Here we go again. Breastfeeding.
My pediatrician told me she prefers the pain of labor to the pain of breastfeeding. Labor, she says, you only have to do once. Breastfeeding is something you have to do eight to 12 times a day.
I have to say I agree. I'd happily go through a c-section a couple more times in exchange for smooth, trouble-free, painless breastfeeding.
I had to give up nursing when Dylan was just six weeks old. I got to 10 months with Hailey, and four months with Natalie. None of my kids were exclusively breastfed. I have a host of different problems, which I won't take the time to outline, instead I'll just say that breastfeeding is physically difficult for me. And very painful. At times I feel genuine despair because I'm just not able to accomplish a normal breastfeeding relationship like pretty much everyone else I encounter in my hometown.
At those times, I try to remember what a friend said to me right after I gave up breastfeeding Dylan.
My friend has three healthy boys. What I didn't know at the time was that she also had a fourth baby--her first--who died at birth. She came over to visit us when Dylan was a couple of months old, and she indulgently listened to me lament my lost breastfeeding relationship. Then she told me about the death of her first baby.
"I used to hate it when people would complain about their uncomfortable pregnancy or difficult labor," she said. "All that pain means nothing if you have a healthy baby. My first baby was stillborn, and you know I would have had him through my nose if it meant I'd have been able to keep him."
And that was it. Perspective. As trying as those first couple of weeks are, as frustrating as it is knowing that I can't give my baby as much breastmilk as I'd like to, in the end it doesn't matter. My baby is healthy, he's happy, and I'm grateful.
When I was a kid I had a few close encounters with bats. I remember getting dive-bombed by a bat while swimming in my grandparents' pool at dusk, and I can also remember finding a dead bat in that same pool. While camping a bat once flew so close to me that I felt its wings brush against my hair. And my mom once discovered a dead bat in our house--later she recalled "something black" swooping past her head when she opened the front door a few mornings earlier. Once there was a very suspicious bat flying around in broad daylight next to our barn; when we called Animal Control the officer failed to locate it and we never found out its fate. Of all the bats I've encountered, that one was probably the most likely to have been dangerously ill. I guess we were lucky that one of our dogs or cats didn't get hold of it.
Despite all these close encounters, I never once worried about contracting rabies. So how come my 18 month old's near encounter with a bat on Halloween sent me into a freakishly irrational state of paranoia?
Here's what happened: we were walking with a small group of fellow trick-or-treaters at dusk when I saw a bat swoop down to where my 18 month old, Natalie, was walking. It veered in quite close to her, flew back towards one of the houses, flew along the wall and then back up into the sky.
I don't know if it touched her. She certainly didn't react as if anything strange had happened, she just kept obliviously walking along in her (adorable I might add) strawberry costume. But for me it was the beginning of an obsessive search for information.
I called the pediatrician on call the next day. "There's always a small chance that a person could contract rabies from that kind of encounter," he told me. "But it's about as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero."
Of course, I didn't focus on the "close to zero" part of his answer. I focused on the part where he said "There's always a small chance."
The internet wasn't really helping me. It was full of stories about people dying of rabies after simply finding a bat in their bedroom, or about entire soccer teams getting rabies shots because a bat flew too close to them during a game. The CDC even went so far as to recommend rabies vaccination for "when a bat flies into a person." Of course, I had no idea whether the bat really did fly into Natalie, or whether it just came close.
And I read about Jeanna Giese, the world's only unvaccinated rabies survivor.That small glimmer of hope for what might happen if Natalie got sick because I didn't succumb to my paranoia and vaccinate her faded when I learned that the medical protocol used to save Jeanna had never been successfully duplicated. Rabies was still pretty much considered a death sentence.
So I waited until my regular pediatrician was in the office, and then I called her for a second opinion. She told me the same thing."I wouldn't vaccinate either of my girls in that situation," she said.
Those doctors must think I'm a basket case.
After talking to them I feel a little better. I guess. Still, this is just one example of what happens to you when you become a parent. I remember in my pre-child days worrying about myself--when the SARS outbreak was spreading through Canada, I obsessed over my own safety. Now my own safety means nothing to me, except of course for what it will mean to my kids if they lost their mother.
And my paranoia for them is far more severe than it ever was for myself. I am told this worrying and obsessing over the health and safety of my kids will never go away. I wouldn't really want it to, either, although I would prefer for it to be more of a rational paranoia rather than the lie-awake-at-night-worrying-about-slim-possibilities kind of paranoia.
I used to dream that one day I would have a nice house and plenty of money to spare. Now I dream that on my death bed I will be able to say that all of my children are happy, healthy and secure in their lives. And rabies-free.
Let's be honest: caring for three kids ages four and under is challenging. It's challenging when you're getting eight hours of sleep every night and are in good health. It's next to impossible when those two factors are out of whack.
I came down with a cold on Sunday. Normally when I have a cold, I take Nyquil. I may feel terrible during the day but at least I can get some sleep at night. Being well rested helps me cope with my day to day routine, even though I'm stuffy, achy and scratchy.
Of course, Nyquil is one of those meds you aren't supposed to take when you're pregnant. No Dayquil either, or cough syrup, and decongestants, though allowed, have questionable safety ratings (pregnancy class C).
So I've been going to bed at night sans-drugs, and I haven't been sleeping well at all. For two nights in a row I've given up and gone out to the living room to read and feel sorry for myself. I've gotten a lot of reading done, but once morning comes I'd trade all that progress in my entertaining but intellectually-limited novel for a coherent thought or two.
It's tough to take care of kids in this state. Kids, being kids, are full of demands. And they never ask for everything they need at once, they always wait until you sit down and try to close your eyes before they come up with new ideas for things they can't live without. I fetch my son a glass of apple juice, I sit down, and 30 seconds later he wants me to go out to the car to get the toy he left there last night. I get my daughter some milk and goldfish crackers, I sit down and try to close my eyes, and 30 seconds later she wants me to change the batteries in her drawing board.
Then there's the usual dishes, dinner, tidying-up etc. Remember the days when you could stay in bed when you were sick? I actually had a lovely dream the night I came down with my cold. In my dream, I called up
my boss and told him I was too sick to come to work. Then I woke up and
realized that my bosses are preschoolers and my job doesn't have sick
leave. Damn it!!!
