those creative types

Our good friends, Rachael and Tim and their bubba Super Sebastian, are moving to Indonesia in two sleeps. Boo! Hiss! It is so very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day-ness of life – sleep, eat, feed baby, sleep, eat – that it is easy to think that a friend’s departure won’t make that much of an impression. There is, after all, the washing to consider. The mail to post. The husband to tend to.

But driving over to my friends’ place, for the second last time, I found myself quite accountably jittery. I get jerky when I have something important on my mind, and so it was that I drove, twitching my thumb across the radio stations, slowing down and speeding up, looking at parks and thinking inconsequential thoughts. I have not lost the habit of subterfuge.

The thing is, I am sad that they are leaving. It will be the end of a chapter, as every leavetaking is. I have done so many good-byes myself, and got used to having only a handful of friends in Sydney. Rach and Tim’s time in Sydney had always been bonus time, destined as they were to move on at the end of a year. So I hadn’t really seen this one coming. Yet here I am, out of sorts. I visited them last night just to sit on their couch and watch tv whilst they settled their bubba. I got extra cuddles with Sebastian, secretly glad he was not settling, because I got to hold his baby head close and whisper to him that he was still my favourite boy. It is no good, thinking of the future, when I next see him and he won’t know me. That is the way of babies. I grieve every day some minor, major change in my own baby, knowing as I do that our days are numbered.

I have never been good at good-byes. I can’t keep my misery guts to myself. I hold on too hard, I try to imagine what things will be like and they always make me sad.

I know I will see them again and it will be great, wonderful. A new chapter. But tonight let me write this. It is my way of saying I’ll miss you.

Ellie is sound asleep, thumb in mouth. It’s 8.07 pm. She went to bed at 6.00 pm after a day of record awake time and five feeds rather than four, which I am regarding as progress since the last three weeks have been all about catching up on those lost sleep hours from her first three, unsettled months.

Today, looking at her in the arms of a visitor, I did a double take. Her feet were at least a centimetre longer than they were yesterday, I swear.

I know babies are destined to grow, yet it is still amazing when they do, right before your eyes. That’s what she has been doing in all that sleep. She has been growing.

It’s an almost alchemical process, the way babies grow. One minute must pass into another and in that next minute, there is an extra layer of cells, and then another, and then another, until, hey presto! Your baby is ten centimetres longer than when she started.

You know, if Ellie would stay still long enough, I would love to do time lapse photography on her. I would love to be there in the moment that she transitions from one size to the next. Well, I guess I am – but it is always with a gasp of surprise that I notice my baby is bigger. The day she could grasp my finger intentionally and not just grab it reflexively, I did have to swallow a sob. My baby is still only a baby, but she is always growing longer, growing rounder, growing up.

I know it’s crazy. But I will find something to worry about, and so here is what I called the Tresillian Live Advice Line about today: Is my baby too settled?

Ellie was a non-sleeper for twelve weeks. She would whinge during the day and not go back to sleep after the first sleep cycle of most naps. She would then regularly stay up until 11.30pm and sometimes 12.30 am, 1.30am and once, 3.30am, crying and screaming if we tried to get her to go to bed. She was a recalcitrant rocking chair girl. Eventually though, it got to the point that, even in our arms, bounced and rocked and patted, she would end up so overtired that she would scream for half an hour to an hour before finally passing out from sheer exhaustion. Even then the most she ever slept at one time was about four or five hours, with one memorable seven hour stint, which was followed the next night by being up until 2.00 am and then only sleeping for two or three hours in a row. It got to the point that, even during the day, in my arms, she wouldn’t settle.

It was at that point that I decided it was time. She was 12 weeks old. If she was going to cry in our arms, she may as well do it in the cot and learn how to get to sleep.

The next two nights were agonising. I had to leave the apartment for very long walks while Yen sat with a screaming, hysterical Ellie, who did not understand why we would no longer pick her up. The first night she screamed for two and a half hours, then took a break for a feed, then cried for another hour. She was asleep by 10.30 pm and slept through until 7.00 am. That night, she cried for an hour and a half and slept through until 7.00 again. The next night, she whinged a bit for about forty minutes. The next night, for ten.

Ever since, we have had her screaming for about an hour at the longest, on days when she is really overtired, or when we introduced Yen as the person putting her to bed, or when I started to reduce my pre-cot soothing rituals easing her towards self-settling. But every night, ever since that awful first, she has slept for at least 12 hours, and more often, 13, and sometimes when she has a lie-in, 15.

She naps well during the day now – although that is less consistent – and when she is awake, she is calm. Relaxed. Smiling. She is so chilled, in fact, that I have to go in and check if she is awake – she will often wake up and just hang out in the cot, sucking her thumb and cooing to the bee mobile over her change table on the other side of the room.

People tell me that this is the time to refuel before teething starts. Apparently, babies can start to need night feeds again, when they go through further growth spurts. I am trying to savour this time while I can.

I still get up a few times a night to check on her. Is she too warm or cold? Is she still breathing?

Today, lacking anything else to worry about, I worried about whether it was quite normal to be so relaxed as a baby. I called the Tresillian hotline.

“I know this sounds weird,” I giggled nervously. “But is it possible for a baby to sleep too much? Ellie can’t really stay awake for more than 50 minutes at a stretch, and apparently the average for babies her age is 1.5 hours.”

The kind woman on the other end of the line reassured me.

“It’s normal to worry, I know what it’s like,” she said without once laughing at me, although perhaps a little with me. “But remember, 1.5 hours is the average. There are going to be babies who are awake for three hours at a time, and then babies like Ellie who are awake for less than the average.”

“She was so unsettled for the first three months,” I said. ‘It’s just strange.”

“Perhaps she is now comfortable in her skin and her surrounds,” the woman said. I like that idea. I don’t know if it is scientific, but I like the notion that Ellie is now getting used to her room. Her cot. Her rituals. Her parents. Me.

Control crying is not going to be for every baby. I had to make the hard, intellectual step of recognising that it was probably worth trying for Ellie, despite how difficult it was going to be for me, emotionally. A few hours of stress for her opposed to days on end of being overtired and cranky were worth it for her.

It was my first test as a mother having to “be the mother,” and take a step back and be definite about what was going to be better for her, no matter if it hurt me in the process to implement. I was worried I was a bad mother; I stood and listened to her crying as my “punishment,” even though as soon as she stopped crying my rational brain kicked in again and I knew it was for her own good. A baby who does not settle in your arms is a baby who is trying to tell you something. Put me down. Let me get some sleep. Stop pandering to your own emotions of guilt and perfectionism, and see what I really need.

Anyhow. So Ellie is now one of the most placid babies you will ever meet. It may be fleeting, but it is good to know that, when the time comes, I can put her interests above my own desire to be the textbook mother and she the textbook baby. And today, worrying about whether she was too relaxed, was just my way of saying, “I love you.”

It’s all starting to unravel.

That’s what I thought as I twiddled my fingers over the keyboard. The Gilmore Girls, series 6, had still not downloaded from iTunes. It had been two days since I purchased it. Two days! And I paid money the way you’re supposed to. I did everything right. And still, it would not work.

And that’s when it hit me. This is it. It’s all starting.

“I don’t want to do it,” Mum had said. “I better go. I’m going to cry,” she said.

I have only ever seen my mum cry once in 35 years. The day my dad died for good.

Allison. It all comes back to Allison.

Allison had fallen over on New Years Eve at the tavern my mum goes to to lay her bets. What was she doing there on New Years Eve? What was my mother thinking? These things only occur to me now, the habit of my mother taking Allison to the TAB so ordinary that it’s only the day itself which beggars explanation. She is now no longer allowed to go to the tavern with my mum. Well, it was only a matter of time. She was already banned from other taverns. She was banned from volunteering at a childcare centre. She was told she was not even able enough to stuff Qantas headsets into plastic bags with the other more able disabled people. She tried hard though. She always tried so hard to have a life.

I digress. She fell over, and then she fell over on New Years Day in the kitchen. “The salt tablets were supposed to help,” Mum said. It turned out that she was on the floor for half an hour, Mum unable to get her up. Mum had to get a male neighbour to come over and help. In the past, Mum has been able to fetch a chair and help Allison get up by leaning on it. Not this time.

And then she fell over again, a few minutes later, after I got off the phone. This time Mum lost it. She got the neighbour to help again, and then my sister called and Mum, thinking it was me, left the phone off the hook while she tended to Allison. She screamed at her, telling her she didn’t want to look after her any more, telling her she should have left her on the floor. She may have even hit her. I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t shake the image from my mind.

I hit Allison once. It was five, maybe seven years ago. I was up on a “holiday” and taking Mum and Allison to the TAB, as usual. I had told Allison several times where we were going next. And she asked me again, and I slapped her on the face. Once. Gently. But I slapped her. Why couldn’t she remember? Why didn’t she just focus? My Mum gave a half laugh in shock from the rear seat. “Jackie!” she said. I wonder what it was like for her to see herself that way.

I will never forgive myself for it. Or forget. I don’t like that anger resides in me like that, against a helpless soul. I don’t like an illness that can make people do things they would never consider doing to strangers.

Mum yelling at her, conjured up a lot of “bad memories,” my sister said when she told us what had happened. How long had this been going on? How could I have left when I knew what Mum was like, and what she might do in her agitation at the end of her rope?

There are only two instances in which I feel like a truly reprehensible human being. Whenever I hear my baby crying and I don’t go to her because she is learning to sleep and I am counting the minutes before I can go in a reassure her; and when I think of how I left Allison to start a life of my own.

There is very little I can do for Allison. I have always had to face that. A number of possibilities entered my head: flying up, taking charge, sending Allison to respite, getting things in train for her eventual move to accommodation, because this time Mum has really reached the end of her rope. I feel sorry for my Mum – in the back of my head I know she was pushed to her limits. I know she cares for Allison more than I will ever understand, because she is her daughter. Perhaps I can understand that. She just needs time out. She is 76 years old. It’s too much. What I can’t forgive myself for was knowing that, even when not pushed to her limit, my mum takes her anger out on the nearest target. And I left knowing that the only daily target she had was Allison.

Not that I think in my rational brain that it was really that bad. Even when angry, these days my mum tends to only be verbally abusive, and we have all learned strategies to let that wash over, including Allison, I think. Since we were kids, she only ever hit Allison and I rarely, and fairly lightly. It’s the emotional pain of that tap that triggers the tears. But I have seen my Mum care for Allison and she does it tirelessly, patiently in a way I could not have done for my sister. She unthinkingly does it all. Bathes her, wipes her, helps her in the toilet. Applies her unguents. Takes her to her doctor appointments. She does all sorts of things badly – resisting all earlier attempts at respite and accommodation, isolating herself from other people who might provide a support network for her. But ultimately Allison loves Mum, and Mum loves Allison and that has always counted for more than all of that. It still does. It’s not that kind of emergency.

But it is time. This is how it was always going to happen: with a crisis, because my mother only acts in response to crises. And now I have a daughter of my own, this is how I can only respond. Putting her first. That part is blessedly easy and it is a relief to see how instinctively I love my own daughter and how I will always put her first without thinking. This was the first test of that, and possibly the biggest. Ellie or Allison. Ellie, of course.

But Allison. This constant heartbreak, this knife in my spine, always there, ready to turn and turn again but never finishing the job. An insoluble drama, but at last reaching its next and final chapter. I’ll do what I can, Allison, but you know it will never be enough.

When I read “We need to talk about Kevin,” I didn’t read it thinking that it was about a mother with PND. But the movie reviews are describing it as such. And I wonder, as someone who was diagnosed with PND in week 2 of her baby’s life, is that a fair assumption?

If you haven’t read “We need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, and you have not been recently diagnosed with PND, then I would definitely recommend it. It is a truly remarkable book and stays with your for years. I read it, gosh, probably six years ago now, and still sometimes think about it and wonder about the questions the book poses. In brief (and I won’t do a spoiler so you can read on), it is about a woman who is married and gets pregnant with her first child. Throughout the pregnancy she is ambivalent about the baby, and once she has her baby boy, this doesn’t change. She never really likes the baby but does what mothers are “supposed” to do in terms of taking care of it. She is not like this with her second child – there she is like the books say mothers are supposed to react. Anyhow, the book looks at the role of the mother in her son’s subsequent actions. The old, familiar nightmare of how much can you blame the mother for?

Looking back, I can see why the lead character is described by the movie reviewers as a PND-sufferer. After all, she is not happy about having a child, the way you are “supposed” to be. And she doesn’t fall in love with the child after it is born, the way you are “supposed” to do. She is that Freudian archetype of the unloving mother, and surely she can therefore be held to account for her child’s personality flaws.

I would just want to question whether this is necessarily a portrait of someone with PND, or if it is someone who simply does not have to usual reactions to her child? And not being able to admit to that, things only get worse. Does a mother’s reaction to her child have to be medicalised, or can it simply be another state of being which that mother will need to work out as she is, ultimately, now responsible for another human?

I can speak from my own experience only. I have PND. I have a mood disorder which has required treatment in the wake of giving birth. The root causes of PND are largely believed to be sleep deprivation and reaction to the hormonal swings and roundabouts of motherhood. There are also risk factors, such as having a C-section – major surgery can trigger depression, as depression, in evolutionary terms is a state where the human is encouraged to lie low, the conditions outside the cave not being conducive to hunting, gathering or any other activity. Other risk factors include: social isolation; life stresses such as financial stress or moving house; a history of past episodes of depression or anxiety; a perfectionist personality; and a difficult relationship with one’s own mother, which comes up when becoming one. So: tick, tick, tick, tick and tick for me .

I have received absolutely stellar support from my husband, Yen, and my friends, both near and far, and I want to thank them for that. I have also received the best treatment I have ever had for depression or anxiety from Marg Booker at the Tresillian Family Centre. I have been part of a PND therapy group, whose other members are naturally anonymous, but who have been an incredible support in normalising our current journey, and sharing it.

As Marg said, “You have PND. It’s like travelling in India – some parts of it are really, really yucky. But it’s part of the journey, and that’s not even a bad thing. It just is what it is.” And having spent three months in India, about 10 % of that with some form or other of gastro, I knew what she meant.

The rate of PND is high – something like 1 in 8 women will experience it, and 2 out of 5 of their partners. The rate is much higher if you narrow it down to the highly educated band of women.

There is no shame in being treated for PND. But similarly, there should have been no shame in the mother character’s response to her child in “We need to talk about Kevin.” Whether she had PND is moot. But if she did not, it was shame – shame of her lack of feeling towards her son – that stopped her from reaching out and working through it, and developing, by sheer intelligence and will if necessary, the ability to love and connect with her son. And if she did have PND, it was also shame that prevented her from seeking treatment. No mother should ever be ashamed of who they are.

If you are interested in finding out more about PND or want some help, you can visit PANDA or call 1300 726 306 as a starting point, or Beyond Blue. I went to my GP. Also, the early childhood centre midwife who visited my in the second week (first week home) referred me to the Tresillian, which is an incredible resource if you are in NSW. There is also the mental health hotline on 13 11 14, and if you are concerned for yours or your baby’s safety then go to the local hospital and get yourself admitted pronto. You can be helped – right now, you need to know, even if you can’t feel it right now, hope is possible.

Maternity bras are the pits. You suddenly have these ridiculously large boobs, and have to ensconce them in flimsy things that couldn’t hold a pair of empty seashells in place. Some are better than others, and various people have recommended websites to me selling “pretty” ones. But try going for a strenuous walk (ie above 2 km an hour) in one of those and tell me how your back feels thereafter.

It’s truly weird, having such big boobs all of a sudden. You get used to your own profile over the course of a couple of adult decades. As you start to shed some of the baby weight, you think, hey, I might be able to fit one of my old tops. And so you try it on. And it no longer reaches your waist, and you have to look away from the mirror because all you can see there is someone else’s chest wearing your once petite clothing. And you didn’t even know it was petite at the time. Ah, all those years when you could have thought of yourself as waif-like, wasted on thinking that you need to lose a pound or two. If only you had known then what you know now, staring at your reflection only out of the corner of your eye in the hope that that will somehow minimise what you see there.

Not that there is anything wrong with big boobs. Lots of people actually undertake surgery to attain what breastfeeding women curse and cajole into button-down shirts or specially designed t-shirts with discreet flappage every day. It’s just that, when you are not used to them, and then suddenly THERE THEY ARE, it’s hard to know what, exactly, to do with them. How do you dress them appropriately? How do you take them out for daytime walks? How do you get them to sleep comfortably at night? It’s like suddenly being lumped (no pun intended) with two household pets, but with no friendly RSPCA to donate them to if things don’t work out.

The other thing about breastfeeding boobs is that they change size during the day and night. No one really tells you that. So your bra straps are constantly getting looser or tighter, doing that annoying sliding down your arm thingie which just gives you shoulder strain from sub-consciously trying to keep the strap up. Now there’s one they don’t talk about in post-natal Pilates.

I was never into showing cleavage in the past, mostly because I never really had any to speak of. Now, I show cleavage without effort or intention, and I am not sure I like it. At least it distracts from the baby weight I am still carrying everywhere else – everything is in Reubenesque proportion except for my height. I am like a short, K-Mart-dressed Eurasian version of those erstwhile lovelies.

For now, I have to resign myself to my “voluptuousness” (I do love a good euphemism). On the plus side (again, no pun intended), I can blame any splotches on my tops on the baby rather than my own, uncoordinated eating efforts. And I can train myself to look in the mirror for short bursts. It’s not as if a person stays the same forever anyway. Who knows. When my boobs return to their former size, I might even miss their company. Although seeing my feet again will probably make up for it.

I once heard a Vietnamese Buddhist monk say, “Always saying ‘I should, I should’ – that’s just shoulding on yourself! Hahahahahahahahah!”

I love how those Buddhist monks laugh.

I have been worrying about how my baby sleeps, especially during the day, but also how long it takes her to settle at night. (I am always worrying – apparently I have stress levels set at a fairly high threshold, so worry is what I do – what a great look-out I would have been for my tribe, 100,000 years ago!) Anyway, something occurred to me last night. The days when I don’t stress about it too much – when I don’t beat myself up for picking her up and cuddling her for one (or more) of her naps – are the days I feel less exhausted, no matter whether I got more than four hours sleep the night before. Stress and worry are tiring.

The other thing I realised was that, like most things I do, I am probably doing this pretty well. By “this,” I mean the whole, mothering, taking care of the baby thing. I tend to stress and worry about work or other activities, only to find later (sometimes years later) that I actually did better than I thought. It has taken me some time to realise that I am actually quite conscientious, even when I am slacking off. So then naturally, I worry that if I stop worrying, I will no longer do things so well .

I don’t want to “should” on my baby. Probably more important to model non-shoulding behaviour than to worry about perfecting feeds, sleeps and whatever else. It’s all going to change anyway (another Buddhist-ism. Hahahahahahahahahah!)

That is the question that all mothers ask themselves probably 82 times a day. Do you leave your baby to cry at some point, or don’t you?

Ellie is now 12 weeks old, and we are starting to wonder if now she might be ready for a bit of tough love. According to “Sleepy Sense,” we should be training her to send herself to sleep, and anything else is a disservice to our baby. This is not to say, dump her in her room and let her “cry it out;” but it may entail some crying, and what I want to know is, how much, and how old do you start?

In “Baby on Board,” a big point is made of the role of carers in the babies’ brain development. The author, a neonatologist, explains that current research shows that a person’s self-esteem and ability to form loving relationships basically comes down to how you treat them in the first 18 months of their life. No pressure, so. That said, the author does say you should get your baby into good sleeping habits before they are 5-6 months old, when they can start learning how to “manipulate” you to get what they want.

So what to DO? Is 12 weeks too young to start sleep training, by which I mean, trying to settle and re-settle in the cot, and leaving to cry for say, 10 minutes before responding – and still trying to leave in the cot when responding? Or is this going to damage my baby irrevocably so she becomes one of the toddlers in the child attachment experiments who seems to not care at all when muma leaves the room, or who clings to muma desperately, not believing that she will come back once gone. Or am I going to instead train her to not be able to sleep without my assistance if I continue as I am doing, thereby doing some other sort of damage?

(I should point out at this stage that it’s naps that I am finding it hard to settle Ellie for, during the day. She normally naps pretty well in the mornings, but in the afternoons she may sleep for a cycle or worse, the dreaded half cycle, and generally refuse to sleep for another one….sometimes I end up rocking her and holding her for her nap, just to avoid her getting too overtired….And at night she is still “colicky,” by which I mean she needs to be rocked or held for anywhere up to 8 hours before she will finally crash out. But once she does crash out, she has just started to sleep for at least 5 hours – once, she slept for 8! she had a cold – but still! – which is pretty acceptable to me as a human in need of sleep). When do we stop giving her the benefit of the colicky doubt and start to treat these afternoon/evenings as periods for determined sleep training on our part?

And what constitutes crying exactly, anyway? For example, do you start counting ten minutes from when she starts grizzling, even if there are pauses between grizzles? Or do you say you have left her to cry for ten minutes only when she really starts screaming consistently, as in, no-holds-barred, see how long I can sustain this note opera training? And if grizzling counts and I have left her for twenty minutes and then she starts to properly cry, does that mean that all this time, I have already been doing irreparable damage to my baby’s brain and she is going to be a crank who spits bile at waitresses about her babycino?

Ah sigh. Yen and I have agreed to err on the side of caution and still pick her up and respond if she starts to seriously cry. We want her self-esteem in tact and her cortisol levels regulated, more than we want her in good sleep habits. That said, I think she is generally doing pretty well – just making my days rather stressful, but hey, my cortisol responses are already set in stone. And in the evenings I do gratefully lie down, letting Yen do the hard yards of rocking and comforting until I think it must be time to feed her again – as one wise woman said, let the baby wear out one parent at a time. And with some trepidation but also, I think, remarkable foresight for someone with perennial exhaustion, I have booked us into baby boot camp for when she is four months and one week old. Because I may be a soft touch, but those midwives sure aren’t.

Can I just say that I love chocolate? It can be your best friend and your worst enemy – too little and you just want more, too much and you turn into a madly typing demon woman, but just the right amount and you are sanguine, busy, with energy but still able to concentrate, awake enough to take care of your baby but not so awake that you won’t sleep when you finally get the opportunity.

At the moment I am off dairy, as we suspect bubba had a reaction to it in my breastmilk, so I am getting all my chocolatey requirements from gluten and dairy free Macro biscuits, which are essentially the GF equivalent of Tim Tams. Mmm, I hear you say . But really, they are quite good, and on a suddenly rainy Sunday afternoon, the sky darkening, the baby napping, the husband reading and the Gilmore Girls providing a happy patter in the background, sitting with two chocolate biscuits, a reliable baby monitor and a mug of decaffeinated tea, I am a happy little dairy-and-gluten-free vegemite (well, vege-spread, but let’s not get too technical about it).

I think I need time out tomorrow morning. It’s a terrible thing, because I feel intensely guilty for not wanting to spend every moment with my baby (I could write a book about mother’s guilt and I have only three months to draw from. Imagine the series in twenty years time! I could beat Robert Jordan). But I do think she gets tired of me too – by the end of the day she welcomes her father home with the glee only reserved for the exceptional.

A friend once described it like this: “I am my baby’s water – constantly flowing and always there. But his father is my baby’s sunshine, and just lights up his day.”

So I have asked for an hour of time out for myself tomorrow morning and my husband has readily agreed, even though he has a nasty head cold at the moment. A happy mother means a happy family, so the saying goes, and probably for a reason.

I have been a bit worried (cos that’s what I do), that I have been getting tired of my baby more and more often. Last night, I had to lie down for half an hour even though she wasn’t really settled, because I was just, so, tired. My husband offered to take over and I only resisted for a minute. She had worn me down.

A few nights previously (I think – my sense of time is shot through with diamonds of moments, like a bridal hairnet – dazzling but barely there) I had had to give her to Yen as well.

“Thank you,” I said as I passed her over. “I was contemplating defenestration.”

“You were going to take away all of Ellie’s assets?” Yen asked.

“No. I was going to throw her out the window.”

“Oh,” he said. ” I always get that word confused.”

Not that I would actually throw my baby out of the window (you can put away the DOCS hotline number). But sometimes, you just need a break.

I think I am going to schedule a regular weekend time out session. If it is in the schedule, I might feel less guilty about taking it and about wanting it. And I can look at it as important bonding time for Yen and Ellie, which it no doubt is. Then, when I come back to my husband and baby, refreshed by an hour free of my responsibilities, I will look at them both with the gratitude they deserve, rather than the weariness that I feel.