A Weary Year

2016 almost perfectly encompassed a year of babyhood. I started the year pregnant and exhausted, just two weeks out from giving birth. I wasn't expecting Nadia to come early; from the beginning I felt like I couldn't catch up, she was growing so quickly. I wanted to appreciate these last baby moments, to not wish away my time with a toddler and kindergartener. I chose “moment” as my word for the year because I didn't want to rush through; I wanted to stop and notice the little moments.

I knew this year would be challenging, but somehow I hoped I would make this three child transition with grace and ease. I pictured myself calmly juggling their needs, taking it all in stride. I had already done two kids, surely one more shouldn't be that much more difficult.

Except that it was. I wasn't the mother that made life look easy, more the one that makes me people think, “Parenting sounds kinda miserable.” I've always been a fan of painting an honest picture, and I appreciate others who have been honest with me. Like all the ones who said three kids was stressful. I probably should have taken them seriously.

My journal this past year reads something like this, on repeat: “This is really hard. I am so tired. I am overwhelmed. Why can't I enjoy this? I am just so tired.”

After nearly a full year of “why is this so hard?” I finally recognized the other piece of the puzzle: postpartum depression. It seems obvious looking back. It's not my first experience with depression; you'd think I would recognize its familiar patterns. I guess it was a relief to realize it's not just that I'm really bad at this, that there was something more going on.

“Moment” seems like an ironic word choice for the year because looking back I don't remember a lot of moments. The year seems draped in a fog. Mostly I remember the feelings: weary, stressed, overwhelmed, irritated, discouraged.

I remember a lot of screaming – a crying baby, a tantruming toddler, a kindergartener always on full volume. I remember feeling like my head would explode. I remember losing my temper and feeling like a bad parent.  I remember the effort of just trying to get everyone through the day.  I remember lying in bed exhausted, knowing I would be awakened again in a couple of hours, night after night all year long.

That's not what I want to remember from this first year of my last baby. But as Nadia approaches her first birthday, I feel less sad at the passing of time and more relieved. Maybe she will be healthier. Maybe she will be more content. Maybe she will sleep. I don't want to wish away the time, but I'm also glad this year is over.

I know the screaming is not the full story. If I think hard, I can remember chubby baby cheeks and baby giggles. I remember Nadia crying and crying until she got me back. Then she cuddled her head against my shoulder, quietly breathing me in. She didn't care if I was being a success; she just wanted me.

I remember Juliana's pride at reading her first story. Even with all the interruptions and distractions, without a lot of fabulously inspired activities, she is learning. I think of her unflagging enthusiasm for life, which my lack of energy has never managed to destroy.

While I do remember a lot of screaming from our three year old, I also remember her sweet smile and bright, mischievous eyes. I remember the funny thing she said. I think of her crawling around on the floor and lavishing Nadia with somewhat aggressive love.

I remember Kevin taking the girls outside to play, putting in a load of laundry, or trying again to get the baby to sleep. It's not always easy being married to someone who is exhausted and depressed and easily irritated, but he has tried to be helpful and patient.

With time the fog will lift and I will look back on this year with more benevolence. I'd like to write this in retrospect, looking back on the good things I learned through difficulty, summing it up with a pretty picture. But right now I'm still in the middle of it. Most of life takes place in the messy space before tidy conclusions.

I know depression still has a bit of a stigma, and that's why I choose to be open about it. I have appreciated others who have been honest about their own struggles. There is always the risk of people discounting your story or giving advice to “just pray more.” We don't want to look as weak as we feel. We so much want to have it all together, but we all need to know it is okay to struggle. We all need to be reminded that we are not alone.

One Ordinary Moment

 “We should never even try to leave the house,” I think. Adalyn is at the marvelous age (3) when she suddenly thinks she can do whatever she wants. What she wants to do is color on her bed, not get ready to go. After forcibly taking her markers and coercing her into the other room, she stares blankly at her socks as if she has never seen such a thing before.

Juliana is remarkably ready, standing at the door, whine-crying about how long it is taking everyone and how her foot is itching so bad and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Nadia is half-dressed, crying on the floor as I run back to the kitchen to fill up water-bottles.

Boots, coats, hats and 20 minutes later we finally close the door behind us. On Tuesday nights we usually meet students for dinner in the cafeteria after Kevin's class. The third floor offers good tasting, cooked to order food, slightly more expensive than the other floors ($1.50). It is an easy opportunity to connect with students and a night without cooking. But still, sometimes the effort of getting three children out and fed seems ridiculous.

We arrive at the cafeteria, students exclaiming over the children as we climb the stairs. Kevin has ordered and is waiting with three students who are equally delighted to see the children. Nadia offers a half smile; Juliana and Adalyn look at them with shy suspicion. They ask Adalyn her age. She looks at them blankly.  “You tell them,” she mumbles to me. They ask Juliana to say something in Chinese. She finally tells them her name, under coercion.

We leave on our coats. Even though the cafeteria is technically heated, it is always freezing up here, due to the full wall of windows. These windows look out over the whole campus and (on clear days) the mountains beyond. Tonight, the sky is already darkening and all we see are the lights flooding the basketball and tennis courts below.

I start doling out bowls and kid chopsticks and water-bottles and noodles. The girls notice these are not exactly the same kind of noodles they usually get, ergo obviously gross and weird. They are unusually long noodles, and on the journey from bowl to mouth, half end up on the not quite clean table. Adalyn keeps choking on every other bite and Juliana complains that she wants a hot dog.

Kevin balances Nadia on one knee, feeding her with one hand and wielding chopsticks with the other. He talks to the students in between doling out bites. I sit down and take two bites of my eggplant and chicken when Adalyn decides she needs to go potty. I take her to the other end of the cafeteria where she checks out each stall deciding which squattie-potty is calling her name.

We return and douse with hand cleaner. I'm certainly not a germaphobe, but a Chinese public bathroom will definitely send you searching for the Purell. In between bites and helping with noodles and feeding a sleepy baby, we find out that two of the three students are twins! Not with each other – one girl's twin also attends our university, where they routinely confuse classmates who see them around campus.

By this point, it is late enough that most students have already cleared out.

Ten minutes later, Adalyn decides she needs to go potty again. As we head across the cafeteria once more, Juliana comes running behind yelling, “WAIT FOR ME! I'M COMING TOO!” The cafeteria workers, waiting behind their food stall windows, are not at all sad to see us traipse through again. They call to the girls, who ignore them. Back to the smelly bathroom to help a small child balance over a large hole and try to convince her not to touch anything. She manages to touch everything.

We parade back across the cafeteria expanse, students turning in their seats to watch. Adalyn runs off to crawl under tables and watch TV. Juliana runs after to call her back. I sit down to eat cold rice remains. “This is not worth it,” I think. “Life with children is ridiculous.”

Suddenly we hear a yell from across the cafeteria. Juliana comes running, waving something in her hand.

“IT CAME OUT!! IT CAME OUT!!”

We know exactly what she was talking about; her very first loose tooth, stubbornly hanging on for two weeks. Juliana bounces around, ecstatic. She proudly shows off the hole in her mouth, and the tooth, and the little bit of blood, to us and the students.

“In China,” they say, “You throw your tooth on top of the roof so you (or your tooth?) will grow up faster.”

I still remember losing my first tooth (sitting in church, entertaining myself with hours of wiggling). How strange to think that Juliana will likely remember as well – this moment on the third floor of a Chinese cafeteria. This ordinary moment, which was achieved with so much effort and inconvenience. I'm sure she thinks it was worth it.

All It Contains

My life seems smaller these days, and in some ways it is. There are days when I don't leave the confines of this apartment. I rarely venture outside this two mile radius, because who has time for that (but then life in China was meant to be lived locally). “I don't teach” - I say this often and it's not actually true, but it's true that I have no real job that involves dressing up and having a title and getting a paycheck.

We have students over so much less often than in our pre-children days. I rarely go out after bedtime. I read a lot, holding a baby in the dark, but it has taken me over 9 months to get through the last season of Gilmore Girls.

I have shared my body, through pregnancy or nursing, for 6.5 of the past 7 years. I sleep in two hour segments, if I'm lucky. I never finish anything before having to start it over again. I must remind myself some days I am in fact, a separate entity, a person in my own right.

But actually my life is not smaller; it has just shifted. My days are arguably fuller than ever before. I wash and chop and cook and puree and freeze vegetables. I feed them to baby and then clean up her and her tray and the table and floor and sometimes myself. I nurse. I cook dinner for the sake of my family and bake brownies for the sake of myself.

I don't have a salaried position, but I teach how to read the consonant blends and how to solve word problems. I plan simple lessons that will keep the attention of small, restless bodies.

I do a dozen loads of laundry a week. I puzzle over grease stains and spinach spit up and coal dust and ink. I memorize the view from my laundry porch as I plan how to fit all the clothes that need to dry, and I curse silently over 20 mismatched, inside-out socks. I rotate clothes already outgrown since last month and prepare for a new season of jackets and gloves. I search the internet for a bigger size of winter boots and pants without holes in the knee.

I calm a million tantrums and hand out ice for a million hurts, real and imagined. I wipe and dress and brush and redress. I find toys and put away toys and get down toys and secretly throw away toys. I clean and I clean and I clean and wonder how it can still be so messy.

I talk to students in between doling out bites of food and answering insistent questions. I invite students to take part in the noisy chaos of our home. They marvel at the way we play with our children and wonder at this strange idea of a mother who doesn't go to work. I send the kids off so I can talk with students about deeper things, some brief focused time in between nap time and nursing and making dinner.

My brain seems to work slower these days - something about sleep deprivation and missing brain cells. And yet it is constantly planning for the day, heading off the next conflict, scanning the floor for choking hazards, calculating the days since the last bath, problem solving the latest discipline issue, and imagining all the possible ways my children could die (fall down stairs, run in front of car, choke on candy, fall on head...).

I stop to read a picture book. I kiss those chubby cheeks, still so soft from sleep. I watch another Frozen dance performance. I admire a bristle-block building. I make up a knock-knock joke. I examine a tooth that is just a bit looser than this morning. I answer questions about life and death and war and butterflies and My Little Ponies. I watch and wait for the giggles, the shining eyes, the silly faces, the outreached arms.

My life is smaller, compared to the outside world, compared to the scope of what it used to encompass. But my life is deeper, in this small space that is filled to bursting. It bursts through the 8 or 10 or 12 working hours and spills onto all 24. It floods the weekends and holidays. It fills my body and my mind and my heart. This house encompasses whole worlds.

This is my pasture, and I struggle to rest within its boundaries. This is my sphere of influence, and I bend beneath the holy weight of all that means, the depth of impact I will have on these lives so closely tied to my own. I join in the ancient rhythm of feeding and clothing and caring for those who cannot care for themselves.

One day, gradually, the space of my life will expand again, no longer measured by hours between nursing, by nap times and loads of laundry. Perhaps I will put on professional clothes and stand at the front of a class. Maybe I will spend full days away from my children, or they will spend full days away from me. Perhaps I will send them off to college, or I will send myself off to get another masters degree. The world is still open, full of possibilities.

But for now I will look inward. This is a season, and in this season I will live small. But I will live deeply.

Autumn Pause

Nadia is taking a rare long nap, the 2 hour kind that only happen when I am planning to go somewhere. I need to buy some more bread for lunch, to support our daily PB&J habit. Our ayi is at our home this morning, so I decide to just take the girls. After a few rounds of “put your socks on or else,” we head down the stairs.

The sky is gray – not “factory town” gray but “blustery autumn” gray. Despite the absence of any visible sun, the girls don pink Hello Kitty and racer flame sunglasses. We have good sandwich bread available at our nearby campus shop, so the girls climb on scooters and balance bikes to ride through campus.

People watch us everywhere we go, something I almost forget about it has become so normal. Students kindly dodge out of the way of swerving children with cries of “How cute! The little foreign dolls!” When we walk in the store the shop ladies and shopping students all smile indulgently. They no longer blink when we pile 5 packages of bread onto the counter, (about the equivalent of one loaf). They already know the crazy foreigners apparently live on bread alone.

We need to get back home, but the girls want to stop in the little copse of trees to find some leaves. I often hurry them along, driven by my own relentless internal clock, but today we pause. Maybe it is the crispness in the wind, or the autumn sky, or the sight of yellowing leaves, but I want to stop and soak in this moment when I am actually enjoying life instead of slogging through it.

We delight in yellow leaves in perfect heart shape and shudder at strange wiggly mushrooms. The girls fill the scooter basket with leaves and dandelions. Just as the wind blows the sun clear in the sky we walk and scooter and bike back home.

Nadia has just woken up from her nap and greets us with sleepy eyes. Adalyn grabs her hands and makes silly faces. Juliana finds a play milk bottle for the flowers and sits down to make leaf rubbings. I settle in to nurse Nadia. For this moment, no one is whining or screaming. The world pauses to appreciate the first tastes of Autumn.

On Not Sleeping and Keeping the Night Watch

 I heard once that babies could sleep through the night from a few months old, and before I had babies I thought that meant babies did sleep through the night from a few months old. I also was under the impression that once babies started sleeping obviously they kept sleeping, and that surely no preschooler/kindergartener/elementary school child would still have trouble waking up during the night.

Let us pause to laugh at my naivety.

Enter Juliana. That child did not sleep. It was a struggle to get her to sleep every single time. She popped awake at the slightest provocation (like if you breathed too hard). She woke up a ridiculous number of times a night and thought 3am was a great time for a party. She wouldn't nap unless we held her. For like, forever. She first slept through the night at a year old, and that was very short lived. Soon we once again up with her for an hour or two every night. Around 18 months she finally started sleeping consistently.

Adalyn was our sleeper. I remember setting her down, patting her gently for 30 seconds, and she was out. At two months old she was routinely sleeping 6-7 hours at a time. She had her regressions, but overall everything just came easier to her. Let the record show it's not just me; I really did have one good sleeper.

When Nadia was born I had pretty realistic expectations. I also felt pretty confident that I wouldn't have another sleeper as bad as Juliana. That just wouldn't be fair, and everyone knows that life is fair.

Nadia started out like your average newborn. Around 3 months she even had a brief spell of 5 hour stretches. Then that 4 month sleep regression hit and she never got over it. For most of the past 5 months, she has been waking up every 2 hours. Sometimes she'll sleep for 3 hours (not recently) often for 1 hour (recently), but there hasn't been any improvement.

It's not that we haven't tried. By 4.5 months, when the whole regression thing didn't seem to be going anywhere, I pulled out my No Cry Sleep Solution book and started going through the various ideas. Nadia kept getting sick, and that didn't help our progress, but I thought surely if we kept working at it we'd see results. We finally got in a full month of working hard on sleep...and it had only gotten worse. I have tried co-sleeping. I like the idea a lot, but practically it hasn't worked well for us right now. Nadia is restless; I sleep fitfully and wake up with a sore back.

I was barely functional and starting to lose the will to live, so at 7+ months we decided to try “cry it out.” I was adamantly, ethically opposed to CIO when Juliana was a baby. I have mellowed on most of my stances since then, but I still don't like leaving a baby to cry. I think there is a reason it feels so unnatural. But I felt like it was the right decision at the time, as what was going on obviously wasn't working.

I still nursed Nadia once a night, but the other times Kevin went in to her. I wasn't even expecting her to sleep through the night – I was just hoping to get to something more workable. But after more than two weeks, Nadia was still either waking up frequently or having a long crying spell. I thought the point of CIO was that they cry and then they start sleeping and stop crying every night. That wasn't happening. As soon as we quit, Nadia went back to waking up every two hours.

So I quit trying. I'm out of plans, and even if I had plans, I'd be too tired to implement them. Do you know how hard it is to be disciplined and think clearly at 3am when you've already been woken up 2-3 times? I have stopped expecting it to get better because it doesn't. I nurse Nadia back to sleep because that's the easiest, and not nursing her back to sleep was hard and took a long time and didn't actually help.

For now, I will be tired. Fortunately I have long since forgotten what it's like to get decent sleep so I don't quite know what I'm missing, except a fair number of brain cells. But in the tiredness I have a choice. I can either be bitter and frustrated and complain all the time (which I do sometimes), or I can accept it. I can recognize that I have survived the past five months and I'll probably continue to survive.

A friend recently brought up an idea from a book she was reading about viewing these night wakings as “calls to worship.” (If anyone else said something all spiritual like this, I would not take it well, but this friend is a mom to five little ones and has had her fair share of poor sleepers. She hasn't just been there; she is there – and that makes all the difference.) What if being up all night with your baby is actually a form of worship? A keeping of the night watch?

It certainly isn't a natural response. It's easily a drudgery to get through, bleery eyed and barely awake. It's easy to resent the sleeping household (the whole world is sleeping except me!), to resent those other people with the babies who sleep (where did they get them??). It's easy to long for this stage to be over and for Sleeping Through the Night to commence. It requires refocusing every single time. Every hour or two, all night long.

But when I stop complaining, I realize this is an invitation to communion. In the quiet of the night, this is a holy place. I may not have a lot of brain function, but I can consciously turn my heart toward God. I can choose to worship, to meditate, to offer a sacrifice of praise. In the midst of physical exhaustion, I can believe that I will find rest for my soul. There remains a rest that only he can give. If I choose to receive it -- There is grace for the night, joy in the morning, and strength for the day.

Related Posts

• Office of the Night Watch: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/night-watch-nursing

They say the church fathers gave us fixed-hour prayer, but now I know the church mothers marked sacred time long before these hours had names like lauds, sext, vespers, compline, matins, and the office of the night watch. Mamas have been keeping watch for as long as God has cooed and whimpered and shrieked through a baby’s tiny lungs every hour…every two hours…or, if you’re lucky, every three.

• Spiritual Practices with Newborns: http://www.motheringspirit.com/2014/06/spiritual-practices-with-newborns-a-new-series/

In those hazy hours before dawn, I think about the practices of caring for a baby. How simple, yet how laborious they can be. How feeding, diapering, and comforting a newborn fill every hour of every day...I’ve been thinking about how these simple acts can be spiritual practices.

• The Nightwatch: http://sarahbessey.com/the-nightwatch/

But then here it is: hiding in plain sight, an altar. I’m standing sentry and holding vigil for her. It feels like I have become the answer because I have no answers and so I am free to simply show up both during the night for the baby and even as I am now during the day. It feels like a holy act to lift one crying and cold baby up out of her darkness and hold her to my body, to still the cries of at least one soul.

Meditations for the Night Watch

Jesus Christ, Son of God,

Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Be still and know that I am God.

In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.

.

You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

You will find rest for your soul.

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

One Word 2016: Moment

It's not even the end of February and I've already had a baby and written about my word for the year. So yeah, I'm pretty on top of things.

Life with a newborn is all about the present moment. Nothing can really be planned - as soon as you sit down to eat or lie down to sleep, baby is suddenly ravenously hungry. For her there is no future. Either she is nursing or starving. She is cuddled with mama or she is unfathomably alone.

The needs of a two year old are less constant but nearly as changeable. One moment she is giving sweet kisses and the next she is screaming bloody bedtime murder because she wants her blanket on but doesn't want her blanket on and it's the wrong person doing it in the wrong way. There will be moments of silliness and toddler slyness and far too many moments of potty training and running away screaming and then suddenly one day Baby Addie isn't even a toddler anymore, she's a threenager (cue ominous music).

It's so easy to get tied up in the minutes of the day. Minutes of sleep and sleeplessness. Minutes til everyone needs shoes on walking out the door. Minutes until the next nursing, until dinner is supposed to be ready, and how many minutes will this tantrum last? Minutes til bedtime and not nearly enough minutes until morning.  This year will be filled with a lot of loud, in your face, strain your patience, labor intense minutes. I won't treasure every minute. Some minutes are just not that good.

The minutes can go by slowly, in the middle of the night, or in the third hour of nursing, but the moments speed fast. Baby squeaks and curled frog legs turn to searching eyes and first flashing smiles. When I look back I want to remember the floppiness of a satisfied sleeping baby.  I want to notice the  toddler's mischievous grin as she wraps arms around my neck, I want to appreciate the dancing five year old yet to discover self-consciousness. 

As this our presumably last baby already moves through new stages, I realize how brief this season of life really is.  I don't want to rush through or begrudge this season.  But in the midst of it all, it can be hard to see beyond. My life looks to be an endless procession of one handed tasks and days divided by a series of catnaps. Any non-mothering dreams will stay on the back shelf. I will be quietly buried under a pile of laundry.

I want to remember that these moments are important. When I am accomplishing nothing and haven't made it outside the apartment because it would take five hours to get everyone ready, when I have been doing and saying the same things over and over with no measurable progress, I want to remember that these days still matter.

These are the moments of nourishing my baby and teaching her to trust. These are the moments of sternness, of gentleness, of silliness - of letting my middle child know she is seen and not forgotten. These are the moments of teaching my oldest how to read and to love reading, of helping her adjust to changes at school and loneliness over losing her classmate-best friend. These moments shape lives.