My last post was all about parental happiness and whether or not marriage suffers post baby.  It seems like lately it is always hard. There are unresolved issues going back to the beginning that seem to be under a magnifying lens since kids came into the picture. Communication has always been a struggle and now we are exhausted, have no time and layers of resentments to dig ourselves out from.  I honestly envy my friends who are single moms sometimes. I know it would be hard to go it alone, and I actually have one of those husbands who helps around the house sometimes. But it would be nice to think my life had some hope and promise. That there would be more to it than THIS. So dreary.

In the last post I said there were hopeful days and the other kind. Well, today was one of THOSE days. It was a holiday! A  free day in which all of us could be together. The difficulty began with what to do. I asked my husband, who struggles with major self esteem issues and chronic untreated depression and anxiety, what he wanted to do. I knew he wouldn’t think of anything because he never does. So, when he said he asked in his resigned way “what is there to do?” I rattled off a list of inside inside activities to do with kids in our city full of museums and shopping centers. How did I know he would pick the mall? Because, in his words, it just seems “easiest”. Okay, whatever…I don’t really care. I’m tired of fighting his constant resistance to a more interesting life. Fine, the mall it is.

Then, as we are getting everyone ready to leave, no small task with two kids in diapers who don’t dress themselves, The Boy finds a toy in his closet he hasn’t played with in ages and its all he wants to do. Fine, it was all about entertaining him anyway. If he is content and occupied the goal is met. So we sit down to play. But, The Girl is messing with the toy and The Boy can’t wait for mommy to get it put together, so I sigh and roll my eyes. I’ve done nothing to speak of all day and I’m already exhausted.

The Husband proceeds to say, “What you need to do is just relax.” And not in a soothing about to get a hot stone massage kind of way, either. More like a “woman, what is your problem?” kind of way. So I reacted. I’m not proud of this, but the part of the toy that was in my hand flew in his direction. This is the man that I have nursed through anxiety attacks every time we’ve had any social event to go to (back when I still tried). This is the man who I am constantly talking down from irrational worries. He was telling ME to “just relax”?!!! I actually meant to throw the toy in mock outrage. I was half kidding around. It wasn’t a very hard toy. I aimed for his chest. But he ducked and it hit his lip. Just as I’m apologizing and asking him if he’s okay, he gets mad and storms out. The rest of the day is stormy silence.  Palpable, icy silence.

I know he’s the victim here, but I was soooooo mad at him. At his reaction and the way he pulls away to punish me and all the years of everything. Oh, too much to list. My natural way when I am angry is to fight it out, but its impossible with someone who refuses to communicate. So I go around in icy silence, too. Its AWFUL how depressed I can feel after only a few hours of internalizing my anger.

At one point he sat down by me and said he wanted to connect with me. Yeah, at one point I did too. I don’t care much anymore. So, I said, okay. I didn’t reach out to him, but I think I was open to what he had to say. But that’s just it. There never is ANYTHING! We made a few jokes about it and the air lightened a little. The Boy did something cute and we laughed at the one thing we seem to have in common anymore. We talked about the funny things he says to us.

The Husband says, “yesterday, he said ‘Dad, you’re not listening to me!’” Which is really funny because that’s what I always say to him. Ha ha. The Husband quickly adds, “of course, I WAS listening to him, though”.

“Of course you were. What was he trying to tell you?”

“I don’t remember, he was just going on and on not really saying anything. You know how he does that.” Yes, I’m pretty sure we all just sound like noise to you.

Happy to Be Here

When my boy was a wee infant my husband and I signed up for a Bringing Baby Home class. I guess to be more accurate, I should say I told my husband we were going to the class and dragged him reluctantly along. I did this with the premise that it was for his (OUR) own good. It would help our marriage. And I think it did. I completely blame that class for getting me pregnant with baby #2. We gave up several Saturday afternoons to sit in an awkwardly silent room full of other couples sheepishly avoiding eye contact. But we walked away with some tools for communicating and a jar full of colorful pieces of paper with a marital tip on each one. Frankly, what that class really did was motivate us by scaring the hell out of us.

What seemed like a disproportionately large part of the class was spent going over the very grim results of the research done by the Gottman Institute regarding how having children effects a marriage. Its not a rosy outlook, let me tell you. For the last two or so years, that class, that research, has been my story. It has been part of the landscape. It has had an effect on how I view my own marriage.

Today, I read this article and it has added to my view. It refers to research that shows being a parent can make one MORE happy, but ony if you happen to be married. I have a lot of thoughts on this and they are not completely formulated, so here are the bullet points:

1. Just the fact that some research study had a certain conclusion can change what I think about my own life. Very powerful. And I think of myself as a very critical thinker. Akin to Scully. I think I need to listen  to my inner voice more and research studies a little less.
2. To be fair, I think the Gottman research was specifically about marital happiness and the quality of the marital relationship and the Journal of Happiness study is looking at the personal happiness of people who happen to be married. Its a subtle but real difference. More on that later.
3. The line in the Newsweek blog that stuck in my head and made me want to write about it was “It makes more sense that life not going to plan is causing the drop, and having kids when life doesn’t go according to plan makes getting back on track even more complicated.” The life not going according to plan immediately sends my mind back to the days when we were having trouble conceiving. I was getting tests, procedures, surgery, fertility drugs and IUI for almost three years and no one could find anything wrong with my husband or I. No one could explain what was going on and I was afraid my life would never go according to the plan in my head. That plan included children. I was very unhappy then. Without children.
4. Somehow  whatever was making it hard for me to conceive resolved itself and I had two babies in less than two years. Now my life is crazy, messy, laundry strewn about in literally EVERY room of my ever more crowded tiny little house. I’ve never been so sleep deprived in my life. Even during dead week my senior year when I had three papers due on one day and stayed up several nights in a row writing. After a night like that I always could sleep it off. This is relentless with no end in sight. But every day includes many heart wrenchingly  joyful moments. And I am happy.
5. I am happy, but my marriage is without a doubt suffering. Badly. Some days I think its doomed. Other days I think we’ll get past this. We’ll see what happens. Right now I’m in a “we’ll weather the storm” kind of mood. 10 minutes ago my husband got up from his video game and came to sit by me and I shooed him away until I was done. I should know better. One of the big rules in the Gottman class was to respond to what they referred to as “bids” from your partner. I’m also not sure if my husband is  happy. Or if he ever was. He has had untreated depression probably his whole life. Oh, but that is for another entry…

Caution: Spoiler alert ahead

Two days ago my boy was happily playing with his megablocks on the living room carpet, building all his favorite things: castles and diggers and fire engines, when suddenly things took a surprising turn. He constructed a long megablock stick like thing, aimed it at his sister and repeated several times the word “shoot”.

HUH?!

Where in his 29 months of life did he get this? His media exposure is strictly limited to a few tractor videos from the library, Curious George, Thomas the Tank Engine and Sesame Street. I know this because we only watch tv from the DVR and that is all we record. I called Grandma who spends three days a week with him. Did she expose him to something that would elicit this? No, nothing….she can’t imagine where he is getting this either.

Then I posted it on Facebook and got quite an enthusiastic response…He’s such a boy! Its in their genes! The collective unconscious! Hmmm….I guessed they were right. I couldn’t imagine any other way he would be exposed to this.

But, tonight I solved the mystery.

We are in a very big Beatrix Potter phase right now. Mostly he wants to hear the tale of  Jeremy Fisher two to three times a day and can paraphrase the entire story in two-year-old-ese. For this, I am thankful because I can get him to “read” it to me, since I SWEAR, if I have to read that ONE MORE TIME I fear what the consequences may be!

We do branch out, though. We have the entire collection, you see. And tonight he requested a story I have not previously read, but I know he read with his dad before. (here is where the spoilers kick in) It is called The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit. No Flopsy, Mopsy or Cotton Tail, this rabbit. Not even Benjamin Bunny or Peter Rabbit getting the switch were as bad as this rabbit. Or received such consequences. It is a bit of a departure from her usual style for Ms. Potter, and was fairly surprising for me. But now I know where my boy learned to “shoot”.

I put this book away until a later date. I’m not opposed to guns, especially when used for hunting. We eat meat and I would be hypocritical if I thought anything else. The part that really worries me about this book is that in the story there is a good rabbit and a bad rabbit. The bad rabbit is very mean to the good rabbit and gets his come-up-ance via a hunter with a rifle. But the thing is in the part with the two rabbits, you could replace “good rabbit” with my daughter’s name and “bad rabbit” with my son’s name and you would be describing what occurs every day at my house. She has something he wants, he takes it and hurts her in the process.  I just worry what his two and a half year old imagination is turning this into. Does he fear he will get his tail and whiskers shot off? Or does he want to rewrite the story so the good rabbit is the one who gets punished. And God forbid he learns to see himself as a bad “rabbit”. I guess mommy just is not ready for this book right now.

Oh yeah….

I completely forgot I started this thing. Hey! Anybody still out there? Was anybody ever out there? After reading that same post I wrote a year and a half ago (!!!) I am struck by how much things have changed and how much they are the same.

I am sitting here in bed, unable to sleep. Everyone else in the family is sawing logs. My baby is struggling with sleeping through the night….So maybe now is a good time to go back to where we left off….

About the time of the last post I found out *surprise* I’m not so infertile as I thought. I was pregnant. (Insert whirring, squeaky fast forward sound) Back to the present….two children, two chickens, a new job, the same husband and a lot less money in the bank.

Without getting too deeply into anything right now, here are a few bullet points that get to the nitty gritty:

• Parenting two, for me, has been more than twice as hard and I don’t think I’m handling it quite so gracefully as I did before.
• I left my old job reluctantly and it was the best decision I’ve made (other than having my kids) in YEARS. I am so. Much. Happier. I now remember why I went into teaching special education and feeling like a valued professional. My boss told me I was a “godsend” last week. She used the word “godsend“! I never felt valued before. And did I tell you about my schedule of 3 6 hour (in theory…) days? Tuesday through Thursday. LOVE IT!
• That said, juggling work and two babies is super stressful.
• We are pretty much living proof of this. The most disturbing part is how little I care. Is it the hormones (still nursing…)? Exhaustion? Disillusionment?
• I am head over heels gaga in love with both my kids and more so every day. They continually charm and delight me with their funny, adorable, unique ways of being alive.

Welcome to the Fun House

The good news is that my little boy, aged 11 months and 26 days, slept through the night for the first time last night! 7:30pm to 6am without a peep. I never thought I would see the day. I am not counting the time he did it when he was eight weeks old after a very smoky barbeque on the back porch of his aunt’s apartment. That was an anomaly we pray didn’t cause too much brain damage. Oh, the struggles with sleep we have been through are worth several posts of their own. Its hard to get accross to you in the time I have right now how mind-blowingly amazing and shocking it was to me that he actually continued to NOT WAKE UP. ALL NIGHT.

Mom, not so much. When I woke up at 2:30 and realized my boy was still quiet, I was puzzled. I waited for it to happen. Tossing and turning, the quiet was the most disruptive (lack of) sound I have ever experienced. Pretty soon it was 3:30, and my mind started to go to dark places. I was imagining the 911 call I would make and how I would explain lying in bed doing nothing while in the next room, my baby strangled on his blanket, choked on a loose snap from his pajamas, or fell trying to climb out of his crib. Eventually, he moaned a little in his sleep and I was able to relax into sleep for a few more hours.

In the morning, I went to get him and learned what was up. Or should I say what CAME up. Everything he ate the night before. And every little bit of fluid left in his gut. Poor little guy. He and I both changed our clothes 4 times before 8 am. His dad had already left for work on his bike and I have NO leave left, so we did some juggling and coordinating over cell phones. I brought him to work and did a trade. So, now I am here at school trying to teach while all I can think of his holding his stinky little lethargic body. It kills me.

On Family Farms and Developmental Delays

Last night I finished part III of the PBS documentary The Farmer’s Wife. If you are like me, and missed it when it came out a full decade ago, I would suggest running out and renting it, or surfing right on over to Netflix and putting it to the top of your que right now. Who knew that watching six and a half hours of the real lives of everyday people would be so riveting? Its the story of a Nebraska farm family and their struggle not to lose the farm or their marriage. The documentary ends when things start to look better, but I was left with the feeling that they will never be out of the woods. So, of course I ran to Google to find what I could about what HAPPENED in the 12 years since we last saw the Buschkoetter family. The Frontline website has a simple statement dated 2006 that they have since divorced and each remarried. It tells what they are both doing with their careers. Nothing else. And there will be no follow up documentary. It drives me crazy!!! I worried with these people when they prayed the rain would stop so they could plant and rejoiced with these people when they had a bumper crop and could pay their creditors. I cried a little when Juanita dropped the littlest one, Whitney, off on her first day of kindergarten. How could they just leave me hanging?!

So, I have, as is my way, spent the last 2-3 hours obsessively searching and reading what I could find. One of the things on the PBS website that really gave me something to hang onto was a series of essays written by several authors, psychologists and psychiatrists each giving their own unique analysis of the events in the movie. “Men and Women in Crisis: The Journey to Harvest” by Terrence Real really got me thinking. He links what happened to them to a larger problem in society:

Relations between men and women are in trouble in this culture…Darrel and Juanita show us that patriarchy just doesn’t play anymore, not even here in rural Nebraska. The crisis between men and women boils down to a simple historical fact – women have changed and men have not.

I hear this a lot. I agree that in some cases this might be true. Juanita and Darrel are just a little older than me, maybe 5-10 years, and culturally so different. They are so much more traditional. In the circles of people I know, men’s roles, when compared to our fathers, are changing. A lot. But that is not necessarily a good thing.

There is a trend I have noticed in a lot of men I know about my age of getting really stuck in a very immature place. I say this with love. I love these men because they choose strong women, they are involved fathers (or want to be), they are creative and reject the traditional domineering roles offered to them by their role models. But they never seem to give up on their adolescence. I know oodles of smart, capable, sensitive men who continue to drink and take drugs excessively and seemingly without control into their 30’s. With children. In front of their children. More than a few who do this at work. Who spend a great deal of their energy on video games. Who cannot commit to the women they love. Who, closer to 40 than 30, can not figure out what they want to be when they grow up. Who get caught up in fantasy relationships with innappropriate partners that destroy their real families.

Some of the men I know are of an age that it makes you go hmm…when they are still single and never married or settled down. To these, I say so what, who is it hurting? And they are fun guys to be around. But more often than not, these men have married, made babies and people are hurting. My take on it is that it is the next step in the evolution of men. Or perhaps a misstep. They reject the examples given to them by their fathers. Unlike Darrel Buschkoetter, they embrace their evolved wives and refuse to participate in patriarchy. But they do not KNOW who to become. They have very few examples of a new man that they can live with. So they don’t change and remain stagnant in an early stage of development. Last summer, roasting marshmallows over the backyard fire pit, some women I know and I coined a term: DDMS, Developmentally Delayed Man Syndrome. Who would you diagnose with DDMS? What are his symptoms? Help me come up with a diagnostic definition.

Hello world!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the imperfect mothers out there! I am a fairly new mom (this is my first mother’s day with baby in arms) but I have spent my life working with kids in one form or another. For the past 15 years I have worked with children with severe behavior difficulties in one capacity or another and I have learned a few things about helping children deal with hard feelings, choose to cooperate and get along. I’ve seen some miraculous changes you would not believe. I still have A LOT to learn (thank goodness…that is what keeps me going), but I want to share what I do know.

I can’t say I follow any one philosophy. I prefer to take in all sides of an issue. When I am curious about a problem, or a topic, I will grab onto it like a pit bull and chew on the information until all the mystery is gone right out of it. I am voracious in my curiosity. I do believe these things:

• That all parents mean the best for their children and are doing the best they know how.
• That all children do the best they are able.
• I do not blame parents for the difficulties of their children, but would like to empower them to realize they are the single greatest influence in a child’s life.
• Parents do really well when they REALLY listen to their guts.
• Kids do really well when parents REALLY listen to what they need.
• We would all do better to forgive ourselves and everyone else who is not perfect. That, after all, is what makes us interesting.

I feel like I have a lot of experience to share and hope this is the beginning of a long dialogue. I would love to hear from those of you out there that are struggling and those that might have things to share with me. I too have my struggles (more on those coming…)