Love Bites

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Mrs Odie

Baby V has a tooth!  It’s just a tip of white poking out through her gums on the bottom right, but there’s no mistaking it if you feel it.  She’ll be happy to bite your finger if you don’t believe it.  She will refuse to let me look at it, the way she refuses to let me do anything that involves her holding still (wipe her mouth, suction her nose, cover her with kisses).  She doesn’t yet use this new tooth for eating, but she is starting to figure out that it’s for biting.  As her mommy, I am the recipient of all new experimentation.  I got the first smile, the first eye contact, the first giggle, and unfortunately the first nipple chomp.

For a week or so, I’ve felt some accidental scrapings, but Thursday night, she started biting down on my nipple during a nursing session.  Tentative at first, then with more purpose and intent.  What really got me was the way she snickered the whole time.  This is wicked good fun to her.  My yelping in pain or getting angry or telling her "NO!" only increases her mirth.  I never believed this day would come for us.  I used to look at my tiny little bundle of impossible sweet chubbiness and believe she could NEVER be one of those babies who bites her mommy and thinks it’s funny.  Since Thursday, I’ve been dealing with feelings of sadness, anger and even betrayal.  Our beautiful nursing relationship feels ruined.  Every time I offer my nipple to her, I feel fear and apprehension.  I force myself to keep a neutral expression and not tense up, but inside I am afraid.  And if she sees my breasts and starts laughing with that gleam in her eye, I think, "Uh oh."

What it comes down to is that I have to be vigilant now.  I can’t force her to nurse when I’m trying to get her to sleep.  I have to get her at the exact right moment and if it’s not time, I have to do something else.  I’ve been pretty lazy and complacent when it comes to nursing.  I can pop her on and watch tv or check my Blackberry (Facebook Status: Mrs. Odie is nursing) or have a snack (and often a glass of wine or a beer).  Now I have to check for that tongue position, making sure it’s under my nipple and covering that dagger of a tooth.  I have to be ready to insert my finger between her gums and pull my nipple out as fast as possible to save myself from pain and damage.  "No!  No biting num-nums!" I tell her crossly.  So far (and it’s been 2 days), she does not seem to either understand or care what I am saying.  I put my breast back in my shirt and say "No num-nums if you are going to bite." 

I admit that the first time she did it, I yelled and flicked her cheek.  I have an old friend, Rachel, who is a mother of 4 and that is what she told my sister she did for each baby.  Each baby bit her once, according to her.  As in, "My baby bit me once.  ONCE."  I trust that Rachel is a good mother.  I mean, she’s a Mormon.  Aren’t they supposed to be like the NICEST people in the world?  Surely if my mother-of-4-and-Mormon-friend Rachel flicks a baby on the cheek, there’s nothing wrong with it.

V startled, paused, and then WAILED like I’d cut off her finger AND broken her heart.  She continued to wail for a good five minutes.  Her cry was so full of betrayal (at least to my ears) that Odie got up out of bed (it was late on a work night) to see what the matter was.  He and I both felt (and feel) incredibly guilty.  Him because he suggested it, having heard Rachel’s tale as well.  Me, because I DID IT!  I know I didn’t hurt her.  To assure myself, I flicked myself in the cheek about a hundred times as hard as I could, knowing that I didn’t do it to her hard at all, and it didn’t really hurt me.

And on top of everything it didn’t work.  As soon as I soothed her and told her a million times that I loved her and kissed her sweet face, I latched her on and she bit me AGAIN.  Immediately.

This is clearly a teething behavior, this biting.  And what is the teething experience like for Baby V?  I tried to put myself in her place.  She must be feeling pain and restlessness.  She must have discovered that biting down on things first intensifies and then relieves this pain.  So she’s biting down on things.  She has no comprehension that it causes ME pain.  As far as she knows, she and I are one and biting the nipple certainly doesn’t hurt HER.  So I cut through my anger and disappointment and I found my compassion.  My poor baby.  She’s hurting and maybe confused and she needs me to help.  I gave her some Tylenol and forced a smile and played with her for another half hour.  When I saw the eye rubbing and the yawning become more frequent, I bravely latched her on, and was rewarded with sleep.

I was hugely disappointed that this same scenario played out Friday night as well (minus the cheek flick, which I will NEVER do again).  I even entertained thoughts that I needed to wean this baby.  Neither of us is ready to end our nursing, though, and I let those thoughts come and go.  Part of me felt tremendous relief at the freedom weaning would give me.  Immediately followed grief over the idea that my baby could outgrow nursing so young.  It’s harder to see a child who no longer nurses as your little wittle baby.  I’m not ready.

She actually fell asleep, not on my breast as usual, but on her tummy in my lap, facing away from me.  And then she slept deeply most of the night with one or two brief in-her-sleep nursings.  All night long, I dreamed of nursing babies with giant protruding teeth.  Indian babies.  Probably because I watched Aziz Ansari’s comedy special before bed.

"Who can top that shit?  Who can top that shit?  Who can top that shit?"

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No Second Takes

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Mrs Odie

I am preoccupied lately with thoughts of a second child.  I think back to being pregnant and I romanticize it.  Not the hemmorhoids or the constipation, heartburn, hip pain, pimples, bloating, or swollen feet.  Nothing romantic about any of that, just ask my husband.  You know what was easier then?  Not having to take care of a baby who is on the verge of being a toddler.  It’s not that I don’t love it.  It’s just that it’s hard!  And I have never been a fan of difficult.

I also have the tendency to live in the past or in an imagined future.  Staying in the present challenges me.  It’s part of why I write a blog.  I want to be here now.  To some extent, planning for the future is reasonable.  When will I go back to work?  How do we want to invest our nest egg?  Should we buy a car now or wait until the one we have stops running?  Should we try to have another child?  If so when?  When should we think about buying a house?  Are buying a house and having a second child mutually exclusive goals (it feels like it)?

The decision about having a second child cannot be put off for too long.  I will be 38 in March.  Who knows how many  fertility years I have left?  The longer I wait, the more significantly my fertility drops, in theory anyway, and the more my chances of age related birth defects rises.  I got pregnant with Vivienne at 36 and delivered at 37.  Every time I went for an ultrasound, I looked at the words "Advanced Maternal Age" on the screen.  I picture going back at 40 and seeing "REALLY Advanced Maternal Age." 

I often think of the night I went into labor.  I think I tried to savor it at the time.  It’s the type of scene so often portrayed in films and on television, usually for comic effect.  I didn’t know I was in labor until my water broke.  I remember the drive to the hospital around 1 in the morning.  See, I don’t even remember EXACTLY when we went.  This is what I’m talking about.  I didn’t record it the way I wanted.  The way I’d planned.  I just let it go by, as if there would be another chance or something.  It was dark and quiet on the road.  I’d imagined it in my head so many times.  It went by very quickly.  We only live 10 minutes away from Huntington Memorial.  I don’t even know if I contracted on the way there.  Again, details lost forever.  A possible once in a lifetime experience and I glossed over it like it was a trip to Trader Joe’s.  I convince myself that if we were going to do this again, I would videotape everything.  I wouldn’t rush to the hospital only to be put on a pitocin drip.  I’d labor at home and really BE PRESENT.  I didn’t do that with Vivienne.  Or maybe I did, but I think I’d be better at it a second time.  Or maybe the reality of all that pain, which is so easy to forget, would come rushing back in an instant and I’d be all SAVOR IT MY ASS!!!  Because one thing I do remember is that I did not deal well with contractions.  I don’t remember what it felt like because nature makes one forget the pain.  I do, nevertheless remember thinking, "Wait until I’m dilated to 4 cm to have an epidural?  WAIT FOR IT MY ASS!!!"
 

We took very few photographs.  In fact, in the delivery room, we only took video.  There are no photos of newborn Vivienne.  What were we thinking?  With a second child, I would have Odie take pictures of the whole thing.  Maybe not of my girl parts, but certainly of my new baby.  The second time around, I wouldn’t be so vain about my looks.  I have almost no photos of myself pregnant.  I was so worried that I looked fat.  And I did!  I gained almost 60 pounds and only 30 of it was necessary.  Once I wasn’t pregnant anymore, though, I longed for documentation of that special time.  My friend Sara is taking monthly photos of herself during the pregnancy (see them here on her blog at eyesofmyeyes.wordpress.com).  That was just one more thing I meant to do, but never followed through on.  I had no way of knowing what it would mean later.
 

And then there’s NEWBORN.  Oh my god how freaked out I was with my newborn.  How I obsessed over the color and frequency of her poop.  How I stayed awake staring at her, making sure she was breathing, reading everything I could on my handheld about the hundreds of ways my tiny baby could fail to thrive.  I spent the first 4 months in an almost constant state of sleep deprived terror.  I tell myself that with a second child I’d be so much more mellow.  I’d go with the flow.  I’d take my toddler to the park with my newborn tucked away in a sling.  Or I’d actually get the hang of the damn Moby Wrap before my baby got too big to like being in it!  I’d put her to sleep in her crib from the very beginning when they sleep ALL THE TIME no matter where you lay them.

I’d blog about every moment with my baby.  Not for a wide audience, although that would be grand, but for ME and for HER (Odie and I have decided we will only have girls).
 

Maybe even if I did all of these things, tried to hold on to time as it passed, I would still look up from my computer at my SECOND 10 month old baby and think, "WHERE DID IT GO?"  How can that babyhood be gone forever already???
 

          

I cannot go back in time and be Vivienne’s mother all over again, only this time be better at it.  So I’m going to go play peek-a-boo with her now, and cherish those shrill giggles while I can.

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