Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

So sweet

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Last night I got to babble like mad at two wonderful people I don’t see often enough. That was really awesome. I really enjoy listening to smart, educated people going off at great lengths about their passions. It gives me this strange feeling of pride when I realize that people that smart want to be friends with me. 😀

And today I was given a surprise by the mom-group I’ve been hanging out with. It’s a banner made out of construction paper with inspirational sayings for birth. Things like:
Blessed be this birth
Strong and gentle all the way to pushing!
Each wave brings me closer to having my baby in my arms
I can & I am!
I can do anything for one minute
Settling; Surrendering; Letting Go
Courage; Faith; Patience
Pain is a wave… I let it wash over me and then it is gone
My baby is big but my vagina is HUGE!

I feel quite blessed that these women have joined my life. 🙂 I hung it up over the birth tub and I keep looking at it and feeling a sort of vague hug. As an adult, and especially as a mother, I feel a very different need for the camaraderie of women. As a child and teenager I strongly preferred men/boys. I like this evolution process.

“false labor” can fuck off

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So I started having contractions a few days ago. The kind that hurt and take a lot of processing. It really didn’t help that kiddo’s position was suboptimal and I was getting to find out what is meant by ‘back labor’. Not.My.Favorite. So I had a few days of inconsistent, painful, breathe through them contractions. Uhm, they seem to have stopped again. WTF. I’m not thrilled about on again off again labor. Although I am thrilled that the baby rotated. Whoo yay acupressure.

But I guess I am back to waiting. The silver lining is that it’s only 7 days till Virgo. Maybe I will make it after all.

Privilege

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Privilege is one of my favorite words. I like looking at the ways in which people take for granted the good things in their life that just happen. Rarely I drop into the nighttime parenting/sleep issues area at MDC. I don’t go there much because I just can’t wrap my head around the problems. I think that a lot of my inability to grok what they are going through is because of my privilege in being a stay at home mom. My kid ‘slept through the night’ early because I learned how to stay asleep while she nursed all night long. My kid went to sleep when and where she wanted to and I didn’t particularly care if it was in bed at 7pm. I don’t particularly see the value in ensuring that my kid is in bed from 7pm-6am with no more than one night waking. I mean, I can see the help in that if you have older children who need to be functional during the day… but for a three month old? Enh, they sleep when they sleep.

Privilege is an interesting thing. If I had a whole bunch of older kids and/or I *had* to sleep during particular hours because I had a demanding job it would be a whole different matter when it comes to sleep. So yeah, I don’t volunteer my opinions on sleep much because boy-howdy do I have a lot of privilege in this area. 🙂

Shades of gray

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I have been spending a lot of time lately doing meta-thinking. I’m noticing how things have changed for me over the past ten years. I showed up at my first munch on August 7th (the one down in Santa Cruz) and my second munch–but my first Wednesday munch–on August 9th, 2000. That’s 10 years plus three days since I first met the group of people who changed my life. I met Tom at the second Saturday party after that Wednesday munch and we went on our first date on the 18th. It’s really kind of wild to think about. I’m somewhat horrified to reread some of the emails I wrote to the local mailing list at the time. (Dear God I was a nitwit–and I really needed some lessons in punctuation, spelling, and basic grammar. I guess I did learn something in the pursuit of that English degree.) I’m pretty grateful that people were willing to get to know me at all.

One of the most striking things to me about how I have changed is the ability to perceive shades of gray. I’m less convinced there is RIGHT answer to every question. I am way better about seeing how relationship structures that would not work for me are just fine and I don’t need to tell people to dump their partners just because I wouldn’t work well with their partners. (This isn’t a common thing–there were a few specific cases…) The parenting stuff is also going that way. Things were way more intense for me during Shanna’s pregnancy/first year than they are now. I’m mellowing out about topics way faster than I used to.

Differences

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I could totally be wrong about these impressions. My memory is never the sharpest and it is especially cloudy lately.

It is interesting to me how my mindset is different this pregnancy. I feel a lot more confident about the early parenting stuff so I just don’t need to do much research at this point. I keep doing my gradual stuff for Shanna’s development, but overall I don’t feel like there is much that is super pressing RIGHT NOW. So my mind is wandering a lot. I’m spending a lot more time thinking about sex (my lack of interest and how much that pisses me off); non-monogamy (both how that will work out in my life over time and how I feel about it as an abstract concept;, feminism (My Fault, I’m Female has been a big part of this); adoption/fostering issues (this is an ongoing thing in the back of my mind. I don’t know that I will ever go back to teaching, but it is still important to me that I do some kind of work with children at some point); how to balance this crunchy shit (I’m feeling more and more like the fanaticism approach just isn’t one that works for me); lots of time thinking about abuse stuff–a lot of this is because I have been hanging out in the Surviving Abuse forum on MDC a lot. Other people have very different experiences than me and that’s interesting. (Uhm, not interesting in a bad way, more like

I feel like there is a lot more ‘me’ in this pregnancy. I am not just in this haze of hormonal love for the fetus and obsessed with all things baby. I have everything I need for the homebirth (I uhhh didn’t actually get that far last time–oops). I feel like I have done sufficient preparation of the house for incoming child, but I’m not actually all that focused on it. I’m sick to death of being held back by pregnancy. I want to hurry up and get birth over with so I can move on with my life. I know the first few months will be challenging, but I can’t help but think that I will actually have way more energy than I do right now. I feel like Shanna will get out of the house more. That’ll be good.

I didn’t start looking at me as a separate entity until Shanna was over a year old. Then I started getting really antsy. I wonder if I will get the hormone rush with birth again and be completely immersed in “Mommy” being my whole world. I might not. If I don’t get that rush, am I going to feel more resentful of the extreme dependence early on? Hm. Interesting.

I’m going to sit over here and judge

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(See–I never said I would stop judging. I said I would work on not shaming. DIFFERENT)

My niece just posted on facebook about the $6,000 car she just bought. Well, I guess that means she won’t be moving out at the end of the summer. *sigh* If she doesn’t get the #$@# out of my sister’s house soon I sincerely doubt she will ever do anything with her life. If you spend all your time with drug addicts who STEAL MONEY AND FOOD FROM YOU then you really aren’t likely to ever have much. She has admitted just how difficult it is to study in that house because there are always people over partying till all hours of the night. I offered to give her the down payment on an apartment if she saved up enough money to have two months of living expenses in the bank so that she could get-the-fuck out. I have also offered to pay for her college education. I see the chances of that actually happening going down the drain rapidly. I feel very sad. 🙁

I don’t think you have to ‘turn out like me’ to have a good life. Far from it. I think that you need to not spend all your time around loser drug addicts who steal from you and destroy your belongings and future in order to have a good life.

Consumerism

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Shanna is starting to get to the point where she is asking me to buy her stuff other than food. (She has been asking for food stuff for a long time, but I really don’t have any issue with her constant requests for fruit. That’s a-ok in my book.)

This morning she was looking through the Hanna Andersson catalog. She asked for a couple of things in the catalog. I told her we could put it on her Christmas list. She thought that was a pretty awesome idea even after I clarified that stuff being on her Christmas list does not guarantee that she will be getting it. It’s a possibility not a promise.

This is slightly weird for me. My Christmas lists were treated as wholly irrelevant. My mom bought what was on sale. I didn’t get the stuff I wanted the most (beyond books–I did get the books I wanted most of the time) and I think I have that poor kid issue of, “Well my kids won’t have to suffer through the constant disappointment I did!” But uhm… I’m finding myself struggling with a balance. I also don’t want to do what so many poor kids turned middle class parents do–namely spoiling the shit out of my kids so they have a horrible entitlement complex. No thanks. I sincerely feel like one of the best things teaching did for me was show me the end result of a lot of parenting strategies and help me learn which ones to avoid. (Teaching 16/17 year olds was perfect.)

It’s hard for me because we totally could afford to just go buy her the like 5 things she currently wants. It wouldn’t be a blip in our budget. But… no. I need to find the happy medium there. She has plenty of stuff. Much of it hand-me-downs. She has really nice stuff by and large. And that’s good enough. She doesn’t need tons more stuff. I think it is going to be a long-term struggle for me to deal with my own baggage around stuff in a way that is healthy for her. There is nothing wrong with her saying, “Oh that’s neat; I would like to have that.” It is not a guilt trip on me that I should provide it. It’s not a demand. It’s a statement of fact–she thinks she would like to have it. It’s ok for her to think that. It’s also ok for me as the parent to say, “I can understand why you would like to have that, but I don’t think we will buy it right now.” That’s ok too. I am not being mean. I am not denying her in some terrible way. It’s ok for me to set these kinds of boundaries because she is not yet capable of doing it herself. It’s ok. Really.

Well, fuck.

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Thanks to facebook I now know that my mother is moving back to San Jose this week with help from my niece.

shit.shit.shit.shit.shit.

Anyone want to make a bet on how long before she starts contacting me to pressure me into letting her see the kids because they ‘deserve’ a relationship with her?

It’s up and it’s down

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Don’t like my current mood? Wait for it… 5…4…3…2…1… There. There’s a completely different one.

Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick I’d like to be able to have a consistent mood for more than half an hour. And I’d like to not feel horribly terribly depressed. And I’d like to not be so angry that I really and truly do seriously consider keying the asshole who parked next to me in such a way that I literally could not get into my vehicle. (Luckily there were more nimble non-pregnant people with me who could drive.) I was mellow for at least a little while yesterday. In between the intermittent temper tantrums and fuss.

I want my body back. I want my hormones to get off this fucking roller coaster. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I don’t know how I am going to handle four more weeks. 🙁 I’m at this place where I really need help (thank you Miss Jenny for once again rescuing me this pregnancy) but I’m pretty worried about fucking up friendships by asking for help right now because I’m pretty seriously not a nice person. (Jenny is being patient and all but she has the audacity to want to LEAVE THE COUNTRY on Tuesday. I’m going to be screwed.)

Just breathe. Just breathe.

Late pregnancy is not my friend

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I was up from 3:30 to 5:30 dealing various uhm physical complaints. Not my favorite. It really is good that I have my wonderful sunshine girl here to remind me of just how worthwhile the suffering is. I’ve been feeling extra schmoopy about Shanna lately even as I have zero energy to play with her and entertain her. I’m feeling some feelings about losing the ‘only’ experience. It has been so very wonderful to be able to just focus on her for the last two years. I’m feeling nervous about having to split my attention.

TBD is moving much less just lately. It’s pretty common for babies to calm down just before labor so I’m petting my belly and saying at least another week. (The birth tub doesn’t get here till next Monday.) 4 more days until I am technically eligible for a home birth. eeeeeek.

Noah is still the best boy ever. I am so so so so lucky to have him in my life. <3

Oh wait–maybe sexism is alive and well.

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By and large in my day-to-day life I don’t encounter much sexism. When guys in my immediate group say stupid things like, “I don’t think male privilege exists” I can kind of sort of almost understand where they are coming from enough to not whack them in the head with a large blunt object. Then I discover things like http://myfaultimfemale.wordpress.com. I think I need to take it off my blog reader because when I am just kind of going about my day I find it revolting, nauseating, and depressing that these stories just pop up. By and large I am spared this kind of shit. And I am aggressive enough that when someone tries I generally react violently and that’s the end of it. (Although there was my niece’s graduation where her father thought it was ok to rub my belly and talk in barely veiled ways about how hot pregnant chicks are. Maybe I’m not as immune as I think. Maybe I just accept this shit as part of life.)

It’s not PC in the slightest to say that I hate men, and it’s not even true. I love men. I love the interactions I have with sane, respectful, decent men. But I really resent the fact that having breasts means I am vulnerable to this kind of shit at any time. I’m not sure if I will be able to refrain from hitting the next man who tells me that male privilege doesn’t exist.

And most of the labs are back

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The pee test is ongoing. Joy.

The blood tests don’t indicate preeclampsia. Whoo! This is a good thing. Apparently some things are a little bit unusual and my midwife says she will be spending some quality time with a reference book trying to determine if they mean anything but she isn’t too concerned at this point.

ETA: the slightly weird stuff seems to boil down to ‘Yup. Yer pregnant.’ So completely all good. Yay for less nervousness.

Now if I could get this damn headache to go away.

(I now get to feel more comfortable shrugging off all the weird symptoms as probably Meniere’s related. Yay!)

So soon

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Other health weirdness aside (test results aren’t back yet) it’s kind of crazy to think that I’m only 9 days away from being ‘ok’ to home birth. It’s of course better to wait longer than that because I have 5 more weeks before my official due date. But I guess I should start thinking about the birth and how I want to set up for it and maybe install a car seat.

I’m trying to decide if I want to move Shanna’s play kitchen out to the garage and set up the birth tub in the kitchen again or if I want to set up the tub in the garage so that I have more space. There are many good and bad points to both locations.

I need to start gathering up birth supplies and get them into a coherent organization scheme so that I can show Noah the system and he can then help the midwives find things. I should stock up on stuff I want to have in the house during labor. (Juices, easy to digest foods)

Soon, soon, soon…

Yup, not doing this again.

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So this afternoon I need to go in to have liver testing stuff done and get a container for a 24 hour urine catch. Apparently I’ve been shrugging things off as no big deal that could actually be a big deal. Things like blurry vision with little spots of light dancing in my vision (I knew that some vision weirdness was semi-common during pregnancy). Severe sudden lower back pain (not crampy so I figured it was just a weird thing). Headache lasting multiple days that Tylenol won’t make go away (headaches are so common in my friends group that I don’t think that much of them). Mental confusion (isn’t everyone kind of batty when they are pregnant?). Major shoulder pain (I figured this was from sleeping on my side for months). Sudden nausea in the third trimester (I thought I was just unlucky). Stomach pain after not having a problem for months (different from my normal stomach acid pain–I can’t tell if I am hungry or full my stomach just aches like mad).

Hey, when you list all this out like this it looks kind of lame that I’ve been ignoring it. Well… it was always just one thing at a time and easy to ignore…

*sigh* I still have very good blood pressure (110/60) and my weight gain is still rather moderate (less than 12 pounds at 34 weeks) so I figured everything was all good. Guess not. Time to head off to the lab. 🙁

Pregnancy sucks so very much.

Thinking about judgment

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So everyone has times when their behavior doesn’t exactly match up with their stated positions/world views. It’s a normal thing. There are a few ways this can be dealt with. Someone can more or less subconsciously refuse to look at the discrepancy and continue on their merry hypocritical way–I think this is the majority reaction really; it is certainly the easiest. You can examine your world view more closely and decide that it no longer works for you and you should change it to align with your behavior. You can examine your behavior more closely and decide that it is inappropriate and you need to change it to align with your world view. Or, as Noah points out, you can look at your world view and behavior and decide they both kind of suck and change both. I think this last one is uncommon and maybe a bit drastic. 😉

This got really really long. Continue reading →

Oh yeah

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I got a new cell phone to replace my dying one and they couldn’t port my contacts. I am pretty unlikely to take the initiative to do it all by hand. If you have my phone number and you would like me to have yours this is a great time to send me a text message with your name. 🙂

ETA: I will not be responding to the text messages because we get a limited number. 🙂

This made my day

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(4:00:17 PM) friend: how you doing?
(4:00:55 PM) me: my nose is running like a faucet, I’m flippin hot (and not in any good way), if I stand up for more than about 3 minutes I’m super dizzy
(4:01:06 PM) friend: that sounds sick
(4:01:11 PM) me: But mostly I’m in good temper, which is rather surprising.
(4:01:29 PM) friend: you usually are whenever you’re doing what you think is right, and its hard

He went on from there, but that’s the bit that made me laugh in a cheerfully self-mocking way. 🙂

Activism (specifically: lactivism)

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When you tell someone else they should feel guilty, you are no longer dealing with guilt. You are dealing with shame. I believe that shaming people is wrong. Do I feel that every infant deserves a full-term breastfeeding experience because that is what is best for children? Yes. But I also feel that nursing is a dyad relationship. If the mother feels that her ability to adequately parent her child will be compromised because she will feel ill will, pain, hostility, resentment, etc towards her child then I am not sure it is actually in the best interests of the dyad to nurse. I feel it is sad when mothers don’t want to nurse, when they don’t even try. But a lot of why I feel that way is because I had a very easy experience breastfeeding.

I 100% believe that women should be encouraged with great vigor to give it a shot because even a couple of days of colustrum is better than nothing at all. But if a woman decides not to nurse… you know, I can’t see how me climbing on a bully pulpit and telling her that she sucks is helping anyone or anything.

People make me sad. Today, lactivists are at the top of the list of reasons I’m sad. Stop being such sanctimonious assholes.

A good day

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I spend most of my time on lj posting about being unhappy or talking about Shanna. That is totally not representative of my every day so uhm, here’s a post that is less depressing.

Today is a good day. I got a little bit of yard work done out front. It’s been bugging me so I’m glad I’ve gotten around to it. I scheduled house cleaning stuff for the next several months so that I can stop feeling bad about how little cleaning I do. (Noah [whom I do not spend nearly enough time talking up–he’s so fabulous] does most of the ‘picking up’ so our house isn’t too bad, but he doesn’t really like doing the deeper cleaning.) Currently it sucks for me to bend over and do it so we decided that three or four months of someone else cleaning our house was a Good Idea. The vast majority of this additional spending right now is coming out of the much larger than anticipated tax refund, so I am thanking my lucky stars that we got it. I really and truly see the financial privilege I have these days and I feel so grateful that I have it. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure can do a lot of work towards making life easier so that you have less stress. That leads to increased happiness. So I thank anyone upstairs who is listening that my life is so easy at this point.

For all that I’m not a great pregnant person I am deeply grateful that this pregnancy is easier than Shanna’s. I’m super tired. I have a lot of random body discomfort. I’m cranky. But I haven’t puked once! I am not so completely listless that I am not functioning! I do manage to take Shanna out to play at least once a week and I’m arranging for her to have more opportunities than that with other people. I’m cranky with her, but she’s spectacular about telling me, “It’s not nice to yell at me.” Which really puts a fast halt to my temper tantrums. Having a two year old call me on my behavior is incredibly humbling in a good for me way. I really love having her.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the sexual assault stuff and I am feeling… better isn’t quite the word but less disturbed. I’m feeling more like I really have handled things in a way that is ultimately good for me. Of course I have done things poorly at times. Of course I have not always been in the best place right that minute. But overall I don’t feel like I am a terrible non-functioning crazy person. And sometimes good enough is good enough. 🙂

Mostly I had a really good weekend. I really love my family. I have a wonderful, supportive, amazing husband. I feel like I had the most perfect-for-me little girl possible. I like her so much. I’m rather excited about meeting kid 2.0. If Noah and I combined to make one kid this awesome, what will 2.0 be like? I strongly suspect that next kid will be very very different from Shanna. I base this on the differences in the pregnancy. This kid is active in a way that Shanna wasn’t. This makes me slightly nervous because of the potential differences in sleeping habits. Shanna has been an awesome sleeper since birth. But we’ll roll with it. Whatever happens is what is meant to happen. I think that I am nervous about having expectations this time. Before Shanna I had almost zero exposure to babies. I had no idea what to expect and then she was so easy. (Maybe my memory is already getting fuzzy… who knows.) Now I’ve had a kid so I have a bit more of the ‘I know about kids’ attitude. I’d be better off assuming that I know nothing again. 🙂

So, yeah. Life is plugging along. I have 6ish weeks to go. I’m nervous but looking forward to the birth. It will be a rather different experience this time. Shanna has expressed rather strongly that she wants to be at the birth so that’s going to be interesting. Luckily nipple stimulation is a big help because there is no way I will be able to keep her from nursing during labor. 😀 I’m really looking forward to tandem nursing for some weird, masochistic reason. Something about it just seems really… I don’t know… motherly? Like even if I feel like psychologically I am not always the best at mothering my body is doing GREAT at the physical parts! I can’t quite figure out why I am looking forward to it so much. Too many years on MDC. They have infected my brain. 😀

So yeah. It’s a good day after having a couple of other good days in a row. 🙂