Little Waves

This morning I could hear Charlotte amusing herself in her crib for quite a long time this morning. Usually she calls out for us within 5 minutes of waking up. When I peeked in on her, she was just laying there, playing with her own hands and wiggling her fingers, and talking quietly to herself in baby babble - even while her pacifier was still in her mouth.

When she noticed me she grinned, and her whole body writhed with excitement, while I sang the Good Morning Song* to her.

Charlotte is very aware of her hands and understands the word. She’s only 7 1/2 months old, yet I can say to her “hands”, and she will reach out her hands toward mine. Then I grasp her tiny hands lightly in mine, and pull her up to a sitting position.

From a sitting position, I will lift her up into my arms, and as I do so, she pushes off with her feet, as if wanting to fly up as swiftly as possible.

*Good Morning Song:

Good morning to you
You live in a zoo
You look like a monkey
You smell like one too!

Since giving birth last November, I have been struggling to get fit again.  After spending nearly 11 years of my life inside a gym, the struggle has been out of boredom, not lack of motivation.  But it was like that before I got pregnant too.  A month before I got knocked up, I had been training with a personal trainer.

Since baby, hiring a personal trainer would be financially irresponsible.  So instead I’m getting myself out of the gym altogether and I am embarking on what is, for me, an entirely new paradigm of fitness.  I’ve started CrossFit training.

Before you can take CrossFit classes, you  have to take their intro class, called Elements.  In Elements you learn the basic CrossFit warm-up and all of the basic functional movements used in classes.

It was fun.  Some of it is relatively straight forward, some of the movements are complicated and take a lot of practice and coordination.

In fact, so complicated, that I flunked the CrossFit Elements 3 class. I had to retake it.  And after 4 Elements classes in 5 days, I was left nearly handicapped.

If I were any more sore, I’d need a wheelchair. Seriously, I can barely walk, sit, or stand - let alone do squats, med ball cleans, or kipping pull-ups.

What’s embarrassing about flunking is that’s it’s the CrossFit “Intro” Class. Like CrossFit 101. We’re just learning the basic moves and techniques. I haven’t even completed an actual CrossFit workout yet.

It’s fun, and very different from any other type of fitness regimine I’ve had before. I plan to stick with it. If I can pass the intro class, I might start with the women’s CrossFit training group. Maybe give boot camp a try too.

I can see it now. Spending the rest of this year working hard to regain my standard level of fitness, only to get pregnant again in ‘09 and flush it all down the drain.

Dave stayed up to watch the red wings the other night, but i was in bed by 10 p.m. I accidentally locked him out of the bedroom. Wow did I sleep great! Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep!

We’ve been living in our house for 3 years now, and I didn’t even know our bedroom door had a lock on it It’s just one of those handles that turns in to lock, there’s no button or latch or anything. Dave was kind enough to not wake me up (perhaps because I only got five hours sleep the night before) so he slept on the futon and got up to feed Charlotte at 5 a.m. Word. I should “accidentally” lock him out about once a week.

Yesterday Charlotte turned 7 months old. She has been sitting up by herself for a few weeks now, which is awesome for her, because she gets really frustrated by her immobility. She’s enjoying the control it gives her. We introduced her toy blocks to her last week and she was stoked. Spent nearly an hour gumming them and banging them together, and dumping them all out of the container. It’s really fun to watch her discover that there is a world around her.

The bumbo is back in her favor, so in the morning on Sunday I put her in the bumbo on the kitchen counter and gave her farberware spatulas to play with while I baked banana peanut butter bread. That was a treat for me, since I rarely get the opportunity to bake anymore. Then we spent most of the afternoon at the pool, because she still gets really bored at home after a while, and she loves being in the water (finally).

She even likes baths, finally. She hated baths for at least the first 5 months of her life.

She is still obsessed with Lulu, so when in doubt or whenever she gets fussy, we just call the dog, and she’s a happy camper again.

We’ve started stage 2 foods. She’s been digging the “Country Dinners” - the chicken and brown rice, and the beef, corn, and carrots, and the spinach and potatoes. Pears remain her favorite so far. She already has become somewhat functional using the spoon by herself, though she does miss her mouth frequently. The spoon to her still is a toy and not a utensil. I never get bored watching her eat, and the colossal mess it makes.

In the past week or so I’ve discovered that I am once again struggling with having Charlotte in day care. Only now it’s for a completely different reason than when she first started day care.

At first, of course, I was completely despondent about leaving my child to be cared for by other people. I felt as if I was paying someone else to do a job that I really wanted to be doing myself. I felt as if I was missing out on the most important thing in my life - the early years with my daughter. Charlotte was 14 weeks old when she started day care, and it felt like a part of my was dying. I struggled to get through every day at work, and would often leave my office early to go pick her up so we could hang out together for a few hours before she went to bed.

Luckily I never really worried about the quality of care she is getting at day care. I am so happy with her day care. The care givers are wonderful, happy, energetic, and experienced. They absolutely adore Charlotte and she is really very happy there.

But lately I’m starting to think that she’s a little too happy at day care.

Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and Charlotte’s day care was closed for Memorial Day. I was really looking forward to having her for three days in a row. While I’m happy with her day care, I still miss her all day every day while I’m at work and wish I could quit my job to stay home with her.

I really cherish our time together, but I also try to respect her need to stay on a schedule. She’s on a pretty tight schedule at day care, and we try to keep her on a similar schedule at home, since she seems happier when there is continuity between her days.

We got off to a good start. I picked her up earlier than usual on Friday, and we spent the hot afternoon splashing around together in the kiddie pool in our back yard. Saturday Dave and I took her with us while we went car shopping, we went out for an early dinner, and we played at home the rest of the day. She didn’t sleep that well Saturday night, and she got up very early on Sunday, so Sunday was a little rough. Charlotte was crabbier than usual, so after her afternoon nap, I took her out with me so Dave could have some time to himself.

Charlotte slept very poorly again Sunday night, and she was even fussier on Monday. Dave and I both struggled the whole day to keep her happy and entertained. We took her to the pool Sunday afternoon, which she enjoyed a lot, but otherwise it seemed as if nothing we did could make her content.

When this happens I become very despondent. Because I’m at work five days a week, I want our time together to be fun. I want to play with her and I want her to be happy.

The kick in the ass is this: She could not have seemed more thrilled and relieved to be back at day care on Tuesday. And the reports from day care are always the same - she is never fussy, plays happily by herself or with the other babies nearby, takes naps without incident, and is generally happy and content all day long.

It hurts a lot. It makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong, that my child is not as happy in my company as she in the company of her friends and care givers at day care.

It makes me feel foolish for giving up my exercise time, and happily relinquishing any time at all to myself so that I can pick her up early from day care and we can spend quality time together.

It makes me want to give up my Super Mom efforts to play with her and bond with her. I feel like I have been giving her 110% of myself, and despite this, she’s happier at day care.

Which leaves me only with the most mundane and tedious jobs of mothering: washing bottles, folding laundry, changing diapers, etc. While I pay someone else to bring out and enjoy the best in my daughter.

It’s frustrating and heartbreaking and, I admit, it makes me wonder if I’m going to be any good at motherhood afterall.

Dave forwarded me a link at CNN to an article explaining the paradox of maternal happiness. According to the article, mothers report being happier since they’ve had kids, yet child care does not rank that highly on their list of pleasureable activities.

“Kids do bring joy,” says Daniel Gilbert, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Harvard University and author of “Stumbling on Happiness.” “They bring transcendent moments that outweigh all the hard work. It’s just that children do not increase your average daily enjoyment.”

I agree with this statement completely. Unfortunately the article goes on to provide a somewhat glib list of 8 things you can do to be a happier mom.

I also think the article fails to explain the complexities happiness in relation to being a mother.

Dave and I often ask each other questions like, “Do you even remember what life was like before baby?” and “What the hell were we doing with our lives before her?”

In the first four to five months of her life, it was nearly impossible for me to remember what our lives were like before we had our daughter. It was easy to remember what we were doing then, but it seemed, in retrospect, so unimportant and meaningless. I was drowning in the joy of my baby girl. There were tears of frustration, for sure, but I never blamed my daughter for my frustration, but rather my own failure to adjust to a new life, the shock of just how suddenly everything in my world was so different.

Charlotte is coming up on 7 months old, and I’ve stopped crying about my failures, and I’m getting a little more sleep. I’m even starting to find ease in what has been the most difficult hurdle of all - having my child in day care.

So, now that some time has gone by and I can reflect back with a little bit of perspective, I ask myself, am I happier now than I was before our daughter came into our lives?

The answer is no.

I’m not happier, but I’m definitely not any less happy that I was before.

It’s the quality of the happiness, not the quantity, that is completely different.

Life before my daughter was a life of complete freedom. Dave and I did whatever we wanted to, whenever we wanted. Sure, we had responsibilities, but they were responsibilities that we had grown into over a period of time, that caused us very little stress. And aside from that, the rest of our time was ours. There was definitely a lot of happiness in that.

What we were doing with all that free time? We were having fun, for sure. We slept when we wanted to, ate when and where we wanted to. I cooked and baked, I exercised, I read, we watched movies, we enjoyed going out with friends, and traveling.

Our lives today barely resemble what they were then. Our time, mostly, is no longer our own. While we manage only a few moments to ourselves every day, we are happy slaves to parenthood. And it’s a lot of work. We still have leisure time, but incorporated into it is the work of having a baby with us wherever we go. The coordinating of naps and feeding schedules and diaper changes. The overwhelming challenge of keeping her happy and entertained.

But every step of the way in my daughter I find a joy that is much truer and greater than any joy I’ve experienced before. The work that I do is hard, tedious, and mostly thankless, but unlike the work that I do at my job, it’s work with meaning and with boundless rewards.

When Charlotte smiles or squeals or becomes curious about something new in her world, at each milestone she reaches, it is as if time stops and all that exists is that moment as I watch her grow and evolve into her own person. And I wouldn’t trade all the free time in the world for that.

It is so hard to listen to your baby cry.

Today is Charlotte’s very first Fussy Day. By this I mean she has been fussy most of the day, mostly due to lack of sleep. And I am lucky, because she’s 6 1/2 months old and I can honestly say that today is her very first all-day Fussy Day.

I don’t know why she’s not sleeping well all of a sudden. She woke up very early. Took a short morning nap. Her afternoon nap, which is usually two hours long, was interrupted by the doorbell after only one hour.

We took her to the pool to wear her out a little bit, since it had already been a long Fussy Day. She enjoyed her time at the pool immensely. After last weekend in Port Aransas, being in the water has become a major source of entertainment for her, for all of us. She sqeals and splashes with such delight. It is endlessly satisfying to watch her wonderment as she discovers and learns about the world around her. A few hours at the pool is all it took, and Charlotte fell asleep for a nap shortly after we pulled out of the parking lot.

Now it is well past an hour after her normal bed time, and I write this while she cries in her crib.

I’m not really the Cry It Out type of mom. It’s too difficult on me, on all of us. But she’s been inconsolable all day, and I don’t know why. She’s not sick, no fever, she’s not teething. Even if I were to go in there an pick her up, she’d still be fussy and whiny and it is likely she would simply cry as I held her like she did this afternoon after she was rudely awoken from her afternoon nap. Tonight, finally, we just put her down in her crib, hoping she’d go to sleep.

And typically she does, with little fanfare.

But not tonight.

Tonight she cries, alone in her crib.

It is gut wrenching for me. And for Dave. But truthfully, we don’t know what else to do, since she is not comforted by anything we can do.

I love this chid so much, it is beyond explanation. The love is so huge, it sometimes has a strangle hold around my neck and I feel as if I am choking on love, suffocating on it. And it causes me to hold on too tightly to just about everything else in my life.

It is an irony, to be stiff and stressed out on love.

I am learning to let go of things, bit by bit. Letting go, maybe that means letting her cry herself to sleep tonight, to provide comfort and security, but to also let her learn how to cope in her ever changing world.

I have to learn to let go, otherwise I fear I will turn into a controlling, freaked-out mother, which is not good for anyone.

The original plan for Mother’s Day weekend was to head down to Port Aransas for some much needed beach time. Instead the whole family got sick - Charlotte had an ear infection, I had walking pneumonia, and Dave had sinus issues. So instead we spent a quiet, low-key weekend at home.

Still, it was a special Mother’s Day because it was my first. Charlotte gave me a card and a smile, which was just what I wanted.

I can’t help but reflect on motherhood, and how much my daughter has changed my life. Insane love, joy. Since she was born, it feels as if a lot of my old self has died - or at least gone into hibernation. I have plunged myself into motherhood, into my family. She is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I can barely remember what life was like before her.

Motherhood also is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I think the depth of emotions surrounding having a baby is mostly what makes it so hard. I mean, she’s 6 months old now and we’re all getting some sleep, but still it’s so hard. The love, the worry, the mistakes, the learning, the laughs, the tears.

Before life seemed compartmentalized. One thing, then another. Get up. Go to work. Go to the gym or yoga. Make dinner. Read or watch TV. Call a friend. Drink a glass of wine.

Now Nothing is separate. It all blends into one giant thing. The bottle washing, dinner making, working full time, exercise, wine-drinking, it’s all jumbled up underneath the umbrella of motherhood, of my baby girl, my family. Somewhere inside of all of that is me, the new me, the wife, the mother, the person.