Oops, I got a job and had a second child and didn’t breathe for two years. But I never forgot about you, blog. We’re in this together.
How do people have children? I mean: how can people possibly afford children?
My husband and I were doing pretty well before I became pregnant—two well-paying, full-time jobs, a nice affordable apartment in a neighborhood with trees, plenty of disposable income after saving our monthly 20% for a rainy day. I guess this fooled me into believing life would be easy after I left the commuter class to stay home and take care of the baby. Not so.
I’ve been home with my son since the day of his birth – so almost ten months now – and it’s the most unbelievably wonderful and difficult work I’ve ever done. (That corny “hardest job you’ll ever love” saying is true.) But instead of being paid for my new 24/7 job (with six hours allotted for sleep every night), I am hemorrhaging money.
My husband has a good job, but not the six-figure salary it seems we would need to cover our expenses as a family and live comfortably. I know my experience is specific to a living in an expensive city, but I’ve been trying to do the math on alternate living situations and honestly… I can’t see how any families survive in America without both parents working full-time.
This post is dedicated to frozen lemonade.
I realize that frozen lemonade is not ice cream OR frozen yogurt. I’m actually shocked myself that I would deign to waste calories on a frozen treat that doesn’t feature dairy. But you know what? This stuff really hits the spot in July and August (and apparently September, too.) And it’s light enough that you can justify having ice cream and frozen yogurt and frozen lemonade all in the same day. (At least I can.)
Perfect for schvitzing pregnant ladies and normal people alike. You can try this delightful Lemon Mint Granita recipe from Smitten Kitchen, or go directly to Full Lazy and just buy a jug of lemonade and freeze it in a shallow pan.
I like Simply’s Lemonade and Raspberry Lemonade, though the latter tasted a bit more artificial to me. I got Gourmet Lazy by mixing a few teensy drops of mint extract (leftover from mint chocolate chip ice cream, of course) in with the regular lemonade. It was smashing.
Here’s the basic drill:
Ingredients:
– Your preferred lemonade (I used Simply Lemonade and Simply Raspberry Lemonade, but anything you like to drink will work)
Method:
I just woke up from my very first birth dream, the morning after Labor Day.
HOW IRONIC.
In the dream, I was recovering in bed at home from giving birth to my son. I had vague shadowy memories of pushing, and of having a painless episiotomy. I must have been drugged or something, because my first thought upon seeing my husband was to ask him about the episiotomy (and not, for example, “where is my baby?”). I was feeling pretty okay down there, and since my memory of the event wasn’t particularly traumatic, I was eager to learn that the procedure was no big deal after all.
He was all smiles as he told me that I would need to see a doctor. “Didn’t a doctor stitch me up afterward?” No. He meant a psychologist. To help me deal with the fact that my vagina had been completely devastated by the birth.
Eek. Writing it down makes it seem much more horrifying than it felt at the time. I guess this means…I’m afraid of tearing? I’m planning to try to stretch the area out in advance, although I’m not sure I believe that it will really help. I’ve definitely heard about people who dutifully attempted to stretch out their vaginal/ perineal tissues and ended up with slices or tears anyway.
But, I mean, it’s no big deal, right? Tons of women deal with vaginal injuries during childbirth, and they’re okay. It’s just…I like to respect the integrity of my genitals. It is a little unnerving to imagine potential damage on the horizon.
According to former palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware, these are the most common regrets people express on their deathbeds. Maybe I should just replace my Rules for Life with this list and call it a day.
Bronnie went into more detail on her blog, and the Guardian republished her post more or less intact:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. “This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. “Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. “Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. “This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”
Given the reputation marriage has for destroying spontaneity, deadening the libido, widening the waistline, and replacing intellectual stimulation with long conversations about laundry and breakfast cereal, it’s not surprising that many people question the value of such an arrangement in today’s society.
I myself have wondered why so many of us willingly condemn ourselves to this infamous fate. Revealingly (in retrospect), I spent a lot of time wrestling with this question in the period before and during my first, brief, incredibly unsuccessful attempt at marriage.
And yet, for some reason, I decided to give it a second chance. Despite everything, marrying my (now) husband felt like absolutely the right thing to do, and it still does. The fact is, marriage fulfills a need that it’s hard for the modern urban young person to acknowledge even having.
I just finished a fantastic piece in the The New Yorker (“The Yankee Comandante”) about an American man who left his family to join Castro’s revolution in the jungles of Cuba in the 1950s. I don’t usually read The New Yorker, and I’m not particularly interested in the Cuban revolution, but a friend insisted and oh, it was worth the weeks it took me to get through all 23 digital pages.
To get to my point, it was this article that perfectly illuminated for me the nature of the need that a good long-term partnership fulfills:
“When Robert Jordan is overcome with love for a woman during the Spanish Civil War, he fears that they will never experience what ordinary people do: ‘Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone. No. None of that.’”
(The bolding is mine. The article is David Grann’s. The author of the quote, I learned later, is Ernest Hemingway in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which I’ve just added to my Goodreads queue.)
How perfectly essential is that? The need that marriage fulfills for each of us is comfort. A sense of safety against the uncertainties, evils, and scarcities of the world. The ordinary.
Ironically, it’s this safety that eventually leads to feelings of smothering boredom. After all, we humans do have a natural urge to explore, don’t we? It’s also not very cool to admit that as adults we still crave the emotional and physical comforts that are found primarily in the arms (or the womb) of a mother. It’s needy, dependent. Un-American.
But how beautiful is it to acknowledge that incredibly childlike and vulnerable desire and to actually reach out to another person—another secretly vulnerable, lonely, childlike person—to help you find the comfort you seek?
I’ve been reflecting a lot on the wonder of unconditional love lately, which I’ll save for another post. I don’t think that marriage is a perfect example of unconditional love. After all, we sometimes fall out of love and get divorced. There are certain conditions in marriage.
But more than any other relationship we enter into as adults, marriage (or an equivalent long-term commitment for those who cannot legally marry) approximates the comfort and safety of a parent’s unconditional love for his child.
And in a world, and country particularly, where people are expected to repress their feelings of fear and vulnerability as they age, those mundane comforts of married life can nourish the weak, hidden parts of our souls. They can allow us to go on creating, feeling happy, acting morally. Even in a world that sometimes seems engineered to break our spirits.
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence or purely the result of gender difference that so many of the mass killings of the past few years have been perpetrated by single men.
People are attracted to each other for evolutionary reasons, yes. Without mating there is no propagation of species. But marriage and monogamy, both relatively modern social constructs, exist outside of the evolutionary imperative. They’re here because we need them as a deficient society.
That is why people continue to put a ring on it, despite the minor annoyances, the sexual sacrifice, the love handles. The comfort of clean pajamas and a morning paper help us act like the people we want to be. Even when it’s hard.
Because I know I loved to read these things when I was in my first trimester, I present to you:
1. Not everybody suffers from morning sickness. I didn’t. I became nauseous maybe four times in the late morning at around eight weeks, but eating lunch made it go away.
My advice: If you’re one of the lucky ones, enjoy it and keep it to yourself. Nobody who’s spent weeks of her life eating Saltines in bed wants to hear about you and your perfect digestion.
2. Pregnancy hormones really can make you crazy. I underestimated the impact that all the invisible changes of the first trimester would have on my mental health. I was prepared to get emotional over that Olympics commercial—you know, the one about the athletes’ moms? Not prepared for the crazy.
Cut to me in the bathroom on my wedding anniversary, dressed up for a friend’s bridal shower and hysterically crying. Over. Nothing. Mascara lines from eyeballs to jowls. It was actually kind of funny, because in between sobs and sniffles, I was very calmly telling my husband that this was clearly a hormone ambush and that he didn’t have to worry about anything. There may have also been a few instances of me screaming at him, which I do not normally do. A lot of patience and judicious application of hugs and kisses go a looong way in getting through these attacks.
My advice: Prepare your partner. If you seem crazy, it is because you are temporarily possessed by a devil, you’re really sorry, and it will pass. Ask them to be patient and understanding, because you really have no control over this. I found the wild mood swings were worst at the very beginning of the pregnancy and got a lot better after the second trimester began.
3. Don’t go on a shopping spree too soon. Because I can guarantee you that if you run out and buy three new bras in your bodacious new cup size, you will be out again in a couple of weeks shelling out for bras in your new new cup size. They just. Keep. Growing. I learned this the hard way.
My advice: Your best wardrobe investments in the first trimester are a pair of belly bands (to help your pants accommodate your slightly larger midsection) and maybe a nice highlighting concealer
4. Choose your information sources wisely. I could not believe the quality of the websites I would turn to for medical advice in moments of anxiety. I mean, we’re talking barely literate secondhand anecdotes from people called MommyGurl1999.
My advice: I’ve been happily dependent on two books since day, oh, fifteen: Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy
5. Life as you know it is over, and it’s okay. Whether you were trying for this baby or not, you will likely have mixed feelings about your new identity/ life/ career trajectory. I’d been trying for almost nine months, and my first thought upon seeing the second pink line was Oh Shit—not Yippee! It’s not often you go through a major physical, social, and emotional life transition in such a short span of time.
My advice: You’re gonna have some feelings about it, and they’re not all going to be good. Go ahead and cry, write about how much you’re going to miss happy hour and spontaneity, and fake-smile your way through conversations with well-meaning folks who only want to hear about how happy you are to be pregnant.
The last time you went through a transformation like this, you were probably about fourteen years old and it probably sucked. But you’re an adult now, so it will be a lot easier to handle. And it gets better. Just wait until you start feeling your baby’s little kicks! They’ll become a constant reminder that this dramatic transformation is worth the little prize inside.
6. You have to relax. The biggest fear in the first trimester is the very real possibility of miscarriage. It’s tough to walk the line between excitement at the prospect of motherhood and fear of potentially losing the little one. This was one of the hardest things for me to deal with early on.
Depending on your age and other factors, your odds of miscarrying any given pregnancy are between 15 and 33%. (15% if you’re 20 years old, 33% if you’re over 40.) Not reassuring, I know, but keep in mind that most early miscarriages are the result of a genetic abnormality. In other words, if something horrible happens, nature probably made it happen for a reason. Taking this perspective helped me to stop worrying so much and put my faith in the wisdom of my body. That, and passing the 10-week mark, when risk of miscarriage drops significantly. Hang in there.
My advice: You may not want to tell anyone you’re pregnant or start picking out nursery colors yet, but it is helpful to talk through your anxiety with a friend or your partner. That way you can indulge in the experience of being pregnant without doing anything that you might regret were you to lose the pregnancy.
And remember: the odds are in your favor. The likelihood of carrying this baby to term is 77 to 85%, again depending on your age and overall health.
——-
I wish I could share home remedies for some of the more common pregnancy symptoms, but my first trimester was really just a sleepy, cranky two and a half months (and I didn’t solve sleepiness or crankiness in that time).
If I think of anything else to add, I’ll tack it on to this list later!
Through all of my teens and most of my twenties, I searched for instructions on how to live life the right way. I don’t know where I got the idea that such a set of instructions exists; I suspect I gave the adults around me a little too much credit when they doled out pearls of wisdom. I thought if I just listened long enough, to the right people, I would develop a clear sense of moral and spiritual direction that would make life easy and optimally fulfilling.
As time went on and Wi-Fi became the norm, I did more of this searching on the Internet. This was…not great. Not only was I confronted with an overload of conflicting information and opinions, but I had no way of vetting my sources. With real people, it was easy to know who I wanted to listen to and model my life after, and who I wanted to ignore and/ or throttle.
But the Internet is made up of anonymous voices, and I found it hard to judge arguments on their merits alone. I began to feel more confused than ever, often deciding my tentative position on a topic based on what the majority of commenters on an article or column agreed was the right answer.
Please. 