Our third day of Mother Words essays, this time by Betsey Matas…

My children are beautiful, intelligent beasts whom I love with a scary intensity previously reserved for Chinese food and donuts. 

This winter, however, I’m not finding them particularly enjoyable. 

At two, five and a pair of ones, my kids are adorable, but much, much smarter than I am.  During these winter months, they huddle together, conspiring on how to drive mommy bonkers, often succeeding beyond their wildest imaginations.

“I know,” five year old Brooklyn, the ringleader, whispers.  “Alex and Aiden, you two learn to walk and scream ‘Daa Daaa’ all day.  Kyan, you color all over everything.  Oh, and get up all night.  I’ll just whine and nudge all day.”

“Daa Daaa!!!” the babies screech in agreement.

Kyan giggles his consent, “Ok, Sister.  Hee, hee, hee, I don’t wanna go to bed!”

This blatant touting of intelligence along with constant fighting, crying and complaining makes me want to buy a non refundable ticket to some exotic island where my new lover Guido and I will live a peaceful existence in our mess-free villa, decorated in various shades of cream and white.

I will live a life of glamour and sophistication and never again hear the incessant, “Mama, mama, mama, look at me!”  Instead, I will lounge luxuriously in bed until fatigue is but a dream. 

When it’s above freezing, I don’t need to rely on this rich fantasy life.  In warm months, I look forward to watching my brood explore and play, with glorious sun glistening off their golden locks.  We spend most days outside exploring the creek, riding bikes and swimming—not assembling in a basement playroom to stare each other down 12 hours a stretch.  Cleaning the sand off their chubby feet or chuckling at the tan lines that cover their little booties, I simply love being with them.

But in winter I wake up counting the hours until bedtime because there is nothing to do but sit.  Until this winter, I made an effort to get out of the house every day.  I was master of indoor playgrounds, free museum days, lunches out and mall trips.  As a trio, and even in the early quintet days (quintet gives it a graceful touch), we were out daily, avoiding and suppressing the special brand of crazy I knew lurked within me. 

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Our second day of Mother Words essays by Laura Blackmar Tompkins…

I look like I got in a fight. I feel like I got in a fight, too. And lost.

At least the black around my eyes is mostly just yesterday’s mascara, combined with some dark circles and puffiness from hours of wakefulness last night. Better than actual bruises. I dab makeup remover on the dark smudges, slowly beginning the process of putting myself back together. I smooth the hair that started to form dreadlocks from tossing and turning.

Good enough, at least, to leave the house in search of coffee.

For a while motherhood had cured me of insomnia, replacing it with the constant sleep deprivation of the newborn period. During those months of round-the-clock breastfeeding, my eyes closed the second my head hit the pillow. And that stage was followed by the current stage of intermittent bad dreams and minor illnesses that still keep me from taking sleep for granted.

Even now, though, insomnia is creeping back into my life, an old acquaintance I’d rather not run into again. (“Hey,” I smile thinly, trying fake politeness, “It’s you. Just in town for a few days? No? You’re moving in? I see. Huh.”)

My daughter seems to have inherited my sleeping patterns. A stressful event, a vacation, any disruption in routine usually results in multiple trips to the bathroom or “scary dreams” at night.

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Each year, we run a week of essays from Kate Hopper’s Motherwords class at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. This year, the class is going online, all the better for you folks who just can’t get out of the house because you’re watching babies. Details of upcoming classes are on Kate’s web site.

But first, here’s the first student essay by Elizabeth Verdick.

I love to hug my son to me and inhale the scent of his bristly hair and soft, pliant skin. Zach is seven but tolerates this.

When he comes in from the outdoors he carries that little-boy smell—sweat, sunshine and fresh air, with an undertone of something earthy and metallic. In the morning, while he’s buried in the warmth of his blankets, I catch the scent of the shampoo I washed his hair with the night before.

I can’t resist this strange, primal urge to bury my face into him like a mother cow nosing her calf. Perhaps it is my attempt to hold him tightly while he’s still willing to be cuddled. Or perhaps I pull him so close to me now because when he was a baby and toddler I could not.

As a baby Zach cried often, arched his back as I held him and pushed away my face with a tightly clenched fist. He learned to crawl away from me, then to walk away from me, then inevitably to run. I took this desperate need for distance personally, thinking that I only knew how to mother a girl and not a boy.

My daughter Olivia, Zach’s older sister, had clung to me as a baby. She said “Mama” early, held my hand as we walked, stroked my face and spent hours in my lap. We could have whole conversations, it seemed, while simply looking into each other’s eyes. So I thought I was a good mother—one who loved deeply, nurtured, supported, and treasured the gift of raising a child. I thought I understood something about the mother-child bond.

But with the birth of my son, the Universe gave me a wake-up call—no, a smack down. Suddenly I had a child who rejected nearly every attempt to bond. Zach ordered me around, not with words (he had none) but with screams and cries. When I didn’t understand his needs, he’d thrash his body on the floor or bump his head against a wall. I jokingly referred to him as “The Little General” but I was worried. The doctors I consulted said that boys tend to talk later than girls and advised me to “wait and see.” I waited.

And I saw a boy steadily retreating from me as time went by.
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After Minnesotan Katie Murr read our Cribsheet post on post-partum pampering, she felt compelled to send us this piece about her son’s birth in the Czech Republic. Josh was born in October. All I can say is - Gives you Perspective.

As I said in Josh’s birth announcement, my labor and delivery experience in the Czech Republic was very comparable to the experience that I had had in the United States. The same type of equipment was used to monitor Josh and me and the reason that I didn’t get an epidural wasn’t that they didn’t offer epidurals, but that I progressed too quickly to get it started in time.

The doctor who delivered Josh was wonderful. She spoke excellent English, was very reassuring and put up with a lot of yelling from an irritating American.

So, after the birth I was feeling very confident about my decision to have a baby abroad. Josh was perfectly healthy, I felt great and I had even managed to have the baby in time to let Dan leave the hospital to pick up Ben from his babysitter before his bedtime. As is the norm in the U.S., the hospital staff let me recover in the labor and delivery room for a couple of hours. Then, the nurses gathered my belongings and wheeled me up to the maternity house, which is the postpartum ward of the hospital.

My postpartum room was dimly lit when the nurse opened the door. It was a high-ceilinged room with a tall window at one end. Three beds with small nightstands lined the room’s walls. In one corner was a dingy, wooden changing table complete with an imposing metal scale and a large, turquoise enamel sink. In the other corner were parked four metal cribs with mattresses. Two other women were already in the room, recovering from births that had taken place earlier in the day.

The nurse woke one of the women and made her translate from Czech to English for me. The woman groggily told me that because I was a second-time mother, Josh would be staying in the room with me. I should not expect to use the nursery unless something was wrong with Josh’s health.

I didn’t really know what to say at this point. All I could do was nod that I understood and then unpack my things. I had expected that I would be able to get a little bit of help the first night, especially because Dan was not allowed to even come into the room to help with Josh’s care. After a moment of panic, I tried to make a plan for what to do. I decided that it was important to find the bathroom before they brought Josh to me.

I hobbled out into the hall that ran the length of the ward and found a bathroom a few feet away. The bathroom was a communal bathroom that served the entire floor of women. There were two bathroom stalls, a few sinks and two showers. It reminded me of a college dorm with the odd addition of newborn babies. (more…)

From guest blogger Deb Sakry Lande…

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