Buddha Made Me a Better Mama

I had a very strong spiritual practice for over 10 years. I haven't been able to practice formally as much, ok, at all, since Arli was born. I really, really miss it. I still try to meditate or even move my mind toward virtue whenever I get a moment of quiet, but those moments are pretty rare. I aspire to return to my practice some day, but I have no idea when that will be. I hope that it's in this lifetime.

I am so, so grateful that I had those years to marinate my mind on a positive path. I don't know what kind of mother I would be without the lessons I learned and took deeply to heart. I truly believe that meditation made me a better person.

When I am up to my eyeballs in frustration, I can hear my Guru whispering to me "Love her more". I am reminded to think of her needs before thinking of myself. I am reminded that she is just a baby, she is new here and she really doesn't know any better. My wisdom tells me that I do know better, and I need to act like it. I am challenged to rise above what I want, to think outside of me me me. Having a baby is the ultimate exercise in giving.

When I get caught up in the activities of the day, I remember that this is all temporary and it helps me to be in the moment with whatever is going on. Some days seem to go on for years, but in reality the hours are ticking away quicker than I know. What a waste of this human life if I allow everything to feel ordinary and mundane. I am reminded to be grateful, and to make it count.

She is teaching me the most invaluable lessons of patience, compassion and wisdom. These are real-life applications of the lessons that I had been studying with the monks. This is where the rubber meets the road. Am I a patient person or not? Am I compassionate or not?  Can I use my wisdom to overcome my unhappiness, and to help teach her how to be happy? In a way, she is now my Guru.

Maybe instead of lamenting the loss of my meditation practice, I should consider motherhood my new spiritual practice. When the time comes that I am able to return to the temple, I will be all that much stronger of a practitioner because of what I'm learning now. Maybe I didn't jump off the path, it just took a very beautiful turn.

Sleep, Oh Glorious Sleep

When I get a full night's sleep, about once every three months or so, I feel like Superwoman the next day! It is astounding how restorative it actually is - all that stuff they say about sleep is true!

When I don't get enough sleep I am crankier, more of a taskmaster to myself and everyone else for the sake of "function", and I'm way less fun. Fun is wherever you find it, and when I'm tired I just can't see the fun. This is bad. Generally it's not that useful to categorize things as "good" or "bad" but in this case I stick with my judgement. Life is short, I'm discovering, and I don't want to live a short life of unpleasantness. I just don't! I need to work on that.

I have to toot my own horn a little bit, though, I am remarkably functional on little or no sleep. It's like my newfound superpower. I'm sure this isn't unique to me. When you have kids you just adjust to the new normal (the former crazy). I still impress myself every day that I'm even able to concentrate enough to put my pants on. I do that, and so, so much more. I'm amazing!

People tell me all the time that it gets better and eventually I'll sleep like a normal human again. I sort of believe this. I want to believe it. When I get one good night of sleep I can see that it might be possible again. I look forward to that day. Until then I'll manage the best I can. Looking like a zombie is en vogue these days anyway, so I've also got that going for me. Ha!

Dear Job Letter

Dear Job,
Our relationship has changed. I wouldn't say that I don't love you anymore, but if I'm honest I will admit that I don't like you quite as much as I used to. Since my change in perspective, I realize that I need you and I kind of resent that. I don't like to be dependent. I like to believe in the illusion that I'm free to do whatever I want, and I no longer have that luxury. I feel trapped.

All this is not your fault, and not even any of your concern. I know the terms of our deal. You pay me and I work. You don't owe me anything other than that. The personal satisfaction is mine to find. You don't have to understand that the rest of my life is more difficult now. You don't have to be flexible with me in any way. I don't expect special treatment because I have a family.

I still want the most creative, cutting edge, high-profile, resume-building projects that I used to get. I want to be a star and be recognized for my brilliance. I want to be promoted and advance in my career. It bums me out that I am out of the running in many ways because of my newfound perceived (and real) limitations. I want to be the one to dictate what I can and cannot do, and I want control of how I'm being considered. But I need to give this up and just accept where I am right now.

I don't want to work the long hours that I used to. I don't want to travel. I don't want more responsibility and more things to wake up worrying about. I am giving about all I've got to give, and I think we all know that. This is a way more brutal "transition" than I thought it would be. I have to remind myself that I just need to suck it up and do my work. I'm happy to have a job, and I'm happy to have this job. I just have to work twice as hard to get the same results now and it makes me weary.

I want you to know that you are still a priority, you are just more of a means-to-an-end type of priority than you used to be. It's inevitable. I don't think we need to go to counseling or anything. I think we can work this out.

Sincerely,
me

The Girl Ruined My Hair (or The Grass Is Greener)

I was born with thick straight brown hair. I always wanted curly, full-of-body hair instead. Even when I tried to manufacture the ideal look with a perm, you could barely tell because my hair was so heavy. Eventually I gave all that up and came to see my hair as a blessing. It didn't do many tricks but it was shiny and healthy and long. This worked for me for years and years, and I came to take it for granted. I had good hair pride and I assumed that it would always be this way.

One of the great things about life is that there is never a shortage of surprises. When I was pregnant, my hair started to develop a wiry wave in the back, underneath the top layer of my straight hair. This fluffed it out a little bit and I enjoyed running my fingers through it. I chalked it up to crazy pregnancy hormones.

Well, the hair is still that way, and the fluff appears to be spreading. When it's wet, I like looking at the curls, but when it dries it's a fluffy, frizzy, uncontrollable mess. My expensive haircut no longer applies. I feel like a reckless clown. Is this permanent? This is a classic case of be careful what you ask for!

I'm afraid I'm going to have to resort to some sort of hair control methods. I've always been reluctant (too lazy) to employ these types of things because honestly I'm overwhelmed by all the choices (and too uninterested in putting effort into research). I've always felt that beauty products are kind of like the emperor's new clothes. They are expensive, and my discipline is fickle.

This is all neither here nor there, but it does mark a new hair era for me. It reminds me that I need to stay flexible with my self-image as I slowly slip into old age, where many more surprises await.

Fierce!

On Saturday, my biological dad and my brother Monte came over to visit. It was the first time my dad had met Arli. She was not impressed! She has suddenly developed a fierce "stranger danger" glare and she is not afraid to use it on anyone she meets!

This is the wind-up:

Mild stay away, sucka!

On Easter, the antics continued. At dinner, she stared down cousin Robby from across the room for about 10 straight minutes. She had the entire room in stitches with her fierce concentration on destroying her opponent with her eyes. I wish I had gotten a photo of it.

She did, however, practice the glare on pretty much everyone. When you're tiny and adorable, you need a defense, I guess! Here she is giving it to cousin Bill:

I'm not sure who she was terrifying here:

She's a little warrior already. I think this will serve her well in life. She looks sweet, but I wouldn't mess with her!

A Family of Sleep Freaks

I never intended to sleep with my child, honest. She came home in November and it was super cold and she was so small and fragile. She seemed chilly. She seemed like she could never settle unless she cuddled up to me. So I took her into bed with me and she slept and fed peacefully. The whole time, I worried. I worried that she would smother, and I worried that I wasn't doing the right thing. They say, you know, that if they don't learn to sleep in their own crib that they will be deficient in some way and they will never sleep through the night. Still, I couldn't quite let her cry it out. She just slept better in bed with me and I slept better too.

Then I went back to work. She was still breastfeeding. Even if I did wean her out of our bed, there was no way in hell that I was going to get up every two hours and go into her room to feed her, and then be able to get up and go to work every day. Now that I was away from her 3 days a week, I missed her, and she missed me. It was a tough transition. So we stayed together.

I thought that maybe when she spent time in the hospital, at 5 months, when she had heart surgery, that would give us the separation we needed to make the split. That it was a necessary split. That I should get her out of my bed because they say that's the "right" thing to do. I spent 5 nights in the hospital with her. Three of those nights she was in the ICU and slept by her bedside. I got up every two hours to pump, and to be with her. She was so drugged out that she didn't even know I was there. But I knew it. I was never going to let her feel abandoned in that strange place.

When she got out of the ICU, I sat in a chair, holding her all night long. She was attached to so many tubes and wires that it was so scary balancing them all to get her into my arms, but still I couldn't let her go. I didn't want her to sit in that steel crib attached to machines without her mother's touch. Some of the babies spent days or even weeks sleeping alone in those hospital rooms while their parents slept elsewhere and it broke my heart.

So she came home, and she slept with me still. I couldn't let her go, although she was getting older, and squirmier. And I was getting really sick of going to bed at 8:30 with her. I wanted to be an adult again!

Finally we tried a different trick. We started rocking her to sleep, and then transferring her to the crib. It was surprisingly easy! She would sleep in the crib for 4-6 hours, and when she woke in the middle of the night I'd take her to bed and we could be close again until morning. By then I was only breastfeeding her a few times a day. This was a natural progression and we were all very happy with it. It was so liberating to be able to have some time to regain my adult conversation, although at first we would just sit at the dining room table whispering to each other.

We went on like this for a long time, six months or more. Some nights were better and some nights were worse, depending on if she was sick or teething or going through something, but in general this was a happy arrangement, a good compromise. I stopped worrying about her sleep habits. She was getting 11 hours of sleep consistently, and a nap during the day consistently. I didn't care if she still slept in my bed sometimes, because we all agreed as a family that this is how we liked it, and it was no one else's business.

I, however, still don't sleep more than 3-4 hours in a row. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm up for hours, worrying, mind spinning, anxious about work or home or both. I have had this anxious insomnia off and on for years, but it seems like it's worse now that I have double the things to worry about. Even if the baby sleeps all night, I never do. I'm starting to think that 8 hours of sleep, in a row, is just a myth or an unattainable cruel lie somebody made up.

Daddy has his own sleep disorder problems. He doesn't go to bed before 2:30am, ever. This has been a real problem in our relationship because often my nighttime insomnia is kicked off by him waking me up by coming to bed. When he sleeps on the couch, I sleep much better. A Lucy-Desi sleeping in separate beds arrangement has never been an acceptable solution to me, and we've been struggling about this for years even before the baby. In fact, I'm pretty sure it contributed to us not being able to have a baby for such a long time. Now that she's here, it just contributes more chaos and frustration to the sleep mix.

Lately, Arli has taken a turn for the worse with the sleeping. Rather than this lasting a day or two and getting back to normal, it's been over a week now. She is napping inconsistently, if at all, and she is so squirmy at night that she can't get to sleep before 9:30 most nights. She has been waking about 6:30, so she's getting maybe 9 hours of sleep a night. And to top it all off, she's refusing to go to sleep in her crib for any reason, night or day. She's been sick, and teething, and we have been accommodating her by taking turns going to bed with her. Now that she's better, I do not want this to become the new normal! We are quickly becoming the Cranky Family, and it's not good.

As much as I want to hold and love and comfort my sweet daughter, I have not had a second to myself and it's driving me truly insane. I don't want to be impatient with her in the short precious time that we have together. I want her to drift off to sleep calm, secure and peacefully. Patience is what it takes to right the sleep ship. But when quality sleep is at such a premium, it's so hard to be mindful of that!

I think that what she's going through is normal baby stuff, and that she will eventually go to sleep on her own, get enough rest, and sleep in her own space when the time is right. I do believe this. But I also worry (and stay up at night worrying about it) that we will pass on our own freaky anxious bad sleep habits to her. You can be as big of a freak as you are comfortable with, but when the kids come along, you really have to take a look at all of that and be a good example. This is how our kids become our teachers, and help us to become better people. Or we crack up from the pressure and get locked up in a loony bin. I aspire to the former.

A Little Less Sugar Never Hurt Anyone

Every time I go to the doctor or dentist for Arli, they start telling me how much juice she should be drinking. "She doesn't get juice", I say, "I don't see any reason that a 1-year-old needs juice." They agree and support my decision. I think this is great, and it makes me feel that I am doing something right.

But if you ask my husband, or either grandmother, they think I'm being a ridiculous sugar nazi. There's no way to keep her away from sugar, they say. A little juice is fine for a child. I don't disagree with either of these statements, however, I do read. I read all the time about how obese kids are getting because of all the processed food and sugar in their diets, and all of the other health problems that come along with too much of these things. If I can, I'd like to give my one and only child a chance to lead a healthy life. And I don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so.

When she was 6 months old and just starting solids, my mother-in-law started feeding her some of the yogurt she brought with her for lunch. She was offended when I politely asked her not to. "But she likes it," she said. I'm sure she does like it. Babies like sweet things. But adult yogurt has a ton of sugar in it, it is probably artificially sweetened, and babies don't need that. It's not good for them. I don't care what they did in the '70's. Look at all the overweight, diabetic, unhealthy adults that grew up in the '70's. I don't want to raise one of those, if I can help it.

She got really worried that I was an uptight freak who was only going to feed my child tofu and millet or something (this was probably because of my former freaky vegetarianism!). She expressed to her husband that I might not even make her a cake for her first birthday! What kind of a mother would deny her child cake?!?

For the record, I'd like to say that Arli gets plenty of sweet things, like fresh fruit and whole milk baby yogurt, even some baby cookies or small bites of my ice cream. She also had a delicious (and healthy) birthday cake that I made myself from scratch that contained an entire cup of sugar in the recipe! She gets more processed food than I would like, due to the fact that sometimes she will only eat 5 tater tots and a rice cracker rather than any fresh food I try to cook up. That's just the way it goes sometimes. Processed food is fine, in moderation.

When she is older, I'm sure she will guzzle down all the juice she wants to, and eat popsicles and grown-up yogurt and cake from the bakery. But for now, she gets the healthiest food her mama can make, and her mama doesn't feel that feeding her less sugar counts as abuse. For now, her mama has the last word.