Primigravida

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.

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.

Is “later” parenthood really different?

The other day, I agreed to participate in a study of women who became mothers at or around 40. Apparently, given the advances in fertility treatments and the acceptability of later motherhood, this is a demographic on the rise – one interesting enough to attract researchers.

This one, Jennie Doberne, is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia and is looking at the social impact in Israel of “later motherhood.” Israel, she says, is particularly interesting because of what she calls in her research description, “pronatalism.” Or, as she puts it in her research summary, “the national pronatalist effort is eroding previous biological constraints on maternity and enabling older women to become mothers.”

In other words, what’s the impact of living in a country where the government will pay for IVF and other treatments up until the age of 45?

Even though we didn’t use fertility treatments to get pregnant, I fit into the demographic, and so I agreed to be interviewed. Which in and of itself was an odd experience: I’m so used to being on the other end of things. As a journalist, I ask the questions, not answer them.

Within minutes of Jennie’s arrival at our house for her usual one-on-one interview, my husband was throwing out answers from the kitchen – and soon asked if he could join in the conversation. When we both agreed, he nearly leapt onto the couch. He’s been as keen to start fatherhood as I was motherhood. And although he’s a year older than me, no one seems to express special interest in what it’s like to engage in “later fatherhood.”

One question stood out towards the end of the interview. Is there something different about becoming parents later? I suddenly thought of the unsolicited advice that an acquaintance who had started motherhood at 40 gave me. “Remember,” she said, “what we lack in energy, we make up for in patience.” Slowly, I’m realizing there is wisdom in her words. A full day with my seven-month-old son – if no one else happens to be around to help –  can exhaust me, though I imagine a 25-year-old mom would say the same. In general, I have loads of energy. But how will I feel in five or ten years? I do think I’m more patient, and more present to the job of being a parent, than I would have been if I’d started having children at say, 28 or 30, when I was still carving out a name for myself professionally. Read more…

Does she or doesn’t she? Or, how I got here.

Oh, go ahead, just ask already.

When you give birth at 40 for the first time, the question on many people’s minds is whether you got pregnant with the help of fertility treatments.

Those who don’t know me often assume I’d been trying for ages, because they think having a first baby at 40 is “late.” And those who do know we got married just two years ago might wonder as well.

So, just to put my own experience out there, because I don’t see the point in a blog that doesn’t, I suppose you can say I got lucky – but it wasn’t quite as easy as that. We returned from a long weekend on our first anniversary and learned I was pregnant – exactly one year after we’d begun trying to conceive.

Six months after trying to get pregnant, I hit 39 and marched myself into a fertility clinic for the usual workup: blood tests, the monitoring of my ovulation and hormone levels, a sperm count for my husband. Six months isn’t long, but I was impatient – and worried.

Everything looked fine, but I still wasn’t getting pregnant, and the ticking of my biological clock was deafening. “You’d better hurry up,” one of my aunties said a month after the wedding, “you don’t have much time.” (Hey, thanks, I didn’t realize!) I saw a naturopath to assess my diet. I gave up most caffeine. And I tolerated a lot of unsolicited advice.

“Don’t eat garlic.” “Stay away from ginger.” “Avoid all dairy products based on cow’s milk.” “Give up sugar and white flour.” “Just don’t think about it.” “Don’t stress.” The list was endless, and occasionally, ridiculous. Read more…