Screaming inside

On a mama-focused web site I today quickly read a story about a mother who is calm on the outside but inside is shouting 'shut up!! shut up!!' at her kids. It made me laugh.

But tonight I was screaming too. Our little one has gone to sleep three of the past four nights without nursing. She's almost one, and for me (and my waning milk supply) it's an epic event. But tonight, as though knowing Mama is having a down day and sensing that it's the last of a long series of nights 'a deux', everything went to hell.

Let's back up a little. Following a hearty dinner she was in the bath and reached up to be taken out, hair slathered in shampoo. I convinced her to stay in to get rinsed off. Clearly that was a mistake. I should have put her to bed with a shampooey head when she wanted to go.

Because of course when we were done she didn't want to get out.

And when we went to her room to read stories, she sat poker-straight on my knee, impatiently looking at the Spanish moon story and pointing up to the shelf. When I realised it was Goodnight Gorilla that she wanted to read (complete with zoo animal sounds from mama), she bounced up and down and started to giggle. I knew I was in trouble but I had no idea...

We read GNG three times. Then once again in the dark for good measure. And Goodnight Moon. Twice. And then in the dark. She turned the pages to the ones with the best sounds, which is cute but NOT at bed time. And then she squirmed and complained as I tried to put her to bed. Half an hour of back rubbing and singing later, she was standing at the edge of her crib, bouncing and tossing things down onto her exhausted mama lying prone on the floor.

Turns out she couldn't care less if Papa buys her a mocking bird or that she's my sunshine, my only sunshine. She wanted to pull my hair and giggle and kick. But not sleep.

So we got up. We rocked. She screamed. We tried soother in and soother out. She screamed. We went to get medicine. She tasted it, and screamed. We came downstairs to refill the water bottle which she was draining at a crazy rate.

Suddenly she was happy. Giggling and chattering away. I was furious.

I put her down for a second, and she started moving like a baby on speed.

I've never seen her zoom around so fast and open so many cupboards in the kitchen. And the big rubbish bin which she loves to push open. I got so frustrated with her that, whilst simultaneously speaking to her father on the phone and saying 'fuck' a lot, I plonked her down with her toys and told her sternly that I'd had enough and she couldn't run rampaging through the kitchen.

She made it back there almost faster than I did, using the speed-crawling method. So, like many mothers before me, I gave in and turned on the Teletubbies (thanks to Youtube) and sat her in her high chair so she would be still and I could have my dinner. She nearly fell asleep in her chair, but perked right up when I lifted her out and tried to take her to her room.

Nothing worked. Not rocking. Not darkness. Not stories. Not water. Not crib. Not soother.

But boob? Oh yeah, she took that all right.

As she snuggled happily against my very hot and sweaty body, I started screaming inside. We'd been battling for two hours, and she'd won. And I was ragingly furious. I'm still pissed off, and she's been asleep for 90 minutes.

Thank God she actually went down after nursing, because if she had refused to I think the inside voice/outside voice filter would have broken. And this screaming mama wouldn't have been good for anyone.

A numbers game

I never thought I'd become obsessed with statistics.

That was before I had our daughter.

To be clear: I don't mean sports stats or share trade data or gas consumption rates. I mean the hard stuff: ounces of food, hours (or minutes) of sleep and -- I'm sorry to confess -- number and type of bowel movements. I'm not proud, but that's how it is.

When C was first born by caesarean I was terrified my milk wouldn't come in. When it did I was terrified she wasn't getting enough. And that there was something wrong on days when she nursed every 45 minutes. I needn't have worried, but at the time it was all I could think about. I saved the sheets of tiny scribbled notes recording how many minutes and how often our baby feasted on my left or right side, as a memento of my temporary insanity.

To be fair to myself, everything about her birth had been different than I'd hoped, so I was determined to make nursing work. G realised that I was becoming truly obsessive, and came home one day with a shiny new baby scale so we could weigh our daughter every day. All the books tell you not to, but it calmed me down to see the weight steadily increasing.

Fast forward about 6 months to starting solid foods. Again, I was petrified. What to make and how and when to feed and if she was getting enough and a hundred other questions had me doubting whether I would do it right. Fortunately by then I had a good network of other first-time mothers and we compared notes almost daily about how many ounces our babies had eaten, what was working and what wasn't, and traded tricks to get them to open their mouths. To this day I still resort to the airplane in moments of desperation.

Through it all, the one measurement I haven't yet let go is that of sleep. I can't help it. With a nearly one year-old who still wakes in the night to nurse, I can't go to sleep in the evening unless I have my mobile beside the bed so I can check the time she wakes me and when I get back to bed. Even though it doesn't make me less tired, I feel a sense of accomplishment if she makes it to 4am without asking for a snack. Knowing the time somehow makes the waking up more manageable.

I'm sure my newfound tendency to measure will rear its head with every weigh-in and growth measurement as the years pass, but as C becomes her own little person by the day, it feels less essential to her survival to mentally chart in- and outgoings. Although I still get twitchy if I haven't seen a properly dirty nappy for more than 24 hours!

Shifting dimensions

When I was pregnant I could never figure out what size I was. I don't mean my clothing size, but my physical size. I was forever bumping into things, rolling further than I expected, or shutting doors on myself.

The door incident happened in St. Tropez. We'd been invited to the land of the ultra-glamorous by an equally glamorous friend from London who had planned a weekend of festivities to celebrate her 40th birthday. Armed with what I hoped was fitting attire (let's face it, it's tough to be pregnant and glamorous on a budget), we drove from Barcelona to St Tropez. I was very excited to see many of the friends I was missing so much from London and to have a relaxing weekend.

Any illusions of glamour evaporated on the autoroutes du sud as I asked my supremely patient partner to pull over time and again so I could use the toilet. If I didn't know my outer dimensions, I was becoming keenly acquainted with the thimble-like capacity of my bladder as it became compressed by our growing baby girl.

After nearly ten hours of travelling -- far more than the six normally required by non-pregnant people -- we arrived in St Tropez. We ate, showered and collapsed into bed. We'd recovered by the next morning and met our friends in the hotel lobby before going off to meet the birthday girl and her family at a gorgeous beach club. I thought I'd pop into the loo for a quick pee, and that's where it happened.

It seemed like a perfectly normal toilet with a full door (not one of those metal stalls) and lots of room for me and my belly. And it was. Unfortunately, in my haste to join the others and get to the beach, I forgot about my paunch and swung the door closed without thinking. As I felt the large metal door latch scrape across my midsection I thought: "This is bad". And it was; I spent the rest of the day with a large welt across my stomach that must have looked like someone had taken a red magic marker to my skin.

As my pregnancy progressed, I found myself falling off and spilling out of furniture and clothing. The summer shoes I bought especially for the pregnancy didn't have a hope of fitting me by month nine, adjustable velcro fastening notwithstanding; the chairs in a restaurant on a nearby leafy street were clearly defective -- or so I told myself as my giant thighs spilled over the chair's edges during lunch one day; and let's not forget how my partner couldn't hold my hand the week before the baby was born because my fingers had swollen so much he could only hold two at a time...

Nearly a year later I'm back to my quasi-normal size, but I miss the Rubenesque excesses of my pregnant body. And as the chances of me enjoying another pregnancy are in doubt at the minute, I wish I could go back to feel again the delicious sensations of my body working to create another person. Who knows, maybe I'll be there again one day, with a little bit of luck.

Mr Sandman, give me a break

"Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream" goes the song.

Right now I'd like to switch it up a bit so it goes a little something like this:

"Mr Sandman, please don't stop by (dum dum dum dum)
Each time you come here, it hurts my eyes (dum dum dum dum)
All I want to do is sleeee-eeeep
Mr Sandman don't be a creep"

So the last line needs a bit of work, but you get the picture.

My partner and I have been blessed with a beautiful, bright and very, very active baby girl. She's nine months old (going on nineteen), and I love being her mother (almost) all the time.

But lately I've been feeling less than glowingly happy in the middle of the night. OK, let's be honest: and first thing in the morning, and mid-day, and every time she refuses to eat, and has a mini tantrum, and and and... I feel like I'm going to burst from exhaustion. Although I suppose I would be more likely to implode. Or crumble.

All I want to do is go to sleep. For 48 hours straight. Ideally in a different country. If I could, I'd contract out my requirement to go to the bathroom just to avoid getting out of bed.

If I add the number of nights that she's been in our lives to the nights of interrupted sleep while awaiting her arrival, I haven't had a full night's sleep in almost a year. No wonder mornings find me feeling like the sandman has been by -- not to bring me a dream -- to deposit some of his granular cargo in my occipital region. Ugh.

While I waited for C's arrival, I read books about how to be a yummy mummy, how not to lose yourself, how to feel attractive and other 'useful' tips. While very exciting and confidence-inspiring (I would, of course, never let myself go), they were a little laughable.

These days I'm happy if I can get through a night without nursing her more than twice, and am over the moon if we get to sleep in until eight (I should qualify by explaining that I would need to nurse at six a.m. to hit the dream sleep in time of eight).

And never mind how glamorous I manage to be (ahem) or how enlightened and varied my conversation has become. I think it's probably for the best that we aren't attending many parties these days that don't involve infants. I wouldn't be the most scintillating guest.

That said, the 'parties' we do attend, complete with nappy changes and feeding circles and vomit galore, are much more essential to my survival than any I've attended in the past. If it weren't for the other mothers I've met since C's arrival, I think I'd have gone mad.

So thank you to Monica, Cliodhna, Charlie, Rebecca and Rebecka, Kate and all the other mothers who offer comfort and tote equally impressive bags under their eyes. And to their delightful babies who make me realise that everything mine does is more or less normal. You're my yardsticks and comforts and companions in exhaustion. I say we form a gang and go after the Sandman. He must be stopped. We can plan it right after we get a good night's sleep.