Entries Tagged 'Parenting' ↓

This post is all about guilt and envy. About passing a buck and picking up the reigns. About how nothing is ever good enough for me, for long.

When Isobel was a hair over a year, nearly a month, really, she started acting differently than she was before. In the context of her – the child who came out blue with a cord around her neck several times and a decreased heart rate, who started screaming and didn’t stop for nearly six months, who walked at nine months without taking more than 20 steps gripping a table-top, that said mama and dada and gagoo and no by eight, who rolled over about two months before learning to run and still hasn’t mastered getting a spoon safely to her mouth – it was like night and day.

She started hitting. Then kicking. A bit of biting got thrown in, but was quickly dropped when she was once aided in biting herself. I didn’t agree with biting her back, but I was fine with making her bite herself when I was in the path of gnashing.

The tantrums got severe, sometimes lasting up to two hours, so long that she didn’t remember why she was upset, if she ever knew to begin with. She wasn’t sleeping much – napping was sporadic and bedtime was a few hours’ battle. She was eating everything she could get her hands on and not growing or gaining weight, still nearly six months behind her peers in size.

I spent my days extolling the benefits of speaking, communicating with me. I talked to her all the time. I never raised my voice or got too frustrated in front of her. Not even when she started hurting herself. Not even when I got kicked in the face. Not even after 40 minutes of her screaming like the world was ending did I freak out at her. (For that, I’m actually proud, given my temper and how severe it was.)

I slowly taught her that she could be upset in her own space, safely. That she could be angry without violence. That going to bed wasn’t necessarily what she wanted to do, but it was still happening.

I watched her, like a hawk. I waited for some magical sign that would tell me what was going on, if there was a red flag that made her more something than other children, or if I was just being uncharacteristically wimpy. It all seemed so wrong.

Coupling that with the multiple sicknesses, infections, infections as a result of antibiotic reactions, and the fact that she’s never quite digested anything particularly well, including breast milk, I consulted Dr. Google multiple times and eventually bullied our way into an appointment with a pediatrician.

Who said that she’d come down with a nasty case of the terrible twos. At 13 months. I walked away from that with the message that I would just have to learn to cope. But I watched her moods get more severe and her food pickiness emerge.

Last summer, I’d over-read enough.

The research connecting dairy consumption and ear infections was just too swaying and after her (I think it was) 15th one, I cut her off of cow’s milk. Not one more infection befell her. In the fall, a switch was flipped in her body and she seemed unable to tolerate cheese any longer.

By her 29th month, again my instincts were calling out to me. Things were just as bad as they’d been with her, mood-wise, she’d dropped naps altogether and I had a few evenings where I’d put her to bed and then just cry. At the frustration and concern. Because I felt guilty, wanting to hit her back sometimes. Because I wanted to run away, drop her off to her dad and say, ‘you deal with this, I’m not big enough.’

I’d cry because I couldn’t do any of those things – hit her or ship her off – and because I just really needed her to be okay and kind to me. Or a vacation. And the vacation wasn’t coming any time soon. And she’d started pissing on the floor when she was really mad, in a completely obviously vindicative way. I mean, she would call me over, and then pee while smiling in an Omen-like manner.

Something had to give.

We went back to a pediatrician and we did an elimination diet. Wheat and dairy gave her a nearly immediate reaction. Those were cut out. For the most part, wheat gluten as a whole has been cut out and on the few occasions since February when she’s been exposed to either of those food groupings, she’s been sick, twisted and mental. It’s obvious to anyone who knows her, even a little. She’s just not her.

Plus, she ends up looking like she’s been in a bar fight.

Here’s the double-standard.

I wanted something to be wrong with her. I wanted her to be diagnosed with something concrete, so that I’d be able to take care of it. There’d be a solution, she’d be fixed, and we could be a happy, loving family 99.1% of the time. And that’s almost exactly what happened.

She went off the wheat and the freakishly long, violent tantrums ended. In fact, by now, tantrums are kind of a rarity. She lost all dairy and things firmed up in the digestive department and she stopped getting sick, well, almost ever, instead of every couple of weeks. Things couldn’t be more perfect.

Except.

Her eyes are still puffy and purple, rimmed in red, with an ocean-liner’s amount of baggage underneath them, and she’s still getting allergic-reactions in the form of rashes – which indicates that there’s still something in her environment or diet that is wrong for her.

Now I must rigorously examine the label of every food stuff we come into contact with, bake almost everything from scratch and she’s still losing weight sometimes – she’s nearly three, still wears a lot of 18-24 months’ sizes and on a very good day, weighs in barely over the 27 pound mark. I weighed that when I was one. Her diet is probably 60% produce, 25% protein sources and the remaining 15% is wheat-alternates. She’s not taking in enough calories, and god help her waistline on a day when there isn’t an abundance of energy-dense snacks for her.

Everything I buy at the grocery store is expensive. I can’t afford to eat organic, because we already spend over $500 a month on groceries – closer to $600 most months. I buy everything that she can and will eat on sale. I stock up. I cook from scratch. It’s so much money and time.

I wish there was nothing wrong. I miss the days when I could have on-sale generic cereal bars in the cupboard and hand her one whenever she asked for a snack. Her, at nine-months old, stuffing fists-full of lasagna into her face. When I didn’t have to buy a carton of soy milk every other day because I’m buying the largest container in one of the only two kinds she stomachs well (which are 210% the price of cow’s milk). I miss watching her peel string-cheese and having a menu plan open to anything. I miss not stressing out servers in restaurants, or having to prepare her her own meal to go to one.

I envy every parent I see, every day, who can go shopping with a stroller, hand over a bagel and have silence during the whole time, while they buy whatever the fuck they feel like. I hate that I saw safe cake mix on sale at the store two weeks ago and after checking it’s expiry date, bought all of them except two.

I hate that there’s still something clashing with her system and that I can’t just fix it like I imagined an answer would give me. I wonder if anything will ever really seem easy, or if it’s always going to be so damn hard and exhausting.

Some days, I truly hate myself for trying to find out what might’ve been wrong, when I could have sailed along on an inexpensive raft of laziness.

Even on those days when I’m met with an overwhelming loss of control thoughts, the ones that tell me that I’m in the wrong role and playing it out so improperly, that I should have run away when I had the chance, I have a sense of calm. Those fleeting moments, (which used to come a lot more often than they do now) when I feel as if Isobel calling me Mama is like she’s breathing a tiny little lie out of her perfect little pouty mouth don’t seem to matter or stab me as deeply as they used to.

Because, finally, now that she’s nearing three, now that I’ve gotten a handle on what my own boundaries are, and what her personality entails and how the two can clash and how I can allow them to intermingle, now I feel some confidence. I may have some piss-poor days, when food is whatever can be quickly cut, slathered or poured, and she walks around with a milk mustache, naked for most of her lucid hours, but I’m still actually feeling like a good parent.

See, I used to walk around with a metaphoric ruler.

Her progress in all areas – speech, motor skills, sociability, violence – those all got held up against others her age. Worse, they were compared to children younger than her, which in some cases gave me a sense of mommy-fail; or children older than her, which often would give me a feeling of vindication.

~ My kid started playing independantly, imagining scenarios with stuffed animals, before she was two. Hers required her mommy to sit and hold her toys for her and make up pretendisms while the little girl laughed at the silly voices.

~ My kid doesn’t know her ABCs and she can’t count. That one knows up to 20 in English and Spanish and watches a lot less Dora, for it.

~ My kid walked four days after turning nine months old. That’s kid’s 15 months and still wants mommy to carry her everywhere. Or crawls.

~ My kid gave me a black eye. That little girl tells her dad she loves him, without coaching.

It was a vicious, evil thing to do to myself, and, on some level, Isobel. This constant measuring uppedness.

But that kind of went away and became less important a few months ago. If I’m being completely honest, it’s likely half because she started excelling at the unspoken mental aptitude tests more often than not; half because I ran out of energy to continue feeling like a lackluster maternal figure.

But through it all, before I heard the first person comment on her year-old personality as ‘not a very happy’ and before she became a half-insanely-happy-half-moody teenager in the body of a two year old with the age of an almost three year old, there’s been one area that I’ve never doubted that I did good at.

Books.

She loves them. Always has. Could lie there at six months, curled in while nursing and I expressively tomed out Good Night, Moon (I memorized that one and The Going to Bed Book quite early on – soon we didn’t even need the book).

Because…

When I was pregnant, two months before her birth, I got to celebrate an early Mother’s Day. The Ex gave me a gift card, because it was what I asked for, to a bookstore. And I promptly bought those two books.

I started after she was born, buying her a new book every month. At least one. When she was old enough to choose for herself, she started picking between two or three. When she neared the terrible twos, a trip to the bookstore became a fun afternoon, when she would grab 12 or so different soft, hard, fabric and bath books, nudging to be read to.

Now, we go to the bookstore a lot more often – one has moved only two blocks away from us – and she nearly always marches out with a new book. Proud. Happy. Excited.

I don’t read to her as often as I used to – there’s no more one mo’ book, Mama before bedtimes. In fact, I have often resorted to using no book as a consequence for naughtiness (not that I call it that). She started doing something about that.

She started reading to herself. To anyone who will listen.

Of course, a two year old who doesn’t know her ABCs would have an impossible time reading. What she does is gather a bunch of books, a few friends of the stuffed or plastic persuasion (unless there’s an actual warm-blooded volunteer around without a laptop perched on their legs. Ahem.), and she will go through the pages systematically, telling them the story by the pictures. If it’s one we’ve read often, she’ll pull out some memorized lines, but for the most part, this new telling is a hushed version of Isobelese.

This is how she puts herself to sleep each night. I tuck her in, we cuddle and talk about the day we’re ending and what tolls in the one that’s coming, and then I say good night, which is her cue to hop out of bed and grab two arms-full of books and read to her dollies and doggies until she falls asleep.

When I crawl into bed, much, much, dear god, so much later, I rearrange her form perpendicular to the way she’s just lain. I stack the books from under her on the nearest flat surface. And I tuck her back in knowing that she’s likely dreaming about all of the things she was just story-telling.

That’s when I can sigh contentedly and think that maybe I’m not doing such a bad job, after all.

Even if she does watch more movies than Siskel and Roper.