Happy to Have a Happy Mother's Day

Since last Mother's Day, our third daughter, Tootsie, joined the family.  By now most of you know the saga of Tootsie--born two months early across the country, and with meningitis.  Tootsie and I spent six weeks together in a Boston hospital apart from Husband and Big and Middle Sis.  But the truth is, after a fairly speedy recovery from her infection, Tootsie was pretty good to go. Throughout the ordeal, we were fortunate on many levels, benefiting from the care of incredible health care professionals in an amazing hospital, the overwhelming support of family and friends, and a lack of related long-term health issues.  Today, you would never know our bouncing baby girl was a preemie.

Because this was my third go-round with pregnancy and childbirth, I knew to watch myself for signs of baby blues.  I figured I was particularly susceptible at this point in my life, with a new job and already busy household.  Returning to a recently purchased home with a fragile newborn and two daughters who missed their mom added a few variables.  But I had no idea how difficult things would be.

While this Mother's Day morning I woke up cheerful, loved up my girls, did a load of laundry, went for a jog, and enjoyed brunch with my family, mere months ago, in the throes of serious post-partum depression and anxiety, I struggled to get out of bed each morning.  Now that I'm reunited with Myself, I have the perspective to appreciate how scary post-partum depression can be for a normally happy, confident woman and her family.

I feel it's important to acknowledge how many women enter into what is universally considered the blessed state of motherhood with the monkey of PPD on their backs--a monkey accompanied by Fear, Lack of Confidence and Motivation, Guilt, Self-Loathing, Malaise, and Search for Meaning, among other unwanted guests.  The challenges of parenthood are great enough without attempting to mother from the bottom of a well.  Sitting among first-time mothers in my therapy/support group, I wondered if I would have had more children if I felt the way I did this time after our firstborn.

I am well enough now to know I would do it all over again.

But the journey back to rational thinking and happy days felt long and hard (and necessitated work on myself I'd never felt compelled to do in 42 years), and I suspect I will always keep an eye trained on myself and my vulnerability to overwhelm.

Whatever the causes of PPD--hormonal, societal, circumstantial, genetic--it's important we are mindful of the mamas out there. It's easy for those of us missing infants and rocking chairs to exclaim to new mothers that these are the best of days and aren't you just so in love?  I was always in love.  But I was also wide-eyed and paralyzed by a sense that everything was Just Too Much to Handle.  Thankfully, perceptive family members and friends began throwing out lifelines as I floundered.

We've got to continue to ask new and experienced mothers probing questions, offer help and support, and be persistent about seeking professional care when there's concern.  I was told a million times that the best mother is a healthy one.  I was told a million times it would get better, and a thousand times I didn't believe it.  But I am a happier, healthier self than I was six months ago, and I love being a mother more than ever.

Happy Mother's Day.  This year, I am not taking the "happy" for granted.

Too Blessed to Be Stressed

I can conjure up a healthy dose of anxiety when change is on the horizon, and I tend to stress out a little in anticipation of transitions.  I forget, for example, at the end of each summer, how I handle the logistics of work and family life during the school year, and imagine that it will be harder than ever this time.  And then the year starts, and what do you know?  I'm coping.  We're okay.  I'm busy, we're bustling, but we make time for family dinners and there are moments of hilarity amidst the homework and driving to and from lessons and practices.  Over the years I've learned I do this, cyclically:  stress out and then figure it out.

But an undertow is tugging at me again.  Call it what you will: the Baby Blues or mild Post-Partum Depression.   I just know it knocks me on my knees most unhelpfully.  I felt it with Big Sis--the joy and in-love-ness, coupled with an inexplicable weepiness and recognition of my own vulnerability.  Why did I feel this way?  Many kind friends would ask me, "Isn't this the most joyous time of your life?" Yes, absolutely!  And...no?  My father, no stranger to the hormonal flux of postpartum emotions, explained that my feelings were helping create the bond that would have me throw myself in front of a train in defense of my newborn.  I found that oddly comforting.   And I eventually emerged unscathed and determined to interact with mothers of newborns differently from then on:  "No, how are you, really?"  Just in case someone else felt similarly.

Ten years later here I am with the baby I yearned for.

In the hospital, in the NICU, in Boston, my emotions had objects:  stressful circumstances, sick baby, unfamiliar and unexpected setting.  Separation from my girls and husband and dog.

But now I'm home, reunited and back in my nest.  And still I find myself wide-eyed wondering why I'm not deeply at peace.

Beyond the clarity of purpose in holding, feeding, staring, talking and smiling at my baby and hugging my girls and husband, my mind zig zags, loops the loop:  making to-do lists, questioning itself, worrying.

There's a new job waiting for me, a Big Job, which I haven't even done yet, but know I can do.  It's the Life + Job that I wonder about, that uncharted territory that I think about each morning when I wake, planning how I'll drop off and pick up and breastfeed and pump and raise my baby and help with homework and cook and do laundry and attend evening meetings and athletic events and dances...and sleep.

And then Guilt, the hair shirt that accompanies bad feelings, bristles my sensitive skin.  I'm "too blessed to be stressed," after all; let me count the ways:  my baby is healthy.  I am raising a thriving, happy family and am married to an incredibly supportive partner.  I have a wonderful new house and job.  I have tons of love and assistance--TONS.  And let me tell you, I know some people who should be crying!  I know some folks going through tough life-and-death stuff, so what is my problem? I ask myself.  There's Syria, and poverty, and depravity, and it's even the anniversary of 9/11, and I'm at home on maternity leave holding a sweet, milky-smelling baby.  Maybe my body needs to plow a field; my mind needs something really serious to focus on.  Could Post-Partum Blues be a first-world problem?

"You're not in charge," the nurse practitioner tells me at my six-week postpartum appointment.  "You can't control this, just as if you had a broken leg or sore throat."  She offers an elixir, with its side effects and promises of relief.  And I hear her, but I want to be the body surfer to this wave, plunging through the whitewash, wave and I both winning and losing, but I, emerging and whipping hair from my face with a triumphant grin.

I'm certain I can get there, and I know the lifeguards are watching.

Wrestling with Worries

Right before bed, Big Sis summoned me for a private conference.  "I've been worrying," she shared.  We hopped onto my bed together, as is our custom when she needs to talk. 

"I'm worried about bombs and poison gases, Mom.  I mean, what if something like what happened in Boston happens here?  How do you know it won't?  We're learning about the chemicals in water and I'm thinking about how our water could be poisoned, and I can't get it all out of my mind..."  Her anxieties issued from her in a gush. 

I don't know it won't happen here, sweetheart.  I can't promise you it won't.  But I can reassure you that kindnesses in our world are more likely than terrible things.  And while we live every day with the knowledge that accidents happen and sicknesses happen and pain is part of our experience, births also happen, and celebrations, and beauty and wonderfulness are all around us. 

A few more trips from her bedroom for reassurance followed, until we finally sent her back to bed with an assignment to think of a baby girl's name for each letter of the alphabet. 

We're all worried these days, aren't we, though we each feel it and wear it and express it in different ways?  Our daughter, prone to apprehensions and anxious wonderings, was bound to come to us with Boston-inspired concerns and questions.  She devoured a copy of The Hunger Games over spring break, a book I'd hoped she would wait to read, with its poisonous berries and...everything else.  Being displaced right now, between old house and new and on an extended vacation at Mammom's and Bampa's house, provides another source of instability.

I watch my own reactions to news and personal circumstances closely.  Pregnancy--even simply embarking on the journey of parenthood by attempting to conceive or adopt--means stepping onto a landscape of uncertainty and unknowns, new frontiers of hope and worry.  I mark the hurdles:  heartbeat on ultrasound, first trimester completed, negative screening results.  But there's no point of earned complacency in parenthood and life, only comfort in acknowledging the risks and joys associated with vulnerability. 

Disasters and tragedies aren't required to provoke our anxieties--all we need is a convenient temporal basket for our worries.  Moving, and a new house, have been ripe fodder for my over-active imagination at 3:00 AM.  I pictured the deck on our house as higher than it really is, the hillside steeper, with guests tumbling into the canyon in the event of a collapse.  Upstairs windows might be easy for children to fall from.  The canyon could be a nesting ground for rattlesnakes.  Would our house be easy to burglarize?

And then I remembered this week we'd momentarily forgotten to be afraid of North Korea.

So much randomness and unpredictability inspires the desire for us to exert controls on identifiable and accessible areas in our daily lives.  I could put locks on the windows, install an alarm system, forbid the kids from exploring the canyon.  But the worries would only reinvent themselves, seep through cracks in the door frames like poison gases.  There aren't enough sandbags to guard against uncertainty.  And somewhere along the bucket brigade we stop living how we truly want to, with chin up and eyes on the birds twittering on the fence, on the sunset, on the horizon.

So we hold hands, snuggle on the bed, reassure, and resolve.

We're working on managing our fears and anxieties over here.  How about you?  How have worries surfaced?  How do you balance caution with embracing wonder and vulnerability?

P.S.  a shout-out to Jewel, whose song "Hands" made it into the iPod shuffle on my jog this morning, with timely lyrics:

"If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we're all OK

And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I won't be made useless

I won't be idle with despair..."

Plenty of Poetry

I've been *enjoying* 3:00 AM insomnia for the past few months.  Sure, call it my body's way of preparing for a baby who is likely not as predictable as whatever internal alarm clock nudges me from slumber at an eerily consistent hour I can't even celebrate as close to early-morning workout time. 

I generally get up between 5:30 and 6:00, so it's sobering to think of how many hours I have after 3:00 each morning to accomplish something, and how little I actually do, as I snuggle my iPad and scroll through blogs and read articles and play a few rounds of Words with Friends (lather, rinse, repeat...).

Today, though, I used the United States Postal Service website to forward our mail to our new house and signed up for a poem a day via email on the Poetry Foundation's website.  I was so grateful to myself when Marianne Boruch's "Pencil" arrived in my inbox later this morning; I had to share it with an art teacher colleague. 

In the afternoon I spotted another teacher/friend scurrying away from the office who called out, "I just left you a poem!" 

Seriously?  Yes. 

There was a photocopy of Billy Collins' "The Effort" waiting for me on my keyboard. 

Today felt like a wonderful profusion of poetry, especially since I unearthed a poem I wrote when I was pregnant with Big Sis to publish here today:

Flutter

Something new is overtaking me
The wonder of you inside
My body a housing,
encasing hope, fantasy,
and infinite possibilities:
The unwitting agent
of change in the world, a new prophet
for the world's devout, I carry you
gently,
little moth.