Melissesages

A few years ago, I stayed with some relatives who had a two year old kid. We were watching television one night, and the mom had to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy because the patient that week was a three-year-old kid. Apparently, it was a little too close to home.

At the time, I thought it was a bit of an overreaction – after all, TV and movies are full of people getting hurt and killed, and nobody freaks out when the good guy’s sister or mother is killed, just because they have a sister or mother. What was the big deal? Then, a while later, I saw “Apocalypse Now,” and I understood, to an extent, how that mother felt. A jillion people die horrible deaths in “Apocalypse Now,” and after awhile it becomes almost boring – you just can only care for so long, when everybody onscreen promptly gets killed. But that’s when they bring out the puppy – a tiny, adorable Golden Retriever (or yellow lab, I can never tell the difference in puppies) that’s practically little enough to fit on Martin Sheen’s hand. When the puppy came onscreen, I almost had to leave the theater.

We see a million deaths on TV, it’s true, but they’re mostly adults, and they mostly have it coming. For better or for worse, we’re used to those deaths. But you never see a dog killed, so we’re not desensitized to it the way we are to, say, someone’s head blowing off, or the millionth person in a movie getting shot. I love dogs. Max, obnoxious as he is, is my baby, and every time a dog gets killed onscreen I still connect it to my own love for dogs, and it upsets me. That’s why my relative was feeling – you rarely see little, little kids die, and for her, it connected to her own fears that something bad could happen to her little girl.

When I was pregnant, I wondered if having a kid would affect how I watched TV and movies. Would it become insufferable to see a child die onscreen? Would I have to leave the room every time a little kid was abducted, or hurt, on a police show? Or when House treated a baby, or someone miscarried on “Private Practice?” When I saw a “House” rerun with a pregnant woman in danger, and then the baby died, I felt oddly proud that it didn’t affect me.

But since we brought Mattie home, a funny thing has happened: my head keeps playing scenarios. It’s not that I can’t watch certain shows now, it’s that the shows I’ve already watched, with kids or babies in danger, keep playing in my head. When I give Mattie a bath, I remember the episode of “Supernatural” where a mother let her baby drown. When I put her in her carseat in the car, I think of the “Bones” where the woman with the baby wrapped her car around a tree.

Really, this breaks down to a matter of odds. In my life, I’ve probably watched seven or eight babies grow from infants to healthy, happy kids (which is 100% of the babies I’ve known, by the way). That’s more than a lot of people my age. On the other hand, in twenty-plus years of watching movies and television, how many kids and babies have I seen hurt, kidnapped, or killed? A lot more than eight, that’s for sure. And desensitization is a funny thing – sure, it can make you immune to getting upset every time a child is injured, but it also severely adjusts your expectations. The morning after Mattie’s first night here, I was honestly amazed that she was still alive. I’d just seen, over the years, so many scenarios (plus the SIDS-related panic that they instill in every new parent at the hospital). A millions scenes in which she got sick and died were available in my head. The other scenario almost didn’t occur to me, the one where she was just fine.

It’s a strange way to live, with so many ways in which something terrible happens available in your head at all times. Over time, I’ve gotten used to things being okay, but the bad stuff still pops in my head sometimes. And what’s the lesson here? That people who intend to have kids someday shouldn’t watch TV? That I would be better off with a worse memory and less imagination? I don’t know. I just hope that I continue to be wrong.

Eight years ago, when I applied to film school, I had no earthly clue about whether or not I’d get in. I knew that I was smart about movies, or at least smarter than most of the people around me, but it was a small town in Wisconsin. In the land of the blind…Anyway, for all I knew, I could have been a film genius, or just this side of a complete idiot.

It’s never easy waiting for results for something like college applications, but it’s especially difficult when you have absolutely no objective concept of your own value in a given field. Eight years ago, I waited on pins and needles for months, afraid that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life by gambling on film school (I only applied to schools in New York and LA). And, as it turned out, I was smart, or at least smart enough.

The past few months have been almost an identical experience for me. I know now that I’m smart about movies, and I have the education to back that up, but at the end of the day I really have no idea whether or not I can write. I’ve been to conferences, I’ve had my worked looked at a little, I’ve read some books…but I don’t really know.

But, in order to be a writer at all, even a crappy one, you have to have at least some sort of ego, some sense of “yeah, I can do this.” Otherwise you just have to fold immediately under the weight of all the odds against you. It took me a long time to develop a baby ego, and that’s what I used to apply to grad school in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee. And on Saturday, I got in. That’s right – I can write, or at least I can write well enough for someone to want to teach me how to write better. Hooray!

Saturday was a strange day for me all-around: my parents had driven to Madison late Friday night with the idea of flying to the Bahamas for vacation in the morning. They’d gotten their tickets to fly out of Madison so they could spend a little more time with the baby. But late Friday night, my mom knocked on my bedroom door to explain that she’d just checked the tickets, and their plane was actually leaving Sunday morning, not Saturday morning. So I had a full day in Madison with my parents, for the first time ever. My mom and I got our nails done and saw a movie, and on the way home Tyler called and told me about the letter waiting for me from the University of Milwaukee. I tried really hard not to drive extra fast on the way home.

In movies, it seems like people with important letters are always too nervous to open them right away, or have to make someone else do it for them. I always thought that was stupid. When I have an important letter, nothing on earth could get me to set it on a shelf for two weeks while I worked up the courage to read it. So I ripped my envelope open, saw the “we are pleased to announce,” and was absolutely elated.

So it appears that I’ll be going to grad school in the fall. I have to confess, when I read the letter and realized I was good enough to get into the writing program, a big part of me wondered whether or not I should have applied to a better school. After all, Northwestern is only 2.5 hours away, and the best writing program in the country is in the Midwest, at the University of Iowa. If I waited another year, I could at least apply to the program here in Madison, which is prestigious and only offered every other year.

But here’s the thing: even if I could get in somewhere else, none of that is possible for me, in my current life situation. Being married and a mom and owning a house means that I am, for all intents and purposes, tied down here in Madison, at least for the near future. And when I made the decisions to do those things, I knew what I was getting into. The program at Milwaukee may not be the best in the world, or even the best I can do, but it’s the best I can do right now (and I am not about to put off school for another year just to apply to a program I have no idea I can get into). And it’s not like it’s a bad program – I’ve heard some really good things. So, while I can’t suppress a twinge of curiosity about where else I could have gotten in (that’s the high school overachiever in me), I feel really good about going to school. Right now Tyler and I are trying to figure out whether I’ll go full-time or part-time, and I’ll subsequently be looking for a job as well. Things are finally starting to move with my life, and I’m incredibly grateful. That “sitting around waiting to have a baby” thing was so not me.

Lest I sound all hateful, I should mention that Mattie is wonderful. She’s gorgeous and perfect, aside from having a little trouble pooing this week. (Is it wrong that I think her little constipated face is hilarious? And if so, just how wrong?) Sometimes I just look at her for ages, and I’ll stare at her ear or long hair or eyes and think, “I made that. I created it inside me. How cool is that?”

Greetings, blog devotees. My internet has been down all week (thanks a ton, AT&T), which has kept me from writing lately- well, that and the fact that I have a newborn. Husband has been working 10-hour days since he went back to work on Tuesday, so my life has pretty much been all baby, all the time.

Mattie is now 19 days old, and I’m getting to know her. I always figured newborns don’t have much personality, and it’s true, but there are some things that she does or doesn’t do regularly. In other words, I’m getting experienced with Mattie the Baby, as opposed to Mattie the Person, who hasn’t developed yet. I can say that baby Mattie is pretty good overall – she cries some, when she’s uncomfortable or hungry, but she never seems to cry for no reason, which is good. She’s not a fan of baths, but tolerates them because they don’t bother her enough to scream about it. After about day 4, she is so over swaddling, preferring to sleep with her arms and legs out, like she just jumped out of a plane. She gets in moods where she insists her food come from a bottle, rather than directly from me.

She also makes the best faces. Mattie isn’t old enough yet to smile as a reaction to the world around her, but she does smile in her sleep a lot, which is pretty adorable. Baby dreams, man – they’ve gotta be interesting. I’ve also identified four key expressions that Mattie likes to go through:

1. The “Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man” smile
Mattie has no teeth, so when she smiles a big, open-mouthed grin, she looks exactly like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man at the end of Ghostbusters – before they started firing proton packs at him. It’s actually pretty creepy.
2. The “Stop F#@&ing With Me” scowl
I do have a picture of this one, here. This is a look that plainly says “I am just barely tolerating this, but you better knock it the f off but quick.” It comes out a lot during bath time, or when she has to get into the car seat. I’d like to think she gets this one from me.
3. The “Mel Gibson”
The TV show “South Park” did a hilarious parody of Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” in which Mel Gibson runs amok. Like most South Park impressions, they use a photo of Mel Gibson’s actual head on a cartoon body to represents Gibson. Anyway, there’s this one moment during the show, when Gibson is terrorizing Kyle and Stan, when he stops and does this ridiculous pose with his lips stuck out. I know that’s a lengthy explanation, but Mattie does the EXACT look. Again, a little creepy.
4. The “Han Solo in Carbonite”
Have you ever noticed just how big Harrison Ford’s lips are? They’re huge. And when he gets frozen in carbonite at the end of “Empire Strikes Back,” he’s frozen with his giant lips pursed, like he’s about to make out with Princess Leia…or having a bowel movement. Mattie can do the frozen in carbonite face.

Now, if you’re thinking to yourself, “Gee, Self, Melissa sure seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about her baby’s expressions,” you are exactly correct. Because frankly, I’ve had almost nothing else to do. Let me back up for a moment to explain that the most annoying thing about having a baby is not the baby itself, or anything it does, but the adults around you who already have children. I cannot say how many times I’ve been given some sort of all-in-good-fun warning along the lines of “you’ll never sleep again,” “you have no idea how hard this will be,” “the next few years are going to suck” and so on. Basically, many, many smug ways of saying that Tyler and I clearly have no idea what we’re getting into, and everything will be so much worse than we can imagine.

Like I said, completely annoying. And pointless. There is no good-hearted motive for giving these ‘warnings.’ They’re not meant, in any way, to actually advise or prepare us, but simply to brag in the manner of “I’ve already survived this, woo hoo!” I can’t really blame people for being reminded of their own difficult parenting days and wanting to express their relief that those days are over…but because I am impatient, stubborn, and independent-minded, it still annoys the crap out of me.

Especially, of course, when the stupid warnings are correct. I was prepared for sleep deprivation (which hasn’t actually been that bad, thanks to Tyler and I’s genius system), but I didn’t really fathom how much I wouldn’t be able to get done on any given day. Mattie sleeps for at least 5 or 6 hours between 8 AM and 6 PM – that should be plenty of time for me to load the dishwasher, vacuum, fold clothes, and even write a little, right? Wrong. While Mattie is sleeping, she usually wants to be held (in fact, she’s lying on my chest as I type this). If she does sleep in the Pack N Play, she wakes up pretty frequently, so I’m constantly shifting her in and out of it. If she’s sleeping in my arms, I will invariably a) need to go to the bathroom, b) get really hungry, or c) become bored. When that happens I have to move, and Mattie wakes up, and getting her to sleep starts all over again.

I also lose a lot of time with feeding – Mattie, like most babies, likes to eat until she falls asleep. If she wakes up, she wants to be fed again before falling back to sleep. That means she’s basically eating for the entire day. And it takes forever – Mattie will often down a bottle like a champ, but if I’m nursing her she putzes around, eating a little, then dozing, then eating, etc. Boring.

I’m beginning to see why new moms often seem incapable of talking about anything other than the baby – it’s because we can’t DO anything besides take care of the baby. I’d love to discuss the new movie Tyler and I just went to, or going to see a band or reading the newspaper or whatever, but none of that is happening anytime soon. In fact, since I started writing this post I’ve had to stop three times: once to give Mattie a bath and get her dressed, once to change her diaper and her clothes again after she peed herself with her diaper off, and once to feed her. You can see how this kind of schedule is not very conducive towards anything that requires attention for more than a few minutes…like, say, writing a novel.

So, to summarize, I hate when the stupid adults around me are right about things, especially since I will always go out and find these things out for myself anyway. (I am, in most matters, unwilling to take your word for it. Nobody’s perfect.)

But, I should also mention something else the stupid adults were right about: it’s different when it’s yours. Before she was born I was a little nervous that I would get bored and sick of Mattie – after all, when I’ve babysat for infants before, it’s only fun for about an hour and a half before it’s tedious. Even my nephew, who I adore, used to make me irritable and impatient to leave after a few hours of changing diapers and trying to entertain him. The truth is, babies are pretty dull, yet very time consuming. Who wouldn’t get sick of that?

I’m not saying I don’t get tired of infant care, but it really is different when it’s your own baby. I was not prepared for just how much I have fallen in love with my daughter. It’s amazing how long I can simply marvel at her, at what I created in my body (Now that my body is somewhat back to normal, minus the weight gain, this is even more incredible). I have never been a gushy or overly affectionate person, but I cannot stop kissing the baby. When she cries or fusses, I want to make her happy, rather than just trying to get her to quiet down. I do still get bored after a long, full day with her (she was particularly fussy on Friday, and I was delighted to pawn her off on my mother-in-law), but it’s just different. I can’t properly explain it. It’s like making sure she’s safe and happy is not just my job, but my duty, an imperative. And when I’m taking care of her everything else just fades a bit.

This post contains some references to breastfeeding and labor. Stop here if you’re easily grossed out.

Mattie is a week old now, and we’re all kind of settling in to having a baby in the house. When we took our baby classes, they talked a lot about expectations - mostly in regards to labor, but also just what the first few weeks would be like. Some things are pretty much as I thought they’d be: Tyler is fantastic with the baby (as long as I can get him to wake up in the night for his turn). The house has gotten messy, but mostly just in an easy-to-pick-up-clutter kind of way. We spend most of our time in the living room on the couch.

But there are a lot of things I did not expect. First, how easy it’s been. Now, before you get upset, kid-havers, I should clarify: it’s really kind of easy to take care of a newborn when you have two full-time parents who have nothing else they need to be doing (the husband is taking two weeks off work). Tyler and I have been having a multi-day Veronica Mars marathon, and that’s our only real activity besides the baby. When there are two people, it’s not bad at all to handle the feeding and changing. It helps that Mattie sleeps a LOT: we’ve even got the night shift worked out pretty well. Mattie sleeps about four hours at a time at night, and I wake up after the first four hours to feed and change her. Tyler takes the second feeding. This works out great because Tyler gets a full eight hours of sleep, and I get to sleep in a little bit to make up for the time I’m awake at night. We’ll probably keep this up when Tyler goes back to work. I know the easiness (is that a word?) is only temporary, and I’m already worried about when I have to be doing all of this by myself, but in the meantime I’m really enjoying having the husband around. We’re both a little tired most of the time, but i wouldn’t call us truly sleep-deprived at this time.

I also didn’t expect for breastfeeding to be the complicated trial that it’s been. Well, feeding the baby, period. I want to be nursing her (breastfeeding is the best thing blah blah blah), but her first day or two she was biting me, and it took time to heal from that. Now I don’t know if I’m making enough to fill her up, and how much formula I should be supplementing at the same time, and whether I should be pumping or trying to feed her myself. It’s surprisingly complex, especially when you compare it to, say, feeding the dogs. Why can’t I just leave a bottle of milk around with an automatic refill mechanism? Think how much easier that would be.

Pain-wise, it’s both more and less than I’d expected. The overall soreness is pretty much on par, and I get to take lots of ibprofen for that. However (and this is where it gets a little gross) there was some…uh…tearing. So there’s stitches. Which are incredibly painful, at times excruciating. But hey, that’s what happens when you have a baby that’s almost 10 pounds. I get to take Vicadin for that, which is awesome, but I’d prefer to just not have to have the stitches at all.

For her part, though, Mattie is doing fantastic. I was expecting jaundice or something, but she’s just…perfect. She’s already started to reject swaddling, preferring to sleep in loose blankets, often with both arms straight up in the air like she’s on a roller coaster. I know she’s just a baby and it doesn’t mean anything, but I LOVE that. She doesn’t cry too much, except when she’s hungry and we’re not quick enough with the food. And she’s completely gorgeous - I know I’m biased as her mom, but you can check out the pictures for yourself on my site. She’s beautiful.

In other news, today I signed up for the Madison Writers Institute. It was strange thinking about something OTHER than Mattie, but kind of nice, too. I gave myself a week off after her birthday to recover, but now I gotta get writing again. I think it’ll be good for me to have something else in my head besides breastfeeding and diaper changes.

Warning: this post contains references to breasts. But not in a dirty way; in a breastfeeding way.

Yesterday around noon we brought Mattie home from the hospital. The discharge went really well, and she passed all her medical tests - as I said, she’s basically perfect. We got home and spent the rest of the day settling in.

While I was pregnant, a lot of people asked me how I thought the dogs would react to the baby. Tyler and I pretty much figured out Tucker’s reaction from the get-go: we knew he’d find her slightly interesting but basically ignore her until she was old enough to provide him with food or attention. We nailed it. Max, on the other hand, was a bit more unpredictable. We both hoped he’d start feeling a little protective of her, the way he is of me, but I afraid that he’d see Mattie as a challenge to his affection. Not in a “I’m gonna eat that baby” kind of way, I just kind of pictured him, you know, nosing my hand away from the baby all the time so I’d pay attention to him, getting underfoot, dropping his ball on Mattie’s lap so we’d be sure to see it to throw for him. I also figured his initial reaction would be to just jump all over the poor kid. He’s seen babies before, and his usual reaction is to lick their faces until someone drags him away. I thought we’d have to hold Mattie up pretty high while he jumped up trying to bathe her face, and after awhile, he’d settle down.

I was totally right about the entrance. To provide some advance damage control, Tyler went in first and let the dogs outside. I snuck in with the baby and put her safely in the Pack ‘N Play crib. The dogs came in and got a chance to be all over me, the way they do when we’ve been away for a few days (or, you know, when one of us returns from the grocery store). And then, when I thought the moment was right, I picked the baby up. Tucker ignored her completely, and Max did the “oh-no, I have to lick” dance, and went nuts trying to sniff her and get to her face, tail wagging like crazy. After awhile, he calmed down.

I was not prepared, though, for the next part: Max immediately appointed himself as Mattie’s personal bodyguard. Immediately. Instead of being jealous of her all the time (though he’s probably a little of that, too), Max decided his new, and only, mission in life was to watch the baby. He wants to lick her all the time. If we keep her in a room other than the one he’s in, he cries and scratches and panics (this made for a VERY long night). He barks and growls at Tucker if he comes within six feet of the baby. If we do let him in the same room as Mattie, he’s pretty much perfect: he just curls up as close to her as possible, and tries to get in a lick every now and then.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m relieved that Max isn’t being all jealous about her, but the bodyguard act is getting a little old. And…a little hilarious. Tonight, after we put Mattie to bed, I was washing bottles in the kitchen sink, and Tyler went to change a lightbulb in the baby’s room. And we found this. Clearly some new training is in order.

Other than the dogs, though, the experience of bringing Mattie home and getting her settled in the house has been challenging, emotional, difficult… I’m having hormonal experiences that I never came close to during pregnancy. For example, I want to be holding her, like, all the time. I wake up in the night convinced that she’s died of SIDS in her sleep, and keep running out to check her. (I was amazed when I woke up this morning and she was fine.) I had my first brush with post-partum depression in the middle of the night when I couldn’t get Tyler to wake up and help me, and I was freaking out about not being able to feed her.

Ah, and now we come to it: the biggest difficulty I’ve had since giving birth: breastfeeding. Something has gone deeply off the rails with my breastfeeding capabilities. I seem to be doing my part (mainly, producing the milk), and Mattie seems to be doing her part (latching on in a certain way), but for whatever reason every time I feed her I’m in excruciating pain. Seriously, probably the worst pain of my life. Last night at four, I sobbed the entire time I was feeding her, because it hurt so much but I couldn’t stop or she wouldn’t eat. (We had tried giving her formula, but she threw up the whole bottle.) That was one of the toughest moments of my life.

Happily, the next time she woke up to be fed, Tyler tried a different brand of formula, and this one stayed down. The breastfeeding drama continued, though, because my breasts were by then so painful that I could barely stand to have cloth over them. And, just like cows, they needed to be emptied. At 2:00 today, though, we saw the pediatrician, and she took a look at me. She saw the bruises and swelling I have, and recommended we go buy an electric breast pump right away. One trip to Target later, I was sitting at the kitchen table vacuuming milk out of both breasts at the same time, to give to my daughter. (FYI: breast pumps are CRAZY expensive. We had to tap into Tyler’s retirement money.) I take back everything I said about breastfeeding not being as complicated as everyone says.

I’m supposed to alternate between pumped milk (as much as I can stand) and formula for the next week or so, to give myself a chance to heal. Then maybe Mattie and I can work something out. And hopefully soon I’ll be comfortable with, you know, having a shirt on. Meanwhile, I’m just glad the first night and day are behind us.