Life, Love and laundry

April09 030

As you see this blog has been on hiatus for a while, and so have I.  I am not sure if this post will return me to the ranks of the regular bloggers or if it is only an update.  We will find that out in the next days and weeks I presume.  I want to ponder for a moment on the very nature of this hiatus though, because for me it has been a hard one.  As everyone who reads this blog nows, I have had a baby now eight months ago.  My little Joseph is wonderful and too cute for words.  He also does not sleep through the night, even at 8 months.  A good night sleep is waking up twice, a bad night sleep is waking up 4 or more times.  A horrible night is waking up to six or seven times. 

When I was pregnant I knew my life was changing forever, I just did not know how much it was changing.  Yes, I figured I had to get up at night for a few months, and yes I knew now that there would be a baby involved in everything, but the total... package of how it would affect my life just did not sink in, especially not since it seemed, and still seems, that other mothers with young babies just get much more things done.  For me, a lot of things in which I took pride just had to go.  I could not do it.  This blog was one example, some other things on the internet another.  But those things at the least were superficial, no mother how much they meant to me.  But I had and have problems keeping the house tidy, getting nutritious meals on the table, and keeping up my appearance.  I have blogged several times about the importance of looking tidy and even elegant as a homemaker and yet with baby, that became more and more difficult (still doable though.  I have not bought that denim jumper yet!  *W*)  Just time to spend with my husband or just time to 'be' and chose what to do has gone, let alone time to sew or embroider.  I felt a little resentful about all those blogs that describe homemaking as this wonderful time that allows you to be creative with flower arrangements, gardening, cooking, letter writing and other things while I barely managed to get dressed.  The hardest thing was having to say no to many worthwhile things that I did.  I had to give up a comite in our womens organisation, I had to give up tutoring, and I had to give up volunteering at the wonderful organisation that Birthright is.  I have felt guilty over that for a long time.  These people have welcomed me here, they have supported me, I made a commitment to them, and now I just ... had to leave.  I could not do it.  Even when my husband offered to watch the baby for me, I just did not have the mental energy to even think about going back to volunteer work, something I had most certainly expected to do after those first three months. 

Over the last few weeks, with sleep deprivation waning just the tiniest bit, I have decided to see myself as 'on hiatus' just as my blog.  That does not mean I give up everything.  I still strive for that neat home, kept up appearance and those healthy meals.  I still refuse to go out in the garden in my bathrobe.  But I have learned that this season of my life looks different than I expected it.  Since we have moved, things have gotten a bit easier as we were able to babyproof a room or two in the house.  THat means that while I can not leave Joseph unsupervised, I can do things while he is around.  I only need to stop him from getting in trouble every five minutes, not every five seconds.  I may not have time yet to sew, but I do have time to clean up my kitchen now and again.  Perhaps my own hobbies and so fort had to be put more completely on the backburner than I had originaly thought.  Maybe I even have to move them to the fridge for a while, but they will keep.  Once I manage to have a system again in housekeeping, I may even have some fragments of time here and there for hobbies.  Till then, I don't fight the hiatus anymore, I accept it.  And that saves me a whole lot of mental energy.

well, that is not really news is it?  This blog is on a hiatus because of a lack of time.  I have this wonderful, nearly five month old boy who insists on hitting every single mileston early, except for sleeping.  He is nearly crawling, he is teething, he is starting to practice his pincer grip.  He is sitting up, he is doing everything, except giving mommy a good nights sleep.  No sleep means little energy and that means that the usual household and other tasks take a lot of time.

For now, posting will be sporadic, but if you want to follow more closely, have a look at my sons website.  I have to keep that one updated because otherwise his grandmother will be very dissapointed.

www.totsites.com/tot/hauk

Every time I feel tempted to whine, I should watch this!

When people ask you to sum up motherhood in one word, I know I am supposed to say something like: life changing, fulfilling or "the best thing that ever happened to me" even though that is more than one word.  Of course it is all these things, but if I must be honest the one word that comes to me is: exhausting, closely followed by "exasperating".  I love my baby, but to my shame motherhood does not come easy to me.  There are two reasons for that: the first is my problem with sleep.  I love sleep, but I have great difficulty falling asleep.  It takes me an hour or so of relaxing, leaving the world behind and reading a bit before I may drift off to sleep.  In time of great exhaustion this can be reduced to fourty five minutes, maybe half an hour but not less.  Add a baby that wakes every three hours to that mix, you never sleep more than one to two hours.  After three months, that starts to weigh more than just the occasional bad night. 

The second problem is noise.  I remember a few years ago they were building a large apartment complex behind my mothers home.  They worked all day from about 7 am to 7 pm, in constant noise and in the weekends my mom did renovation projects at home.  The noise drove me utterly insane.  I became cranky and short tempered, and it takes quite a bit to do that.  I am convinced that the noise has been a big factor in my decision to move out, and my crankiness in my mothers enthousiasm for the plan.  If you have a baby that does not sleep a lot, and that is socialised by lots of talking to him, the big problem is that that baby will babble very soon, and afterwords never stops.  Of course this babbling is better than the crying that is his primary means of communication before, but it is still noise.  It seems that motherhood erodes the two things from your life that are needed to make me mentally comfortable: a certain amount of quiet and sleep.  (And then we do not even mention routines, some time to devote to intelectual stimulation or creativity, and time with daddy)  Some of these we hopefully will get back over time, but until then, I struggle to get through the days.

Luckily there are some rewards, like the moment there is that first smile.  That one night in which you got to sleep four hours, the admiration of strangers, the secret conviction that your baby is the smartest and most beautiful baby ever, and the new milestones that you get to celebrate.  Nevertheless it is wonderful now and again to have a trusted person to whom you can hand baby with full confidence while you get some of that elusive sleep and quiet,  Oma and grandma are two such people.  But although Joseph clearly loves them both, he will take revenge on mommy for not being at his back and call.  So, of course when this afternoon I sank into the blissful sensation of sleep that only a mother can appreciate my baby LAUGHED for the first time.  And I was not there to hear it.  He has refused to repeat the feat so far, making it very clear that if I take my eyes off from him for a moment, he will go through with this growing up thing by himself.

Well, Christmas is past us.  I hope each of you enjoyed the celebration of the Word incarnate.  Such an amazing thing isn't it:  The Word became flesh.  I experienced Christmas very differently this year than before. Each year during Christmas mass our the blessing at the meal I have this wonderful experience in which I seem to feel steeped in the meaning of Christmas.  I contemplate the meaning of Christmas: God becoming man for our salvation.  What is smallest is greatest in the eyes of God.  The smallness of the Child, no room in the Inn.  I can think about it, feel it, let it overwhelm me.

This year I did not have the oportunity for the mystery to overwhelm me.  Yes, we did read our little baby, too young to understand, the story of Christmas from the bible.  Yes, we did go to Midnight mass.  But half exhausted by a little one that refuses to sleep before 2 am for weeks and still wakes three times during the night, what overwhelmed me was fatigue and misery instead of mystery when Joseph decided to celebrate the coming of our Lord with a screaming fit that did not end until mommy or daddy carried him into the aisle to the back and kept walking him there.  After we went back sitting, the screaming fit resumed.

I will admit honestly that I felt dissapointed.  Was this my Christmas this year?  Where was the spiritual experience?  Where was the wonderful mystery.  Slowly it is dawning however that this reality is part of the mystery.  God becoming man, central to our Faith is not just a cerebral exercise.  It is messy, it is afterbirth, it is poverty and refugees, it is sweat and tears and dissapointment, ending on a cross, without every losing love. 

This isn't a magical solution.  I still feel tired and there are still days that I wonder why this baby does not seem able to give mommy just an hour of quiet to do something.  But I try to remember, as my priest said, that my life now is a prayer, even when I do not find the beautiful words to express it.

Our Joseph has done just fine during his first intercontinental travel.  There was a minimal fussing, a lot of dirty diapers, but no blow outs, and there was a lot of sleeping.  THank you American Airlines for letting us take our car seat on board and have that extra chair when the plane was not sold out. 

Actually, I've been scared from the moment I knew we were going to do this.  We are going to fly to Belgium tomorrow with our 3 month old baby.

This means two hours of driving.  Then getting through security and all that fun stuff and waiting in the first airport.  Then flying two or three hours.  Then waiting another three or more hours in the next airport.  Then flying about nine hours.  Then driving another hour.  All this with an almost three month old who chose this moment to become slightly ill for the first time.

I think people who travel with young babies should be given first class treatment for free.  Everywhere.  The one consolation I have is that in his only other traveling experience, driving from Columbia SC to Nashville Tenessee and from there to Saint Louis MO, Joseph did well.  Still... I am scared.  Especially if any of you reading this remember my posts about "the journey of a lifetime", which was our last travel by air experience.  *shudders*

6november 010

Isn't he cute when he is sleeping?  His dad took this picture.  His dad btw is extremely cute too.  Joseph is especially cute after I have slept, which at nearly three months I still am not doing too much.  He managed to go to sleep at 11.30 pm last night, then wake up at 3.30 am and needing to be fed.  Not a problem.  It becomes more of a problem though if after being fed he does not want to go to sleep anymore or be quiet.  It was past 5 am before we managed to get him back to sleep, and then only because daddy took him in the big bed for a while.  Once he sleeps it seems to be ok for a few hours, but falling asleep is not Josephs forte.  During the day there is still not much time for mommy to have her hands free.  Therefor each free minute is taken up by things like coooking, cleaning, and trying to restore some semblance of life, and this blog, as well as any non essential activity, suffers. 

I am hoping and praying that Joseph will manage to get into a better rhytm soon because sleep deprivation and social isolation is making mommy cranky after three months.