It's all my fault: sleep and guilt

I don't do sleep deprivation.

Or rather, when circumstances demand it, the result isn't pretty.

Lack of sleep brings out all the worst aspects of my personality. I think this is true for everyone, but I learned long ago that life is so much better, both for me and for those around me, if I get rest. In the best of circumstances, I have a self-critical nature, but I can usually keep it somewhat in check and use that criticism to improve how I do things, especially with Gail, an optimist who nonetheless sees the value in my pessimism, by my side. Without sleep I become viciously critical and judgmental, mostly of myself, but since any parenting actions and decisions around here are made with Gail, she also bears that burden. When I'm rested, I'm a reasonably patient and steady parent. Without rest, I'm impatient, grumpy, and easily knocked off course by the inevitable curve balls. When I'm rested, I'm usually smart enough to make good daily progress on my (non-family) work. When I'm chronically exhausted, work progress is minimal and slow. My mind feels about as nimble as cold oatmeal. Then that vicious judgmental woman who has come to inhabit my body jumps in and makes everything worse.

Coming home from a less than stellar work day yesterday, as I thought about my smiley, laid back, crawling, adorable baby, knowing that I was already exhausted and was going to be up with him at least four times overnight, feeling no hope that anything will get better anytime soon, I was in tears. I was that woman crying on the subway. I'm at the end of my rope, and I've been here for a while.

Lack of sleep doesn't bring out the best in Gail either. When things are hard, she tends to prefer a head down, ignore-the-problem-until-it-goes-away sort of approach. This doesn't sit will with my the-end-is-nigh-and-it's-all-my-fault approach. This plagued us back when we were TTC. We know it's a pattern. As soon as one of us sees it we can usually start being nicer (me) and actually listening (Gail). But it still stinks. When we're in good form, we work seamlessly as a team. It's harder when we have to try, especially when there's so little energy available for trying.

Ira will be 8 months old tomorrow. He's still up many many times a night. Many of you saw our semi-desperate sleep post a couple months ago. But this isn't supposed to be yet another post about how bad things are, or what we've tried, where you then tell me what worked for your kid, or say sleep sucked for you too and that you didn't get any rest until your kid was five (and, wow, people, that is not a very encouraging thing to say. If that's what you're thinking, either keep it to yourself, or lie). And since it's not that kind of post, I'm not even going to tell you what we've tried, or what we're planning to try.

In one of the many difficult conversations we've had about this, Gail said something along the lines of "It's like you think this is all our fault, that we're messing up our kid, and that if we could just do it right, he would magically sleep."

She's right. That is what I'm thinking, at least at times like when I was crying on the train. Except, actually, I think that I'm ruining him and this is all my fault. If only I was capable of co-sleeping and/or sleeping while nursing this wouldn't even be a problem. If only I was capable of being up every night with him (instead of every other night since Gail is on duty for half of the nights) so that the response when he cries could be perfectly consistent, and so he'd always get milk with the right magical hormones at the right time. If only my milk supply hadn't tanked just when he was getting the hang of doing a nice long nighttime stretch. And, just for fun, I'll beat myself up some more for even whining about this at all when there are women out there who have to do this every single night, and when Gail is just as exhausted as I am (though she fakes it with more skill). Sometimes I throw in that I couldn't sleep at all during the pregnancy (due to intense morning sickness, then itching due to liver problems) and that must have caused me to grow a sleepless baby, so that's my fault too, and I should have tried harder.

It is this kind of pressure and guilt that made Gail resist sharing nighttime parenting. It's this pressure that Ayelet Waldman wrote about in her eponymous essay in Bad Mother -- while we decree that fathers are good fathers if they are sincerely trying, we believe that mothers are good mothers only when we achieve perfection. I sincerely wish that I could accept myself as a parent of a child who is not a good sleeper (and I'm begging the universe to let me edit this later to add "...until the night before his 8-month birthday"). But that's not going to happen, at least not until I get some more sleep.

Second-Parent Adoption

On Wednesday, I officially adopted Ira. Since we live in Massachusetts and are married, I have actually been a legal parent to Ira since his birth. We opted to go through a second-parent adoption process in order to provide me with legal protections outside of the state of Massachusetts. Because many states (as well as the federal government) do not recognize our marriage, they also may not recognize my legal claim to Ira in the absence of an adoption. This adoption protects me in case Lyn and I should ever break up. Without the adoption in hand, Lyn could choose to move to another state and fairly easily shut me out of Ira's life. Three years ago, Lyn similarly adopted Leigh. (Actually, as an interested aside, in reality we both adopted Ira on Wednesday -- that's how it works any time you do a step-parent or second-parent adoption. Of course that is really a legal fiction and we all know that I was the only parent whose status was really in question.)

Not all lesbian couples in Massachusetts do a second parent adoption. We know couples who have opted against it because of the substantial expense, deciding to rely on their status as a married couple for protection. We know of one couple who did the adoption but were very angry that they had to. Lyn and I haven't ever felt angry about jumping through the legal hoops (although I wouldn't mind it if the lawyer gave us back that fat stack of cash). So I wanted to say something about why we have chosen this route.

It comes down to something the judge said just before she signed our papers. "This adoption is a permanent decree. When this paper is signed and registered with the court it is permanent and irrevocable." Those words struck me very deeply, and I turned them over and over in my head for the rest of the day. At the end of the day I found that the word "irrevocable" had really impacted Lyn as well. It is the revocability of the relationship between a child and his non-biological mother that gets at the heart of the difficulty in establishing and maintaining a lesbian-headed family with two moms.

Without legal protections, a bio-mom can revoke the parenthood of a non-bio-mom any time she chooses. Non-biological mothers in most states don't have legal protections which leads to mothers losing their children and children losing their mothers. If I knew that Lyn could take Ira away from me it would change our whole relationship. It would change my relationship with Ira, setting up Lyn as the mediator of our relationship, even if neither of us intended that to be the case. That's what makes that word, irrevocable, mean so much. It normalizes my relationship with both Lyn and Ira. It means that my community cares enough about my family to invest each of our relationships with Ira with equal importance.

Too often, we don't take lesbian parenting relationships seriously enough. In most places lesbians are not allowed to marry; our relationships are not taken seriously by the larger community. In our hearts, too many of us believe that our relationships really are second rate and that the bio-mom is really is the "real" mom. I feel so blessed that the state has imbued my marriage with legal backing and my parenthood with serious and irrevocable status. It makes my marriage and my family stronger.

Book Review: Equally Shared Parenting

Our friends, Marc and Amy, have a brand new book out:

Equally Shared Parenting: rewriting the rules for a new generation of parents. We got a sneak peak and it is amazing. It's written primarily for heterosexual couples, but Marc and Amy write a convincing welcome to gay and lesbian families, and also include a lesbian family among their examples throughout the book. That family happens to be us! We love how they treat our two-mom family as just one more example, and not some sort of extraordinary special case. While some of the material does focus on traditional gendered division of labor, it doesn't take much to extrapolate to other family arrangements. We think about this stuff all the time (and even talk to Marc and Amy about it frequently) and still came away from the book with smart new ways to look at how our family life and work is structured.

We've heard Marc say that it is important to them to create a family based on relationships rather than on roles. This is particularly appropriate for queer families because we don't fit into clear-cut roles. Instead of trying to squeeze our families into confining gender roles, the Vachons suggest we try to create balance for both parents in the spheres of childcare, career, housework, and personal time, so that both parents can live fulfilled lives, relationships can flourish, and the whole family can work as a team. I found the chapter on career and breadwinning particularly helpful, as this is a particularly hard place for Gail and I to find balance as individuals.

(Another plus -- this is the only parenting book we've found that doesn't talk down to dads, and assumes they are full and competent members of their families. I wish that wasn't such a rarity.)

Rest for parents

For about six years now, Lyn and I have observed Shabbat in some form. We don't work on Shabbat, we light candles and sing blessings in the evening, and we generally pray at our havurah on Saturday mornings. Since we began our Shabbat observance, it has changed and grown, generally moving toward increasing observance. It has provided a consistent pause in our daily lives and given us an amazing space to take a spiritual breath.

Or, rather, it used to.

Now that we are parents of young children, the main work of our lives is caring for the two of them. Every day we make Leigh's meals, get her to eat them, and clean up after her. Every day we make sure she gets dressed, help her go to the bathroom and remind her to wash her hands. Every day we brush her teeth. Every day we navigate the tricky psychological world of parenting a kid who doesn't stop and seems to have a relentless drive to uncover our weaknesses. And did I mention that we have a baby too?

None of this stops on Shabbat -- it doesn't even slow down. It's been three and a half years since I had a truly restful Shabbat. These days, Shabbat doesn't provide a pause or a change or something really special; it's simply another day as a parent, and one in which I don't allow my child to watch a movie.

I feel as though I have allowed the cultivation of my daughter's Shabbat observance to eclipse my own. I want to create a certain kind of Shabbat environment for her, but haven't stopped to consider that perhaps my own is more important. A little bit like how on an airplane you are supposed to put on your own air mask before attempting to put on your child's.

That's an interesting realization, but doesn't necessarily solve the problem. However, I have had a few thoughts on changes we can make.

• Earlier this year, we started to pay for our havurah to have childcare on Shabbat mornings. This has opened up the possibility of actually getting to pray on Saturday mornings, rather than spending the morning either playing upstairs with Leigh or worrying that it is time for me to relieve Lyn who has been playing upstairs with Leigh. Having childcare allows me to relax and open myself up a little to some spiritual renewal.
• Now we have unfortunately entered that time in a baby's life when we can't just let him nap in a carrier on the go -- we actually have to nap Ira in his crib at home during the day or we'll pay for it at night. That means someone needs to stay home with Ira. We've decided that for the time being, most Saturday's one of us will go to services and the other will stay at home. Being at home with just a baby for companionship can provide it's own kind of rest, especially when it is Shabbat and you don't have to keep up with work or household chores. So one of us gets to pray (with Leigh upstairs in childcare) and the other gets some contemplative time at home.
• We've also decided to start trading off longer solitary afternoon breaks. This will also mean changing some aspects of our Shabbat practice, like our observances around spending money or writing. For instance, the next time we do this I may walk over to a coffee shop, buy a coffee, and do some reading or writing for a few hours.

I'm curious about how any of you find time and space for rest in your lives (whether it is connected with a religious observance or not). How do you recharge? How do you find time for quiet contemplation?

It's a good thing big sister can't read

Early on in Ira's pregnancy, my older sister, who at the time had two and four year old boys (and now has added a third kid) gave us some good advice: "Be really careful of the books for older siblings. They are almost all extremely negative."

It turns out she was right. Leigh is so excited about being a big sister (and generally doing a fabulous job of it!) that she picks out any book from the library that has an older sibling (especially a sister) and a baby in it. Fortunately, she still hasn't figured out our propensity to change the words, so we can get away with liberal editing.

She picked out such a book last week, and when we sat down to read it, every single page was filled with how awful the big sister thought her new baby brother was and how mad she was at her parents (and now I've completely forgotten the title, and the book went back to the library, so I'll spare the author my wrath). Sure, there was a bit of a turn at the end where the sister decided maybe the baby was sort of OK, but 99.99% of the content was about how her brother's arrival ruined her life.

But as we're sitting there, and I'm trying to make up this or that nonsense story (it was truly unreadable), Leigh fortunately took over much of the reading. The book had absolutely beautiful pictures and she was exclaiming "Oh! Look how cute the baby is! He's yawning! That's a big sister just like me! She's going to take good care of the baby. She'll help put him for a nap and play with him and make him laugh..." She went on and on and every single word out of her mouth was about how great it is to be a big sister and how wonderful babies are. Now, you might say she was just buttering me up, but she could barely contain her excitement and was practically bubbling over with everything that's great about having a brother. I'm so glad that with my sister's warning, we mostly managed to avoid giving her a script ahead of time about how awful the baby was going to be.

There are a few other indications that she's pretty fond of our new family structure. The other day at dinner she said, out of nowhere, "It is really great to have a baby. Don't you like having a baby, Ima?" A few weeks ago, she was "reading" to me from a "letter" she "wrote" to me at daycare which said, "Dear Mama, I don't know if you are going to have another baby (author's note: unlikely), but if you do, Thank you."

I know we might be in the sweet spot right now. Ira isn't very mobile yet (he's a little mobile, but not fast!) so he can't take any of her things, but he's smiley and interactive, and clearly thinks she's the bee's knees. I know when he's a toddler it will be a whole new ballgame, but for now, we're grateful that Leigh has taken to big-sisterhood like a duck to water, at least for the first 6 1/2 months.

[PS: If you are looking for a good book for older siblings, we have two recommendations. Of course, neither of them is 100% perfect for queer families, but you can't have everything. The first is I'm a Big Sister by Joanna Cole. It's a simple book about having a new baby and is very positive. It also shows both mom and dad caring for children, which is a plus in my book. (The same author has written I'm a Big Brother which is likely similar.) The second book is Not Yet, Rose by Susanna Leonard Hill with illustrations by Nicole Rutten. This is a sweet story about a girl, Rose, anticipating the birth of a younger sibling. She eagerly anticipates the new baby, wondering whether she will have a brother or sister. She has a couple of fears, but they are introduced gently and Rose talks herself out of them. The end of the book when the baby comes is one of the sweeter moments I've seen in picture books about siblings. My only complaint is that the division of labor is overly gendered in this book, but otherwise it's a joy to read.]

The Anti-NaNoBloMo: recovery roundup

** Now With Fixed Links **

As you can see, in celebration of NaNoBloMo in November, we made our fewest posts ever in a single month. In an attempt to get things going around here again, here are some posts we've enjoyed reading on our unplanned hiatus:

Two Hot Mamas >> thoughts on (possibly not) nursing
N writes about many thoughts in anticipation of feeding her soon-to-be-born baby. She writes things that often don't get said out loud, but I'm sure many women will recognize. She has a very nice bit in there about how decisions around feeding in a two-mom family can be a little more complicated than in a mom-dad family, and I think she's right.

Adjustment Disorder >> Who is a Rabbi?
SWMama writes about her take on a court decision in the UK regarding who is and isn't Jewish, and what that means to her and her daughter. I have had many of these thoughts and feelings, but have never managed to identify (let alone write) them quite so clearly.

Totally Smitten Mama >> My Leo
Lex writes about falling in love with the son her wife gave birth to, and the differences and similarities compared to her experiences with their first three boys. I love how she captures how beautiful and enriching this path to motherhood can be, even when you already have plenty of mothering experience under your belt.

It's not like a cat...>> Mommy on the Sidelines
JM wonders how life would be different if she wasn't the taskmaster around her house. She's dissatisfied with her current situation but not sure how to shift the division of labor to something more egalitarian (which would leave her more room for fun with her son).

Beginning of the End

Well, you knew we couldn't hold off forever, so, yes, we are back with another installment of our lactation-induction saga. You can read about our decision, how it's been working, and some pros and cons. Now I'm going to tell you about what is probably the beginning of the end.

Lately I've been very tired of the work it takes to keep up my supply. In an ideal world, I'm taking 2 domperidone pills 4 times a day and 3 fenugreek and 3 blessed thistle pills 3 times a day. Lately I'm lucky if I do half of that. I'm very tired of taking pills and have had an increasingly hard time making myself do it.

So I've decided to stop. I'll be tapering off all of the medication and herbs over the next couple of weeks. We're not sure if my supply will dwindle to nothing, or continue at roughly the same rate (these days probably about 6 ounces, though I've been as high as 10, or maybe 12 on a good day). Either way, I will continue to nurse Ira, probably almost as often as I do right now. I'll continue to take every other night with Ira, and, if necessary, I'll feed him a bottle of breastmilk at night.^* I'll continue to nurse him from time-to-time during the day, even if at times it is just comfort nursing. Honestly, it is often largely comfort nursing now; for a daytime feed I usually nurse him and then either give him to Lyn for more milk or give him a bottle.

We are hoping that my cutting back won't put too much more pumping pressure on Lyn. She currently pumps once in the morning every night that I am on Ira-duty, once before bed on nights that I do the "dream feed" (and on those nights she has Ira-duty), and once at work on days her three office work days (pumping more times at work for Lyn seems to generate the same amount as just pumping once). I will continue to pump on mornings that I go to work (since I don't feed him overnight on those mornings). We currently have a large freezer stash and are hopeful that Lyn won't have to add more pumping (particularly more pumping at the office) to keep Ira in breastmilk.

I am glad that I induced lactation. It helped us share nighttime care more easily, reduced the feeding pressure on Lyn, and gave me a wonderful experience with my son. It also gave Lyn more opportunities for uninterrupted time with Leigh, which may have helped smooth her transition to big-sisterhood. But right now I feel like if my nursing becomes just a close and cosy pacifier, I really don't mind. It's served it's purpose and I can let the milk go if my supply doesn't stay up without the drugs.

^* Nights are a sore subject around here right now. Ira's sleep has been going south and lately he wakes up around midnight and then every hour or two after that. We all need more sleep! We learned our lesson with our older daughter have a consultation with a sleep consultant scheduled for next week (with Leigh, they were far more helpful than a giant library full of contradictory "sleep books"). Hopefully we'll get some good ideas and there will be more restful nights in our future; right now it's an absolute lifeline to get a solid night of sleep every other night. (And note, we're not really interested in receiving sleep advice here on the blog -- though empathy is welcome!)