praying the particulars: nursing an older baby

A Prayer for Nursing An Older Baby:

God of nurturing love,

Trying to nurse this squirmy worm of a growing baby has become a daily wrestling match.

Each time we snuggle into the rocking chair together, I grow frustrated with how quick he is to push away, holler in protest, lunge towards anything more interesting than his mother. Long-gone are the sleepy newborn days when he would curl contentedly in my lap. As he begins to crawl, the world is his to explore; he can’t scoot out of my arms quick enough for his curiosity.

Help me to give of myself with love and patience.

Turn my eyes from the clock to my child, from my chronos schedule to your kairos moment. Let me rejoice in his eagerness; let me celebrate his growing. So many adventures await him – let my love for him be a reflection of your great love for us, steady and faithful no matter how far and wide we roam.

Thank you for the gift of nursing him. When my frustrations grow high and my temper grows short, let me remember mothers who wanted to nurse but couldn’t, or who feel guilty because they never tried, or who persevere through painful complications. Transform our anxieties into assurance that every mother’s gift of self is life-giving, sacrificial, enough.

God of goodness, each day you offer everything I need: love, patience, forgiveness. Each day I push away from your embrace in search of what seems more pressing, interesting, important. Help me, too, to rest in your love, to drink in what I need most, to be grateful for the simple ways you sustain my life.

In patience and humor, I pray –

An exasperated mama

praying the particulars: wrangling children at church

A Prayer for Wrangling Small Children at Church:

God of infinite patience,

Help me not to lose my mind at Mass today.

When my son falls off the kneeler for the umpteenth time and howls at me indignantly, let me not say I told you so! but I love you.

When the baby gets so fussy during the homily that no one within six pews can hear the priest, let me not sigh with irritation but distract him with smiles.

When I miss every word of the readings (again) because I was fishing books out of the diaper bag, let me not brood about what I lost but notice the small service I gave to the least among us.

When I spend communion time pacing the floor of the gathering space, or trying in vain to nurse the baby in a corner of the cry room, or taking the toddler to the potty for the tenth time, help me to see that this is Eucharist, too – the gift of self in love.

When that older couple behind us, the ones I worried about the whole time – that we were annoying them and distracting their prayer and giving them reason to think the future church is going to hell in a handbasket – when they tap me on the shoulder after the final song and tell me we have a beautiful family, help me believe them. And even thank them graciously.

And when we’re tempted to skip Mass next Sunday because it’s just so hard in this crazy season of life, and it throws off nap schedules for the rest of the day, and what are we getting out of it anyway, let me remember the importance of coming. Because children are part of the Body of Christ. Because I need community and they need me. Because much of what is important about parenting isn’t easy anyway.

God, you promised that wherever two or three are gathered in your name, you are in their midst. That means our pew, too. The one covered with spit-up that two boys are trying to climb over.

Bless my hyper, healthy kids. Bless our diverse, dynamic church. Thank you for the weekly reminder of what matters most.

With gritted teeth behind that laughing smile,

A mama in the third row

you will not steal his joy

You know how every child is superlative in their own way? The cutest, the smartest, the loudest.

Our second son is the happiest.

This boy brims over with grins. Every photo we snap shows bright eyes and beaming smiles. He wakes up with delight and he chortles to himself all day long. And it’s not just his biased parents who notice it. Strangers stop me in the store or cluck his chin after church, remarking that he’s just such a happy baby.

While his older brother was a fairly cheerful chap, there was still a cautious look about him. Many of his early pictures reveal a startled shock in his eyes, unsure if this whole Existence Ex-Utero thing was to be trusted.

But #2 is 100% delighted at life. Ceiling fans! The dog that licks his face! Peek-a-boo! Babies in the mirror! Everything is funny, joyful, rollicking to our young lad. And lately his giggles and grins have made me wonder if I give enough space in my day for joy.

Celebrating the joys in my life was one of my New Year’s resolutions. But I’ve slipped away from this simple daily practice of pausing in contentment. Joy seems buried under to-do lists, kitchen clutter, and loads of laundry. Once again in the spiritual cycles of my life, I’ve let the busy get in the way of the mindful.

I wonder what I can learn from my youngest son about joy. I’m not an unhappy person, but I sometimes tend towards the stance of my older son: a bit hesitant, a bit cautious. I long to borrow a bit of his baby brother’s delight at the world.

Certainly he doesn’t have the burdens of adulthood to worry about. No deadlines or bills loom over his sweet head. He doesn’t have the depth of emotional awareness that clouds my day when I hear depressing news – a loved one’s illness, a friend’s death, a news story about unbearable suffering in a far-off land. Worry is not yet a habit he’s developed. He’s wrapped in the pure joy of childhood like a warm blanket.

But his joy is resilient.

Last week he cut his first tooth. The milestone was heralded by a few fussy days, a few restless nights. The cranky departure from our normal jolly gentleman came as a clear sign that a change was on the horizon. But this morning as I write, he’s all goos and giggles beside me, happily gnawing on a toy with his one wee pearl of a tooth. He’s bounced back like the pain never existed.

The persistence of his cheerful nature is teaching me that joy is not simply a reaction or a response. It’s a way of life. It’s the way this child operates – his default mode. I’ve known few people like this in my life, but every time I come across them, I’m filled with longing to borrow their joy, to see the world with their bright, loving, open eyes. Joy is contagious like that.

Certainly the joy of an adult differs from the innocent bliss of a child. But while my daily swirl of cares and concerns often shift me into a different gear, I also possess a capacity to make choices that my baby cannot. So I can make a decision to delight. To celebrate. To give thanks for goodness. Knowing the darkness of the world and its shadows, how much brighter and more meaningful is my decision to choose joy?

And if joy – in God’s goodness, in the promise of resurrection, in the triumph of love over evil – is central to the Christian life, how does my daily demeanor reflect the deep convictions underneath?

How can I refuse to let anything steal my joy?

where we dreamed our babies

We’ve been tackling lots of house projects lately – windows, floors, closets. So I find myself thinking a lot about this home we’ve created, this place we became a family.

There is a deep joy in making a house a home, a fulfillment I never imagined when I was an energetic twenty-year-old, hauling tattered boxes in and out of different apartments every year. Today I find myself having lived on this street for longer than I’ve lived anywhere except my childhood home. My address hasn’t changed in years, but my perspective has.

Through the seasons I’ve spent gazing out the same windows at the same trees, I’ve learned that settling in isn’t the same as settling. The joy of owning a home is putting down deep roots so beauty can grow. It’s the wisdom grown from tending to one small piece of God’s green earth. It’s the wonder of taking someone else’s place and filling it with your own dreams.

We’ve planted gardens and fruit trees, rose bushes and lilacs. We picked out new appliances when old broke. We hauled furniture upstairs and down when inspiration struck. I’ve watched crews of construction workers tromp in and out of our yard, putting on new roofs or tearing up old floors. My handy husband even built a bedroom and a basement of bookshelves.

In short, we’ve made this place our own.

But when I think back on this house, my strongest memories will be the transformations that took place within us, within its walls.

This house was full of infertility’s charts, tests and meds before it was full of babies’ clothes, books and toys. It was full of couple love before it was full of children. This “starter home” is where we became partners and parents. Where we started writing the story of our life together.

A few days ago I took a break from wrangling the bottomless heap of kids’ clothes in the closet. Sweaty and tired, I laid on the floor and stared up at the spinning fan. The fan that my husband installed, in the room that my mother and mother-in-law painted for our first baby. I thought about the home we have made while I listened to my son pretend to read from one of his favorite books:

We’d dreamed a baby, we’d wanted a baby, we’d planned for a baby, we’d waited and waited and waited for a baby. 

Until finally there was you. 

As he flipped the final pages, I turned my head on the carpet to watch him sing: And oh, how we love you!

Watching my baby-turned-boy, I realized that perhaps this chapter is the most important one we’ve written in the story of this house. Not the herb garden we planted out front or the strawberry patch we dug out back. But the family we became along the way.

When we were giddy newlyweds rushing in the door from our honeymoon, we had no idea how the early years of our marriage would be shaped by the wanting and hoping and praying for children. This was the place we dreamed our babies, wondering how they would look and when they would arrive. This was the place we planned for our babies, worrying as the months stretched into years. This became the place we waited and waited and waited for our babies. Until finally, they were here.

And oh, how we love them.

i am such a good mom when my babies sleep

My husband guffawed when I first proclaimed this, a few months after our second was born.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and we had gotten a rare hour (or was it two?) to ourselves while both boys napped. I luxuriated in the quiet of the house, the projects we both got to tackle without interruption, the conversations we could share as we worked or cleaned or did sweet nothing at all.

On one hand, my comment was certainly sarcastic. While my kids were sleeping, I felt like the kind of mom I wanted to be: relaxed, peaceful, patient, kind. It was only when they woke up and I had to deal with them that I inevitably fell short.

But on the other hand, my words revealed deeper truth: I can’t parent well when my basic needs aren’t met.

Looking back over the past few months when we did not sleep, I marvel that I survived. Sleep is essential for me. Some people can slide by with a few hours a night, but I need a solid six or seven. So when sleep eludes me, my temper flares and my patience disappears. I’m a growly grizzly bear.

Maslow’s hierarchy claims that sleep is a basic human need. Without it, we can’t achieve – or even desire – any deeper psychological needs. While Maslow’s pyramid has been deconstructed by many folks who followed him, I always remember his hierarchy when parenting forces me to go without sleep for long stretches. I can’t do much else but dream of dozing. No wonder sleep deprivation amounts to torture.

Now that the baby is sleeping well again, I feel like a Human Being once more. Gone are the zombie eyes and the fuzzy brain. We’re not quite to the dreamy, 12-hours-straight that his brother does, but we’re getting closer. Hope is back on the horizon.

So when my inner critic started nagging me lately about Lent (specifically, my lack of spiritual engagement therein), I made myself go look at the calendar. It’s only been a few weeks since the baby started sleeping through the night again. Prior to that point, I had to focus on meeting basic needs to survive, work and parent. So I had to cut myself some slack in the spirituality department. Prayer just wasn’t happening after night after night of naps.

Yet I’m grateful for feeling refreshed in time for Easter. Sleep is everyday’s Sabbath: time to rest, recharge, recenter. And I’m reveling in the normal rhythm of our days and nights returning. For me this Lent was like our Winter That Wasn’t: surprisingly unseasonable, but leading into a long stretch of spring to savor.

Lately the “simul-nap” remains the Holy Grail of sleep. Snatched only once or twice a week, but when we catch it, life is glorious. Extra work gets finished, house projects get tackled, and everyone gathers refreshed at the end of the afternoon.

I do feel like a better parent, and I’m not embarrassed to admit what I need. Rest makes me ready to sing Alleluias.

roller coaster parenting: hold on to your hats

Recently, at the Terrible, Horrible End of a No-Good, Very Bad Week, I happened upon a reflection which described the tunnel of parenthood: the first five years of raising young children.

Tears sprung to my tired eyes as I read while baby nursed. We are in the tunnel, I realized. The long, dark, will-it-ever-end tunnel.

Finding myself in that mother’s description of these difficult days brought me both hope (only a few more years till we get to age five and know what we’re doing!) and despair (WE STILL HAVE YEARS UNTIL WE GET TO AGE FIVE AND KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING). A deep breath and another pot of tea calmed me down, reminding me there is nothing magical about age five.

Yet the core truth is this: right now is really hard. But it will get better. My own sheer, stumbling faith tells me it will get better.

(That, and our toddler does now sleep a blissful 12+ hours a night, so I know theoretically that his little brother will someday, too.)

Now, I’m not naive enough to think this is as hard as it gets. I know we have plenty of rough days, sleepless months, and trying seasons of parenting ahead of us. That’s the life we signed up for when these babies came on board.

But the more I thought about the tunnel of new parenthood, the more I realized this was not just any tunnel.

This is a pitch-black, terrifying twists and turns, hold-on-for-your-life roller coaster tunnel. The Space Mountain of early parenting.

We waited a long time to get on this ride. When we decided we wanted to go, we checked that we met the requirements: age, height, medical conditions. But then it took much longer than we expected for the line to snake its way to the start.

So when we finally stepped into the long-awaited car, we were giddy with excitement. We strapped ourselves in, grinned at each other, and slapped our hands down on the bar. We were ready to go.

As the car slowly clicked up the first hill, we marvelled at the view. Look at us! Here we are! I can’t believe we’re about to do this!

Then the slow crest at the top, the instant suspended in mid-air….

And suddenly we’re free falling, wind and ground rushing at us so fast we can barely breathe, let alone scream. We’re whipped around to the right, banking the curve at insane speed, then slamming to the other side, spinning upside down and praying that we won’t plummet to sudden death below.

Hurtling up, down, back, forward; lurching in every direction; careening from one side to the other. Stomach spinning, head pounding, fists clenched to the bar, eyes squeezed shut. We thought it would never end.

But we held on, and we screamed when we could manage to gulp down a breath, and we even whooped for joy when we raced from one tunnel to the next and saw the blue sky shoot through overhead. We remembered that we wanted to be on the ride in the first place.

That’s where we are right now, my partner in parenting and I. Right in the middle of a wild ride that we jumped at the chance to take. Sometimes the loops make us laugh, sometimes the lurches make us queasy. We wonder some days if we were crazy to get on board, and we shake our heads other days that we can’t imagine not taking the plunge.

Living day to day in the coaster’s vertigo leaves me spinning. I lose my perspective as quickly as I lost control over the direction of the ride. I wonder who and where I will be when light finally bursts forth at tunnel’s end.

But I do know that one day – maybe at that magical age five, maybe years later – we’ll suddenly snap to the finish, just as sharp as the beginning. Bars will raise up, belts unclick all around us. We’ll look at each other, wild-eyed and grinning, and realize we made it. We never have to go back and be new parents all over again. We survived.

But oh, the darkness of the tunnel.

When the ride’s just beginning and you have no idea where it will end…

how to not prepare for lent

Yes, you read that right.

(And yes, I’m even aware that I split the infinitive. I broke my own grammatical pet peeve and did it on purpose.)

Lent starts tomorrow, and I could not be less prepared. No resolution carved in stone, no discipline established, no good intentions for prayer or fasting or almsgiving.

Sure, I’ve got a zillion ideas. Sugar purge. Facebook fast. Daily writing with Scripture. Creative donations to important causes.

But I can’t commit to anything. Why?

BECAUSE I CAN’T SLEEP.

My darling, beautiful, bouncing baby boy decided a few months ago to regress from his long-sleeping ways. Since Christmas, we’ve been up every three hours. Four if we’re lucky. Two if we’re not.

And everyone in this house is losing their minds.

Some days we can laugh about it. Some days I can drink enough caffeine to overcome it. But some dark days I do nothing but wallow in the exhaustion.

We’ve tried it all. And then we tried it again. And - parenting epiphany! – this child refuses to submit to our schedule, our demands, our desires.

Lack of sleep has affected every part of our lives: our work, our home, our relationships. After too many breaking points, we’ve finally come up with a new plan that we hope will work. (So please send prayers for this weekend’s launch of Finally Getting the Baby to Break Bad Habits and Stop Nursing All Night Without Crying So Loud He Wakes Up His Brother Next Door And Then We All Go Insane.)

But in the meantime, Lent has crept up to the doorstep and is gently knocking to come in. And I can do nothing but laugh and shake my head. This house? This family? You seriously want to come in here?

I have no time or energy to prepare for Lent this year. I don’t even have time to feel guilty about it.

So for the next forty days, all I can do is invite Lent into the chaos of our lives. And pray that God’s grace forgives my stumblings. And remember that God’s invitation – and my response – was present there all along.

Going about my daily work even when I’m dragging? That’s prayer.

Giving up the glorious sleep I love to feed a hungry baby? That’s fasting.

Investing my last bit of energy in my needy children? That’s almsgiving.

So come on in, Lent. Pull up a chair (you’ll have to kick the toys aside) and a cup of tea (you’ll need to wash that dirty mug).

We’re completely unprepared. But you’re always welcome.

presentation

My babies were each a few days old when I placed them in their great-grandfather’s hands.

Seated each time on the same couch in my in-laws’ living room, he and I gazed down together at the peaceful beauty of a sleeping child.

Their bodies hardly noticed the transfer from arm to arm: heads simply flopped from one side to the other, limbs still curled in newborn C. Their soft cheeks snuggled into his thick flannel shirt; their pink toes dangled over his old corduroy pants.

But the move to me seemed monumental. From one generation to the next, a stretch across time.

I have no grandparents of my own left. So the gift of Grandpa in my life has been a reminder of these figures from my childhood: one grandma’s hug, another’s warm smile, my own grandpa’s deep guffaw. Their faces and stories rise in my memory when we visit Grandpa.

Behind thick glasses, his eyes beamed as he welcomed each new great-grandson. “Teeny, teeny baby,” he cooed, patting their backs with a rough, weathered hand.

Half-hovering, half-heartened by the sweet scene unfolding, I sat in silence, smiling at the pair. Two balding heads: one old, one new. In the bell-curve of life, our beginnings and ends are not so different.

We who are new at parenting – whose arms are unaccustomed to the weight, whose shoulders have not long borne the responsibility – pass over the baby to the elder with hesitation: will he remember to hold the head? Will he jostle the wee one awake?

Amateurs at the feet of experts, we remind ourselves that they raised plenty of babies themselves. The body never forgets how to cradle, comfort, caress.

But perhaps beneath our anxiety lies a deeper worry: will we be questioned? Will we be judged? Are we doing this right?

So when the inevitable words of joy and pride are pronounced – what a sweet baby, what a beautiful boy – we feel comforted and reassured. Another generation is blessed to take up the work of raising the young.

Grandpa has offered no great words of wisdom to me upon these presentations.

(Although, for this most recent child, he proclaimed that the babe had “nice, squinty eyes” and further elaborated that “we don’t need any more of those big-eyed babies around here.” No idea what this meant.)

But the very fact that I got to witness him holding my babies was blessing enough.

His gnarled hands grasping their tender curls of fist, his knobby knees bouncing their bottoms when they woke, his wrinkled face grinning at their puzzled eyes.

He brought to my babies’ beginnings all the other grandparents who surely wished their own blessings from beyond. Who must have hoped and prayed for these children to grow and become strong, filled with wisdom.

His hands brought the grace of the grandparents upon them.

enlighten your spirit: louise erdrich

“But of all passing notions, that of a human being for a child is perhaps the purest in the abstract, and the most complicated in reality. Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting, and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life.”

Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year

I knew from the moment I saw the book’s cover that I would lose my heart to it.

Drawn from the back, a dark-haired woman nuzzles a dark-haired baby in the curve of her neck, both gazing together at a blue jay outside the window. A newer edition has replaced the duo with the lone bird’s unflinching stare. But at the beginning of my own birth year with baby #2, it was this quiet, anonymous madonna-and-child that drew me in.

Erdrich describes her book as “a set of thoughts from one self to the other – writer to parent, artist to mother.” (So of course I tore through it cover to cover.)

And her treatment of a well-worn feminist theme – the dilemma of mother torn between child and work – is tender and tough at all once.

But what I love above all is that her treatment of maternal love is the most true and least sugary-sentimental I’ve yet read:

We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby’s needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children’s faces.

You have to love nature to truly love this book, or at least be willing to stay the course through Erdrich’s wanderings through the wild that eventually wind back to mothering.

(You also have to forgive her several sections of randomly-placed recipes and homages to her husband’s cooking. Though pregnant and nursing mothers can’t help but fall in love with food as they nourish themselves and their babies at a staggering pace. Writes the woman who just helped herself to second dinner.)

But anyone who has lived through the seasons of a child’s early years will find themselves in her changing landscapes, both of the natural world and the interior life.

She weaves the stories of three of her babies into one narrative of a nameless daughter, reminiscent of the way any mother of multiple children looks back and wonders, “Was that with the first baby? Or the second? Or was it the third?”

A blur of babyhoods, but the powerful love and the raw frustrations and the deep conflicts meld into one story of woman becoming mother over time.

I love this memoir of early motherhood because it is poetic in its imagery and powerful in its honesty.

She writes of walking in winter at the end of a pregnancy and letting her swollen body sink to rest in a deep snowbank, wishing she could just birth the baby right then and there.

She describes her fraying nerves while rocking a colicky newborn for the umpteenth night in a row that finally resort to whispering (amidst the baby’s screams) words that parents never admit in the light of day: I love you, but you’re driving me completely nuts. You’re such a g****** crank.

I still laugh out loud when I think about that scene.

So if you long to write in the middle of life with littles, or if you gaze out windows to mark seasons passing through the maddening monotony, or if you simply love to dig in the dirt with children, your mothering spirit can find yourself in Erdrich’s words.

Perhaps we all can:

 Mothering is a subtle art whose rhythm we collect and learn, as much from one another as by instinct. Taking shape, we shape each other, with subtle pressures and sudden knocks. The challenges shape us, approvals refine, the wear and tear of small abrasions transform until we’re slowly made up of one another and yet wholly ourselves.

conversations with myself, 2:00 am & 8:00 am

2:00 am (after a night of naps):

My head is going to EXPLODE. How is that baby screaming again?

I cannot handle his yelling. I’m going to lose my mind.

Didn’t I JUST get up and feed him? Sigh.

I could sleep for weeks and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I am never going to have another baby.

How is his brother in the next room waking up, too? I wish they would grow out of this phase.

I can’t believe how this time drags on and on and on. These days are so dang long.

8:00 am (after a shower and a cup of tea)

My heart is going to explode! How can the baby be grinning like that?

I cannot handle his laughing. I am going to lose my mind!

Didn’t we just bring him home from the hospital? Sigh.

I could cuddle him for days and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I want to have a zillion babies.

How is his brother in the next room going to preschool soon? I wish they would stay little forever.

I can’t believe how the time flies. These years are so short.