Crawling out of My Cave

I'm sitting and listening to Led Zeppelin, typing with one hand while Bruno sleeps peacefully in my arms. This . . . us . . . Massi, Bruno and I, has been incredible lately.

I've arrived to motherhood 100% and I'm in love beyond everyday more that it's sometimes difficult to swallow. I even start thinking about the "what ifs . . . What if Bruno wants to ride motorcycles very fast. What if some kid at school bites him . . . What if he hurts himself? The evil curse of fear that comes with the depth of unbelievable love you attain from your baby love. I think I handle it pretty well. I think about how annoying it was when my mother was overprotective of me and I try to let it go. It's a challenging road to navigate . . . control, protection, obsession. . . especially as a mother.

Bruno is now three months old and he is just spectacular. He's started sleeping 6 hours straight through the night occasionally and I have him on a routine of wake, eat, sleep that occur in basically three hour rhythms. The structure and routine make it easier for us to communicate together and for me to feel more at ease about why he may be crying. Plus he recognizes that I'm in charge and he takes comfort with that. He really only cries now when he has to take his naps. He fights the sleep that overwhelms him and that's where I come into play and rock him and tell him it's time to take a nap. He knows what time it is, the repetition, the conditioned response of certain sounds I make when he needs to sleep.
In the beginning when it started working even I was surprised, but now we have such a better relationship. There is more clarity to communicate with each other because a lot of uncertainty over what he is feeling is eliminated. He doesn't have to ask to eat because I feed him every time he wakes up from a nap and his body has adjusted it's need to this schedule. Plus he will always stop eating if he's no longer hungry. This has decreased much of his fussiness and crankiness from either being overtired (because he will not regulate his sleep himself), or from crying over being too hungry . . .and the result overall has been one super smiles happy Bruno.

He is now eating his hands and will sit in his bassinet for an hour while I either cook something, clean, exercise in the living room, and recently I have even brought him into the bathroom while I shower. It's all about timing and I know that I need to start these projects right after he feeds in order to get the best results. It's been almost liberating and I no longer wake up asking myself, "what am I going to do today?" and have to answer, "oh, nothing." Now I have my master list of what needs to get done and I try to crank out as much as I can. I feel like I am crawling out from a cave I've lived in over the last year. It's been a cozy cave with bonfires and 'smores, but I'm so over it and ready for dresses, white table cloth dining, and glasses of wine again in my life.

Can I Have Both? Myself and Bruno?

"Will I ever get through this?" There are some days I question myself . . . after a night of waking every two hours to breast feed and at 4:30 a.m. Bruno decides that he really doesn't want to go back to sleep. Or perhaps it was one of those nights when I went to change his diaper and his little weewee hardens up and sprays. I reach for a wet towel and grab both his teeny ankles with one hand and raise his bottom to clean the leakage puddled underneath him. Now he starts to scream and wail.
"What's wrong?" I ask in that high pitched baby voice you just can't help speaking to them in. "oh my god," my tone drops to low tone. "Shit," I say and my voice raises in volume, hoping his daddy will get involved at 2:30 a.m., "you peed again, all over your face!" I want to cry with Bruno. It's the common tragedy comedy piece that comes with having a baby, so I've discovered.
But that's not the hard part . . . it's the bigger picture of the accumulation of lack of sleep, waking up at 6:30 a.m. tired, and knowing that there's no nap in sight. For the first two months Bruno would only daytime nap in his stroller on a walk. If I stopped moving he'd wake-up. That meant exhaustion plus taking daily four mile walks, two miles per nap, and the mid-day nap was an hour and a half session of Bruno sleeping ontop of me in the rocking chair. I would ponder, "how can I keep doing this?" and that's just the day. I look at the day now in its full 24 hour cycle broken into quarters. Late afternoon/early night is the most challenging. He would get super fussy, I would be super hungry and sometimes he wouldn't let me put him down to even rush to prepare something for dinner. His cries spoke of torture, painful physical disembowelment . . . they are hard for a mother to hear .. . .better to sacrifice myself than to witness him in such discomfort. The crying stops when I hold him. Has anyone ever needed me so much? It's beyond amazing. But I want to get through it. It would be nice to eat dinner. Not to mention the floors need to be mopped. The bedroom dresser has a half-inch of dust on it because it's overlooked. The bathroom is an uncomfortable dirty and mommy is always hungry. There's laundry to fold. The bills to remember to pay on time, and god how nice it would be to buy a new dress that fits my now d- size breasts and to wear lipstick again? Oh, the plants need to be watered, I sill haven't legally changed my name, Bruno needs a passport, and I need to pump my breast milk if I ever want to go to a yoga class or have a glass of wine. I am so behind myself with so much extra time and yet incapable of accomplishing the most bare essentials.
And then one day it's just all easy. And then when he hit two months old, he started staying in the bassinet and playing with himself. And then all of sudden during his fussy time he didn't throw a fit for a week straight. And the house is still dirty, but I bought a new dress and wore lipstick last night. I pumped and drank amazing wines and got solid sleep. Bruno is getting bigger and I am able to start doing a little bit more for myself and I made it through. My ass is still flat but it's starting to lift little by little and I'm hoping to now work on butt lifts in the middle of the day and I know it's possible. I have to admit, the first two months were very challenging, but right now it's becoming so amazing. I can actually start to have both: myself and Bruno.

"Every Mother Is A Working Mother."

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not." James Joyce

Mothers,

Let's teach our children the strength in valuing real love and honesty. Let's teach our children how to express themselves and their own truth -- and how to handle the world when they disagree. Let's teach our children to stand up for their beliefs because the world will always challenge them especially when they are unsure of what they are. It's just magnetism. It's just that there are a whole lot of assholes out there.

Everyday I wonder, how on earth did our world become so fucked up and dysfunctional? There are so many things that I worry for in my son's future that was never a consideration in mine. And then I think, well this is his world now and the greatest thing I can truly do for him is to lead by example.

Some days I find myself believing that I need to fill his every waking second with some type of learning. I get lost in the worry of wondering if I'm behind in sending him to special classes for children. Am I stimulating him enough? But then I say to myself, "let's be practical here. Bruno has to also learn to entertain himself and watch mommy do her thing around the house. This is truly where he will learn the most right now." How many of us have some of our fondest memories of our parents in the kitchen, or in their work spaces -- for example I used to love to hear the sound of my mother working on the type writer. I used to love to help my nanny clean the house. Who knows in which state the big world will be in when he finally takes his first step alone out into it, but until that happens I will do my greatest to teach him real love and honesty, which he can learn just by watching his mommy and daddy in the living room. I will teach him how to express his own truth and how to handle the world when they disagree, which he can learn by watching me interact with our community every time we walk out our door.

We don't need more money in this world to fix it, we need stronger values and those values start at home. Women are the most influential creatures on this planet. Perhaps we as mothers are so accustomed to sacrifice that we give our power and influence away too much. But this doesn't do justice to us or our children. We have unconditional love for our children but there must always be conditions. We cannot forget who we are as women in order to become a mother. There is a balance and a cross over and I look forward to having Bruno help me discover where they are.