Labor Day Weekend – the Snooze Button Baby and the No Food Diet

Labor Day, holidays in general, and for that matter the difference between the week and the weekend, really have little or no meaning anymore. Time is marked more by things like – wow! we learned how to go to the grocery store with the baby! – than actual hours on the clock and days on the calendar. I do notice night and day though – night is when it’s dark and everything is so hard I just can’t go on, and day is when the sun is up, and I pray tonight might be better. But anyway, these two events happened sometime over Labor Day Weekend, I just can’t tell you when.

The first big event of the “weekend” was the Snooze Button Baby – the first of two incidents that solidly confirm I am NOT qualified to be a mom. I’m trying to make up for it by being extra paranoid about SIDS this week, but I guess we won’t know for 18 years or so if I did ok (or 35 years, or however long it takes this particular generation to grow up – oh wait, I’m 35 and I’m still not grown up – I guess we’ll never know).  Anyway, we’ve been using the baby monitor for a while now, mostly for naps, and mostly to practice and gain confidence before actually moving Calan into his own room and his crib. This “move” has created a lot of anxiety for me (oh, what hasn’t?) for a couple of reasons. One is that his room is down the hall in such a way that it is very hard to hear him from our bed, especially with the fans (yes, fans plural) running. They are for cooling and for white noise, to help us sleep (hahahaha). Here is the first point of this story where I fail as a mother. You see, I’m supposed to have this super-power mom hearing that allows moms to hear their infants’ tiniest peeps anywhere within a 50 mile radius and over the loudest sounds imaginable to man. Well, I didn’t get this, and I can’t hear our son wailing away through the walls, down the hall, and over the fans. Oh well, the monitor works great! And we figured out where to set the volume so that you only hear his sounds, not the sound of the monitor turning on and off, which we were worried would make it impossible to use for the long haul. Super! Yay! Well, the first night we used it during actual “sleep” hours, sometime after the second time I had to get up and check him, I basically passed out and the next time he cried I turned the switch to “off” and snooze buttoned my baby. Now, in the past, when I’ve had to wake up early and set an alarm clock, I’ve always had a tendency to hit the snooze button. I always remember having a valid reason for doing so – “I can put my hair up today and save ten minutes, the sleep is more important” or “I set the alarm early, so I have another ten minutes anyway” or (my favorite) “I don’t want to wake up Tyson, so I’m just going to shut this thing up as fast as possible, then I’ll sit up, turn it off properly, and sneak out of bed, and start my morning”. This is the reasoning I remember when I turned off the baby monitor – “I don’t want to wake up Tyson, so I’m just going to shut this thing up as fast as possible, then I’ll sit up, sneak out of bed, and attend to my baby”. Yeah, right. I also know, looking back on these snooze button episodes, that I always felt a sense of no control, no ability to stop myself from hitting the thing – like some kind of snooze button addiction. But the big difference between snooze buttons and baby monitors is that the snooze button goes off again within ten minutes. When you turn a baby monitor off, however, it stays off. So I don’t know how long our poor son cried, but eventually, Tyson woke me from my oblivious slumber to let me know that Calan was crying. Wearing earplugs, my husband (who, by virtue of being a guy, is supposed to be terrible at these “mothering” things) actually heard our baby when I did not. Well, at least one of us got the super-power mom hearing, and is a light sleeper, NOT prone to sleep deprivation-induced black-outs. I’ve been feeling guilty ever since.

To add to my guilt, the second bad-mom event of the week was my post-partum break-down number 349. Now, I’m lucky in that I’m not experiencing that horrible, lengthy, more severe post-partum depression. What I think I am experiencing, though, is just your basic human reaction to extreme stress, profound lack of sleep, and hormonal acrobatics. Most of the time I’m ok, but every few days, it all catches up with me, and I can only rebalance it all by crumbling into a blubbering heap on the floor, where I sob for a while, declare how unfit I am as a mom, beg for some relief, and walk away to take a shower while Tyson watches Calan. They may be dramatic, but at least these episodes are brief, and end within a couple of hours. Right now, I sort of feel like a volcano (but my cycle is about three days long, rather than thousands of years). Everything’s fine, then the pressure builds, you can start to see signs of the pressure (irritability, being overly-particular, no smiling), and finally, something happens that takes the pressure over the top. It’s usually something that in the daytime, after a solid four hours of sleep, would make me laugh – like the twentieth pee geyser in one diaper change. But when the pressure is at its highest, nothing is funny, and I blow. But afterward, and after the shower that always seems to wash away the madness, I feel like new, and I go on – usually to smile and laugh again within the hour. So, it’s not so bad, and at least it’s predictable. Anyway, onto the breakdown of the weekend. It was pretty normal, started like any other breakdown. But this weekend was the first time I brought up the very real possibility that our baby might be a little colicky (oh please God, no). We had had a particularly rough night, and were trying to figure out some new way to approach things. Tyson innocently made the mistake of mentioning the No Food Diet, recommend by our pediatrician for breast-feeding moms, to help ease the fussiness. Now, you must know two things. First, our pediatrician does not call this the No Food Diet, but he should. Second, I spent all nine months of my pregnancy nauseated, hyper-sensitive to food smells, and picky picky picky with food. And, just so you know, I’ve always been a healthy, hearty, non-picky eater, so this was new territory. Fortunately, the nausea was not the severe kind – I never threw up more than once or twice a day, and sometimes would go a week or so without throwing up at all. I also never became dehydrated, and was able to start gaining weight by mid-pregnancy – thanks to my Jamba Juice addiction (our baby was built with fruit). In fact, my pregnancy was very healthy, just also very uncomfortable. Even if you don’t throw up, there’s nothing quite like always feeling at least slightly sea-sick. Things got better, though, after some hypnotherapy, acupuncture, strategizing, and oh yes, time. The last month, in fact, was down-right tolerable. Anyway, all of this is to emphasize that when I gave birth, and the nausea button switched off, I was in heaven – well, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, but my relationship to food was heavenly – I liked food again! So when the doc handed me the No Food Diet, I wasn’t sure if I should laugh, cry, or ignore him. I chose to ignore him – our baby wasn’t overly fussy – yet – nothing unusual with his digestion, he’s just a newborn, really strong, and needs to be swaddled to be comfortable. At the time, I really believed this, and I still think it might be true, but he has gotten fussier, and he does make really strange growling noises while turning beet red often enough that I think it might be more than just a tough poo-poo. But, again, he’s only four weeks old – we hear these things are especially tough right now for everyone, and will start to get better after six weeks. So, I’m still not convinced he’s actually colicky – and the doc hasn’t used the word yet, so we have hope. Anyway, back to the No Food Diet. Here’s the list of “Foods to Avoid” that the doc handed me: oh wait, I don’t have that list because I hated it and shoved it somewhere where I wouldn’t have to look at it – not sure where that is . . . but I remember a lot of what’s on it. Eggs, dairy, beans, broccoli, cabbage, well, most super healthy vegetables (especially raw) that cause gas, peaches, nectarines, well, most fresh fruit actually,citrus, tomatoes, tomato-based foods, caffeine, and the list goes on. Basically, anything that “causes gas” or is acidic – which is most fresh and healthy food, especially plant-based – is a “Food to Avoid”. So, now that I have a normal appetite again, all I can eat are peanut-butter sandwiches and chicken and rice?? How in the world am I supposed to do this and be healthy and happy – oh, and keep up my milk supply? After my nine-month bout with nausea, this was really too much, so I disregarded. And when we were out of things to try over the weekend and Tyson brought up trying to adhere to maybe some of the doc’s suggestions, I broke down, and launched into a tantrum – how is that possible? How can I stand it? That’s not fair! I was a regular five-year-old. Poor Tyson, the things he’s had to put up with . . . but I recovered, and so did he, and so did Calan. But now, I have more guilt to add to my big casserole-size serving of guilt – I guess I won’t do anything for my child.

So, I can’t hear my child like a mom should, and I’m not willing to sacrifice my own sanity and happiness. But you know something, at the end of the day, if we decide that the best thing for him is the No Food Diet, then I’ll do it. I’m just not convinced it won’t do more harm than good – for both of us. We’ll see . . . As for the hearing thing, maybe it’s that leftover congestion from the ear infection I had back in June, maybe it’s just the profound loss of sleep, I’m not sure. But one thing I am sure of is that even though I feel deeply unfit to be a mom, I know intellectually that I’m doing ok, and more importantly, I love this kid with everything I have in me, and I love his daddy with everything I have in me. And I still believe – through all the post-partum madness, recovery, sleep deprivation, and loss of control of my own life – that these are the most important qualifications of a good mom. After I catch some zzz’s, maybe I’ll start to feel like a good mom:)