Last Firsts

This week, I celebrated my last baby’s first birthday. G is officially a one-year-old. No more telling people I have a baby at home.

I could cry at the drop of a hat thinking about how fast my kids are growing. The days are long but the years are short. It’s truly unfair, especially when they’re little and just so freakin’ adorable. I started writing this post on March 4th, so clearly I’ve been dreading this birthday milestone for a while.

Dreading and looking forward to it at the same time. Here I go again, a complex web of contradictions.

I am tearfully rocking my baby, I mean, my toddler to sleep because she will be ever so slightly heavier and older and more independent tomorrow. At the same time, I’m thinking about all the things I want to do with my life after she leaves the nest 17 years from now. I simultaneously want my freedom back and my children to stay in their preschool years forever.

I can’t believe a year ago we were bringing her home from the hospital. I can’t believe today, she’s walking and climbing and communicating. She’s drinking from a straw and prefers solids. I can’t believe that this is the year she’ll learn to talk, to run, and maybe move out of her crib. Tell me how the first year of a baby’s life makes sense. Seeing her grow from gremlin to a little girl in just 12 months is mind-boggling.

What’s also weird is that I don’t even remember Bub at this age. I had to look at photos and videos to remind myself, which made me terrified that I might someday soon forget what G is like at this very moment. Oh please let me remember her chubby cheeks, the sound of her babbling, her toddling to me with arms open wide. A big toothy grin on her face. I want to remember all of it.

Now I’m crying again.

Girl Mom

Before G was born, I falsely assumed that she would be more fond of Steve than me. Once she was born, I gave her every opportunity to bond with him. From the beginning, he was on duty most nights and took her out on his own during the day. Though I try not to use labels, I assumed G was going to be a “Daddy’s Girl”.

Much to my surprise, she wants nothing to do with him. At least, at this stage of her life.

I feel honored when she takes the bottle from Steve’s hand and gives it to me so I am the one who feeds her. My heart swells when she reaches for me, rushes to me, wants only me. I try to stifle my smile so as not to hurt Steve’s feelings when she pushes him away and fast-toddles into my arms.

I hope she and I have this close connection forever.

Because I don’t have a close relationship with my mother, I find myself thinking of people I know who have a special bond with theirs. How did they do it? How do I do the same with mine? How do I become the person she can call, no matter what? How do I not screw it up?

For now, I’m doing my best to simply be there for her - as much as I can. She is my second, but no longer my second choice. I love her just as much as her big brother but the love is different. Just as I love every person in my life differently. She is her own being. One I am loving getting to know.

They’re There

When I walked into my parents’ house the other day, I saw two large boxes of old photo albums near the front door. My mom said that they had been sitting in my grandparents’ basement for over a decade, collecting dust. When I told her she could digitize them, she said she didn’t have the time.

It made me wonder if someday, my zettabyte of personal photos would do the same. Sit in a dark cold datacenter, collecting digital dust. My children and grandchildren too busy to look through them.

That’s the blessing and curse of modern technology. On one hand, our cameras allow us to take thousands of photos and we can store them in perpetuity in the cloud. But, what for?

If you looked at my Google Photos today, you’d see a hundred photos of Bub eating cake on his first birthday, 30 photos of a random meal I had, a five-minute video of G eating oatmeal in her highchair. No one is going to look through all of this footage when I die. I don’t even know if I will look through all this footage while I’m alive.

There’s this pressure, perhaps from social media, that I have to take as many photos and videos of my children as possible, especially when they’re small. Gosh, the first few years - they grow up so damn fast. My brain mush from the sleep deprivation and constant pulling in a million directions - sometimes a photo is all I have to remind myself of their milestones. The big events in their lives and the simple daily joys.

But, I find myself rarely looking back at the photos and videos I’ve taken. I certainly don’t need so many photos of the same experience. Just one good one. At this point, a clean-up of my digital assets sounds exhausting. I keep telling myself I’ll do it someday when the kids are older. Maybe when I’m 50 I’ll make a three-hour long film with all the videos I’ve taken throughout their childhoods. It’ll be screened in our living room to an audience of two.

If I’m constantly trying to take photos and videos and I’m not going to look back at them because I’m too busy living my life, then what is the point of taking them? As soon as I turn to grab my camera, that moment with my children is gone. I am no longer present. Either I’ve interrupted the moment by being a distraction and cutting it short or I’ve lost touch with reality by putting a lens between us. As soon as I look away, I’ve lost it. They’re there, but I am not.

It’s a delicate balance of being in the moment or capturing it. They’re there, and I want to be too.

“When they were taking the picture, they were never there in the first place.”

— Charan Ranganath

My BF Era

This month, I officially stopped breastfeeding. After nearly nine months of constantly thinking about when to breastfeed or pump, stressing about emptying my breasts every two hours, sitting at the pump for hours, it’s so strange to be done. My brain hasn’t quite caught up with my body.

I’ve never been able to produce enough milk for my children so that they were exclusively breastfed. Sessions with a lactation consultant didn’t improve my supply. My children have always needed to supplement with formula. With my firstborn, I didn’t anticipate my low supply and beat myself up about it. With my secondborn, I expected it and had a much healthier attitude about feeding my baby formula.

That being said, while G was in my belly, I told Steve I’d be fine with her being completely formula-fed from the beginning - because breastfeeding is literally and figuratively so draining on my body. When she was born, I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll give this breastfeeding thing a go because I probably won’t be able to breastfeed for very long anyway.’ After a couple months, I thought, ‘I’ll keep going until it’s very clear my body is done.’ Three months passed, then five months passed and I thought, ‘Maybe now I’ll stop.’ At this point, my milk supply had dipped significantly. But, I kept pumping. Something innate in me wanted to try to squeeze as much milk out of me as I possibly could for my baby (cue martyr syndrome). Even as month 8 crept up and my body was barely producing any milk, I kept sitting at my desk, tied to the pump – trying to convince my body to keep producing. I kept trying to breastfeed G despite her biting, pawing, and tearing away when she realized as soon as she latched that there was nothing but droplets. Whereas Bub would happily comfort-nurse, G was less inclined and quickly grew impatient if there wasn’t any milk for her to drink.

Honestly, towards the end, I too started growing tired of it all. I was tired of feeling guilty for not pumping or nursing around-the-clock. If I were to listen to “expert” advice about pumping every two hours to keep my milk production going, I’d be pumping or nursing for 6-8 hours a day. That left little time for anything else, challenging when I have another kid to take care of. Breastfeeding is an unpaid, often unseen, full-time job I’m glad I don’t have to do anymore, especially because the juice really wasn’t worth the squeeze given my sad supply.

I was emotional during my last nursing sessions with G. I was emotional feeding her the last bottle of breastmilk that I pumped. I’ll miss the special bonding time breastfeeding provided G and me. I’ll miss the excuse to “take a break” at my desk to pump. But mostly, I was so emotional because this is the last time that I’ll ever breastfeed a baby. My breastfeeding era is officially over.

A part of me held on to breastfeeding for as long as I could because stopping symbolized my baby not needing me anymore. I wasn’t ready to face the fact that she is quickly growing out of being a baby. My last baby.

Breastfeeding has made me appreciate my body in utterly new ways. It’s made me feel anger and frustration towards my body. It’s taught me that I really don’t know my body at all and that no one really does because women’s bodies aren’t researched enough. I don’t understand how my body produced milk. When I thought I’d produce more milk, I didn’t. When I least expected my body to produce milk, it surprised me with more. I don’t understand dysphoric milk ejection reflex and why I felt depressed every time I pumped. I don’t understand why when I stopped breastfeeding, I had horrible intense mood swings. I don’t understand my hormones and as a result, I feel like I barely know myself. My breastfeeding days may be over but my journey to better understanding myself continues.

“In terms of brains, we may be first among mammals, but we are mammals nonetheless, and as such we cannibalize our mothers in order to live.”

— Betty Fussell, "Eat, Live, Love, Die"

Flying Solo

This week marked the first time I solo-parented both kids for multiple nights. A daunting task in and of itself. Tack on being sick and juggling work during the day – my battery was drained before my solo flight even took off.

The “cough” I caught from Bub had turned into a sinus infection. It was the second time I’d been sick in a month. While Steve was away, Bub cut his foot and G bumped her lip while gnawing on a wooden toy screw. At one point, I was laying on the living room floor completely exhausted, Bub was limping around me and hopping from one couch to the other, G’s lip was swollen and bleeding slightly, and Buddha was panting and scratching non-stop from her seasonal allergies. We were a sad sight.

And yet, I’m glad I did it. It absolutely sucked at some points and I wouldn’t do it the same way I did it this time, but I am a slightly more confident parent having gone through it. Now, watching the kids on my own for a night feels like nothing.

One of the hardest parts of solo-parenting for me is that when it rains, it pours. Things that normally would be easy to tackle are harder. Bub wanting to help me make dinner is usually a fun activity for us to do together. It’s not as much fun when I also have to hold G who only wants to be held. Bub dropping a slice of pizza on the floor is not a big deal, but I squeezed my eyes shut and needed to take a deep breath before wrangling a fussy G into her high chair so that I could scrub red sauce off of the white carpet. Bub spilling a bowl of mac and cheese in the fridge because he’s trying to help me put food away is a sweet attempt but one more thing I have to clean up by myself while G is crying in her Pack ‘n Play.

Being the only adult in the house can feel isolating.

On the other hand, there were things I thoroughly enjoyed. I loved exploring a new library with them. I loved doing school drop-off and pick-up. On the drive there, Bub and I laughed with each other about how I didn’t get lost taking him this time around. I loved the slower evenings of just the three of us, rolling around and playing in the living room.

I let myself simply survive in certain areas. Sometimes Bub would have a sandwich for breakfast and lunch. Sometimes the only solid food G would have during the day would be strawberries. I relaxed about bed times, telling myself that it didn’t matter what time they went to bed and to focus instead on making it as smooth as possible. Once both kids were asleep, I’d creep downstairs to eat something myself, do the dishes, and catch up on work.

Flying solo means no bickering with Steve. I make the decisions and don’t have to run them by anyone else. It means learning to be comfortable with the bare minimum sometimes. It means being more vigilante about safety because I’m now the household’s sole guardian. It means tightening bonds with my children and them tightening bonds with each other.

Flying solo also means breathing a huge sigh of relief when Steve texts that “the eagle has landed”. I finally have my co-pilot back.

I hope the kids have enjoyed their flight with me. We hit some unexpected turbulence at times but it was as smooth as it could have been given the circumstances. Now, this mama needs to refuel.