Does This Make It All Worth It?

Parenting Lesson #1

When I was pregnant I frequently tried to visualize the little baby growing inside of me. I assumed he would have blue eyes, since both Steven and I have eyes of the blue/green genre, and I assumed he would have blonde hair, since both Steven and I were blonde as babies. I also pictured a little button nose, and while I knew that there would be some crying once he left the womb, I didn't think there would be all that much. I also just assumed he would breastfeed.

Now that he's closing in on his 4 week birthday, it's become apparent that all of the tube feeding and lactation-consultant-visiting is not going to make him into a baby who nurses. And it's occurred to me that perhaps this is my first lesson in parenting, writ large on my boobs: he's going to be who he's going to be. That is, even though I wanted a blond-haired, button-nosed nursing baby, I got a brown-haired, fat-nosed bottle-feeding one. From day one Milo is his own person, no matter what I may want him to be. An while the fight right now may be over boobies, in the future it will be about other things, like what clothes he will wear or what words might come out of his mouth or the fact that he wants to be an accountant and I want him to spend a year trekking in Mongolia.

Steven and I joke that Milo can be whatever he wants to be except a writer or an actor. We laugh about how acceptable professions include rocket scientist, neurosurgeon and chemical botanist. Because we know that ultimately when it comes to choosing what kind of person he will be, we won't really have that much say in the matter. And so far, we know that he's never going to be a breastfeeder. I just didn't realize he was going to start being his own person so soon.

Great Expectations

"Wow," I said. "Milo is really fascinated with the lights. He keeps staring at them."

"Yeah," said Steven. "Maybe he'll become an electrician."

New Lows In Sleep Deprivation

You know you've reached complete and utter exhaustion when you can't figure out how to operate the Diaper Dekor. For the first week or so after Milo's birth we shoved diapers into the mouth of the thing and then waited for it to do something magical, like seal up the diapers and spit them out like sausage links. Unfortunately we hadn't bought the diaper pail that does that. We'd bought one that looks all high tech and shit but doesn't do much at all.

I should probably have foreseen this moment a month ago when I bought the Diaper Dekor and discovered there was no plug for it. I had envisioned it being something more than, say, a garbage can, because it had the word 'diaper' in the name, after all, and come to think of it, it had a name in the first place. Normal garbage cans that don't do anything with your garbage don't have names.

And then there was that funky looking knob on the side of it that looked like it might trigger some sort of diaper sealing and removing process. But when I turned it nothing happened. Which was how I came to be on the Internet at 5 a.m. one morning trying to find directions for how to operate my diaper pail.

Turns out, the thing has a sharp blade-like object mounted on one side of the interior. You use the blade to cut off the plastic bag on the inside. Then -- here's the really high-tech part -- you tie a knot in the plastic bag and take out the dirty diapers. Almost like a real garbage can without a fancy name. I can't help but wonder if it would have taken me two weeks to figure this out if I were getting more than 3 hours of sleep a night.

Indications That I Might Be A Bad Mother

1. I keep forgetting the baby. The other day I came back from lunch with my father, put the baby all wrapped up in his car seat on the dining room table and went to the computer to check my email. About ten minutes later my father came into my office and pointed out that the baby was still sitting, all swaddled in assorted layers of fleece and down, in the car seat on the dining room table. And that it was about a million degrees in the apartment.

2. When the baby simultaneously poops and falls asleep I let him sleep in the poopy diaper because if I change him it'll wake him up and who wants him to be awake?

3. My cleaning lady felt compelled to point out that the baby wasn't dressed warmly enough.

4. I have decided, in lieu of sterilizing the eighty-seven thousand bottles we go through in a day, to simply rinse them out with the scalding hot water that, in a happy coincidence, shoots from our fuacets.

5. The baby peed in his own face last night. Technically this was not my fault, as it was in the middle of a diaper change. What was my fault was that I didn't notice until I touched his hair and it was wet.

6. It took me two weeks to realize that the baby is not self cleaning, and probably would need to be bathed.

7. Sometimes, like at 11pm when the baby has been up for six hours vaciallating between crying, being about to cry, and just having cried, I really wish he would just go away.

What I Wouldn't Give For A Hard Day At The Office

So I was checking in on my assistant the other day. I managed to sell one last project as I was in labor (I know, I know - I take anal-neurotic-over-acheiving to an entirely new level) and i wanted to see how she was doing on it. So I called her and we chatted for a bit and then she asked a totally obvious question.

"How's being a mother?"

I thought for a minute.

"It's a lot harder than being an Information Architect," I said, finally.

Dirty Little Secret

A few days ago I bought a burgundy nursing top. It has strips of material that criscross my body and pull down for easy boob access, sort of like a designer mummy costume. I also bought a new nursing bra, one with underwire support that will keep my currently pendulous breasts looking perky (as perky as a 38DD can look). I have a few packs of nursing pads on my night table and a tube of Lanisol cream (for nursing mothers, the tube reads in a comforting lilac script). And now, packed away in the back of the closet in the baby's room are my blue and white My Breast Friend nursing pillow and Dr. Sears's book on nursing. At first I packed them away because I couldn't bear to look at them. Then I took them out again to torture myself. And now they're back in the closet mostly because they're useless and make me feel bad. My dirty little secret? Milo won't nurse.

There are all kinds of reasons I could point to - the jaundice that kept him in the hospital for an extra two days, where I was told by the NICU nurses that my choices were to either give him a bottle, start producing more milk, or have him hooked up to an IV; the fact that he's now used to the bottle and screams when my breasts don't produce instant lunch; Milo's faulty tongue, which the lactation consultant says he uses improperly and needs to be retrained through finger feeding - but I'm not sure which reason is important or accurate or matters in the long run.

I'd always imagined that I would breastfeed. I pictured myself being one of those women who dot my neighborhood, the ones with their babies tucked neatly into maya wraps, casually popping out a breast over salads at the 2nd St. Cafe, offering junior a little suckle to tide him over until the big feeding after lunch. Of course, this has nothing to do with who I am in reality. For starters, I don't really know anyone in the neighborhood to meet me for lunch at the 2nd St. Cafe. And I have no plans to acquire a maya wrap. And part of me feels like this is a blessing in disguise - I get more sleep because formula-fed babies sleep longer, I can pump and Milo can get breast milk whenever he likes, not just when I'm around. Which means I can take the afternoon off and go shopping, or do some writing, or get a pedicure and not have to worry about whether he needs to eat (even though I worry anyway).

Yet I can't help but feel like I've lugged these breasts around in vain for all these years. Seems like if you've got 'em you might as well put 'em to work. But the amount of effort it would have taken to get him on the breast - the two hour finger feedings, the one hour sessions with the tube taped to my breast that would leave him screaming in anger for more, the mental exhaustion, the fact that I needed a good stiff drink after many feedings despite never having been much for alcohol, that my stomach would roll over and inside out each time he awoke with the thought of another feeding, and another feeding, and another feeding... at some point I had to take stock of what was really important.

"It's okay," the pediatrician said, eyeing me a bit pitifully as I sobbed in response to her question about whether I was breastfeeding. "Plenty of women don't or can't breastfeed and they have perfectly happy, healthy children."

"It's not that big of a deal," my father insisted as I cried to him over the phone. "Nobody is sick, nobody is dying. You have a wonderful kid. He just is bad at sucking. May that be his biggest problem in life."

"That's true," I sniffled. "I guess he can still grow up to be president."

I wanted to believe it, but some of my friends sounded taken aback when I admitted that I was thinking about giving up on breastfeeding. It was too early - I'd only been trying for 2 weeks. Everyone has problems with it, I should just try harder. My mother gasped in horror when, after witnessing me attempt to feed Milo with the tube, I eventually gave him a bottle of formula.

"Formula is poison," she said. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe it just seemed like she wanted to.

But the worst is the breastfeeding book, which makes me feel like Satan every time I open it.

"My baby is two days old and I have been advised to offer a bottle after each feeding in case I don't have enough milk. Is this okay?," a question in the book asks.

"No, it's not okay," the book replies flatly. "If you run into difficulties get help from a reliable source and solve the problems. Believe that you can make enough milk for your baby and you will."

Well what if your baby has jaundice and is likely to permanently damage his nervous system unless he gets something into his system and you aren't making milk yet. Then is it okay? What if after he comes home from the hospital for the second time he refuses to latch on and is rapidly losing weight. Then is it okay? What if you simply don't want to spend the next month of your life doing nothing but trying to get him to suck, because you are s elfish, horrible mother who also wants to participate in activities like, oh, I don't know, sleeping or eating lunch. Then is it okay?

Milo is getting some breast milk. Actually, mostly breast milk, because now instead of spending my time with a baby at my breast I am spending time with my new best friend, the Medela Pump In Style. Every three hours I hook myself up to it, prop my boobs on my knees and attempt to read the New Yorker while expressing what the breastfeeding book refers to as "liquid gold" into two plastic bottles.

Sometimes I forget that my sole purpose in these sessions is to squeeze nourishment for Milo out of a part of my body. Sometimes I think i am just sitting there reading the New Yorker, and I try to turn the page. This is always a mistake, as one of the suction cups usually unseals itself from my breast and breast milk leaks down my torso.

When I first used the pump i would listen to the motor running and it always sounded like it was saying wacko, wacko, wacko. Sometimes I still hear it whispering.

My friend Allison says that she knows someone who pumped exclusively for 6 months and it almost killed her. Such is the desire to do right by one's child. To give him all the goodness and truth that is supposedly sealed up in those little droplets of breast milk.

But here's the thing: I was breast fed until I was old enough to walk over to my mother and demand milk in two languages (we lived in Switzerland at the time). And I'm allergic to everything under the sun. I sneeze all the time. I can't eat eggs. For all intents and purposes, I've always thought myself to be a more sickly person than most of my formula-fed friends.

And still I try. When Milo started crying the other night as i was pumping, Steven shushed him and whispered into his ear, "Don't worry, Milo. Mommy's making dinner."

Milo's Birth Story - Part Two

By morning, around 7 or 8 am, the contractions got a bit closer together - somewhere around 3 minutes apart - and the pain increased significantly. At this point I kept thinking about the scene in Signs, the crap M. Night Shyamlan film with Joaquin Phoenix and Mel Gibson where Mel Gibson's wife gets pinned to a tree by a truck and is basically cut in half. That was what the pain was like. Except, truth be told, I wasn't really thinking about the scene in Signs. I was thinking about a parody of the scene in Scream 3, which we'd watched the night before, in which Charlie Sheen makes idiotic sexual gestures while a police officer attempts to tell him that his wife has been pinned to a tree by a truck (and he wants to know if she'll still be able to have sex).

"Why would you think of the parody of the scene instead of the actual scene?" Steven asked a few nights later when I told him I kept replaying that stupid Scream 3 scene in my head, and explained that the pain of my contractions had seemed, while I was in labor, to be on par with that of the pain of being cut in half by a truck.

Why? Because one is not a rational, thinking person in labor. One is a hurt, lowing animal. One is reduced to nothing but a uterus and a cervix and a few functioning brain cells. Some cells of which were thinking about traffic. I didn't want to be suffering through contractions while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. And so, even though at 9am we called the OB and finally spoke to my doctor who, upon hearing me go through a contraction, said she thought it was time we came back to the hospital, I insisted that we wait until 10am. To avoid rush hour.

And so at 10am we packed the food bag and the clothing bag and the pillow bag and my huge, moaning self back into a cab and off we went back to the hospital. So here's a weird thing about labor. In between contractions you are a totally normal, pain-free person. So you are writhing in pain one minute, and the next minute you're arguing with your husband and the cab driver about the best route to the hospital.

The cab driver, seeing rather quickly that I was in the throes of full on active labor, did not do what I feared he might and throw us out of the cab. Rather, he got excited.

"Do you want I go extra fast?" he asked in an accent that at some other point in time i might have tried to place but at that point could have cared less about.

Sure, we said. Go extra fast. He then proceeded to drive straight through two red lights.

"Not that fast!" Steven and I both shouted.

"There's the police," he said. "You want I try to get pulled over?"

Steven and I looked at each other and realized that he was hoping to get us a police escort to the hospital. Steven tried to explain that we weren't in that much of a hurry. Yes, I was in labor but it's not like the baby was about to be born in the car.

This time around things at the hospital went much faster. I was instantly whisked off to the triage room and checked. The OB on duty announced that I was dilated to 5 centimeters, at which point I was so happy I burst into tears, which seemed to freak her out a bit.

Someone asked if I wanted pain relief and there was not for one second a doubt in my mind as to what the answer was. I'd said, pre-labor, that I would play it by ear. I'd go as far as I could without medication, but I wasn't going to torture myself. And in my mind, 5 cm was the magic number. I'd just wanted to get to 5. And now, 28 hours into my labor, I'd made it and sweet relief would be mine, damn it.

Things happened quickly after that. A nurse made a failed attempt to get an IV started in my left arm, then successfully got one into my right arm. Cell phones rang. The anesthesiologist showed up and had me sign some papers and more cell phones rang and then I was making a C shape with my back so they could get the needle in and it was just like on Birth Day on Lifetime except this time it was me and not some random woman in Philadelphia and then the pain of the contractions started to fade but only on the left side and then they were adjusting the epidural and then all was quiet and I was trying to sleep.

And then my contractions slowed down. A few hours later someone came in to check my cervix and I was still at 5cm. My OB arrived and broke my water and we waited. And nothing changed. At which point it was time for Pitocin. I've seen this Birth Day episode before, I kept thinking. The one where the woman's labor completely stalls out and they have to give her a C-section. I don't want a C-section. Start, labor, start!

At 5pm my OB came in and checked me again. Miraculously, the Pitcoin had done the trick. I was at 9cm, and the OB thought it was time for me to start pushing. She took one of my legs and Steven took the other and they counted to ten as I pushed. I thought about how much I wanted this whole ordeal to be over and how unfair it would be if after 36 hours of labor it took me two hours to push the baby out and how I just wanted him out already for God's sake, and I pushed as hard as I could. Fifteen minutes later, Milo was born.

The OB plopped him up, hot and slimy, onto my now deflated belly and as I looked at him my first thought was, omigod, he has my father's nose. My second thought was that he didn't look anything like I'd been imagining he would. I'd thought he'd be familiar in some way, that because he'd been growing inside me for 9 months I would instantly recognize him. But I didn't. He was totally his own person, someone I couldn't possibly have anticipated or imagined. I also thought that I'd be overcome with emotion, that I'd cry or laugh or, I don't know, emote in some way. But mostly I just felt exhausted. Exhausted and scared with a baby lying on me.

Milo's Birth Story - Part One

This may only be of interest to pregnant women and med students, but I always liked reading them when pregnant, so here goes...

At 6:30am on Nov. 1st I woke up with what felt like some sort of intestinal distress. After lying in bed for a while it occured to me that the intestinal distress seemed to be coming and going every ten minutes or so, and perhaps I was actually in labor. I lay around in bed being happy about being in labor for a while, wondering if this was really it or not, nudged Steven on the other side of the bed and told him not to get too excited but I thought I might be having mild contractions, and then got up at around 8:00 or so and began puttering around the house.

A few hours later I told Steven it seemed like things might be a while, so he should just go off to school to teach his class. I spent the rest of the morning making lists of things for my mother to do, straightening up the apartment and generally feeling pleased with myself. I instant-messengered my father and told him I thought I might be having contractions. He thought perhaps I was being a bit nonchalant.

By midafternoon the contractions were strong enough that I had to sit up and start to take notice of some, so I started timing them. They were about 8 minutes apart at that point. By 4pm they were strong enough that I called Steven and told him I thought he should come home. Two hours later we had dinner - I couldn't eat much at that point, but figured i should try to get some sustenance - and decided to time some more contractions. They were 5 minutes apart.

Now, here's the thing: in all the birth classes they tell you to go to the hospital when the contractions are 5 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute, for an hour. They weren't lasting 1 minute at that point, closer to 30 or 45 seconds, but they were definitely 5 minutes apart. We waited another hour and they didn't seem to get any longer, although they did get more painful. I sat on my birth ball for a bit and Steven massaged my back and I breathed through the more painful ones. Still, I kept feeling like, is this it? This doesn't seem agonizing.

At around 6 or 7 Steven called the OB and told her what was going on. The doctor on call, not my OB, said we should come in to the hospital. It all seemed completely confusing. I was clearly in labor but the contractions just weren't that strong, and it seemed sort of early to go to the hospital. My understanding on when one goes to the hospital was when one couldn't possibly take another minute of the pain. And even though I'd already had 12 hours of labor, the pain wasn't beyond the realm of types of pain one might reasonably expect to experience in life. So we waited.

By 10pm the contractions were painful. Painful enough that I couldn't talk through them and had to concentrate on breathing. I never understood, pre-labor, what people meant when they said that at some point ht epain is great enough that you can't talk through it, but that's what happens. It gets intense enough that all you can do is think about the pain. You can form a thought but not a sentence. You lose any interest in communicating what you're thinking to anyone. So off we went to the hospital.

The second we got to the hospital I understood why people choose not to give birth in hospitals. At home I'd been laboring in relative comfort. The lights were low, I had my bed and my pillows and my purple Vitamin Water. At the hospital I was immediately asked to fill out forms, which I did between contractions, and then given a chair in a hallway to wait in while the triage room freed up.

In the mean time, we had made the mistake of calling our parents when we got in the cab to tell them we were on the way to the hospital. This meant that every five minutes either my cellphone or Steven's phone would ring with a parent or sibling on the other end demanding to know what was going on. And yet again, here's an instance where having divorced parents really sucks because for my parents every new piece of information we received had to be relayed not once but twice. So between my mother, father, brother, and Steven's parents the phones didn't stop. Were we at the hospital yet? Had we been admitted? How long would my labor take? When would the baby be born?

By 11pm we'd gotten intot he triage room and the OB on call checked me. I was 1 cm dilated. Or, in technical terms, nothing was happening with my lazy fucking cervix. I'd been in labor for 18 hours and my cervix had done nothing that might facilitate pushing a baby through it. And so they sent us home with the instructions to come back when something changes. Come back when something changes? Like what? What might change? There might suddenly be a baby's head sticking out somewhere? Then could I have my epidural?

And so we gathered up all our bags (the food bag stocked with Odwalla bars, peanut butter and crackers and Laughing Cow cheese, which we'd now taken to calling Hospital Cheese because Steven kept telling me I could eat it when we got to the hospital; the clothing bag filled with maternity clothes I'd grown out of in the hopes that I'd be able to wear them home, Steven's clothes and clothes for the baby; another bag with my extra long comfy pillow and assorted god knows what) and, dejected, took the elevator back down to the street.

After a brief comic interlude where Steven was unable to find a cab while I suffered through contractions on a street corner in the Financial District at midnight, we returned home. At which point my Night of Hell began. For the next ten hours I wandered around the apartment as my contractions got worse. Sometimes I sat on the birth ball, sometimes I lay in the bathtub for a bit, sometimes I lay down in bed, sitting up when a contraction hit to breathe through it. As the hours wore on I did less breathing and more moaning. Pre-labor I'd wondered whether I'd be a moaner. I've never been one to vocalize pain that much - I'm much more likely to lie in a corner in a ball - but this was a pain like I'd never known, and I groaned and moaned and cried my way through it.

Enter Milo

And then suddenly everything was different.