On Sticky Situations

Dear Annie,

I’m not sure where this is headed but I’m just going to start it and we’ll see where it goes. Early motherhood is an obsession with sleep (not my own) and making sure the baby 1) is not in peril and 2) is developing normally, but mostly an obsession with sleep. Violet naps in the crib (sometimes; now, however, the last technical day of my maternity leave, she’s napping against me as I type, and yes, there have been tears). Like I wrote before, I needed to babystep it (more for me than her to be sure). Since then, there have been a few more naps of swing-sleeping, quite a little bit more sleeping in my arms, a few weeks of sleeping in the bed with me next to her, and now the crib. Here’s yesterday:

She doesn’t always sleep nailed to an invisible cross. And yes, her mohawk is AMAZING.

Monday, I return to work. This means I leave my baby in the care of someone else. Luckily, this “someone else” is, quite literally, THE ONE PERSON I WOULD CHOOSE, IF I COULD CHOOSE ANYONE IN THE WORLD, dead or alive. Like, QUITE literally. Which is, obviously, the best I could have hoped for. My clever and creative twenty-year-old niece Haley will be watching her (along with her dad one day a week and my mom the other).

I worked as a nanny some years ago. It was my all-time favorite job (sorry, 826, you take the silver on this one), and it ended about as horribly as it possibly could have.

I have since vowed never to have a nanny, because that’s a difficult relationship to navigate. The better she is with your child, the happier you are (at first), and the more jealous you are (later). You can’t win. If you’re not jealous of her, your nanny’s not doing a good enough job is the long and short of it.

I am hoping to beat the system, as it were, by hiring someone who: 1) I am delighted to give money to, and 2) I want to be as close as possible to my daughter anyway. The baby LOVES the nanny? AWESOME, because that nanny is her cousin, and will be around for her entire life. Instead of sitting around at working thinking about how SOME STRANGER is having a hundred and one sweet moments with my baby every day, I get to sit around and think about how my dear, very beloved niece is having a marvelous time with my sweet, very adorable baby. I *think* it’ll be a win-win, as much as me being away from Violet thirty hours a week can be.

Before having this baby, I didn’t really know any babies. I had a sort of “I’ll go back full time and we’ll save up some money, and then when she’s actually DOING stuff in a couple of years I’ll go to part time.” I thought babies were puddles of human beings. And, very likely, OTHER PEOPLE’S babies are. But not MY baby.

And I guess that’s it for us for now. Violet’s making noises, and I do not want to miss one waking moment this last week.

Love,
Amy

PS Interestingly, this is the post I’ve edited down the most. It’s a tricky subject, being a working mom or being a stay-at-home mom, and I don’t want to offend anyone. I make no judgements. I guess I’ll save my ruminations on that for another day.

Dear Amy,

I’ve never been a nanny, but I did spent some time toddler-sitting in my early twenties.  That experience may have been the thing which solidified my personal baby-making agenda, or non-agenda, as it were.  Kids are pretty gross, dude.  Some of them are cute and some of them are fun and some of them are complete terrors but ALL of them are gross, at some point.  It’s not even the poop and mucus and spit-up I mind so much, (though I just gagged a little even typing that out) it’s the stickyness.  EVERYTHING gets sticky. And who knows what the hell it even once was that is now sticking to you, it doesn’t matter, it’s all somehow the same two shades of red or off-white and somehow it is all over everything you are touching and wearing.  It was also during this period that I concluded that wet wipes are basically the greatest invention of humankind and also that you should probably not have cats and toddlers in the same house, as this can lead to angry, sticky kitties, which I believe we can both agree is a perilous situation.

Babies are a bit easier, I’ll admit.  At the very least they cannot wantonly destroy pets and household items, and they are delightful in their wide-eyed amazement.  Hey baby, check out my house keys.  Awesome, right?  Look how shiny and jingly.  Yep, those are my boobs.  You seem pretty into looking at those.  I’ll just sit here while you stare, and think about how 20 years from now that behavior will probably not be as well-tolerated as it is at this moment.

I suspect whatever overwhelming maternal feelings people seem to have toward human children I have toward animal children.  I’ve recently signed up to volunteer at a songbird rescue, and while I haven’t yet started I gather my duties will consist of grinding up various items and then feeding them to baby birds with an empty syringe, and also SMILING ALL DAY LONG.  I can’t even EXPLAIN how excited I am to hang out with naked, peeping birdlets all day.  When I shared this news with a friend he replied “EW.”

So, tomato, tomato, I guess.

Love,
Annie

On Shifting Sands

Dear Amy,

I’m so worn out from being riled up. I feel beset on all sides by tides of anti-woman, anti-feminist, anti-choice, anti-science, anti-reason sentiment.  These are times that fracture my brain, times that create in me a powerful and unstoppable need to passionately scream out THIS IS WRONG WRONG WRONG to anyone within listening distance.  I have been so traditionally a mediator, a relativist, a gray area advocate, a bridge between viewpoints, growing up amongst religious family and community, abandoning it (the religion, not the family) but still maintaining relationships with people of widely differing political and moral viewpoints. I’ve been so good at toeing the line.  But these days, I am incapable of fence-sitting. My feminism is ramped up to Defcon 1 and I don’t care who knows it.

Two nights ago, I was walking down a darkened sidewalk and a middle aged guy was walking toward me on the same side of the street. He was ambling, in that way that everyone knows, in that way that you can tell that this person has an agenda.  Sure enough, as he got nearer he called out “Miss. Miss” and veered toward me. There was no one else around. I veered away into the street.  He kept approaching, beginning a speech about two children nearby in a car who needed something something and I interrupted with a very sharp “NO”, and kept walking past him.  He called out again, loudly,  “Well you DON’T gotta get a attitude with me, white girl”.  I wheeled back around and yelled back “YES, I DO, AND FUCK YOU.” And then I full-tilt ran to my car, realizing I had just deliberately antagonized a guy who may or may not have been trying to do some uncool shit to me.  But you know what? Yes, fuck him. For approaching a strange woman alone at night and expecting any other reaction than “leave me alone”. Fuck him for making it about race. Fuck him for trying to shame me about it.

Someone I know and respect (a man) posted a link on Facebook to an article in favor of mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.  He added his own comment referencing people who “insist upon calling themselves Pro-Choice” and suggesting that such people should be in favor of women having “all the information” they can. Historically, my reaction would be to seethe, silently, and move on.  I do not typically take the bait in such cases.  This time, however…my brain exploded with repressed ire. I replied with a long vitriolic screed that ended with something like “WE’RE NOT IDIOTS, I’M PRETTY SURE WE KNOW THERE’S A BABY IN THERE THAT’S WHY WE WENT TO THE CLINIC IN THE FIRST PLACE OMG.” He had the grace not to reply, as the exchange surely would have deteriorated from that point.  But I just can’t STAND it, Amy.  The unmitigated NERVE of men who know nothing about what it means to have a uterus, the crippling (and, in my case, terrifying) responsibility of carrying and bearing a child, men who deign to make decisions for us, to presume that a woman is not VASTLY more knowledgeable about her own reproductive system than a male lawmaker (or just any random dude off the street) has driven me beyond my habitual coddling of other people’s sensitivities.  The sheer idiocy of female supporters who set back the cause of women’s rights by following along in this madness simply because the church and/or party line has dictated that they do so has turned me into a fiery mushroom cloud of personal relationship destruction.  Bottom line: do what you want with your own body, but don’t you dare tell me what to do with mine. This isn’t the 16th century and this isn’t a theocracy. Women get to be people now. This is what choice means. If you can’t agree with me on this point, then you’re a jerk and I just don’t care about your feelings anymore. I am a walking rage-face.

I mean, not you, Amy.  I care about your feelings.  Um, so…how are you?

Love,
Annie

Dear Annie,

Are you on your period or something? Take some Motrin and crawl into bed for a couple of days. It’s unbecoming to be out walking around the world in such a state. It’s a disservice to women, who should always have freshly blown-dry hair, and pleasant smiles, and a benevolent, bendable will. Women should be pretty and malleable and agreeable. They should take catcalls as compliments!

I don’t know, was that funny at all? I think the part about your period was. Maybe it ended there? I haven’t gotten my period in over a year now, so I’m not up on menstrual humor. I’ve been walking around for the last two days trying to figure out how to respond to this, and I’m still not sure. “I understand your rage” doesn’t seem like enough. And yet, I do. And yet, anger is not an emotion I feel all that much anymore. I don’t know how to identify it currently?

Generally speaking, as a new mom, I’m all smiling and cooing at my baby, smelling her baby head, going for walks, watching her watch the world with this newborn sense of wonder. I am looking at her look at trees, thinking about what she must think when she sees such things. I’m three weeks away from the end of my maternity leave, and I am grasping every last second of Babyland that I’ve been given.

And, of course, as the mom of a little girl, your letter is hard to respond to because it makes me want to shut down, think about something else, put my fingers in my ears and sing LA LA LA LA. To think of anyone pestering her on the street or telling her to do with her body…I don’t know what it does, because my brain shuts down in defense before I can get there. Baby head smells, baby carrier, trees.

Don’t get me started on all the BS currently happening with abortions. I’ve had it up to HERE with people calling pro-choice people pro-abortion, because, as far as I can tell, that’s just not what it is. I don’t know anyone who is like HOORAY ABORTION, but I know a whole bunch of people who believe that it’s a woman’s right to choose. And I am with those people. And I say this AS A MOTHER.

Otherwise, all is well here. I go back to work at the end of the month, and I’m currently trying to figure out how to cut my hours at work as much as possible while still being able to get all of our bills paid. This, for me, feels VERY radical. Jason continues to look for a teaching job. Violet is four months old this week, and she is impossibly sweet and has shifted every possible thing that could be shifted inside me.

Love,
Amy