(no subject)

In the comments to my last post an anonymous commenter asks, under the header "why are you surprised?":

Rivka, you are one of the most intelligent, sensitive, and articulate persons I've ever had the privilege to encounter. Nonetheless, you've apparently been at least somewhile surprised by how difficult it is to care for a tiny baby. If I'm correct about your being surprised, I'd love for you to comment on why.

It's often hard to read the tone of an anonymous comment, lacking the benefit of history, but this one got under my skin a little. See, I don't think I sound very surprised when I talk about the difficulties of parenthood. I pretty much expected the sleep deprivation, the crying (hers and mine), the pacing the floor, the spitup on all my shirts, and the diapers which appear to contain an entire bottle's worth of French's mustard. The only thing that truly surprised me was our inability to breastfeed. (I had expected it to be challenging, but I thought we would eventually succeed.)

Given that I haven't been posting anything along the lines of, "My God, why didn't anyone tell me it would be like this?", it's hard for me to read "why are you surprised?" as anything other than "why are you complaining? You should've known what it would be like." I did know, yes. I complain sometimes because, well, early motherhood is hard. The fact that I expected it to be hard doesn't, in fact, make it any easier.

It's ironic that this comment was left in a subthread about Andrea Buchanan's book Mother Shock, because a major theme of that book is how upset our society is by any hint of maternal ambivalence. Moms (in the popular imagination) can be divided into two categories - the good mother, who is a continual fount of giving and unconditional love and adores every minute of it, or the bad mother, who abuses or abandons or screws up her children. There's no middle ground to contain mothers who are basically competent and loving but are sometimes sick of it all. Buchanan notes that any brief conversational excursion into what she calls the "shadow side of motherhood" results in an anxious rush to assert that of course it's all worth it, wouldn't change a minute of it, no real complaints.

So I wonder if the anonymous commenter was made uncomfortable by the references in my last post to the fact that, on that particular day, I wasn't enjoying motherhood very much. I wonder if the reminder that I knew about the difficulties going in was supposed to prompt me to minimize them, and instead declare my delight in every last one of Alex's tiny little toesies. I wonder if the enumeration of my many fine qualities was supposed to evoke the feeling that I ought to be more competent at all of this, so maybe I should fake it a little better.

I also wonder if I'm reading too much into an anonymous comment, of course, but it did get me thinking.

(Look! This is also a Gratuitous Icon Post. More Alex pictures available in the June 05 album.)

(no subject)

I was feeling way claustrophobic this afternoon. Alex had settled into a pattern of snacking every two hours or less, rather than her usual habit of a big meal every four hours. This meant that she only slept in short bursts too, and every time she woke up she was miserably hungry. Lots of crying. Endless bottle mixing, warming, and washing.

Finally I said, "The hell with it, we're leaving the house." I packed up the diaper bag, slowly, because Alex was so fussy, put our overdue library books in the basket of the stroller, and went outside. I figured that even if she was too fussy to go inside the library, we could still get some exercise and return the books to the outside slot. But she quieted down for the stroller ride. She didn't smile, but she looked around with wide, serious eyes.

Inside the library, we looked at the new books and then checked some things in the electronic catalog. Alex started to cry, so I scooped her up and put her in the sling. That was all it took! She rested quietly against my chest long enough for me to make a good sweep through the fiction library. The fiction librarian - a reserved, proper woman in her fifties who has never said a word to me that didn't involve books I was requesting - came rushing out from behind her desk to see Alex. Apparently she's been worrying a bit, not having seen seen me since two days before Alex was born. She actually took my hand as she told me that she was glad to see that everything had turned out well for me.

By the time I reached the checkout desk, Alex was sound asleep. I debated moving her from the sling to the stroller for about two seconds, and then decided to load the stroller full of library books instead. We must have made a funny picture.

We walked home slowly, because it's a lot hotter out when you have a baby in a sling and a stroller full of books. Hot enough that we stopped by City Cafe and had a large iced chai and a chocolate chip cookie. I read one of my library books until Alex woke up, and then shifted the library books into the stroller basket so she would be able to ride where she could look around.

I felt much better about the world by the time we got back home. It's amazing, what an hour and a half out in civilization can do.