rivka

We fired her. We said that it was a bad fit and not improving. She denied ever saying anything about the devil, recast the God story to make Alex's comment about the emperor of China the beginning of the conversation, and predicted that when we try with someone else we will find that Alex simply adjusts poorly to being left and none of this was her fault.

I can't think of anywhere else that Alex would have heard of the devil. We're very careful about media exposure, and her classmates all come from secular families.

We gave her a week of severance pay.

I feel surprisingly crappy for someone who just did the right thing for her child.

This got long, so I'm going to lj-cut everything but the takehome message.
( Read more... )
If I seem like I'm really tightly wound these days, or quick to take offense, or too dramatic over too little, or not paying very close attention to what's going on with you, or if you think I'm flaking out on something I was supposed to do for you or comment on or generally just take care of... all of those things are probably true. And I can't promise to do anything about it, either. It's about the best I can do right now. ( Read more... )
I am not falling apart, because this is pretty much the living definition of a situation that is Not About Me And My Feelings. But I am brittle and impatient and, necessarily, a little bit slipshod right now. And exhausted.

I've been posting to LJ more than usual lately - mostly about stuff that isn't this. I expect that to continue, because (a) it distracts me enough from my mouse-in-the-bottom-of-a-jar thoughts to be genuinely relaxing, and (b) it's about the only social interaction I'm up for. It's not that I don't want to see people, it's that I am just not capable of orchestrating a single additional thing however tiny.

I am holding a sleeping baby upright on my lap, letting her digest for 30 minutes befor I put her back to bed. She's been on the Zantac for about sixteen hours now. It hasn't kicked in yet, but fortunately she doesn't usually have as many symptoms at this hour of night. My pamphlet on "breastfeeding the baby with reflux" says that it's often less painful to them to eat while sleeping, which she more or less was for this bottle. No symptoms ten minutes in - I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

We spent today trying to reintroduce breastfeeding. Alex was delighted. She latched on and held my nipple in her mouth, snuggling up and curling one hand posessively around my breast. She patted me happily. Here's whta she didn't do: nurse. She took the occasional sip, but nothing you could really call nutritive. So I'd put her to the breast and cajole and harry her, and then afterward I'd need to give her a bottle to keep her nourished. With her weight gain problems being so serious, I can't afford to wait out a nursing strike.

So instead I spent the day getting progressively more hysterical about the possibility that nursing just isn't going to work fot us. All day I kept thinking about a link porcinea posted to an article explaining the vital importance of not ever letting formula-feeding mothers think what they're doing is okay. We shouldn't say formula is "second best," because it's much further down the list than that, after nursing, pumping and bottle feeding, using a milk bank or wet nurse, and possibly letting the baby roll around on the floor eating lint. We shouldn't say "breastfed babies are healthier," we should say "formula-fed babies are sickly." And on and on. People posted approving comments in porcinea's journal. I haven't been able to get that article, or the people I know who really do feel that way, out of my head.

It's so important to me to make it work. It's so much better for her health. I know that. But I also wonder how long I can realistically keep trying, if she doesn't start taking in large amounts of calories from the breast soon. I mean, this is what our current feeding system looks like:

1. Nurse. Prod the baby to keep her from sleeping on the breast, and attempt to cajole her into taking more than just a few dainty sips. This step takes about 30-40 minutes.
2. Give her a bottle, adjusted downward from 2.5oz depending on how much she seems to have taken from the breast. Today that mostly meant 1.5 to 2oz of expressed breast milk/formula.
3. Hold her upright for 30 minutes to reduce reflux symptoms. Usually in here somewhere the reflux kicks in and she starts yelling and arching in pain.
4. Attempt to comfort and soothe the hurting baby.
5. Try to find a way that the baby will tolerate being put down so that I can pump breastmilk.
6. Pump, if possible. This takes 20-25 minutes for pumping and washing up.

She eats every two to three hours.

So the anecdotes people are posting about "I know a woman who pumped and fed bottles for months and then successfully established nursing" are kind of inspirational, but kind of terrifying. I couldn't keep this up for months. I would quit trying first. That probably makes me a bad mother, or at least, so I told myself all day. I'm not ready to give up trying yet, but I'm already being hammered by anticipatory guilt.

This evening, at last, she nursed with a little more authority. Not enough to count as a whole feeding, but enough to count as actual food intake. We'll see if she continues to improve tomorrow, or if we'll find ourselves back at square one. Also I talked to my sister, who reminded me that breastfeeding is not an all-or-nothing thing. Every bit Alex gets will help her, even if it's never enough to be her sole source of nutrition. So we'll keep doing whatever we can.

Yes, I am keeping in mind that my guilt and frustration might be symptome of postpartum depression. We are all keeping a very close eye on that. I don't think I'm there yet - I think it's more about stress and sleep deprivation and physical illness at this point. I mean, look at that feeding routine up there. You don't have to be depressed to find that overwhelming, right?

I'm not doing very well.

I'm crying at work.

Thoughts of miscarriage keep crossing my mind. Not as in, wanting to have one, but as in, how could the baby possibly live through this?

I know that's crazy.

But when the majority of my fellow Americans have given their stamp of approval to the architects of Abu Ghraib, where can I find hope? How can I be a parent in this world?

Dear World,

Too many bad things are happening to people I love, and I've had enough of it. Just stop it. Stop piling on the shit. Let's have some good news for a change, for once, for heaven's sake. I mean it.

Sincerely,
Rivka

rivka:
> > Did you intend to insult me with the "Piled Higher
> > and Deeper" part, or did you not realize that it
> > refers to *shit* being piled higher and deeper?

Someone else, not the original poster:
> Of course; it's a geometric progression (or worse):
>
> BSc -- Bullshit certificate
> MSc -- More shit certificate
> PhD -- Piled higher and deeper.
>
> Felicitations and salutations -- nobody will ever know
> what agonies you went through for that worthless piece
> of paper but you. Treasure those happy memories for they
> will sustain you in the trials to come.
>
> I'm not good at this sort of thing, as you may have surmised.

rivka:
If you were aiming at taking me down a peg, undercutting
my pleasant sense of accomplishment, or devaluing eight
years' worth of hard work, you're on the right track. If
that's not what you meant to be doing, well, maybe next
time you should stick to "felicitations" and leave it at
that.

I know I'm supposed to take this as all in good fun, but
I've spent eight years of my life working very hard,
earning very little, forgoing many pleasures, and postponing
other significant life goals. I don't know what prompts you
to tell me that my degree is worthless and my work is a
shitpile, but forgive me if I don't really have a sense
of humor about it.

---

Okay, I feel as though I've completely lost my shit here - or at least, my sense of perspective. But these comments just feel hostile to me. I'm sure he thinks he's just teasing and I know I'm supposed to be a good sport about it. And maybe if I weren't still so tired from the whole ordeal I would be a good sport about it. Or if it was someone I knew so well that their supportiveness could be taken for granted, and we had a pre-existing teasing relationship. In the absence of those factors, I feel as though I'm being told not to get above myself.

I'm not going to self-label my posts as "testy" or "bitchy" anymore.

Obviously I am only an egg.

Updated to add: Also, apparently, I have much to learn about how to respond to criticism.

As long as I kept my momentum, I was okay. Most of the workday was a fine engaging rush forward, but whenever I hit a snag I got derailed. As my first post from yesterday shows.

Traffic slowed to a jam on I-95 as I drove into work, and it occurred to me that something might have happened. I felt trapped, exposed. Sirens and firetrucks on Pratt Street, several of them, and my heart leapt in a wild panic that was completely unreasonable for someone who works across the street from an ambulance bay.

I fantasized about joining a Red Cross disaster relief team the moment I get my license, really helping people next time instead of frantically spinning my wheels.

I was angry all out of proportion. At everything.

I don't want to hear saturation 9/11 coverage on Wednesday Night Baseball. Shut up and call the game. If you must talk about 9/11 nonstop, you are not then allowed to laud baseball as "an escape." (I wanted to avoid the media altogether, but at the gym you can either listen to the radio or TV. The game should've been safe.)

Church was good. I don't remember what they said in the sermon, but I felt understood, and found solace. I didn't know how to pray. Over the candle I lit I said silently, "Dona eis requiem. Grant them all rest, the living and the dead." That seemed to serve.

I composed at least six LJ posts in my head, and didn't make any of them.

I wasn't prostrate with grief. I wasn't paralyzed with anxiety. I was sad and irritable and restless and bothered by the nagging suspicion that I didn't have a right to feel that way. That I knew the feeling to be ridiculous just added more irritation to the mix.

I didn't know what to do with myself.

I'm glad the day is over.

I spoke with my friend and found out that I had gotten some of the details wrong, in ways that (sorry) may have reduced plausibility of the story. Some details are vague because of the girl's limited English.

On the side of this being real, or at least, less damning than the way I originally told you the story:

My friend's correspondence with the girl began last spring, well before Sept 11th, and before the girl had come to the U.S. (She was at that point living in/attending school in U.A.E., was planning to come to the US to attend math summer programs and started posting to the newsgroup because she wanted to talk to people in the U.S. about what it would be like to come, what kind of things to wear, etc.) The family has money (hence the private planes, and the ability to send a daughter to the U.S for education, and the ability of some family members to leave Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power), but only the grandfather was in favor of her getting educated, and he died on Sept 11th. She had attended 2 summer programs (Smith, and ? second program in California) and was going to stay and get placed in a school this fall to continue, when all this upheaval happened in this country and in her family.

The guy who originally contacted my friend to make sure she was an appropriate email contact for the girl was an associate of the family; he's the one who returned to Afghanistan and was killed along with other members of the family in the fire started by the Taliban. My friend has his name; don't know at this point if there's any way to confirm whether he died as we've been told. His contact with my friend was by email.

The U.S. contacts were not actually a host family (I was wrong about that.) The couple who died in the WTC were actually a teacher in her summer program and the teacher's husband. The Afghan girl had become close to them over the summer, eaten in their home, etc. The other U.S. contact was a man who was working as a liason to place her in a U.S. school. She stayed with him and his family for a short time after Sept 11th, until family members came and over-rode his authority to keep her. My friend has emailed him (as have other people in the newsgroup) and got a response on the lines of "I share your concerns and am doing everything I can..."

On the side of this not being real:

1. odd that her current "caretakers" could be so unaware of her ability to use email to communicate with outsiders. She apparently has been able to use both her handheld device and (in the middle of the night) possibly her desktop without being detected.
2. she sent my friend a photo of the prospective husband. Can a palm-type device handle something large like that? I won't even bother speculating about scanning the photo in, etc. because I'm assuming if she had it and sent it, that she received it electronically in the first place (which again raises questions about #1--how it is that the relatives are allowing her access to email, if they understand what it is.)

Thanks for your suggestions; my friend is going to call Smith College tomorrow and try to verify that the girl attended their summer program and see if they have any contact information. She's also going to email the girl to suggest that she email police, FBI, and/or State Dept directly with her story.