Captain's Log Stardate 021716: Just Slow Down!

Some days I feel awesome at being a mom, and other days I really suck at it. I'm short-tempered with Junior Mate, cry a lot, and sometimes even swear at her. I'm horrible. These days tend to be the days when I didn't get much sleep for whatever reason (sometimes, but not always, related to Junior Mate's sleep). I'm really trying to cut back on the swearing because she's definitely getting old enough to start repeating stuff like that. Obviously, I also want to cut back on the swearing because it's not nice; most people don't like to be sworn at. Also, it can be hard to remember that babies are actually just very small people. They seem so different to adults that it can be easy to think of them as if they're a different species or something. I told my mom the other day that I really think I should get some Buddhist practice into my life. I tend allow myself to be ruled by my emotions, and you really can't raise kids that way. The truth, my friends, is that there are times when you just don't like your kid(s) at all, but you can't let that make you treat them like you don't like them. This is what I'm struggling with. I know Junior Mate deserves better than this, but I have not been good at it. I am trying to get my depression under control, upping my antidepressant a bit and continuing to go to counseling. (I've also gotten someone to help me with her two days a week, allowing me to get out and have some me-time.) Unfortunately, I have not yet arrived at Happy Captain, and there are days I feel I never will again.

Anyway, I sometimes let my emotions rule me in my dealings with Junior Mate, and I know this is unfair to her and unhealthy for both of us. I know I cannot continue this way with her because I want to do as little damage to her as possible. (I'm of the belief that your kids are going to be screwed up somehow no matter how awesome you are. The best you can do is try not to actively screw them up. ;) I have a couple of books I want to read to help me get in this mindset. I started reading a series last year called The Dalai Lama's Cat, by David Michie, and it basically presents basic Buddhist tenets through an easy to digest little story about a cat who learns these tenets through her life with the Dalai Lama. I have enjoyed them and recently purchased the newest one. Maybe when I get around to reading it, I will actually try to think about practicing some of the ideas. (The last one I read had a really good part about not letting anger and frustration rule you; I could definitely use that one.)

One of the things I've been thinking about recently in this vein is "slow down." Now, I could have used this for the weird dichotomy of having a newborn/infant where you are sort of just hoping that they'll grow up so things get easier while also mourning the fact that they don't fit into those little 3-month clothes anymore. However, I think this is more important, at least for me. Lately, Junior Mate has been having a little trouble falling asleep, taking closer to 30 minutes (or more) than 15 minutes. At first, I would get so frustrated that I'd end up just getting First Mate to get her to sleep. I should also point out that, having read all these infant sleep things, I was totally stressed about making sure I put her to bed awake. Otherwise, all sorts of bad things would happen, and she would NEVER SLEEP NORMALLY!!! Finally, I decided that it didn't matter if I rocked Junior Mate to sleep. In fact, it doesn't bother me (most of the time), and it's not like I'll be able to do it forever. She is usually able to fall back asleep by herself when she wakes up in the night, which is the main reason given for not rocking to sleep. I've decided to just enjoy getting to hold her and watch her fall asleep, knowing this will not last forever. At some point, though, I started getting impatient for her to fall asleep so I could get my little bit of "me-time" during the day.

Recently, while we were visiting family, I found myself rocking Junior Mate to sleep for naps. Yes, I'm still trying to figure out how to transition Junior Mate out of the swing and into the crib for naps. I would feel impatient about getting back to family, and then I thought, "Slow down, Captain. Just slow down. Enjoy these moments. Let Junior Mate sleep on your shoulder. Maybe take a nap yourself." And then I realized that even though my life has felt incredibly hectic and just trying to make it from day to day, Junior Mate is actually making me SLOW DOWN in some ways. Adult life is so humdrum sometimes that we forget to appreciate the uniqueness of each day. In the midst of doing the same things we do every day, we forget that there will never be another February 17, 2016, and we take it for granted. Babies grow so fast, especially in the first year (I have yet to experience the second year), that it's much harder to take it for granted. And the older they get, even at a whopping 11 months old ;), the more independent they want to be. Those sweet times of them snuggling into your shoulder become fewer and fewer, and I imagine I'll find myself missing them. I do miss the newborn times when Junior Mate would just sleep effortlessly on my shoulder. Now she does sometimes, but she's more restless. And she only naps two times a day, so there aren't as many opportunities.

Stardate 030216 Appendix: I started this a couple of weeks ago and am now not in exactly the same place anymore. Antidepressants have been upped a little bit, and Junior Mate is once again sleeping more easily. Junior Mate is helping me to slow down and appreciate little things more, and I appreciate her for it. I'm currently finding it easier to do this whole mommy thing than I have for the past nearly 12 months. However, I think the things I say and feel in the first part of this post are important because I'm certain some people feel them but are afraid to talk about them. We have to be willing to talk about our weaknesses in order to support one another and overcome them. Thus, I am posting it as is, though I could not figure out how to finish it in the same vein. Just remember that we all screw up and don't do as well as we'd like. Fortunately, kids are resilient, and I think if we try our best to be great most of the time, they will be fine.

Captain's Log February 2016: 12 Book Reading Challenge - Book You've Been Meaning to Read

This month's book falls into the "Book I've been meaning to read" category. I figure it's easy to do categories like this at the beginning, because I've already got it in mind. I'll save for later those categories for which I don't already have a choice. Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, by Kate Braestrup, is a book given me by my very good friend from seminary, AmenAbility. I think it's been sitting on my shelf for 3-4 years now, so it was about time to actually read it. (Image below links to the book on Amazon.) Also, I'm pretty sure I've decided to do this challenge by reading all women authors. Gotta love an additional challenge. ;)

The book is a memoir, which I didn't really notice until I started reading it. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this wasn't exactly it. I think I was sort of hoping for some sort of helpful handbook on how to do marriage. First Mate and I are doing okay, but I'm not always so good at this marriage thing. It's also gotten a lot harder since having Junior Mate. Parenting is hard, and it can be easy to feel resentful toward First Mate when I'm home with Junior Mate all day while he's working. I struggle with the understanding that he's had a long day/week at work and wants some down time because I want down time, too. And honestly, there's still this part of me that feels like I don't have a right to complain because I get to be home all day "doing nothing." Not that raising a child is doing nothing - it just doesn't feel like the kind of work you do outside the house. For an introvert, though, it is a bit draining. I love Junior Mate, but I really love nap times and the end of the day when she goes to sleep and I get some time to myself.

Anyway, that was more of a tangent than I intended; suffice it to say that having a baby has made marriage more difficult for me. Braestrup gives some good anecdotes about how marriage is hard for everyone and shares how she overcame a time in her own first marriage (ended by her husband's death by car accident) when she was going to divorce him. Basically, she says that "The Golden Rule" saved them. You know the one, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." For her, it came in the revelation that she wouldn't want to be treated the way she had been treating her husband, so she started treating him how she wanted to be treated. Honestly, this was a little disappointing for me. I mean, I suppose it's true - this is a great way to work on a marriage, and perhaps the only real advice one can give or receive. However, I wanted something more concrete. Maybe I even wanted some reassurance that it's supposed to be hard and that it would get easier. Instead, I got that it's hard. Because let's face it: we're selfish beings, and constantly trying to do for others what you would want instead of doing it for yourself is hard. This was especially true for First Mate and me during the early months of Junior Mate's time here. We were both so tired and emotionally drained that all we could do was take care of ourselves. Only recently have we been able to care for one another better again.

I think the part I liked the best was her recurring theme of caritas, a Latin word that we translate as charity in English. She talks about it as the kind of love that desires the best for the other person (among other explanations). Obviously, you hope that you feel this way about your spouse (and that they feel that way about you), but thinking about it with the actual words helps to better define it. I have caritas for all the guys I've dated in the past. I truly want them to be happy and have the best; I was certain I was not the best for them, which is why I broke it off. It is actually harder to have continuing caritas for First Mate because we live together and work at this baby-raising thing together. He's not a passing thought or earnest desire for happiness. He is always there, whether I'm in a good mood or not, had enough sleep or not, dealt with a cranky baby all day or a happy baby. It takes more work for me to be charitable to him because I see it when he leaves his socks on the floor or puts his dirty dish right by the sink rather than in it. For this reason, I appreciate Braestrup's reminder about caritas and its importance in a marriage. First Mate and I both need charity as we navigate this difficult and exciting path of parenthood and marriage.

Over all, I would say this is a pretty good book with some poignant reminders of what marriage can be. It's a relatively easy read, and Braestrup is pretty relatable. She's a Unitarian Universalist minister, though she came from an atheist background, so there are some spiritual concepts and biblical references. I would recommend it if you like memoirs and easy reads, but if you don't have a lot of time for reading, I don't know that I would put it on a "must be read" list.

Captain's Log January 2016: 12 Book Reading Challenge - Book You Can Finish in a Day

Since I didn't start the challenge until halfway through January, I chose to do the "Book you can finish in a day" category. Incidentally, the book I chose fits into other categories as well, but I'm putting it in this one. This month's book was Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. (Image links to book [for $3!] on Amazon)

This is a book that I read the summer before 9th grade for a summer reading assignment. I hated it at the time. I don't really remember why I hated it at this point, but I suspect it had something to do with the melancholy and sense of hopelessness prevalent in the book. At 14 years old, I had never really had cause to think about or appreciate these themes. I preferred (and often still do prefer) happiness and romance. Back then, I think it was because I didn't want to have to think about such things. Now it's mostly because I struggle with my own depression, and I often feel overwhelmed by the bad things in the world. When I read, I want to believe things can be different, not be reminded how much they can suck. It's the same for me with movies. This read was more enjoyable than the first, but I don't think it's a book that will make it to my favorite books of all time category.

Anyway, a quick synopsis: Ethan Frome is a man living in what we learn to be a rather sad and hopeless situation. The narrator, who frames the story, wonders how he came to be such an aloof and sad figure and gets the opportunity to find out when he and Ethan (who has been driving the narrator to and from work) get caught in a snowstorm. He spends the night at Ethan's farm and somehow pieces together a sad story of a mismatched, loveless marriage and a forbidden yet exciting chance upon new love when a hired girl comes to live with Ethan and his wife, Zeena. Unfortunately, poverty and a sense of right and duty make this chance at new love impossible, and when Ethan's wife tries to send Mattie away, she and Ethan despair and make a fateful decision that will leave all of them in a desolate and hopeless situation. I'll make you read the book for all the specifics.

A couple of thoughts I had while reading: why did Edith Wharton choose to write from a male point of view? What do I think would have been the right thing to do, i.e. are love and happiness more important than duty?

I don't have a problem with Wharton writing from a male POV. I mean, it's pretty common for men to write from women's POV's, so why not have women write from male POV? I mostly wondered about the place of women writers at the time. The book was published in 1911, so women weren't yet allowed to vote. Were women writers taken as seriously as men writers? I know there were plenty of great women writers before the 20th century, but I think I've heard that many of them weren't really seen as writers of serious literature due to their gender. I mean, isn't that part of the reason George Eliot chose that pen name? So I found myself wondering if Wharton wrote from a male POV because writing from Mattie's POV wouldn't have been taken very seriously, as in, "Who wants to read a book about a little lady who has fallen in love with her cousin's husband?" Of course, there are also issues of class at play here. Generally, any of the women who were able to gain recognition for their writing at this time were wealthy, and Wharton is no different. I suppose there's also the fact of the choice that faces Ethan, which is not really present for Zeena or Mattie, and that makes up the main conflict of the book. Obviously, the story would have presented quite differently from either of the main women characters' POV. At any rate, I don't really have any answers or great philosophical thoughts for this question. It just came up for me while I was reading. I was interested in hearing the story from Mattie's POV and/or Zeena's POV and wondered why we didn't get that.

The second question is much harder to consider because it touches on sort of murky moral ground. On the one hand, I have a BA in psychology, and I think it is important to feed love and happiness into your life in order to function fully during the day. I mean, I know from personal experience how hard it is to do daily tasks when you are living with depression, whatever is the cause. On the other hand, Frome is admirable for wanting to follow through on his matrimonial commitment to his wife and his realization that she does not really have the resources to survive on her own (particularly with his own poverty and inability to send alimony). Honestly, I found Zeena to be tiring, and I wanted Frome to leave her and run off with Mattie. However, I think his commitment to being honorable is good and should not be discounted. It's difficult because we currently live in a climate where it is all too easy and expected for people to do the easy thing that makes them feel good. As a society, we expect and sometimes encourage, people to leave their spouses if they find someone they "love more." Perhaps we ought to return to having a little more societal pressure to try harder at those commitments we made before family, friends, and God (for those of us who made them before God). This is difficult for me, though, because I think there are a lot of societal pressures, particularly in some Christian and other conservative circles, that push people to get married before they're ready, often to someone who isn't really a good match for a lifelong partnership. I don't want to punish people for poor choices they may have made when they were 20, but I also don't like how little our society seems to regard marriage nowadays. There must be some way to find a middle ground here. I have a hunch that it may have more to do with how we discuss sex and marriage with our children than with trying to pressure people who are miserable to stay married. At any rate, I admire both Ethan's honor and his desire to love. It would be lovely if he'd been able to have both in one woman.

Have any of you read this book? What were your thoughts? I welcome thoughtful and constructive comments on my thoughts but will summarily delete trollish comments.

Captain's Log Stardate 012216: Sleep Like a Baby?

Now that I've actually made it to the magical "It gets better" place, it's so much easier to talk about stuff. I also don't feel as compelled to write about all the depressing, unhappy times I experienced. Maybe that's what happens to parents. You sort of just want to forget about the difficult times, and you do. Anyway, part of my plan with this blog was to write about stuff that I didn't expect or had to learn on my own through some difficult experience(s). I don't think it's because other parents didn't have to learn it themselves, but perhaps they forgot about it and thus didn't share it with me (or whoever else they share parenting advice with). I wanted to try to write about these things while I was still in them or remembering them to help other parents have a leg up, so to speak. So this blog's topic (pulled from a little list of things I wrote down to share as they cropped up) is about sleep.

Getting babies to sleep is obviously a huge thing. If you Google it, you will see tons of websites, including plenty of sleep consultants who are happy to take your money for their services. I didn't really think much about baby sleep at first because my experience was that newborns tend to just fall asleep when they're sleepy and wake up when they're hungry. I didn't really feel there was much I could do to change that schedule and thought it would regulate on its own (which it really pretty much did). What really threw me for a loop was when right around two months old, Junior Mate suddenly just stopped napping during the day. I thought, "Well, maybe she just doesn't need to nap as much," so I didn't worry about getting her to nap. Then, one day she didn't nap AT ALL the whole day. That was the day First Mate and I left Junior Mate with my mom while we went on a dinner date. We were gone about two hours. When we stepped off the elevator onto our floor, we heard crying and thought, "Uh-oh, Junior Mate must be tired and hungry." My mom informed me that Junior Mate had cried inconsolably the ENTIRE time we were gone. I felt so guilty, not because Junior Mate had been crying but because my mom had been dealing with an inconsolable baby by herself for 2+ hours. (It is just as exhausting as it sounds.) We felt so guilty about it, in fact, that we wouldn't leave her with our visiting parents for months afterwards, only going out for whole family meals or eating in.

I figured out that the reason Junior Mate had cried that whole time was because she was just exhausted from not napping. I realized she wouldn't go to sleep on her own anymore and that I would have to encourage her to nap. I was pretty stressed about this whole napping thing, so I bought a couple of books and looked at sleep consulting sites online. One site I found to be pretty helpful because it has free suggested schedules for babies from age Newborn through Toddler was The Baby Sleep Site. I still consult this site to get an idea of about how long the average baby Junior Mate's age can stay awake between naps, how long naps (ideally) should be, and about how many feedings they should have per day. It has helped me understand what to expect on the sleeping front and helped me through a couple of sleep regressions and a nap transition.  I also read the below book (image links to Amazon's book page), which has some great tips on how to help your baby sleep at various ages and explains why their sleep habits change over time so you can better understand and respond to the changes. It contains alternative methods to the controversial "cry it out" method if you think you're at that point but can't stand listening to your baby cry for however long it takes for him/her to fall asleep.

So here's the long and short of it: once babies get interested enough in their world to pay more attention to it (around 2-3 months), they stop falling asleep on their own. There's just too much interesting stuff out there, and they want to learn all of it! You have to help create an atmosphere that encourages them to fall asleep. Create a routine that has cues to let them know it's time for a nap, and watch for their "I'm sleepy" cues. For me, it helped to kind of watch Junior Mate for a few days and get an idea of how long she stayed awake before she started showing signs of sleepiness (crankiness, rubbing eyes, staring, etc.). This helped me get an idea of what her natural schedule was and enabled me to watch the clock in order to prepare for nap-time before she got overtired. Because the totally unfair thing is that the more tired babies get, the more difficult it is for them to fall asleep. Anyone who ever told you to keep a baby up so that s/he would sleep better at night was WRONG. They need good naps during the day in order to sleep well at night. It felt so counterintuitive to me, but Junior Mate really did nap better and sleep better at night when I made her nap regularly.

But you have to be careful not to give them too much sleep during the day…it's a balance. And realize that as soon as you get used to one schedule, it's likely to change. Junior Mate and I were in a pretty predictable routine of three naps a day (morning, mid-day, afternoon), with one of them being on the short side, when she suddenly wouldn't nap in the afternoon anymore. It was a rough week or so while I figured out that she was transitioning from three naps to two and finally decided to let her do that. For a few weeks, we had some days when we took afternoon naps and some days when we didn't. Now, we're solidly in a two nap a day schedule (morning, afternoon), and she's handling it pretty well. Sometimes she gets fussy at the end of the day (when she's awake for 4-5 hours instead of just 3), but the new schedule is working well for us.

Since I figured out the whole napping thing and been able to put Junior Mate on a rough schedule, we've both been much happier. She's getting enough sleep, and I'm able to sort of plan the day around her naps. Some people advocate making the baby adjust to your schedule (which I know you can't avoid if you're working and taking baby to daycare). However, I'm a firm believer that things will work best, and you will all be happier trying to do things, if you work around baby's schedule. It may be a pain, but I remind myself that it's only for a couple of years. If you work and have to have baby on a schedule that matches a daycare, then stick to that same schedule on the weekends. Obviously, I only have the one baby, so I have no idea if this idea is even feasible with multiple kids. However, it has worked very well for me with Junior Mate. She does great at restaurants and other places out, as long as I plan the outing around her nap times.

I guess that's about it for now. For anyone who's still in that newborn stage wondering when they will ever get sleep again, I will repeat what everyone keeps telling you: it really does get better. Until then, though, pick at least one of their naps during the day when you will also nap. I know you probably don't want to nap every time they do (I wanted to actually be awake sometimes during the day), but if you pick one of the naps every day to nap yourself, it will help. Good luck with your baby's sleep! Feel free to share your stories! I'd love to hear what has worked for other people!

Captain's Log Stardate 011516: Get Your Read On!

I promise I'm going to actually write a substantive post again some time. (Babies can take up a lot of time as they get older!) However, I wanted to share with any of my readers a sort of project I'm undertaking with some friends from my graduate school alma mater. We have decided to do the below 2016 book challenge together and talk about our choices in a Facebook group. I invite you to do the challenge on your own or with some friends/family/partner, and feel free to discuss your own choices on my posts if you want. I am working on my choice for January and plan to write up a blog post on that when I finish. Because adult reading has been declining (here's some info on that, from 2014), I think it's a great idea to challenge us to choose one book a month to read using this interesting list. Feel free to download the graphic and share with anyone else.

Here's to getting our read on!