Getting what I deserve

In a recent blog post, I mentioned the challenges of trying to bring up baby alongside boisterous toddler. After griping about the latter throwing blocks at the former – these days the greater issue is headlocks of love and other toddler-on-baby moves that look startlingly similar to wrestling positions – perhaps I got what I deserve.

Big Bro E loves to grab baby Z’s face from behind and squeeze vigorously – not sure she enjoys it quite as much.

One reader wrote in to say, in a word, that’s why it’s a good idea to be mindful of spacing one’s children successfully, as she did. But that reader, it turned out, had her first child at 25, and was done by age 32. Bless, as they say in the UK. I’m glad it worked out for her that way.

Life for us primigravidas is different. A woman who starts a family with a first birth somewhere near 40 is not going sit around and wait until her child seems old enough to handle being a big brother or sister, or (where relevant) until she and her partner feel truly “ready” for another baby. Most of us conceiving children in this age bracket, whether naturally or through assisted reproductive technology (ART), know that our fertility is finite. No one knows exactly where or when it ends, and we’re likely to be pressured by doctors, as many of my friends have, to get on with it now if they hope to have another child or two.

One friend with fertility challenges, though still in her mid-30s, has been told by her doctors to start a new round of IVF, just five months after the birth of her first baby. Another friend all but forced herself to have a second baby before she felt ready, simply because she knew time was running short. Similarly, my husband and I were quick to try to conceive after having our first child because we thought it could take a long time to get pregnant again. I had convinced myself that my first pregnancy was a fluke and would be near-impossible to repeat.

In my best moments, I feel blessed to have two gorgeous children who are just a year and 5 months apart. In other moments, I feel overwhelmed at the challenges: keeping them happy and fed and warm, preventing them from hurting each other, and stopping them from feeling that they must compete for my love – though I suppose that happens at any age.

Of the primigravidas in the target demographic of this blog, I’ve met a preponderance of women who have children very close in age – that is to say, much closer than they would have preferred, had they started earlier – and women who have twins conceived via IVF.

I write about this trend neither to criticize it nor to laud it, but rather, simply to take notice of it. This is what motherhood looks like for the growing ranks of women like us. It means that more of us are coping with twins, or with children so close in age that it is, as I sometimes put it, a bit like having twins, except one has the ability to harm the other – or to smother her with well-meaning hugs. People sometimes call this situation “Irish twins,” though I suspect the term is a bit politically incorrect. So I’ll just call it what it is. Since last February, I’ve had two kids in diapers. Two kids who often demand and compete for my undivided attention. Two kids with different needs that are hard to fulfill simultaneously. (Currently, one needs to be rocked and held in the dark at exactly the moment that the other needs to be read an engaging story.) Two kids who cannot be left alone to play in the living room for more than two minutes while I cook dinner in the kitchen.

A sweet moment of playing together nicely: the littl’uns cooking together in their new kitchen, care of their American aunts and uncles.

BUT WHO REALLY CARES? Only me and a bunch of women (and men) in the same situation. What I’m coming to realize is the extent to which I must stop expecting the world to sympathize with the struggles this entails. Especially, that is, a certain obnoxious flight attendant on British Airways, who during a leg of our recent trip home acted heartlessly throughout, all but yelling “schnell, schnell” as we tried to gather our things and our babies and get off the plane. I just wanted for her or her colleagues to offer a hand at pulling a piece of carry-on luggage down the aisle or to understand that when your toddler is fast sleep and needs to be carried just like the baby, it’s pretty damn hard to also carry your many accoutrements necessary for an 8-hour flight, plus winter coats, etc. Perhaps she didn’t know that strapping on your baby and negotiating three other bags takes a few minutes.

As part of this experience, I realized how attached we are to our double stroller cum luggage cart. Dear flight attendants, if you’re going to deprive us of it at the boarding gate, at least help us to and from our seats and be nice about it, the same you would as the little old lady who needs wheelchair assistance.

Of course, parenting is not a handicap. But having more than one mini-person in your charge does add so many complications that I sometimes wish people would see it that way. We move more slowly, we need the elevator, we’re dependent on our wheels. Please, I feel like saying, can’t you see I’ve got two kids in diapers? Can’t you please rearrange the universe to make it easier for me?

Again, I’m probably getting exactly what I deserve. Once upon a time, I was the person who had no clue why people with small kids needed to stop having a normal life. I was the woman who occasionally snaked off to see if she could get her seat on the plane changed (‘sure, that baby’s cute, but I need to sleep/work/read/etc.’) And more than once, I probably looked at an overwhelmed, exasperated mother of multiple children and thought, ‘well, don’t have ‘em if you can’t take care of‘em.’ I distinctly remember seeing a wayward child on a plane and thinking, ‘Sheesh, can’t you control your child?’ Control. Were it that easy! Seems almost as quaint a notion – as old-fashioned family planning.

Liberated from the Playpen

Guest blog
by Josie Glausiusz

A few days after we moved into our new apartment in Ra’anana, Israel, I noticed that my not-quite-two-year-old boy was very quiet and was nowhere to be seen.

I looked around our box-stacked apartment and discovered him in my husband’s office, sitting calmly at his desk. He was playing with a pair of pliers, and he looked very pleased with himself. I couldn’t help but laugh. And this is a new sensation for me, because in our old home in New York, I would never have let him wander around our apartment on his own without watching him and his twin sister very carefully. If I was unable to stay in the same room with them—if I was cooking, for example—I’d put them both in their double-size playpen where they would play with their toys. Not always willingly, I should add, but most of the time without tremendous fuss. But when we moved to Israel last October 15, we came with only our suitcases, and nearly all of our possessions—including the playpen, a newly purchased piano, our furniture, computers, wedding china, and a red-booted, wooden Nova Scotian folk art chicken—traveled via ship to Israel in a 40-foot long Zim container.

Now the playpen has arrived in Israel, and we are planning on selling it. My children have been liberated from it, and in the process I have liberated myself from some of my fears of calamity befalling them.

I am a nervous mother: I admit it.

The laundry basket is more fun than the playpen anyway.

I gave birth to my twins at an age when many of my friends are sending their children to college, and I became pregnant after enduring seven rounds of fertility treatment and an earlier miscarriage. Perhaps as a result, I suffered from debilitating anxiety during my pregnancy, even worrying that my worrying could impair my babies’ brain development. Until they were about nine months old, I crept into their room every night at 1 or 2 a.m. to make sure they were still breathing. If they napped in their bouncy seats in the living room, I would carefully check that no cushions could levitate from the couch, ricochet off the walls, and land on my babies and smother them. As they grew older and began crawling and walking and climbing, I worried that they would fall off the slide in the playground, or wander out of the playground and get lost, or swallow something nasty that they found in the grass.

As any twin mom can attest, it’s not always easy to supervise toddlers who are determined to run in opposite directions. During our first five weeks in Israel, we lived in a rented, furnished apartment and for the first week or so it seemed as if my children were going berserk: climbing on the furniture, opening, slamming and shaking the doors, unraveling the toilet rolls, emptying the kitchen cabinets of all the pots, pressing all the buttons on the washing machine and turning it on and off, and ignoring my requests to stop, come back, and sit down. If I had had a playpen, I certainly would have put them in it. But I didn’t. And as I discovered, Israelis aren’t too impressed with the idea of confining your children in a cage. A babysitter who worked for us for precisely one morning looked at me derisively when I told her about our playpen and cynically remarked, “very good for their emotional development and curiosity.”

Just as it seemed as if I was about to lose my marbles, I had a wonderful conversation with the children’s nursery school teacher.

One day when I went to pick them up after lunch, she said to me, “your kids don’t really listen to instructions, do they?” I agreed, with some embarrassment, that they did not, and that I had no idea how to encourage them to listen, either. She said, “call me; we’ll talk about it.” So I did. Her solution surprised me: not, as I had expected, more time-outs or more rules, but, “you need to give your children more responsibility.” Have your children pick up their toys at the end of the day, she suggested. Sing the “clean-up” song with them. That evening, I told my twins to pick up the plates and spoons they had thrown on the floor during dinner. They willingly did so, and seemed to enjoy the task. They also enjoyed sweeping the floor, packing their toys in boxes, and hiding their shoes in the scattered soup pots.

Israeli attitudes towards toddlerhood, I’ve found, are quite different from those I’ve experienced in the U.S. I’ve noticed that Israelis seem to be more liberal about allowing toddlers to follow their natural instincts and explore, even if it means more chaos. When a worker came to install our new dishwasher, I apologized for not listening to his detailed instructions, because I was chasing my children around at the same time. “My children are very curious,” I said. “But that’s what you want; that’s good,” he replied. “You don’t want them to be phlegmatic.”

During a recent visit to Tipat Chalav (Well Baby) clinic, my kids walked behind the nurse’s desk, pressed all the buttons on her computer, and turned it off. Then they emptied the rubbish bin on the floor, opened all the drawers in the room, found a packet of plastic spoons, took them out and stuck them through the slats on the window blinds, laughing all the time. When I posted an anecdote about this clinic visit on Facebook, my American friends seemed mildly surprised about the absence of control—MY control—even though I was attempting in vain to curb the chaos. One dear friend commented, “Wow….very cute! My pediatrician (whom I adore) would have lectured me on the need to enforce the 1-2-3 strikes you’re out rule and give them a time out!” But the Tipat Chalav nurse remained calm throughout, and seemed to think that this was exactly the kind of behavior she was looking for in a toddler – a sign that they were developing normally.

Let me be clear: I’m not in favor of children running wild, either. Or playing with pliers. But when I watch my lovely children bouncing up and down on a see-saw, or bravely climbing steps to the slide that are half their own height, or climbing into a cupboard, crouching down and then leaping up and laughing, I think about all those times in our lives when we try to re-create the feelings and experiences of early childhood, where everything is new and different and exciting. For them, to open a kitchen drawer is to discover new and amazing inventions: a potato masher, a garlic crusher, a soup ladle. They find an old breast pump flange, and turn it into a trumpet. They turn a clock into a telephone, hold it to their ear, and say, “’allo, ‘allo.” Life may have been calmer in a playpen, but definitely less interesting – for them and for me. And there is no way you can teach your children the value of freedom unless they experience it for themselves.

Josie Glausiusz is a journalist who writes for Nature, Scientific American Mind, and other magazines. She recently returned to Israel with her family after living in New York City for twenty years.

Does baby belong on book tour?

Baby helping me sign books

I was a few days away from the big book launch night in London, and trying to tie down a babysitting plan.  My mother, who had flown in from America to celebrate with me – and to help me take care of baby Z – wondered if that was really necessary.

“Do you really think you need a babysitter?” my mother posed. “Why don’t we just bring her to the book launch?”

Oh, how tempting. Indeed, I am far more full of love and pride for baby Z than I am for the book – most of the time. And that’s saying a lot, as baby Z was in utero for the usual nine and-a-half months, whereas “Baghdad Fixer” had a seven-year gestation period. I knew that were I to bring her along to the launch, dressed up like a doll in her new clothes, she’d be the talk of the town.

For about ten minutes, that is. The launch was set for Daunt Books at 6:30 p.m. – the witching hour. Baby is usually in the thick of her dinner/bath/bedtime routine at that hour of the day, and being away from it could be a recipe for baby getting cranky at best, or cantankerous at worst. I decided that there was no need for her to be there. To drag her along would just turn her into eye candy. I could imagine the critics. (“The reading was alright. But that baby – now she was something!”)

For a while, my mother’s thinking prevailed. Maybe baby would be calm. And if not, Mom could whisk her away. But that didn’t seem right either. My mom had come too far to just be a babysitter and I didn’t want her to miss the launch by having to shush baby in a corner or push her stroller up and down Marylebone High Street.

Back to my instincts. If that baby is unhappy and I’m in the room, she’ll settle for nothing less than my arms – or breast –  and I’m going to want to take care of her. A funny friend (thank God for those) suggested I should consider breast-feeding smack in the middle of the book launch. Now, that was a surefire way to grab headlines.

Deep down, I knew the answer. It was right to bring baby to London, and the launch itself was the right time for a babysitter.

Of course, at every book event or interview I went to in London for the week – there were about six of them – someone would ask, “Where’s the baby?” To which I was occasionally tempted to respond, “Oh my God, the baby!” as if I’d forgotten her somewhere.

Baby wants a cuddle – or maybe a signed copy.

Back home, I have two bigger book launch events set up as well as some smaller, less formal ones. My Palestinian friend and colleague Nuha Musleh offered to have a book event in Gallery Zainab, her store in Ramallah. There, sitting on stacks of the most sumptuous Middle Eastern and Central Asian carpets, I talked about the book with a intimate, sympathetic crowd. Knowing it would be a smaller gathering, and starting at an earlier hour, we decided to bring along baby Z. (This decision was based in part on the fact that it’s extremely difficult for any one babysitter to manage both baby and toddler at bedtime, so big brother E stayed home.)

The results: a book talk with a lot of baby babble, which one of the moms in attendance kindly deemed “background music.” It didn’t so much bother me, but I worried about it giving the attendees a feeling that this was  a less-than-serious book talk.  As you’ll see from this video clip, in which I’m talking with Nuha about why I decided to write a book about a fixer, I stop at some point to pick up the pacifier on the table in front of me and pass it over to the person holding baby Z. Which, of course, causes people to jump out of their seats and insist that the baby isn’t bothering them. Of course she isn’t – because she’s just so cute. In fact, I think some of the people there probably enjoyed the chance to hold her more than they enjoyed hearing me speak. But I can’t help thinking that at least one or two people went home expecting to hear more Baghdad, less baby.

Such is life when you take baby on book tour.

I learned as much from Jennifer Steil, author of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen. Jennifer also had a baby at 40 – and also went on book tour with baby in tow. “Nope,” she told me reassuringly, “you’re not the only lunatic. I started my daughter on her first solid foods in hotel rooms on book tour! Fortunately, her dad was with us for the first three weeks and did 90 percent of the babycare (other than the breastfeeding, that is). So it didn’t feel too crazy and it was kind of fun to have her with me, so she could meet friends of mine along the way. Of course, after the three weeks were up and Tim headed back to Yemen ahead of us, my daughter caught a horrible stomach bug and vomited for 10 days straight, losing half her body weight and “failing to thrive…” resulting in the cancellation of the West coast part of my tour and emergency visit to an NYC pediatrician!” She added: “But I’m sure that won’t happen to you!”

Well, we certainly hope not. My “book tour” will be limited, for now. It includes two launches – one at East Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop tonight and the main event on Dec. 20th at Mishkenot Shaananim, one of Jerusalem’s loveliest cultural venues. (There’s a small possibility of a Dec. 30th event in Washington, DC, but don’t hold me to it!)

Jennifer’s story inspires me. Looking at my blog, she said, she realized how much we have in common. She’s also a “late-bloomer,” as she put it. Though I sometimes use the same term, I think maybe we’re blooming right on time. I’d once wanted to publish a book by age 25 and to have kids by 30. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t. I wasn’t ready then to be a mother or an author. Today, I’m more capable at both – and able to recognize my fault-lines as a writer and as a parent.

In the meantime, I’m lining up babysitters for the Jerusalem book launch events. The next time baby comes to a book “event,” it’ll be in my sister’s living room.

Talking about “Baghdad Fixer” in Ramallah (Video)

Daycare Drop-out

I made a crazy and caring decision recently. I turned my daughter into a daycare drop-out.

Crazy, because this decision is costing us loads of extra money. Crazy, because I’m working full-time, but decided that we could try getting by with a part-time nanny – which doesn’t quite allow me enough hours of childcare to accomplish what I need to each day.

Caring, because the person who ran the daycare program in her house was simply not kind and sensitive enough to be taking care of my baby. Caring, because I needed some place far more loving for my baby girl, and the thought of dropping her off for up to eight hours each day with a stranger who might not be as loving as she presented herself at the start was killing me. I found myself crying in bed at night, wondering if I had signed my daughter up for spending long days in a crucial developmental stage of her life -  6 month to 18 months – in a less-than-loving environment.

What do I mean by less-than-loving? When I started baby Z in the daycare at six months old this September, I was still nursing full-time. As I only live a five-minute walk away, I decided that I wanted to visit once during the day to breast-feed. After all, why attach myself to a pump when I could scoot down the road around lunchtime and spend a precious half hour with my baby?

I found it hard to get through the day knowing that these sweet eyes were just down the road, but I wasn’t quite welcome to stop in during the day to see them. Mostly, I just couldn’t put my concerns about my baby’s caretaker to rest.

The Woman In Charge (who will henceforth be referred to as the WIC) clearly didn’t like this idea. She threw up all kinds of reasons why it wasn’t good, but reluctantly said she was willing to tolerate it temporarily. But each time I arrived, I felt unwelcome. I snaked off with the baby into a darkened bedroom of the apartment, where I nursed her and let her drift off happily for her nap.

Although I closed the door, I heard things.

A baby would begin to cry. “Noa,” the WIC said. “What?!” There was a petulance in her voice, a patience wearing thin. On another occasion, I heard her snap at a baby, “You’d better not spit up what I just fed you.”

Other statements began to rub me the wrong way. One time, when I was in the process of pick-up, just as the WIC was handing her over to me, baby Z started to cry. “What?!” the WIC said threateningly, pushing big, bossy eyes at baby Z. “No crying here!” The WIC grinned widely. She apparently takes pride in how seldom her babies cry. In fact, her biggest concern with me coming over to breast-feed was that baby Z would suddenly go hungry waiting for me and cry. “I don’t like it when my babies cry,” she boasted.

I wish I would have heard one statement of support for my attempts to make it a priority to continue breastfeeding my baby even after my return to work. I wish I would have heard some indication that some crying was okay, even natural, among babies – it’s all they have to express their needs and discomforts. I wish I could have believed that the WIC had read any of the child development literature written in the last 30 years, which indicate that a baby of six months or a year really does understand language and moods. So if you tell a baby she’d better not spit up and better not cry, well, she gets it, on some level. She gets the message that she can’t feel safe to express her feelings.

There were many other things that bothered me about the WIC’s set-up for caring for eight babies. She’d promised two adults for an 8:2 ratio. It turned out that the other adult only stayed until 2 p.m. each day, while the daycare goes until 4 p.m. And it turned out that one of the adults on rotation was her unfriendly mother-in-law, who sat on the dining table or on the couch – and just sat. In all my visits, I never once saw her pick up a baby or engage with one of them. And then there was the matter of the WIC going to pick up her own youngest child every day sometime after 1 – leaving the babies with this lethargic and aloof mother-in-law.

I found myself wondering how one woman can care for eight babies and toddlers, especially if one of her “assistants” is a mother-in-law who never seems to get off the couch.

I told the WIC we might be leaving, and gave her an honest part of the story. My job had changed, and now most of my hours were spent working from home. Being at home – but not having baby around – was downright depressing. Plus, a reporter’s work day often doesn’t get going at 8 a.m. It starts later and ends later, making standard daycare hours a bit off from what I needed.

But here’s the Primigravida part of the story, where having babies “later” made the difference.

Having waited so long to have babies, I want to be around them more. Further, it occurred to me that baby Z might be our last, and she was growing fast.  How would I feel to look back and realize that her first year flew by, really flew, because so many of her waking hours were not with me?

Then came the final straw. I went to pick up baby Z. The WIC was holding her, while her three young children, already home from school, stood nearby, itching to leave the house. They couldn’t wait until the last of the babies was picked up because their mom had promised to take them shopping. The WIC handed baby Z over to me as if she was happy to be relieved of her and said, “Ugh! Your baby is so heavy.” That was when she was hardly 17 pounds (about 8 kilos). If this baby is heavy for you now, I thought, how will you feel about her in almost a year when our contract with you runs out?

I came home and shared my distress with my husband. “It’s over,” he said. “Let’s just leave now,” he added, like the good man he is, the kind who likes to make a decision and not deliberate over it for weeks, as I often do.

The WIC was not kind about the news. She had little empathy for the fact that I realized I just wanted my baby at home with me. All she cared about was that we’d fulfill the contract, which requires us to pay for two more months after we leave.

So we’re paying. But as one parent reminded me, you need to go with your gut. Mine told me to run the other way. Miraculously, our wonderful part-time nanny was free to work the hours we needed.

And so I’m managing, living with my crazy and caring decision. Perhaps the hardest part is to accept that the decision is not just about caring for my baby, but caring for myself. Not wanting to be apart from my baby all day isn’t a weakness. It’s a wonder.

I’m going on booktour in London! Baghdad Fixer, my first novel, is due to be released this coming Thursday, Nov. 15th at a launch party at Daunt Books (Marylebone). See here for more details about the book and various author appearances, or see these links on Amazon or the Book Depository to order. And since you may be wondering, yes, baby is coming on booktour! As is her grandma.

Do Reporting and Motherhood Mix? Tales of maternal multi-tasking

Though I like being back in the game, I find myself wanting more hours like this and fewer hours on deadline. If you’ve been there and figured out how to balance work and baby, let me know.

Reporting is like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget how to do it. And once you do it again, as I’ve done for the past six weeks after being rather out of practice, it can feel as exhilarating as getting back on the bike. I have the wind in my hair, the sensation of whizzing past pedestrians, skirting between motorists. I’m back to getting perfect strangers to talk to me and tell me their problems – a psychologist for the masses. Sometimes I think there is no better job in the world, though in more cynical moments I think this is a myth we journalists tell ourselves to swallow our paltry salaries.

The only problem is that reporting is not entirely compatible with motherhood, in particular with mothering a six-month-old baby and a toddler who’s just turning two. (Happy Birthday, Eli!) In fact, the reason I have hardly blogged at all in the past two months is that I don’t know whether to celebrate or mourn my return to work.

Sometimes being a reporter with a baby means breastfeeding in the middle of writing a story, trying to type up notes with one hand while securing baby Z with the other. Sometimes this feels valiant, and at others, vulgar. Sometimes I put baby to sleep for the night by the light of my iPhone as I trawl for tweets that might give my almost-finished story that extra punch. When baby is this sleepy, I figure, she won’t realize that the soft glow is no night-light, but Twitter feeds from Benghazi and Beirut. (Yes, I worry about radiation, and realize that we don’t know how dangerous being around a cellphone may be, so I hold the phone as far from baby’s precious cranium as possible.)

Once upon a time, I thought nothing about taking off for a month to Iraq or Sudan, or driving the easy hour and-a-half from Jerusalem to Gaza, not being sure if I’d be coming home or staying over for a night or two. I used to keep a satellite phone a flack jacket in my car, just in case. Now I tote along my Medela Pump in Style, just in case.

Trying to make room for motherhood, in January 2011 I accepted a job as an editor at the Jerusalem Report magazine. I thought it would be the perfect way to keep a foothold in journalism without having to run around too much. My son was then four months old.

This July, as I prepared to come back to work after the birth of our second child, I found that the job had changed. It was unacceptable to the magazine’s upper management that I edit from home, as had been my previous arrangement, and I was ordered to be in the office for eight-hour days. A plan to bring my baby to work for half the day was nixed; I learned it was forbidden. So when the Jerusalem Post, which owns the Report, made me an offer to be a senior reporter with a beat focusing on Israeli-Arabs – a.k.a. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship – and other Arab world stories, I decided to take it. In addition to covering issues I care about, when not out reporting, I’m totally free to work from home. Ironically, the busy reporting job gave me more freedom to be around my baby than the “desk” job as an editor.

My friend Orly Halpern out reporting on West Bank settlements with her son in a baby carrier, along with journalist Elizabeth Rubin, who also does an amazing balancing act between journalism and motherhood.

I find myself wondering where I will draw the line. Will I take baby Z out reporting from time to time? I might, if it seems a tame and safe enough environment. Colleagues have done so, like my fabulous friend Orly Halpern, pictured here. Will I go away overnight and leave baby Z behind? Not yet. It would probably be more traumatic for me than for her. But as my husband, my favorite editor, noted when I asked him to read this, “You have more cognitive ability to reflect on her absence. She will ache in your absence with no ability to comprehend that you will be back.” (Great, I feel much better now.)

A few weeks ago, an editor asked me to cover a demonstration of settlers about to be evacuated from their illegal outpost in the West Bank. The location, it turned out, was in front of the Justice Ministry in East Jeruaslem. One solution was to bring baby Z to the demo. But settlers? East Jerusalem? The two don’t mix well. What if someone decided to toss a rock or a Molotov cocktail? I had just covered, for nearly a week running, an awful Molotov cocktail attack near a settlement that seriously injured six members of one Palestinian family. Images of a burned five-year-old boy, whom I’d seen in the hospital a day earlier, flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t worth the risk. Something in my gut said no. Instead, I found a babysitter who helps us from time to time, and took off.

Of course, nothing happened. It was perhaps the most boring, quietest protest I’ve ever covered. But the issue was before me. What would I or wouldn’t I do?

Recently, reluctantly, I put my daughter in a small day-care program in someone’s home, five minutes from my front door, four days a week. On days when baby is home, I still usually have to work. Sometimes I type with one hand while I hold her with the other. Or I set baby on the carpet, where she now loves to be as she does downward-dog poses and tests out her ability to sit up, while I write nearby. In late afternoons, I usually blow off work for a few hours, doing playtime-dinnertime-bathtime-bedtime, only to return to my computer, often on deadline, to continue working until 11 p.m.  Sometimes, when the story is too big and I’m too far from getting it done on time, I simply rely on hubby to pick up all the slack. Which induces great guilt, but that’s the subject of another post.

Baby Z paging through my notes with vigor.

The odd thing is that my daughter has already reached a stage where she is no longer oblivious to almost everything but the task of getting herself fed. Now, as she lies breastfeeding while I type, she constantly lets go and turns her head around to see what I’m doing. And then, shockingly, she reaches over to the mouse pad on my MacBook, making all the open pages jump and dance around the desktop. My daughter is six months old and she’s already switching screens. And trying to crumple up my notes.

Admitting this, I am half-amused and half-ashamed. Shouldn’t I be rocking her off to a milky oblivion in a nursery with the sounds of a Bach lullaby wafting through the air? Well, I did do that for a while, in the first three months. And there are still moments when baby gets my full, undivided attention. But it seems there are moments when deadline is looming, time is short, and I have no choice but to multi-task. She too is learning to multi-task, gathering from her mother that it’s okay to do more than one thing at a time. I’m not sure what to do about it. Except maybe to ask her if she thinks I got the story right.

Baby Z is beginning to discover the joys of crawling around my office, and dragged this out of a carton under my desk. Book launch is set for November 15th in London, and baby says she’s coming along for the ride.

Let Them Latch On

By Josie Glausiusz

Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Breast milk is best? Gee, I didn’t know that.

 

Disembodied droplets of milk surround the plump baby on New York City’s “Latch on NYC” campaign poster. “Breast Milk is best for your baby,” the poster says. Breast-feeding, as the campaign states, lowers the baby’s risk of ear infections, pneumonia, and diarrhea.

All very true. The odd thing about the poster is that there is nary a breast in sight, never mind a real woman actually breast-feeding.

As has been widely reported (see some of the best links below) come Labor Day on September 3 this year, “Latch on NYC” will enter a new phase: 27 out of 40 New York hospitals will keep infant formula locked up like medication, signing it out to new mothers only upon specific request and only after she has received a mandated pep talk about why breast is best. The campaign, in my opinion, is well-intentioned but misguided.

Take that poster, for example. It emphasizes all the benefits to the newborn, but doesn’t tell a mother why breast-feeding may be good for HER. There is some evidence, for example, that breast-feeding may lower the risk of post-partum depression (although the evidence is tenuous, in part because depressed mothers may wean their babies earlier.) Yet one of the best reasons to breast-feed is that when successful, it simply feels fantastic: nestling a baby (or in my case, two babies) in my arms, watching them nurse, was simply one of the most serene, lovely and loving feelings I have ever experienced. And there are probably sound biological reasons why this is so: prolactin, the milk-making hormone, is known to induce a sense of calm.

The problem for many mothers, however, is that they never reach this stage. Because breast-feeding, while it may be “natural” is not automatic. If that “latch” isn’t correct, nursing can be very painful. If the baby doesn’t drain the breast of milk—because the baby isn’t latched properly, or isn’t sucking well—the baby may not be satiated by breast-feeding, and will cry from hunger. If the baby doesn’t drain the breasts, they may become engorged—an excruciating experience, as I can attest. All of these are problems that can be addressed and solved, given sufficient time—but not by giving a new Mom a pep talk when she is exhausted, bewildered and in pain.

In fact, as New York’s Latch On campaign points out, ninety percent of mothers in the city start breast-feeding, but by the time the baby is two months old, the figure has dropped to 31 percent. That implies that the overwhelming majority of new mothers want to breast-feed, but don’t get the support that they need after they leave the hospital—if they have even had the attention they require from nurses in the hospital soon after giving birth. As Katie McKenzie Woodall, a New York mother of a now eight-and-a-half month-old formula-fed baby boy, says, “I had to go crying to the nurses station at 9:30 pm to get help feeding my baby; only then did they bring a pump in and actually HELP me try to feed him—all of this after getting a “tsk tsk” from the nurse because he didn’t have the proper amount of wet diapers, and as she was leaving I get, ‘That’s not good.’ The post- partum time is so scarily emotional and fragile and I already feel that we don’t care for new moms enough. But to add to that making a new mom have any added stress over how she feeds her baby is just cruel.”

Nickmom.com came up with this funny list of pros and cons.

I do believe in encouraging women to breast-feed their babies. But as I know from experience, and as I wrote in an earlier post on Primigravida, breast-feeding a newborn can be a real struggle. In my case, I succeeded in nursing my preemie twins after weeks of pumping round the clock, but I also had constant help from nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit where my babies spent the first eight weeks of their lives. The first time I tried to nurse my baby boy, a nurse spent more than an hour positioning my baby boy, encouraging me, saying “come on, come on,” as my tiny baby opened his mouth, sucked on my nipple for a second, and then fell asleep – over and over and over again. I had the strong support of my husband, my mother (who nursed me when I was a baby) my sister (who nursed all of her six children) and a wonderful lactation consultant who visited me and my babies in the hospital and at home (for a fee.) And even so, and despite my determination and my best efforts, I never succeeded in making enough milk for two babies, and I always, always, had to supplement with formula.

A government-issued ad from the 1930s – a perhaps more appropriate one with mother and breast part of the picture. (Work Projects Administration Poster Collection – Library of Congress)

Many women who give birth in New York City may be unlikely to have this degree of support. Some older new mothers may not have been breast-fed themselves as babies—American breast-feeding rates, which declined through much of the mid-20^th century, reached a record low in 1971, when only 21 percent of mothers breast-fed their infants at birth. They may never have seen their mothers, sisters or friends nurse their babies, and may have no idea how to do it. Their friends may feed them misinformation: one pregnant woman I know said that her friends told her that “nursing is really uncomfortable, but you get used to it,”—not exactly an incentive to try. They may be unable to afford the services of a lactation consultant. Or they may need to return to work soon after the birth (the U.S. is one of three countries in the world that provide no paid maternity leave) and may have no opportunities to pump at work if they do.

Encouraging new mothers to breast-feed is a worthy goal. But the 48 hours that most mothers spend in the hospital after giving birth may be too little time to establish a good breast-feeding relationship. And mothers who give birth by caesarian section—as I did—may not even begin producing breast milk until three or four days after their babies are born. New mothers need support and understanding long after they leave the hospital, and all the more so when they are up in the small hours at home, desperately trying to feed a howling, ravenous baby. They also need encouragement and comfort if they choose—for whatever reason—to feed their baby formula. As Woodall’s pediatrician told her, “do what you need to do to stay sane.” When she took his advice, she says, “you could feel the whole house take a sigh of relief.”

As for me, I breast-fed my now 19-month-old twins—one on each breast, every morning—until they were 15 months old. Truth be told, I didn’t think they really needed nursing at that point. But I loved breast-feeding, and I doubt if I would have succeeded if I hadn’t. I also don’t know what I would have done if supplemental formula hadn’t been available for my teeny-tiny twins. Wet nurses aren’t exactly thick on the ground these days.

Josie Glausiusz is a science journalist and author of “Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects”

Some links for further reading: Huffington Post, The New York Post, CBS News, and Time.

 

 

Breastfeeding Bullies

Last week, I went back to work, with something of a heavy heart. It’s true my hours are flexible. I’m a journalist and I’m not expected to be in the office all day, every day. But still, it’s time away from my baby girl, who’s a little over four months old, and that’s just hard. In addition, I started teaching an eight-week creative writing workshop.

When I mentioned my plans to an older colleague, she reacted with shock.

“But how can you – your baby’s only, what?”

“Four months old.”

“And so you’re planning to stop breastfeeding?

“No, no, of course not,” I replied. “I have my own office, so I can close the door and pump.”

“Oh, but I just don’t see how you can really continue, and it’s so important to establish breastfeeding now,” she lectured, oblivious to the fact that it had already been well-established in the week following my daughter’s birth in February. And then she continued to offer the following from her own Joan of Arc school of mothering. “When I breastfed that’s all I did. I was just 100 percent there for the baby for at least the first year, and even beyond. I didn’t even read a book while breastfeeding -  I could never understand how women can do that.”

Paperbacks usually make for good reading during breastfeeding, because holding a heavy hardcover isn’t comfortable – I fear I might drift off and drop the book on baby. If I didn’t read and feed, I’m not sure when I’d get time to read a book at all. Baby doesn’t seem to mind.

Well, some of us can. And I’m not sure if by wondering how women “can do that” you’re wondering if it’s really possible to lactate and cogitate at the same time, or if you’re suggesting that, well, shame on me for engaging my intellectual capacities while my body is busy doing what it was put on this earth to do – make and feed babies.

If I had the guts, I’d have told her she was being a breastfeeding bully. Given that she’s not a good friend, it was none of her business to ask what my breastfeeding plans were and whether my daughter would continue to be EBF – or exclusively breastfed, initials that dot the mommy blogosphere. As if that weren’t enough, this woman went on to suggest that I really should take the rest of the year off to be at home with my baby.

I suppose what got me so angry was not just this woman’s patronizing tone, but the assumption that every mother who wants to can afford to stay home for an indefinite amount of time. I point out that she is of a different generation only because I find myself theorizing that 30 years ago,  women wanted to work but most still weren’t expected to; it was assumed that they could take several years off for childrearing and be dependent on their husbands’ income. Today’s economy is  different. When they invented the terms DINKS (dual income no kids), they never told us that once you have those kids, you’ll still need the dual incomes in order to survive – and probably even more so. Though there is an image that women who have kids later are more financially secure, the reality is that even “successful” people like me cannot afford to hop off the career track indefinitely, or even for a full year.

The truth is that I needed to write this piece not only to rail against this particular guilt-peddler – who may have been oblivious to the inappropriate nature of her “advice” – but to admit to something. I too have been a breastfeeding bully. It was, I swear, unintentional. Last year, I gave someone a “my breast friend” nursing pillow as a gift after she gave birth, assuming she’d love it. But breastfeeding wound up bringing her nothing but frustration and a hungry baby who wasn’t getting enough milk; she quickly moved to formula and has had to endure a ridiculous number of nosy questions. Before I realized that I, too, might find myself a victim of the breastfeeding bullies, I often took tabs on women around me who were not breastfeeding. I admit to having harbored a sense of superiority over random women – in my baby music class, at the playground, on the airplane – who were younger than I but shaking up a bottle of formula instead of reaching into their shirts.

Most recently, I accidentally started to unload some advice on a friend about to give birth; she said that because she’d had a breast reduction, she didn’t expect to be able to breastfeed. I offered that I have a friend who had reduction surgery and still succeeded in breastfeeding and has a great book on the subject…and there I was again, being the bully – or perhaps proselytizer – I never intended to be.

We have Dr. William Sears, now of Time magazine fame, to thank and to blame for the revival of breastfeeding, baby-wearing and co-sleeping – all part of attachment parenting. I’m part of the trend because I do all of these – in moderation. (What’s moderate? A friend who would have me wear the baby all day long and who would ban the bouncy chair from my living room is not moderate.) I have one foot in and one foot out – trying to maintain my career while making time for my children.  With a little help from family and friends, it seems to be working so far. That is, as long as I banish the bullies who would have me borrow money if necessary – as Sears suggests – over returning to work.

Would I like to stay home with my baby longer, and spend all day every day feeding her, playing with her, watching her grow? Yes, a part of me would. And part of me will always need more than that, and cannot nullify the woman I was before I had two babies.

I’m not sure what I would do if my role as a family wage-earner weren’t pivotal. I’m grateful that I have two sweet children and a supportive husband – and that my opportunities and options have grown, thanks to the battles waged by the men and women who came before me. I’ll find a way to be the best mother I can be and still have a role to play as a writer, journalist and teacher. So am I still nursing full-time? Why yes, in fact I am. But before you ask me or any other new mother, consider how loaded the question is, and try to stop yourself before you become a breastfeeding bully.

“Enjoy every moment!”

by Ilene Prusher

“Enjoy every moment! It goes so fast.”  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard that in the past year and-a-half or so. (Ok, 20 months this week, but who’s counting? Who else but new parents count in months?)

People who say that it goes fast are people who are long past dirty diapers, sleep deprivation and dinner ending with half of the food on the floor.  And people who insist you should enjoy every moment have forgotten what it’s like to have an inconsolable baby, or a toddler who thinks the point of the xylophone mallet or a kiddy flute is to whap said baby in the head.

Another feckless attempt to prevent big brother from giving little sister nuggies. Now we make sure the kids are on the outside in a photo, rather than on the inside.

I am blessed to have both baby and toddler, and I am humbled by the challenge of raising them. When I go walking with the two of them in our double stroller, people point and peek, I assume because they’re expecting twins – or maybe because the generous ‘rents brought over a state-of-the-art stroller that is perfect for a baby-and-toddler combo. Indeed, I’ve recently come to realize that having babies who are less than a year and-a-half apart is something akin to having twins, except one has the ability to throw blocks at the other’s head, or pounce on the bouncy chair with a bit too much gusto.

My son, to clarify, is a charming, sweet boy who was and remains what the parenting gurus would call an easy baby – sleeps well, eats well, and entertains the masses.  But he doesn’t know his own strength and still hasn’t mastered the causal relationship between throwing that block and the baby crying when the toy nicks her cheek. He is all smiles and kisses every time he sees his sister, and coos “baby, baby” with delight.  Baby Z looks at turns bemused and terrified as he approaches to give her sloppy kisses and a not-so-gentle head massage, or to tug enthusiastically on her footie pajamas. Yes, these are precious moments – but also trying ones. More specifically, these are moments where, unless big brother is trapped in his high chair, I can’t leave him alone with his little sister for a minute, not even to so much as take a wee. Last time I did that, stepping into the kitchen to turn down the heat on some eggs, a flying board book narrowly missed her eye.  Now, if we want to put her down and take a few minutes’ break from attachment parenting – which would have baby strapped to our person during most of her waking hours –  we put her in a wooden playpen. It has the look of putting the baby in an open air prison cell, a la Hosni Mubarak on trial.

BABY IN A CAGE: I never got the idea of having one of these in your living room and thought it looked horrible - until I realized its uses in protecting one sibling from the other. Except that is, from empty egg cartons, matchbox cars, and books - just a few of the things our son has managed to toss in before we could stop him.

So I must be honest, because that’s what I think a no-holds-barred blog on motherhood should do – it’s what I feel inspired to do after reading the funny-but-fakakt realities outlined in books like “Bad Mother” and “Afterbirth“. I am not enjoying every moment. And there are days when it does not seem to be going fast at all.

Sure, kids grow quickly, which seemed all the more obvious when baby weighed in today 12.7 pounds (5.8 kilos) – well on her way to doubling her birth weight and putting her in the 75th percentile of weight for babies her age. All of this on good old-fashioned breastfeeding, which suddenly everyone and their mother seems to have an opinion on thanks to the recent Time cover story. Suddenly she’s in the 3-6 months clothes, and not necessarily swimming in all of them. Flashing a smile here and there. Making me proud.

But also screaming with seeming hysteria a few times a day. See, the people who say it goes too quickly probably are also not people who have or have recently had a baby with colic and reflux, which cause terrible abdominal pain and burning in the esophagus. This is a reality which I’ve avoiding facing for quite some time, not fulfilling the doctor’s prescription for Zantac until last week because it sounded like too serious a drug; I wanted to stick to over-the-counter or natural remedies instead. Since the baby’s been on Zantac, she seems to be feeling better, but still has episodes in which it seems she’s being tortured by a demon. (Yes, yes, I’ve tried cutting various things out of my diet and am even putting goat’s milk into my coffee to avoid the purportedly evil influence of cow dairy. Oh please, please, leave me to my one cup of coffee a day.)

Yes, it goes fast, but would I be a bad mother if I said there are moments where I find myself wishing it would go faster? Babies with reflux usually get better by four months, or six months, but sometimes it goes for longer. Is it terrible for me to want to fast-forward to that day – or to the time when I can leave my two children in the same room for two minutes without the threat of one doing bodily harm to the other?

In the meantime, I’ve become one of those women I once glared at menacingly, all but hissing, lady, pick up your baby. She obviously wants to be held. I hadn’t considered that maybe that baby’s been held for two hours straight, through almost non-stop crying, and maybe what that baby needs now (and her mother needs) is to move in the fresh air, even if the baby doesn’t know it yet. At the start of one city block today, I felt like an ugly child abuser who people were looking at; by the end of the block I felt like supermom, a posterchild of post-partum glamour gliding by with angel baby. I guess she just felt like a good scream – and then she fell blissfully to sleep.

Someone wise put it this way: The years go fast, but the days go by slowly.

I love these two children with all my being. And yet, there are evenings – especially ones like tonight, when hubby has to work late and I’m flying solo – when my happiest moment is when I’ve succeeded in getting both of them down to sleep. Or, when I peek in half an hour later, and listen to the glorious sound of them breathing peacefully.

The food of memory and the food on the floor

By Josie Glausiusz

COMFORT FOOD: One could lock oneself inside for six weeks and emerge without a trace of hunger.

In my parents’ house there is a walk-in pantry filled from floor to ceiling with dried, bottled and canned food of all kinds: beans, lentils, spices and oils, tuna and sardines, flour and rice, wine and mayonnaise, tea and coffee, onions, bananas, potatoes, and bread.

I like to joke that one could lock oneself inside for six weeks and emerge quite happily without a trace of hunger. I’m quite fond of that little room: to me, a home well-stocked with sustenance embodies comfort, security and welcome. I hate to waste food, and that is a lesson I learned from my parents: my father was starved as a child in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, and my mother, evacuated from London with more than one million children at the start of the second World War, ate what was given to her without any fuss.

I’m old enough to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and young enough to be the mother of 16-month-old twins—which is why, when my lovely children throw food on the floor, I sometimes feel like crying.

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