Shame and Other Hard Things

Some things are harder than I was expecting and some things are easier.

I feel *slightly* more functional that I was expecting to, so that's good.  It's a mind set, really.  You must force yourself out the the house.  You must make yourself comfortable with navigating the world with more factors to consider such as; are you dressed? And; is the baby going to eat/poop/sleep sometime soon (this is impossible to predict but nonetheless something to consider)?  And also; is it actually worth it?  I mean, how badly do we really need those groceries? Because it's just not that fun strapping your tiny itty bitty person babe into that awkward heavy car seat and then getting said tiny-person-in-car seat in and out of the store with whatever groceries you actually do really need.

Point being, I lack a certain lightness and freedom I had in the past but am still somehow leaving the house most days, at least briefly.

I'm also handling the lack of sleep relatively well.  My little love peanut doesn't sleep more than two hours at a stretch and it's okay.  He's put on nearly two pounds from his birth weight in less than a month and that makes me feel pretty good about the amount of feeding and the absence of long sleeping stretches we share.

The thing that I am struggling with though, the thing that at times threatens to crush me, is guilt over my older son, now 12.  Before having the baby, I talked myself and talked him up heavily about how I would do my best for him to feel just as important, just as loved as he always had.  I feel that I have failed at that and I feel awful about it.

My older son is amazing and wonderful in so many ways.  He is also incredibly strong willed and stubborn. And being a single mom with him since he was 2 years old unfortunately fed into a cycle of exhaustion and helplessness on my part that led me to often relent to his demands.  Plus, I suck at discipline.  It feels unnatural to me and I lack the emotional and intellectual buy-in.

What I mean by that is that I am vehemently, ferociously anti-shame.  I am so anti-shame that I stay as far the hell away from even the possibility of shaming someone as I possibly can.  It's not that I am opposed to experiencing accountability; the realization that you have done something that you don't feel good about that makes you not want to do it again.  But shame is so much deeper than that. It is something that infects your perception of self and is not isolated to the particular incident.  And that's what I am not okay with. Part of this is the therapist in me.  I want to understand, try to understand and to empathize another to the point that I totally exhaust myself.  I am excruciatingly careful with my words when in conflict with anyone.

Both of my parents are also very anti-shame.  My father has spent his life refusing to be silenced or shunned because of who he is or what he believes.  My mother, while less outspoken, is a tireless defender of the vulnerable.  And yet both of them, despite their strong value system, have often made me feel ashamed.  It comes out in the way they speak to me and in the things they say. Whether it is about how clean I keep my house or how loyal of a daughter I am, the message is the same.

And so part of this too, is that this is my child.  My children.  And I want my children to grow up being able to understand why things may or may not be okay, how you should and shouldn't treat a person because they really get it and not because they were punished and therefor fear or avoid certain actions or expressions.  But not to feel ashamed.

At any rate, my propensities coupled with the natural personality and strong will of my older son has lead us to a place in which, at times, he is very hard to handle.  He's resistant to doing things he doesn't want to do and doesn't yet care that that is simply part of life.  Maybe this is his age. I don't know.  What I do know is that he can go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds and that the intensity of his anger is so unsettling to me that I find it very hard to emotionally unhook from it enough to lay down a consequence.  Plus, as I mentioned, I don't like the idea of consequences.  So we have a problem.

Lately, in the event that the anger monster comes out, I sort of freak out.  What I mean by that is that I go to a black and white place of "I cannot have that kind of energy/negativity etc. etc. in the house and around the baby".  And when he is not able to cool off or calm down, which he most certainly is not when something is, for example, taken away, I panic.  And when I panic, I shut down.  And maybe I ask for help.  Help in the form of sending him to his grandma or dad's house.

This is my dirty little secret. My own source of shame, the emotion I spend my life trying to banish from the world.  The infection that becomes about my strength as a person and my beliefs about myself as a mother.  I try to listen to what it's telling me about what I want to change.  But it overtakes me.

The lessons we learn from changed lives are often not those we were expecting to learn.  I am trying to be patient with myself.  And to remind myself that my newest childspring is less than one month old.  That's not a lot of time to have figured out how to beautifully transverse the choppy waters of a new family dynamic.

So it's a work in progress.  Like everything.  Like figuring out how to pee while holding a baby.  Except harder.  I haven't nailed either one without the occasional problem.  But I'll keep trying.

17 Days Old

My son was born 17 days ago.  My son is 17 days old.  Before long his age will be noted by weeks, then months, then years.  But for now, only days.

Time has a strange way of changing when you have a new baby in your life.  Days and nights blend and blur, marked only by the punctuation of a hunger cry.  Right now those cries come every 1-3 hours, the longest stretch of silence being somewhere between 3 and 7, a time that I cannot, no matter how exhausted, seem to nap.

Days feel incredibly long and yet despite this, it is rare that I am able to complete even the smallest most innocuous task.  Going through the mail.  Putting one load of laundry away.

This is not a complaint.  Merely an observation.  And one that for some reason surprises me.  I don't feel tired all the time.  Nor am I sad.  I just feel slowed down.  Like I am moving through amber love infused molasses.

I can stare at my son for hours.  Perhaps this is where so much of my time is going.

When I hold him, which I am approximately 20 hours a day, I feel complete. When he is being held by another, usually his father, I feel a baby shaped hole in the curve of my torso.

This is what being the mother of a new life is like.  It is thick and slow and full and aching and sweet and light all at the same time.

I said in an earlier post that I hoped to retain a greater sense of self with this mothering experience than I did 12 years ago, when my first son was born.  And I believe I am.  Not because of anything I am doing or not doing but simply because I have a greater sense of self.  But I also am realizing that I would never, ever want to remain unchanged by such a profoundly life changing thing.  It is a gift to be granted such change and it seems appropriate that the shift in time, my increased vulnerability and susceptibility, would result in other such openings.  A tear in the fabric that so tightly wound me into myself.

In only 17 days I have learned some hard truths about myself, as life changing events are often wont to so enlighten us.  One is that I am terrified of conflict.  Anger is a emotion that, when I experience it in others, causes me to panic.  I don't know why this is and I dance between thinking that anger is toxic and thinking that anger, like any other emotion, is temporary and okay to witness just as long as damaging behavior is not part of it.  Another thing I have realized, along these lines but not exclusive to them, is that I am generally profoundly avoidant of things that make me uncomfortable.  Going through and purging contents from the boxes that have overtaken our basement.  Disciplining my older son when he breaks rules or is terribly disrespectful.

I had an inkling of these things before.  But now they stare me in the face and I feel the palpable urge to flea into a storybook otherworld in which I do not need to address them.  Even though I know they are steps on the path towards becoming an even better me.  And nothing motivates you more to be your best you than having a new child, who is yet to know the flawed and faulted you. The you that is lazy.  The you that is scared.

I don't say this to you to or to myself for pity or mercy.  I like who I am.  I am a good person, strong and skilled in my professional field, and I know that I am as loving and attentive of a mother as they come.  But I have before me now the gift of the potential for change, the time suspended in order for me to find it, and the reason to reach for it.   In this in-between world I am sleep deprived and soft and slow.  But I am hoping I have the strength to begin a journey that parallels the others branching out from, around, and beside me as well.