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!

Captain's Log Stardate 092615: PPD Sucks

This post's title could also be "How I Learned that Depression Really Is Exponentially Worse When You Get No Sleep and Have Crazy Hormones"

I dealt with depression before I became pregnant, so I knew to watch out for Post-Partum Depression (PPD) after Junior Mate was born. I had been on anti-depressants before getting pregnant, and I stopped them completely by my third trimester (which was the recommendation for the particular drug I was on). Unfortunately, this halt in my anti-depressants coincided with an extremely stressful December, so I was unable to tell if the depression and anxiety I was feeling were related to the stoppage of medication or just the stress. Looking back, it was probably both, because I spent much of my last trimester feeling anxious and unhappy about the impending birth of Junior Mate. (There may be another post about how I think it really took about 5 months after Junior Mate was born for First Mate and me to really accept that our lives were forever changed.)

Junior Mate arrived about 4 weeks early because I had low amniotic fluid levels (AFL). On a Monday, I went in for a routine doctor's visit and (yet another) ultrasound. I'd had 4 ultrasounds in 5 days at that point, as we were monitoring my AFL to make sure it didn't drop too low. I was already exhausted with having to do all the ultrasounds while trying to finish up things at work. When they did the ultrasound, they told me my AFL was 3.5; anything below 5 calls for immediate action. They called my OB-GYN, who said I needed to head across the street to the hospital's maternity ward. I assumed I was going to be checked in for monitoring, but when I got there, they said I was being induced. I was like o_O and had a pretty hard time keeping it together. The nurses all acted surprised that I was upset about being induced 4 weeks early (seriously? Is it super common for people to be excited about being induced 4 weeks early?). I guess I was supposed to be thrilled that I would get to meet Junior Mate 4 weeks before I was supposed to. Unfortunately, I had been counting on that 4 weeks to finish getting everything together. The previous Friday had been my last day at work, and I thought I'd have the whole month to get things together, as Junior Mate's due date was at the end of the month. We didn't even have a mattress for our crib yet. (To be fair, I had ordered it the previous Friday, but the day I was induced, it hadn't yet arrived.) There were no diapers in the house, and we just simply weren't prepared for the baby. Yes, I'm sure people will argue that I should have been prepared at the beginning of the third trimester in case something like this happened. However, see my parenthetical above where I say that I think both First Mate and I were sort of in denial about how radically our lives would change.

I share this with you to sort of set the stage for my mental state when Junior Mate was born. I wasn't prepared, either physically or mentally. I know I'd had 8 months (she was about a month early) to get prepared, but I wasn't. To be fair, I'm not sure you are ever really prepared because it's so radically life-changing that you simply can't imagine how it will be until it happens. However, I was clinging to that last month of pre-babyhood like a lifeline to help me come to emotional grips with this impending change, and just like that, it was snatched away. I resented my body a bit for not keeping the amniotic fluid where it needed to be, and I was anxious about how healthy Junior Mate would be. I was also anxious because I knew that induction often leads to a more difficult labor than when your body naturally goes into labor.

Anyway, I'm going on more about the birth process than I meant to. Suffice it to say, my anxiety levels were pretty darn high for several days before Junior Mate even entered the world. Additionally, she had to be in NICU for a week due to a suspected infection, and my milk took forever to come in (see my post about breastfeeding here). I felt like a literal milk-cow because I was pumping every 2 hours but without the benefit of having the baby to bond with. It was exhausting. Once we finally got her home, I was already exhausted, and we hadn't even had the first night with a newborn in the house. Enter Junior Mate's reflux(ish) problems. She would spit up every. time. she. ate. To help with this, I would hold her up for at least 30 minutes after she ate. This meant that by the time she ate (which sometimes took 45 minutes), I held her up for 30 minutes, and then put her in the bassinet, I would get maybe an hour of sleep before she woke up again. I guess now's a good time to explain that lack of sleep greatly exacerbates my depression and anxiety problems.

I found myself wishing I had never gotten pregnant and feeling as if my life would never be good or happy again. I was mourning the loss of my old lifestyle with First Mate and couldn't see how I could possibly enjoy this new (currently hellish) lifestyle. I cried a lot. Some days (not all days) I had trouble feeling connected to Junior Mate. Some days, I felt as if Junior Mate had destroyed my life and that I could never be happy again. Eventually, I decided how I would end it if I had to (I'm not sure what was going to be the indicator that I had to), and I had decided that I should probably take Junior Mate with me so First Mate could have his own life back. (You don't have to tell me how messed up this is; I know.)

This went on for about a month until on one of those days when I actually had enough energy and initiative to do it, I called both my counselor and my psychiatrist to schedule appointments again. Fortunately, they were both able to work me in right away. I got back on a medication that was safe for use while breastfeeding and started seeing the counselor on a weekly basis again. Having taken antidepressants before, I was prepared for 10-14 days of waiting for it to build up in my system before I felt better. However, I was shocked when literally two days after starting the medication, I felt better! My psychiatrist explained that when depression is hormone-related, as with PPD, the medication tends to work right away.

Don't get me wrong - it's not like being on the medication magically made everything better. I still had A LOT of adjusting to do, and I really think it wasn't until Junior Mate was about 6.5 months old that I finally started feeling like I could be a semi-normal person again. However, the medication helped me to have far fewer days of crying and feeling as if my life was over and would never be good again. There were far fewer days when I wished I had never gotten pregnant or wished that I could just run away and never have to deal with any of this again. There were far fewer days that I was afraid I might actually do something bad to Junior Mate. (For the record, I never did - the few times that I was unable to deal with her crying, I put her down in the crib and walked away to do my own bout of crying until I was calm enough to pick her up again.) Even now that I'm feeling significantly better, I have days when I wish I could go back to pre-babyhood. Life was easier. However, I'm also excited to see the changes happening practically every day as Junior Mate grows. I've realized I'm not really a baby person, even when it's my own baby, and I'm looking forward to each day that she becomes more interactive. I feel like I can actually handle this whole mommy thing now.

So here's my advice for this post
If you are suffering PPD, particularly if it is severe, don't put off getting help. Don't spend the first month (or more) of your baby's life wishing you were dead and getting to the point that you're planning on how it could be accomplished. Your doctor can give you something that will help get you through the crazy hormonal changes and lack of sleep so that you can actually try to enjoy your newborn. While it is perfectly normal to feel a bit overwhelmed and exhausted after the birth of your baby, it is not normal to constantly wish you and/or the baby were dead. Seek help. It is worth it. Because that thing everyone says is true: it doesn't last forever, and before you know it, you won't have a newborn anymore. Things will get easier, you'll start to get sleep again, and you'll be grateful that you made it through the first few months.

ETA 100315
Another relatively recent new mommy friend of mine reminded me that PPD doesn't always hit right away. Sometimes it can take several months, and then suddenly, WHAM, you're hit with it. This does not make you abnormal. This article suggests that it can begin even before you deliver, and at any time within the first 12 months after delivery, it's considered PPD. The article also points out that it is not actually only depression that new mommies may experience. There are also postpartum psychosis and other similar mental issues that can crop up. While it absolutely breaks my heart to hear stories of moms neglecting and even harming their babies, I better understand how it can happen, having experienced my own severe depression. Hormones are whack, y'all. They can MESS. YOU. UP. Either way, you know yourself best, and you know when your mental state isn't where you prefer it to be. You are not crazy or horrible. You and your baby deserve the best you you can be. Get help if you need it.