Nobody withstands the machine

In falling back the house of babies surely does not sleep an extra hour, yet it feels the pang of each minute over which it must spring in March. I could not ask less rhetorically: where did the time go?

Daylight Savings Time

Swamp thing

Here is something everybody just has to know: anything one thinks in the middle of the night while lying in bed is completely crazy and must be discarded from one's brain pan as soon as possible. I will provide a humiliating personal example because my sister likes it when I do this.

For a long time I have wanted to visit the Heron Pond cypress swamp in the Shawnee National Forest. I had seen pictures of it and thought it looked really cool, and hiking in cool places with the kids is one of my favorite things to do.

An opportunity arose. In the shining light of this opportunity, I hazarded to look forward to it. In the middle of the night while lying in bed did I hazard to do so. Doing so, I went completely crazy.

I imagined that we were hiking in the cypress swamp, and that some unknown sick freak had released an unwanted pet caiman into it, and the caiman grew into a mighty alligator, and attacked my defenseless family. I am fairly knowledgeable about alligators, having streamed a few episodes of Swamp People, so I knew that my beloved family was done for. We could not outrun it and we could not kill it by shooting it in its one tiny vulnerable area in the back of the head (see how knowledgeable?). We would all be torn to pieces in sight of each other by an alligator in Illinois. I lay in the dark breathing heavily, heart pounding, sweating, freaking out.

Need I mention it? Alligators don't live in Illinois. Caimans don't grow up to be alligators. A swamp in Illinois after a summer of drought is about two inches deep. My brain in the dark bed in the dark night was the only sick freak I needed to worry about. We went to the cypress swamp and it was awesome.

What is it you're worried about? Did you think of it in the middle of the night while you were lying in bed? I guarantee: it is insane.

You idiot.

In an old girl's brain

I weary of the mysticism attributed to various parturitional phenomena. Why does it have to be magic*? These things just make sense. Call it hormones if it makes you happy, I guess; I'd rather imagine that I still have some capacity for a valid analytical response to stimuli.

1. Nesting: a completely rational reaction to knowing that one's house will be mostly neglected for something like a year after the baby is born. No, this shape I'm in is not the most practical for some of the random projects I find myself undertaking in trimesters 2 and 3. But if I don't do them now, they absolutely won't get done later.

2. Post-delivery "high": again, a totally reasonable and predictable reaction to having a healthy baby, having L&D over with, and not being gordo pregnant any more. Freakin duh. (Not to mention that if the alleged nursing "high" were more widely or meaningfully experienced, more people would nurse for longer than three weeks. Oxytocin, the least effective miracle hormone in the universe.)

3. Pregnant/postpartum brain: The BSG "33" sleep schedule alone accounts for this; why even mention the other variables?

*I know, it's not magical, it's brain chemistry. Magical brain chemistry!

Crazy is the new black

I've been surprised several times recently to hear mothers of different types and situations lament, "Why isn't anyone else feeling like this? Why am I the only one?"

"Like this" of course means "completely bleeped-out insane." And, honey, let me tell you, you are not the only chic in this phase of life to feel like your thinking is as murky as yesterday's fry oil. You're crazy, I'm crazy, and that lady over there is crazy. We're all crazy. Really. We just gussy it up a bit in public and call it, "tired."

And now the baby is screaming again, so I've got to go. Just take heart, sister. You're are so not in this alone.

Guess when I wrote this?

All mothers are familiar with the childhood phenomenon of fullness in terms of meatballs and green beans juxtaposed with emptiness in terms of brownies. Mothers experience a similar phenomenon with regard to sleep. We combat a period of difficult sleepiness at some time of the day: around 7:45 when there's a baby in the house whose day begins at 5:12; at 10:30 when the children can tolerate no more maternal housework and the mother can tolerate no more maternal childwork (neither having been accomplished in any creditable way); in the early afternoon when younger children nap; in the late afternoon when they're all back up and crabbier than when they went down; in the early evening when they still can't be put to bed. During pregnancy this urgent exhaustion may strike several times a day, or persist without any break at all.

But then: they go to bed. And suddenly, the mother is awake! She feels great! She's like a normal person! She can do things again! So she does, far past the bedtime that should be her own, the bedtime that would keep tomorrow from feeling like miserable, somnambulant today. But she's not tired any more, and the bedtime of responsible mothers passes, and she enjoys hours of glorious free time instead of the 45 minutes she should have.

And then it's 5:12 again.

Defessissima

My go-to response when someone asks me how I am is "tired." It allows them to show some brief, polite sympathy and provides a natural segue into a safe and limitless small talk topic, the kids (I'm not a conversationalist; I rely on tricks to get me through unstructured social situations).

But I find myself annoyed at times that "tired" is so easy to blow off, particularly during the first month or two or three or four or five or however many after a baby. I can't remember where I read it, but I thoroughly enjoyed one mother's fury at seeing her husband sleeping when she'd been up all night, desperate for a newborn to go to sleep. She said she wanted to throw a bucket of ice water on him. Ahem.

Sleeeeep.

I also recently read The Mask of Motherhood by Susan Maushart (book: acknowledged to exist, neither recommended nor unrecommended). The image that stuck with me from that one was her description of a new mother fantasizing about sleep like a starving person dreams of food. Um, yes. When I daydream about my imaginary weekend away that could never happen, the central feature is sleeping, sleeping, sleeping until I wake up of my own accord, and then going back to sleep.

How many nocturnal hours I've spent in the baby's room HATING all sleeping people. Is there anything more offensive than the rising of the sun when you've been up all night? All creation doesn't give a care. Everybody needs bums wiped and clothes and breakfast and ponytails and supervision for another whole day.

I did that thing again the other day where I kept falling asleep in the middle of reading to the babies. I must have somehow slept through a whole paragraph because I know we finished the chapter, but when I read the same chapter again later to a kid who missed it the first time the entire last paragraph was completely unfamiliar. This amazes me.