning around.

I have to echo my husband. We’re gonna have trouble with this one.

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