A rocky place

10 months

Holy shit, 10 months old. Double digits.

When I tried to pack some black beans for Linc's lunch, he yelled and flapped until I gave him some this morning. Funny little person.

And he said "hi da!" to S. He's all into saying "da". And waving at the birds in the trees. Good god this is fun!!!

Well, duh.

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before. Let's blame it on the sleep deprivation and hormones, shall we?

Nearly all my anxieties about having a baby centered around physical stuff--long ago I feared labor, but reading about epidurals helped me in that respect. I worried, vainly, about having a very saggy stomach and lots of stretch marks, about my breasts being transformed in a most unpleasant way by nursing. The nonphysical stuff I thought about--no more weekends reading the NY Times for hours on end, not being able to decide to go to a matinee with S on the spur of the moment, stuff like that. I knew what I was in for in terms of that kind of sacrifice, and I was down with it, so to speak.

Turns out the physical stuff hasn't been that big of a deal. My body weathered the pregnancy and birth pretty well (And at nearly 39, the glory days of ye olde rack are over, so whatever changes nursing is causing aren't worth worrying about.)

But the mental stuff is a different story. I am still fine with the sacrifices and financial struggles and all that. I know I've written about this a lot, but what's blindsided me is the painful burden of my attachment to my child. All that fretting about physical stuff and silly me didn't have an inkling of how the emotional stuff overshadows the physical. I am smart, aware, and consider myself to be semi on top of most things psychological. So why the hell didn't I worry about the things that are truly hard?

Why don't the baby books focus more on the emotions? I swear that everything I read was like this: pregnancy is hard, childbirth hurts, but then your baby comes out and it's love at first sight. You won't get much sleep, and you won't have much sex, but it's all worth it.

I'm fine, mostly, with little sleep--though one could argue that my sometimes fragile emotional state is a result of fragmented sleep. I can handle the physical. I wasn't completely and uncomplicatedly in love right away, but my god I am now. Everything I was told was hard hasn't been, and I feel like there are these other surprises, things I never read about.

It's painful to be so attached to someone--I've known this, and it's partially why I was single for so long (the whole thing of not wanting one's eggs in one basket). But I didn't know this kind of pain. It's an exquisite, precious thing--but the depth of love and protectiveness is overwhelming. It's an unbidden attachment that I will never be free of, and that's a wonderful and terrible thing.

Linc, Daddy, and Uncle David

We took Linc on his first flight this past weekend--to the N. California coast, visiting my mom for her birthday (her gift to herself, flying us up!)

The pup did great on the flight, and while it was a lot of travel (2 hr flight. 2 hr shuttle, 2.5 hr drive), it was really wonderful.

Here's Linc with his daddy and his uncle (my brother). They have similar looks, no? Coloring? Not sure. My bro is really tall, 6'3". S is 6'1"ish...I wonder if Linc will be tall like them, or, um, not tall, like me. Huh.

Fuzzy head

I love his fuzzy little head.

Teeth

You can see 'em here if you look close...

edited to add: S says those aren't his teeth in the picture, that it's the reflection from the window, that his tongue would be covering his teeth. It's true that I was surprised you could see his teeth, so maybe he's right. You can't see his teeth in any of the other pics I took in that series. Hmm. I don't know now...

Morning light

Ethics and morality

I've been pondering how my decision-making, particularly in the area of ethics, has changed during the TTC process.

After being vegetarian since I was a teenager, I began eating salmon at the age of 37. The RE stressed the importance of DHA in infant development. My acupuncturist told me that I absolutely needed animal protein, but not just dairy and eggs. I read that soy can cause fertility problems for some women, and I'd been relying heavily on soy for my protein, and when I cut it out, I needed something to replace it. So after a few months of struggling, I started to eat wild salmon.

I have always thought that the dairy and egg industries are crueler to animals than wild fishing. I also had a rule that I couldn't eat meat unless I was morally capable of killing it myself, and I could picture catching and killing a fish in a way that I couldn't picture killing another animal. (The inconsistency here is that I really do have a problem with the egg/dairy industries and surely wouldn't eat cheese while watching a cow be industrially milked...)

So in a way, eating wild salmon was about as morally muddled as eating eggs/milk. Mainly, though, my desperation to have a baby meant that I would do things I wouldn't otherwise do. I ate supplements in gelatin capsules, something I didn't used to do. I surely bought products whose parent companies conducted animal tests.

I continued to eat salmon once a week when pregnant, and am doing so while nursing. I sometimes eat tilapia now too, and have had little bits of other fish. What stops me from eating other fish more often is concern with environmental contaminants, mostly.

What happened to my long-held morality? What happened to my supposedly solid ethical decision making?

In a way, my steadfastness about eating meat was more about being consistent than about morality, but after 20 years, I really thought I would never again eat meat. It seemed impossible. Though I did tell myself that fish wasn't completely out of the question--I thought that if I completely stopped eating dairy and eggs, I would allow myself to eat wild caught fish on occasion, if I wanted--I thought it was a fair moral trade off.

I continue to eat fish, and I tell myself I'll continue to do so while nursing. I crave the protein so badly. I hated when people used that argument for meateating and would list the other available sources of protein. I lived for years without animal flesh--why am I eating it now? I don't want to rely on soy and dairy and eggs, and I can only eat so many beans/legumes. But that's an excuse. People find a way if it's important to them.

Bottom line is that I'm putting my desire to feel good above the rights of other beings, and I'm struggling with this. Of course we always are making decisions that are better for us than others. If we wanted to act in a purely utilitarian way, we'd all be like that millionaire who gave away his money and his kidney. (I forgot his name.) All of our efforts and resources would go toward the greater good.

I, we, make selfish decisions all the time. But it's hard to live in such denial, the denial I have always lived with about eating dairy, about buying clothes manufactured in developing countries, about how people down the street are living, the wars going on in other countries.  I have a comfortable bed and some people don't have homes. The pain of the world is omnipresent, and to some degree we have to tune it out to function.

But Peter Singer's essay on animal rights has always been the most compelling argument, in my mind, for veganism and abolishing animal testing (and animals as entertainment and pets). Here he quotes Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Singer says that avoiding suffering is something intrinsic to all animals that have the ability to suffer--and that we have a moral obligation to avoid inflicting suffering.

Something about utilitarianism is appealing to me, though I know it's not an ideal easily upheld. (Singer had an article on utilitarianism as it applies to global development issues and the world's billionaires in a recent New York Times magazine, and while I appreciate some of his argument, and find it boggling how much disparity there is among humans, I find some flaws in his logic. Pure utilitarianism really only works on paper, and even then it has holes, because we must always use OUR judgment to make decisions about what benefits the group, and OUR judgment is intrinsically biased toward us. Still, Bentham's assertion that the ability to suffer is what we should use as a criteria in evaluating our behavior toward other beings is as good as any logic I can find.)

Anyway. Here I am, knowing what I know, having the resources I have, and I'm still making the decision to contribute to the suffering of others. Yes, it's inevitable to avoid inflicting suffering. But we can mitigate it, and I'm not, in a host of ways, but eating fish is among them. It's not wrong for one species to eat another--it's "natural", whatever that means. But I have other options, and I still am eating fish.

I used to argue with people about animal rights, all the time. People would say "but if your child were sick, you'd believe in animal testing if it helped him/her". And I said that was true--that any decision, taken to a personal level, is made selfishly. I asserted that we shouldn't make policies based on how something feels to us on a personal level--we should use pure ethics.

I am now someone who would do anything for her son, and while I still think that animal testing is wrong, I also feel that it's impossible to keep ethical reasoning pure. It's just so much more complicated than I ever imagined. Motherhood is humbling, and muddling.

Five Months

Linc is 5 months old today.
He can pull off his socks and suck on his feet, sit up with his hands on the floor (though he usually topples over quickly--he is NOT just chilling in this picture, like Hey there, I'm SITTING--the sitting is brief, and he is in fact starting to topple backwards here--we just started sitting), and still loves to stand up while holding onto us for balance. He laughs so much more now and smiles quite a bit. He has a favorite book, which isn't mama or daddy's favorite, but it's amazing to us that he has such a strong opinion about these things already--it's been his favorite since he was about 7 weeks old, I think. He loves being outside and is quite content to bounce in his Bjorn 1-2-3 in the shade while we work in the yard.
He's also demanding when he wants something, and there's been a major sleep shakeup this week--he used to sleep from 9pm-5am with only one quick sleep feed around 3am. Now he's up every hour or so starting at midnight. He eats a few times at night now. Not sure what's up. Are there any gentle sleep training techniques that work while the baby's still in the cosleeper, or do we have to wait until he's in the other room?

Of course

The day after my last post, I was home all day with Linc and it was idyllic. 78 degrees, giggling baby, blue skies and lots of birds, and I wished I could do that everyday. So I guess my point is that it SOMETIMES feels like a lot more work taking care of the baby.

Drugs

I don't know why I've been so reluctant to discuss this, but I have been.I've been taking Zoloft for a little over a month, and I feel so, so, so much better. Maybe I felt guilty b/c I wanted a baby so badly, and I know that so many others are still trying to have their babies, that I feel like there is something terribly wrong with me for being anything less than happy after having a healthy son. It's not him that I'm unhappy with though. It's not even ME that I'm unhappy with. I just felt acutely anxious so much of the time, in a way that felt beyond my ability to control. It felt physical, outside of me, intrusive, and overwhelming.

My OB referred me to a woman who runs a postpartum psychiatry program, and both psychiatrist I saw (as a team) strongly recommended I take meds. They said I didn't have to feel so anxious so much of the time.

I thought that Zoloft and other meds of that type were more for depression than anxiety and I didn't feel depressed. I felt jumpy and anxious and kind of in a loop. But they said many of the newer antidepressants, and Zoloft in particular, are very good for anxiety and OCD.

I worried about taking medication while nursing, and I didn't want to stop nursing. Zoloft has been very well studied in nursing women, and the drug is barely detectable in breastmilk, and not detectable in the infant's blood.

The doctor told me that there were no studies showing danger to the breastfeeding children of mom's on Zoloft, but there were many studies documenting the harmful effects of maternal anxiety on children.

That did it for me. I could help myself and keep nursing and try to protect Lincoln from my anxiety.

I feel so different, so much better. I was supposed to incrementally increase my dose, but I felt improvement at the initial lower dose so I'm staying here.

I don't feel like a different person, but my brain feels like a different place. Before, my world felt too big and very scary, like there was Danger! Everywhere!

Now my thoughts aren't on the All Peril, All the Time! channel. I know the world is a big scary place, but I just don't focus on it constantly. I don't know what it is or how it works but it feels effortless--like my brain is just different. I don't feel numb or apathetic or resigned. I just feel like it's okay not to think about how scary things are.

I also went to a cognitive behavioral therapist--thanks to suggestions from some of my friends in the computer. It was helpful, but also strange, b/c I could only talk about how I USED to feel. We talked about techniques to cope with my former way of thinking, but it felt so remote. It's hard to work on something when it's not right in front of me.

The therapist talked about "guarding your moment", where you refuse to let worries intrude on the lovely things right in front of you. I understand that, and right now it makes sense. But when things are on the Scary Channel, it doesn't seem possible to refuse those thoughts--it feels completely beyond my control.

Maybe it's helpful to learn how to manage these thoughts when I'm not having them, b/c I have more distance. Maybe I'll just need to be on Zoloft a while. I know that I've always been prone to anxiety, but it got way worse after having Lincoln. I know the volume was turned way, way up under the influence of hormones.

I didn't realize how much the physiology of my brain affected the way I thought and felt. It's amazing to feel so dramatically different, yet so much more like myself. Coincidentally, I have several friends going through some very difficult times right now and I am able to be there for them in a way I couldn't have a couple months ago. And my house is cleaner. And--the most significant change--I can really be present with my son, enjoy him RIGHT NOW, without the constant, draining spectre of All That Could Go Wrong.

A happy thing.