"Sleep Like A Baby"

I think it's safe to assume that the person who coined the term "Sleep like a baby" was a man.  Obviously some well-coiffed buffoon paid a visit to the nursery on his estate and, while the exhausted nanny struggled to remain upright and awake for Sir's visit (which cut into the brief rest she was to have), remarked upon how envious it was to be able to "sleep like a baby," while chewing on his pipe and peering down into the bassinet. Requisite fatherly duties dispensed with, he exited the room in a puff of foul-smelling Turkish tobacco smoke and in his sound-insulated, wood-paneled study, put quill to paper to record for centuries the most maligned term in English language.

Sleep like a baby, my ass.

In fact, I hope he spent the rest of his days sleeping like a baby.  Waking every three hours desperate to eat, crying for no apparent reason, and shitting his pants.

Between the baby being awake, and the short spurts of blissful sleep, there is an arid wasteland of putting the baby to sleep.  It is in this desperate time period that we are at our most harried, exhausted, sensitive, and imaginative.  There will be WORLD PEACE if only I can get this baby to bed.  I will dance in a field of flowers with sunlight streaming through my hair, if ONLY I can get this baby to sleep.  Woe betide you who interrupt me from this task.  The blinders are on.  There is NOTHING more important and completely necessary than getting this baby to shut his eyes and sleep.  On a recent car journey, with the baby refusing to sit in his seat and instead spending three hours wailing away in my arms (I possess biceps like the Hulk at this point), when Andy asked me to wipe our older son's sticky face, I almost picked up the car seat and threw it at his head. "Cleaning his face isn't on my priority list right now!" I snapped back, before being absorbed back into the hellish world from whence I came.

But once the baby is asleep, oh then, it's all summery breezes and butterflies.  The tornado raging away around me dies down and everything is beautiful.  Unless he is just pretending to sleep, of course.

This happens only when I MOST need the baby to sleep.  Say, for example, when I have been up for hours at night and it's finally morning naptime.  He's pissy but through a dizzying combination of bouncing, patting, and continuous swaddling of those tiny fists that love to break free and pull out the pacifier just as he is falling asleep, it's working!  Eureka!  Now I totally know how Archimedes felt! I have an out of body experience as I forget my weary limbs...I'm completely focused on my task of putting the baby to sleep.  Suddenly, I can climb mountains.  I start imagining all the wonderful things I can achieve when he (definitely) sleeps.  I could NAP!  Wait, who has time for a nap when there is food to be had?!  I could eat a HOT breakfast!   I could write!  I could shower AND brush. my. teeth!

My head swimming with dreams and possibilities, I realize I am bone tired.  I need to sleep, before anything.  All else can be achieved...later.  I'm still bouncing, I'm still patting, but my eyes are heavy.  The baby is breathing steadily and sleeping soundly.  My eyelids are drooping.  I'm actually already dreaming.  Dreaming of the cool sheets under my tired body, the soft feather-stuffed pillow beneath my weary head, the fluffy duvet insulting me from reality...I just can't wait.  I'm already there, even while bouncing with the baby in my arms.  I just need to transplant him successfully from my body to the crib.

Half-asleep, I glance down before I make my stealthy moves. One.  One tiny little beady eye is open and is peeking up at me.

Sigh.

Then, a gummy smile.

Shit.

The beautiful, peaceful world I just built around me comes crashing down.  It's really cold in here, I really need a shower, and my eyes are burning.  Stupid hopes and dreams.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I was in bliss - bliss being a piping hot shower.  I had leisurely washed away the dried spit up, spilt breast-milk, and other bodily fluids that seemed to always find their way onto my tired, depleted body every day. I felt so clean.  Yay for me! As I rinsed, I suddenly felt something foreign making its way down my body.  Paralyzed with fear for a moment, I risked a glance down and jumped back in shock as far as I could (within the confines of my shower cubicle), trying to get away from the tarantula that had just snaked down my leg and lazily dropped to the floor.

Only, upon squinting at the thing, I realized it wasn't a tarantula at all.  What it was, was a rather large knotted clump of what used to be my beautiful, lustrous hair.

Shit.  This was more frightening than when it was a tarantula.

I quickly thought back to how many prenatal vitamins I had left in the bottle by my bedside. Had I been taking them every day? Did I skip a few? This wasn't supposed to happen for many months yet! In any case it wasn't going to happen to me because my hair was Just So Perfect.

It's not fair!  Being a curly girl, my hair has been a daily struggle since I was born.  My corkscrew curls as a chubby toddler made way to wiry, wavy hair that was neither here nor there (This was the 80's.  Side ponytails were not a good look on me, and now you know where my dislike of scrunchies comes from), then to a greasy-rooted but fluffy-ended pyramid during puberty, and finally, FINALLY into perfection.  We had a rough past but things were glorious from then on out...until I had the baby.

I try not to blame him.  It's not healthy.

One has to go higher up the food chain.  What false, woman-hating God is this who screws with new moms in this manner!?! Were they recovering from some Deity all-night rager, on the day they had to decide the minutiae of how our bodies worked?  Were they just sitting around on their respective clouds, nursing some holy headaches and trying to get through the work day by being particularly imaginative?

God A: "You know what would be fun? Let's make their bodies too small to actually hold the baby, so that their bellies have to stretch out...like play dough."

God B: "Cool! OMG and they should totally squeeze the babies out of a tiny hole in one end!  SO fun! The bleeding should only last like, 6 weeks, tops.

God A: "Yes! And afterwards, we can blur the line between their waists and hips so that their entire midsections are just amorphous blobs.  (Solemnly) The only way to get their waistlines back are through sacrifice and physical exertion.  It'll be a nice way to make them appreciate the bodies we bestowed upon them."

God B: "Hmm...I'm feeling artistic.  I kinda just want to draw a magical dark line down their bellies.  Hey, vertical stripes are slimming (giggles)!"

God A: "Do it, bro! We'll call it something exotic, like "Linea Negra" We can make sure it fades with the passage of time (waving arm through air dramatically)."

God B: "Waiiiit, you know that utterly gorgeous hair we gave them a few months ago? Let's have them shed it...

God A: "Like dogs?"

God B: "Duuude.  It's like you always know what I'm thinking (shakes head in awe)!"

Back to Earth.  Indeed, soon every time I ran my fingers through my disappearing locks, an alarming number of strands would pull away into my palms. One fine day my shower stall turned into a mini bath-tub and I had to call our maintenance guy up to unclog the drain.  Embarrassed, I joked about how hairy my husband was, and hid in the other room until he was done.  Part of me didn't want to see the horrific findings, and part of me didn't want to see the look of wonder on his face as he pulled out more than a scalp's worth of hair.  I debated lecturing him on how humans shed 50-100 hairs per day, but how when a woman is pregnant, her body hangs on to every strand until a few months post-partum...but it's an exhausting explanation and I think he just wanted to leave my house of horrors.  You see how I decided to hide away.

I still maintain that was all Andy's chest hair, but whatever. I guess some of it could be attributed to me. Not my chest hair. I don't have chest hair. That would be weird.

Let's talk some more about the hair on my head.  I tried everything - rubbing warm coconut oil in it (that brought back memories of school friends in India, who had to oil and double-braid their hair every morning as part of the school dress-code.  I used to feel sorry for them but now they have the most fabulous hair of all time!) I tried the latest and greatest elasticizing and deep conditioning at-home treatments.  In the end I had to settle for chopping it all off.  My stylist looked at my split-ends and rat's tail in surprise and said "What happened to you?!" before she took her shears to them and mercifully restored some dignity to my fading mane.  Thank God (but not those A and B a-holes) that the Lob is in.

Hopefully the passage of time will indeed bring back my hair, my waistline, and my sanity.

Do you have an inexplicably gorgeous head of hair, even after your baby?  If so, please share your secrets below! I will literally try anything.  If I had a placenta handy I'd eat it, if that would help. Or rub it into my scalp. Potato, potahto.  

Paranormal Activity

I seem to have developed preternatural hearing.

I swear, even in my deepest sleep, I can distinguish between the roar of the air-conditioner, Hudson’s snuffles, and the telling mini-creak of the floorboards when tiny feet carry my sleepy toddler into my room so we can all “be to-ge-ther”. At the sound of him approaching I usually get up and am ready to escort him back to his room, no matter what the time.

Recently, he has become something of a master negotiator. First he tried perseverance. After the fifth visit to my room, I could see him smiling every time I led him back to his bed. He knew he was just going to give it 10 minutes and try again. He knew he would break me in a battle of wills. Toddlers are not to be screwed with. They will make you PAY.   Now he tells me in a surprisingly clear voice “I just wanna lie down in your bed a LITTLE BIT…” It’s 3 a.m. and I’ve done the dance between our rooms 7 times already. I want to cry. Or laugh. I’m not sure if I’m super proud of him or if I hate him just a little bit. But I’m hardly likely to argue with him. There’s no reasoning with a toddler. Smart SOB.

I KNOW if I bring him to bed, I stand no chance against his hard little fists and fidgety legs. It’s really cute to feel his tiny hand across my throat in the morning, but it’s a bit alarming in the middle of the night. Once the sun rises, a sweet little foot on my back is adorable. But not ALL. NIGHT. LONG. And not when that foot ends up in my pajama bottoms (Sorry for getting mad at you, husband), and not when I have to listen to an accompanying chorus of Andy harrumphing in annoyance (it seems our little guy likes to furiously rub his feet on a hairy chest). Hey, if you’re willing to get up and put him back in his room - go for it! Yay Papi! No? Oh, well then. Stop your near-silent judgement and move over.

Lately though, since the baby came along, my abilities have diminished. I can’t discern if the sounds I’m hearing are from Andy (who sleeps with a pillow over his face as insurance against all child-led noise), or from Hudson, who has a habit of choosing the dead of night to continuously lick his paws/drag his face across the carpet/bark at phantom intruders. Or is it the new baby, who has some weird sleep snort thing going on, which I’m obsessed with? All this has me feeling insecure in my powers, and I find myself randomly sitting up multiple times a night, making sure I know which sounds are coming from every creature in the room.

Among the normal cacophony on any given night, the toddler’s nocturnal visits have become a little creepy. I haven’t been able to hear him approaching at all. I must be so sleep deprived that I faint and miss the telltale creaks. Sometimes I open my eyes and he’s just…there. Like last night, when he went all Paranormal Activity on me. It was the middle of the night, I was fast asleep but I felt my skin prick…like someone was watching me. I opened my eyes, saw him looming ominously over me, and screamed! A second later, I realized it was just my child, silently staring. My harmless, loveable three-year-old. Not a demon hell-bent on torturing me (although one could argue that they are one and the same). Nonplussed by my scream, he proceeded with the business at hand.

“I want to sweep wit you.”

“You can’t, let’s go back to your bed.”

“But I want to SWEEP wit you.”

“I know baby, let me cuddle you in your bed”

“But I just came to cuddle you in YOUR bed.”

Since I never heard him coming into my room, I didn’t get out of bed. Hence, I was attempting to negotiate with this sharp-minded individual (who really should be wearing pin-striped pajamas) from the drowsy warmth of my cozy duvet and pillow-top mattress. Hardly a position of power. My sleep threatening to leave me at any second, I hastily agreed and moved aside. I wonder if tonight he’ll just lie there and be still. Yes! Tonight he’ll be fine! I’m so optimistic I’m starting to feel giddy. Fool.

Up I get to fetch his little toddler pillow and his TeddyCat (it’s neither a Teddybear, nor a Cat. It is, in fact, a dog. But he refuses to believe me and so we have the first hybrid-cuddly toy ever. Doing great things for the Trans (species) community since 2012). Upon my return, I find he has made himself very comfortable on my down-filled Frette pillow and is already sleeping peacefully. On my side of the bed.

Andy doesn’t even know he’s in here (or he’s pretending like he doesn’t know). I can’t very well leave! Or maybe I can. Toddler pillow in hand, TeddyCat in the other, I use my foot to push the baby bassinet into the other room and tuck myself into the twin bed.

Best night’s sleep I’ve had in ages.

The Minefield

I steady my breath, willing it to be even and calm. My muscles are taut, poised to gently rise up, one limb at a time. I balance nimbly on the balls of my feet, sending a blessing to my pre-natal yoga instructor for the hundreds of Warrior poses she made me do. As I slowly make my ascent, I say a silent prayer. Katniss is about to enter the arena.

Or is it a silent plea? Please let me make it out of the minefield.

If my ankle cracks - it's over. I navigate my way towards the exit in pitch darkness, holding my breath, taking a moment in between each step to ensure I make the right choice of floorboard to step on next.

While I play the parenting version of “the floor is water and it’s full of crocodiles,” a mantra plays in my head. Please don't creak please don't creak please don’t creak.

I wonder, what will it be that does me in this time? The ankle? The stupid parquet flooring which only seems to creak while he is sleeping (bastard flooring), or the ominous sounds of the door squeaking (note to self, smile at maintenance man tomorrow and ask for WD40.)

Who ever knew a nursery with a sleeping baby in it could be fraught with so much apparent disaster at every turn?

I make it to the partially open door, and visualize myself as a snake, willing my body to suddenly attain a flexibility it has never possessed, as I try to squeeze through silently.

I’m at the threshold...I allow myself a brief turnaround to glimpse my sweetly sleeping baby, pivot, and ever-so-gently Shut. The. Door.

Hallelujah! I strut through the hallway of my apartment, receiving accolades from my imaginary audience. Screw the diet! Chocolates and tea all around!

This adrenaline-pumping experience is a twice daily routine. Lest it get boring, the exact stage of sleep the baby is in does change things for me. Sometimes I army-crawl across the room (who convinced me to buy this long pile sheepskin rug anyway?) dropping to the floor at any little whimper or deep exhale, waiting for my break to continue scuttling across like a cockroach. Sometimes I play the weight-game, where I’m patting the baby and I slowly remove my hand, hovering directly above in case he makes a sound, at which point it will come crashing back down upon him, the lullaby I’m humming increasing in pitch and sounding more frantic than ever. Sometimes I make it back outside, only to realize the bloody monitor is still inside the nursery, next to the crib.

There's nothing like a another nerve-tingling roundtrip to make me crave a soothing bottle of wine. Sancerre for naps and Pinot Noir for bedtime, sounds about right and not at all disturbing, yes? YES?!

And sometimes, having risked a look back, I'll see the baby watching my tribal dance across his room with fascination. He lets me know that he appreciates my efforts at entertainment by making guttural cooing noises and flailing his limbs like he can fly. Once we lock eyes of course, (his full of mirth and mine full of panic), his expression darkens and the wailing begins.

I'm at a crossroads. What is the right thing to do? If I quickly hide behind this convenient wall, will he wonder if he made up the mommy-sighting and just go to sleep?

Let me try it.

Nope, he's really pissed now. Should I leave and shut the door?

Oh, my bad. That just resulted in blood-curdling screams. I briefly imagine the neighbours calling the police and child services knocking at my door (presumably during naptime). I rush back in and resume patting, pretending like I never left, unable to look at him. He won't accept my apologetic actions.

Pick me up or else, Mother, if that even IS your real name.

As I oblige and cuddle him, he rears back his head to show me the full extent of his displeasure by screaming in my face, tears and snot streaming down his. I can't believe I did this to a poor, helpless baby! I'm sorry!

Having taught his errant mother a solid lesson in obeying orders, he soon settles down just enough to sleep, but only as long as I'm holding him.  The minute his sleep-sack laden legs touch the mattress he's twitching like a fish out of water. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. Immobile but finally a little less frazzled, I am content to hold him like a bag of flour, because mommy-guilt.

It seems the little shorty has indeed won the battle.

Tell me you have gone through this too. Please.

Yours in Desperation,

V