Tag Archives: Parenthood

This Postpartum Body

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

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I often joke about my uterus deserving a participation trophy: it tried, bless it, but it really wasn’t totally up to the task. My first child, though term, was so small that he was barely on the growth chart (he was, and is, developmentally fine – he was just small for gestational age). My second pregnancy lasted eleven weeks and one day. My third time, I made it to 31 weeksbefore delivering two babies, by dramatic emergency c section, whose combined weight was less than my first child.

I have stretch marks, but because all my children were so small, I don’t have the dramatic diastasis recti or saggy skin on my stomach that is the aftermath of a healthier twin pregnancy. I’ve mostly lost the weight I gained and am at the same weight now as when I first got pregnant. I don’t really have much to complain about, really.

Of course that’s not stopping me. I have recently stopped breastfeeding so the last hope I had of blaming the babies is over and I am coming to final, depressing terms with my body. This is what I’ve got. It works. I can run and jump and swim and dance, and I so grateful for that. But when I do any of those things, I shake and jiggle and flop, and that’s a little harder to appreciate.

I went to get fitted for a bra recently, because my shape has changed in my post-breastfeeding life. The woman assigned to do my fitting told me, with a sour face, that my breast tissue was wide, wrapping around my rib cage more than most women’s. And I wanted to snap ‘yes, I know, they’re pancakes. Now get me a damn bra that fits anyway!’

She brought me a few options, including a hilariously awful old-lady bra in hot pink (so bad I sent a pic to my sister with the caption ‘fml.’) In the end, though, I bought a sports/yoga bra and ran out of the shop; a different woman at the checkout said ‘oh these are brilliant – though of course you can’t wear them during the day’

And I wanted to weep with frustration. Even worse, I have worn it exclusively since – I don’t have a *better* option.

I had thought in the past that I might like to get plastic surgery. Thirty-four is too young to be done feeling happy with your body, and all the cardio in the world isn’t going to change the fact that I breastfed three kids. When I think about it now, I tell myself that as a mother of daughters I need to set an example, but really I’m just too cheap and pain-averse to do it, not to mention too lazy. And my husband thinks I’m being ridiculous, which is…good, I guess? He says ‘You don’t have teenager breasts. You’re not a teenager!’

In the last few days, my son has taken to saying ‘silly old mummy!’ – a phrase he learned from Winnie the Pooh. When I told him I didn’t feel old, he said that I was objectively old and I should get used to it (I paraphrase). Maybe my discomfort with my body is an outgrowth of the fact that I may not be objectively old but I am objectively middle-aged and that, well, sucks. I don’t want to be a teenager, but I don’t love watching my body deteriorate either.

I spent a lot of time wishing that I could have carried my girls longer: every extra day, we clawed back the chance of infant mortality or cognitive impairment. Extra baby weight or diastasis recti was a small price to pay for a diminishing chance of major developmental delays. My medical team was thrilled that we got to 31 weeks, but I still wish I could have done better, even a year later, when everything seems to have turned out fine. It doesn’t keep me up at night anymore, but if I could trade my physical presentation for my daughter’s health, obviously there’d be no choice. Since that is a given, I feel guilty that I have spent so much time in the last few months being frustrated with something I can’t change and wouldn’t want to anyway. If given the opportunity, I’d want exactly the kids I have and I’d want to breastfeed them again, and if pancake breasts are the price, well. That’s that, isn’t it?

BUT SERIOUSLY I wish I could have it both ways. Surely that’s not too much to ask.

This shit is hard.

12 Monday Mar 2018

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Before I had kids, I read a blog post about a woman who had three kids (singletons, its worth noting) and she talked about how intimidated she was by the prospect of taking all three out by herself. And I thought, in my infinite childfree wisdom, ‘why would you have three kids if you couldn’t cope with it?’

And then in the midst of the UK version of Snowmageddon last week (it snowed, like, a quarter of an inch. Everybody freak out), nursery was closed, I was home with three kids, and I just…couldn’t. In the end, a very kind friend brought her kids over because their nursery was closed too, and I had to admit that I couldn’t handle the prospect of hauling three kids out for a playdate at 4 pm. Or maybe, more broadly, I was kind of at my threshold, in terms of my ability to successfully parent three children at the same time.

Lately I’ve been making a real effort to parent more intensively, especially with the littles (I’m less worried about Theo. He had three years as an only kid). I’m trying to stay off my phone, verbalise more, focus on each girl individually, be a more present parent in general. And I’ve been proud of myself, because I’m succeeding. Bu I saw something on Facebook a couple months ago that really resonated with me. It was a meme that said ‘I’ve been dieting ALL DAY, am I skinny yet?!’

That’s how I feel about parenting babies. I can do a bang-up job for about thirty minutes at a time, and then what I want most in the world is to dick around on my phone. Or drink coffee in silence. Or fold laundry. I want to do anything but sing ‘zoom zoom we’re going to the moon’ for the 37th time that morning.

I also vividly remember watching ‘Master of None’ when I first brought the girls home (pre-Aziz Ansari sexual harassment drams). At one point in the show, the central character is feeling lovelorn and confused and he goes for a walk around New York. I saw him do that and thought ‘Efffffffff YOU! You just leave the house whenever you want. What’s that like?’

There is a reason that babies generally come in ones and parents usually come in twos (at least to start). The reason is: babies are a crap-ton of work, and multiple babies are more than double that. It is relentless and hard, and man oh man do I love my kids, but I would also love to see a little less of them.

So, to the mum of three on the internet whom I judged when I was pregnant, I apologise. I still think having three on purpose is kind of nuts, but I understand how great they are once they’re here, and I also understand how, some days, leaving the house just isn’t happening.

International Women’s Day!

08 Thursday Mar 2018

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No gender normative toys here!

When my first kid was born, a friend sent me a message that said ‘hurray for feminist boys!’

And that was the first time I’d thought about my feminist responsibility in really specific terms. I had birthed five pounds of feminist baby. This was happening.

As the big kid gets bigger, it is becoming more clear-cut, if not exactly easier. I have age-appropriate conversations with him about consent almost….constantly. When he says ‘don’t kiss me, mummy!’ I do my best to listen, and respond. And then, when he treats me like a climbing frame, I can remind him that I respect his body, and he needs to respect mine. I am confident this strategy will pay off eventually. Dear lord I hope it does.

There have been a few occasions where I have had to re-examine bits of my childhood I had been excited to share with my children. For example: Green Eggs and Ham: he said no! No means no! The lesson about trying new things seems less pertinent to the current #metoo moment than, ffs, leave the poor guy alone. Who wants to eat green ham? Can you blame him?

Or The Little Mermaid….have you ever thought about the lyrics to ‘Kiss the Girl’? In case you are less steeped in Disney than I am, here is a sample lyric:

Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
It’s possible she wants you too
There’s one way to ask her

So. That’s gross.

With the babies, it is harder. About a year ago, a friend told me about some friends of hers who had avoided using gendered pronouns with their child, a boy with a gender-neutral name. Everyone at the table scoffed a bit. One woman said ‘I mean. My child is a boy, so I’m not going to stop calling him one. If he decides at some point that he isn’t, well, I will deal with it then.’

I thought that seemed like a fair perspective. But then. For the next couple of days, I noted all the occasions I referred to my children by gender, and I was shocked. Spoiler alert: it was constant. Phrases like ‘clever boy,’ ‘brave boy,’ and ‘strong boy’ had permeated my vocabulary. I have since read that, as innocuous as that might seem, it reinforces gender boundaries for children, who figure their boyhood/girlhood must be essential, since adults refer to it all the time.

In the last few weeks I have made a real attempt to stop gendering my infant children. It is hard. I’m not 100% successful – Daphne is wearing a pink floral romper this morning. I chose it, I love it, I think she looks beautiful. My convictions only extend so far (Fiona is wearing gender neutral clothing, though, and she’s no less cute for it). I am not sure how sustainable it is, not least because they will self-identify as girls soon enough. It’s just – I try not to call them ‘the twins,’ though that’s a separate thing – and now I try not to call them ‘the girls.’ Calling them by their names is a six-syllable mouthful and calling them ‘Fi and D’ is twee and grating. It’s a work in progress.

None of this is the end of the world, of course. But I do think it’s important to begin as I mean to go on. So I want to set a tone, for myself as well as for my children. I want them to know that their parents are are feminists and I want them to be feminists too: I want a desire for gender equality completely baked into their psyche.

It has been a humbling experience. It has given me new respect for my mother, who seemed to do it effortlessly. Even more, it’s given me appreciation for the extent to which raising feminist kids is a two-parent endeavour, much as I hate to e reminded I don’t have a monopoly on the Feminist Perspective in our household. On one memorable occasion last year, my partner completely schooled me in the art of feminist parenting. Theo asked me about penises, and I told him that he and Daddy both had one; that men have penises and women had vaginas. Just as I was feeling a bit smug, my husband chimed in: ‘most men have penises and most women have vaginas,’ he said.

Mic drop, husband.

I don’t want to end my Women’s Day post with a fawning anecdote about my husband, so I will end here instead: I want to explain sexism to my children the same way I explained landline phones to my son last week. It is something that still exists, but is indisputably on its way out.

So this blog has an Instagram account now.

04 Sunday Mar 2018

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I love Instagram. It is my social media drug of choice. But I try to be judicious about how much I post because, you know, everyone has That One Person who is always clogging up your feed with pictures of their baby in every conceivable holiday getup. We don’t need to see your baby in a four-leaf clover onesie, alright? I got the gist after New Years, MLK Day, Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day. Just be cool, ffs.

I don’t want to be that person.

But I do kind of want to be internet famous.

It turns out I don’t really have the stamina – I started this blog in 2011, dropped it in in 2013, started again in 2017 and this is my first post in 2018 – but that also there is some sort of magic ingredient in monetizing your social media presence that I haven’t figured out. There’s one blog I read, which was part of my inspiration for returning to blogging, and its just her talking about her boring suburban life. Seriously. Kids, pets, house on a cul de sac and not much else. And yet I read it – along with thousands of other people. She’s wrangled free holidays out of it!

Anyway, I’m at it again. I started an Instagram account – @snacksandadventure – to match my mummy blog. This evening I’ve been going back through my photo archives and posting my favourites from the girls’ first year, which was kind of cathartic. I carried so much anxiety home with me from the hospital, and through that summer. I can’t remember if I’ve written about it before, but when Daphne was five weeks and six days old, she smiled. The entire week before that, I was a wreck. At one point I had her in my arms while I sobbed into her peach fuzz, whispering ‘I just want you to be ok!’

Going through the pictures and posting them on the internet was much more fun than actually living through it, for the most part. And since this Instagram feed is specifically public-facing, for people who want to see pictures of twins, I can post every day if I want to and I won’t piss anyone off.

But I also feel a little…well.  Greasy, maybe? I don’t know exactly what my goals are for this project, but I certainly wouldn’t hate it if I ended up with thousands of followers. Its not purely catharsis, or an online cache of the best pics I took in the last year.

So I’m grappling with the question of what is appropriate. The internet is full of mummy blogs, full of stories of NICU survivors and full of people peddling twinhood in one fashion or another (for example: @trendy_twincess is an actual Instagram account with 5,219 followers. The kids are gorgeous but I can’t even.) It wasn’t gross when I did a #thisgirlcan photo shoot while I was pregnant; I had no compunction about that, though you could argue I was monetizing my pregnancy. And it certainly doesn’t feel gross to suggest that being a parent has given me new skills that are applicable to the job market (just because our society doesn’t value caregiving doesn’t mean it hasn’t taught me a whole bunch of shit), or that I would take a job offered to me through a parent network. Buuuuut…I know there is something a little yucky about actually pursuing notoriety. Its gross if you do it on your own and its worse if you do it with your kids. I know because I follow celebrities and I judge them for their own ambition and judge them worse when they use their babies to bolster their own fame.

…

…

…

SO with all of that said, if you want to see a bunch of cute baby pics, check out @snacksandadventure on Instagram.

The Tiny Baby Blues

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

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I met a family last week who had an extremely premature baby. I had two extremely premature babies, but this baby was so premature that I was reduced to saying, essentially, ‘oh, shit, that’s an early baby.’

I have been thinking about that family a lot since. They arrived at the NICU – our NICU – a couple months after we left and stayed for a long time, though they are home now. But I keep feeling regret for them – not that they spent four months with a baby in the hospital, though that sure sucks a lot – but that they left the hospital without the resources that they would have had if things had gone more smoothly. Its hard to make friends with other parents when your experience diverged so sharply from everyone else’s so early, and its hard to settle into a rhythm as a new parent when you feel alienated from everyone else and their robust, healthy, oxygen-free newborns.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I did a birth-prep class. We had been warned that the content was not especially useful (it wasn’t), but that there was a lot of value in meeting your classmates – classes are organised by neighbourhood, and we live in an extremely fertile area, so our classmates lived around the corner, down the road, up the street – we were extremely geographically concentrated. When one of the babies was born early, the father sent an email to all of us saying how nice it was to meet everyone and he hoped to see us again soon sometime.

We had a good laugh about that at our fourth annual birth-prep group holiday in October. We saw each other almost every day all summer, and are still in regular contact with virtually everyone in the group, which has swelled (with second and, in our case, third children) to 32 people.

My group are outliers; most people don’t end up taking regular vacations with their parenting classmates. But most people do leave the hospital with a roughly shared experience of birth and new parenthood. Plus a baby. Most people leave the hospital and take their child with them.

For NICU families, it isn’t like that. I found it relatively easy to leave my daughters behind, not because I’m a callous witch, but because they were clearly…not finished. They were in incubators and they clearly needed to be. I found it harder at the end, when we were in sight of a finish line that never seemed to get any closer, and the girls looked and acted like babies instead of fetuses.

Still, from the moment they were born, I thought they were perfect. I wanted to tell people about my gorgeous twin daughters as much as any other new parent. When I was two weeks postpartum, I took my son to a birthday party and people asked how I was. It was only as I watched their eyes widen that I realised I had to adjust my rhetoric a little. ‘I just gave birth to tiny, perfect, extremely premature babies!’ isn’t exactly cocktail fodder. No one knew what to say. I skipped the next preschool party.

Of course there are families in the NICU who are going through something similar to what you’re experiencing. When people ask if I made friends in the NICU, I say ‘well – Facebook friends.’ I did meet people whose acquaintance I value, but none of them live within a twenty mile radius. Catchment areas for Category III (most intensive) NICUs can be huge; there are only a few in the UK. There are always families coming and going, and there is a hierarchy. One woman took weeks to warm up to me, presumably because her kid was having a rough go and she didn’t want to deal with another baby having an easier time than hers.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this family I met recently, who had four crummy months in the hospital only to find themselves starting from a different place than everyone else who has a baby the same age (actual or adjusted) after they got discharged. I’ve wondered what could be done to make it easier for them, and I’ve wondered what I could do without coming across as an overzealous weirdo. I haven’t come up with much so far.

 

 

I Hate Santa.

22 Friday Dec 2017

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My paternal grandmother invented the Elf on the Shelf about sixty years before you ever heard of it. She didn’t profit from it – but she created a household elf, McGiffiny, who would come to Shorewood, Wisconsin around Thanksgiving, spy on my dad and aunt and uncle, and have little tete-a-tetes with my grandmother about her children’s behaviour. To say she cultivated a belief in Santa would be an understatement. When my dad found out the whole thing was an adult fabrication – from a friend of his older brother’s – he felt duped and betrayed. And while he’s not exactly losing sleep over it at age 67, it was sufficiently unpleasant that he and my mother went out of their way never to endorse Santa mythology to me or to my sister.

When I was in first grade, I asked my mother where presents came from if Santa didn’t bring them. And she told me. I have been grateful since then that my parents never tried to bullshit me about Santa or about various other imaginary creatures – the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, etc.

Now that my son is old enough to understand the narrative about Santa, I appreciate more than ever the way my parents never endorsed the myth. Because it is a difficult fricking line to walk. This year, Santa has made appearances at nursery and my husband’s office do, and my son is a firm believer despite the fact that my husband and I have gone out of our way to avoid encouraging him.

And so we find ourselves hamstrung: when Theo met Santa last week, he looked completely star-struck. There is no doubt in his mind, despite the fact that he met two different Santas on two consecutive days, that the whole shebang is real. If, come the 25th, there aren’t presents from Santa under the tree, we will have to have a reckoning. But if there are, we are playing into this weird fantasy about a fat man who breaks into people’s houses every year that is perpetuated by adults for their own amusement. I know some people argue that its fun to believe, but I don’t think anyone enjoys learning that they have been lied to. Stop deceiving your children because you think its cute!

And McGiffiny notwithstanding, don’t even get me started on that damn elf on the shelf. Creepy AF.

Why I Need New Mum Friends

30 Friday Jun 2017

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A few weeks ago, I met up with some friends who have pre-schoolers and younger children for a Friday afternoon out. I pulled Theo out of nursery early, certain it would be a Grand Adventure, and schlepped one three-year-old and two twinfants to the Botanic Gardens.

Things immediately began to go awry. Moments inside the Gardens, Theo began nagging me to play video games on my phone. Then he asked to go to a different park. Then he licked the snacks the other parents had brought and put them back, declaring them ‘disGUZting!’ (but he ate all the raspberries, because of course he did). Then both girls started screaming and I had to tandem-feed them while yelling at my child not to trample all the rosemary varietals.

The whole event came to a head when the other two boys fell/jumped in the fountain. We ended up with two naked three-year-olds running laps around the centre of the gardens, with one ripping off his Pull-Up and waving it around his head like a helicopter and wiggling his hips at the spectators in the Victorian greenhouse. At that moment, with two sleeping babies and one fully clothed, dry child, I said ‘So I’m gonna go.’ I swooped up my spawn and headed for the door, feeling smug about the fact that I had somehow come out ahead despite the inauspicious beginning and – oh yeah – that whole two babies thing. But I was exhausted, and we had been there barely 90 minutes.

At that point, I realised I needed to make some new friends. I had an incredible baby group the first time around (which is how I have a posse of pre-school parents to hang out with now), but I don’t actually feel the need to take three kids on superfluous excursions far away from home, even if I get to hang out with the women who were so critical to my maternal homeostasis last time.

Thankfully there are tools available to me that didn’t exist three years ago. I downloaded two apps, Mush and Peanut, intended to help new mums connect (either for adult or child friendship — the apps are pretty agnostic as to their purpose). I never used dating apps, but Mush has what I imagine is a pretty standard format for traditional sites. Women (its all women) enter their age, location, age, basic info on their children, and a small bio. They choose from a selection of really cringey hashtags about you as a human and you as a parent, and you’re matched up with other people who live near you, have kids your age or, presumably (based on your hashtags) share your values as a parent. It is mesmerising.

You can filter for people near you, people with kids your age, etc., and then you can add friends and chat (or group chat) within the app. I live in a very fertile neighbourhood, but after about an hour, I had exhausted the possibilities. I added about 8 women as friends and called it a night.

That was about two weeks ago. Since then, I have gone on two friend dates through Mush. One women is an American expat (like I am) and lives just down the street from me. Her son is about a week older than my daughters, and they were in the same room of the NICU at the same time (though he was a NICU tourist – only there for a day). Its not clear to me that we will be besties, but she seemed cool, and we have a follow-up outing planned for later this week. The other date was similar – I liked her; we might hang out again; it wasn’t a total love connection. In both cases, the women lived in my neighbourhood and are people on whome I could presumably, at some point down the line, have a more casual relationship with – someone who could watch the girls in an emergency, or who might be available for spur-of-the-moment coffee.

Peanut, unfortunately, was a total bust. It is like Tinder in that it involves swiping, but I got way less visceral pleasure from it than I expected. I’ve barely opened it since my first foray.

As a friend said, one of the hard parts about mum-friending is that its like an awkward, alcohol-free cocktail party – at which you’re trying to figure out who you’d want to drink with if you had the opportunity. Mush doesn’t make the initial conversations any less awkward but, when I’m meeting up with other parents of infants, we are both clear on what we’re looking for: we want a village. I don’t think anyone is looking for their new bestie, but they want to feel like they’re part of a community, and a village that originates online is still a village.