six cats in the yard

It’s been a long time since I posted anything on this site and I think I’d like to try, along with everything else I want to do, to start new and see what happens. I may not succeed, but I feel like I need some kind of outlet, whether that really means I should keep a journal instead of typing things for everyone to see remains to be seen. Let’s just hope I can come up with something worth writing and worth reading!

I think the snow started falling *last* Sunday. Leigh worked from home on Monday and Tuesday, luckily so did everyone else in his office. But Thursday he had a meeting and so Wednesday he went in to prepare, knowing that he would be camping out on someone’s couch. I steeled myself for him to be gone until Saturday since the reports were talking about snow storms everyday for the next week!

It was nice to have the entire bed to myself (and Maddie) and to be able to put her to sleep at 6:30 instead of 7:30. She still didn’t sleep through the night, but I had enough time to start reading the Super Baby Food book that my friend Sarah gave me. And I hatched a plan to add another solid to her diet and get into more of a routine with the solids. I guess one of the reasons babies at her age will stop sleeping through the night is that they are still hungry and can’t get filled up enough from the breast milk, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

And after Leigh returned Friday night, the snow has continued to fall. But this year it is welcome, more peaceful and more of a blizzard! I remember being constantly cold and feeling off all winter last year. I didn’t know if it was from a dissatisfaction with work or my life in general, or it if was hormones from the pregnancy. This year, while I’m still working, my work hours are *much* reduced with no emergencies! And I’m happy to say that while we do struggle with my lack of steady income and an intermittent lack of sleep, I’m having a beautiful, fun, joyful time being a mom and perhaps that feeling of peace with the world is helping me to return to my pre-vet school feelings of calm, love, tolerance and openness that has really escaped me for a long time. The snow storm gives me a good excuse to snuggle up on the couch or get out an walk to appointments rather than drive and I get to see the world in slow motion.

Every now and then we look out the window and watch the snowmobilers tearing off down the street or watch the snowplows clink by or even see people swish-swish by on cross country skis. 

Today I appreciate my life.

My mother gave me a lot. She taught me how to enjoy and appreciate reading, learning and music. She was not meant for poverty, not meant for the life she ended up living. She was a gentle soul with a lot of heart, but too much in her head held her back.

She made me who I am today, partially from my desire to never be like her. But the good qualities in her are coming out little by little in me, especially now that I have Madeleine. My mother never wanted a child and sometimes I felt she never wanted me, though I do know that she did her best with what she didn’t have and managed to keep herself together enough while I was growing up to get me off to a good college where I could start living my own life. I realized that she had been living for me when she quit law school and lost the house.

It left me feeling very conflicted because I was at the point where I was ready to break away and start following my own path. At the same time, I knew that she wasn’t taking care of herself and needed help. But I wasn’t in a position financially or mentally to do that. I was learning who I was, what I wanted, and what was important to me. And while I know she wanted me to stay in Eugene with her, I knew that I couldn’t do it without sacrificing my dreams and my well being. It would have left me even more resentful. But then, if I’d stayed, would her life have been different in the end? Would it have been better? And would mine have been worse or just different?

When I had Madeleine, I knew that I wanted to be a better mother to her than my mother was to me. I wanted to make sure she felt safe, loved, and free to experience life with all of its amazing twists and turns while feeling like she had a good home base to come back to. I wanted her to feel like she was supported in whatever she wanted to do and that life was an adventure to be lived and not something to shrink or hide from. I also wanted to shield her from the things in my mother that I knew made her weak.

But I wanted to instill in her my mother’s love for music, for reading and learning. And now that my mother is gone, I hope that I can find a way to teach Madeleine what my mother taught me, while passing on to her the realization that this is a gift from her grandmother, even though she is not here to do it herself.

My mother never liked to confide in me mostly because she knew that I would worry and feel guilty because I couldn’t do anything to fix it. I knew that something was wrong last Christmas when Leigh and I visited her, even just briefly for the holiday. She was losing weight, which was a good thing in her case, but she also was weak and bent from back pain. Then in July, just before Madeleine was born, she was even more drawn and thin. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong until the week after Maddie was born and then she told me that she had been diagnosed in May with advanced pancreatic and liver cancer. I knew something was wrong with her health, but I didn’t expect it to be so devastating. With my medical knowledge, I understood that was a death sentence and one that would come quickly. She told me that they had given her 6 months to 2 years survival time. My mom was trying to be optimistic, that her doctor was the best oncologist in Eugene and had fought her insurance company (the government) to get her enrolled in a new chemotherapy study. And that they were doing everything they could to make her comfortable and extend her life.

After she left that day, I cried like a baby and wished that my mother’s optimism was well-founded. I started making plans to spend Thanksgiving with her and kept my fingers crossed that she would still be here. I also stressed about when I would be able to get down to spend time with her. But while Madeleine and I were bonding and struggling with the breastfeeding, I knew that travel, even just down to Eugene, just wasn’t going to be possible for awhile. Finally, when Maddie was 6 weeks old, in early September, I decided I needed to make the trip and couldn’t put it off any longer. I could at least help out buying groceries or taking her to the doctor, even if I couldn’t stay with her or do much else for her while I fulfilled my responsibilities to Maddie. 

The day that I arrived, I could see she looked so very tired. She was having significant vomiting spells. I left her that day with the promise that I would do grocery shopping for her the next day and that I would take her to her doctor’s appointment the day after. She called me less than 3 hours later and told me that she needed me to come get her to go to her doctor and I needed to hurry. 

They drew blood and told her to go home and wait for the results the next day. That frustrated me, especially seeing just how weak and uncomfortable she was. When I drover her home, I tried to make her promise that she would either call me or 911 if she got any worse. I don’t think I really trusted her to be able to take any kind of care of herself, she seemed so weak. The next day, I couldn’t get ahold of her and had visions of her dead or passed out on the floor somewhere at home. I discovered, finally, that she called 911 late that night. I finally found her at the hospital that afternoon after worrying and worrying when I couldn’t reach her at home. You never really expect to call the hospital, ask if your loved one checked in by chance and have them say, “why yes, she came in early this morning…”

Two days later she had a stroke and 8 days later she was gone. She was certainly mentally gone well before that and physically, she was only a shell. The last days were painful for me emotionally, definitely they were exceptionally painful for her, but thankfully I had a lot of support from my good friend Emily and Leigh who was able to get time off from work. Thankfully, too, my aunt Sherri and Uncle Scott were good enough to put up with me camping out at their house for two weeks. While they were out of town, my cousin Kailee was moving back in with her husband and son and was able to keep me company and help raise my spirits.

I was constantly torn between my desire to be with Maddie and my desire to spend time with my mother and make sure she was comfortable. She was her stubborn self until the very end, which meant that the hospital had to post a nurse’s aid with her around the clock so she wouldn’t try to get out of bed. In her state, she was not steady physically and fell at least once before they put the 24-hour watch on her. She was frustrated with her inability to communicate and that made the last days all the more difficult.

I did what I could to be her advocate and to make sure she wasn’t forgotten, especially after listening to Emily’s experience with her mom in the hospital and in hospice. It’s not that the nurses don’t care, but I watched them hurry around between all of their various patients and understood how things can fall through the cracks. Initially, they all relied on my mother to be able to them when or if she was in pain. That just wasn’t working; I could see how restless and edgy she was. I harassed and harangued the nurses to stay on top of her pain, but it took me and the social workers at least 4 or 5 days before the nurses understood what I was after and how to treat her. I watched as each different nurse and aide interacted with my mother and knew instantly which ones would drive her crazy and which ones would make her comfortable. None of them would fully be able to get her cooperation, but some came closer than others. And it made me appreciate what the end for all of us might bring, a lack of control. 

I called as many of her friends as I could and my uncle, who had lost touch with her, because I didn’t want my mother to be alone in the hospital. I knew that I couldn’t be there all day and night, though I wished that I could. And I hope that I was able to facilitate some good-byes for her in the end, even though she wasn’t able to speak.

Those last days, which seemed surreal to me then, were spent on automatic pilot, but even once they were over and we had cleared out her house, I found that I didn’t really feel like crying. We whittled her life down to a small 5×5 storage unit. Most of her belongings went either to the dump or to Goodwill, which made me realize how much crap we really don’t need. This is what will happen to each and every one of us when our children or our families go through our belongings after we pass into the ether. I found myself comforting my mother’s friends far more than they were comforting me and I realized it was because I had been expecting this, and because I had done much of my grieving right after she told me about her diagnosis, while I was nursing and getting to know Madeleine.

I will always be hit at odd points, during odd conversations, and feel a surge of loss that will surprise me, but for a long time afterwards, I didn’t have the tears. Part of that lack of grief was the relief to get back home after two weeks of being away, and the desire to get to enjoying my time with Madeleine. Because she was my all-consuming focus and I was so happy to be able to get back to providing her with the attention she needed and hadn’t been able to get while I was in Eugene saying goodbye to my mother.

I was driving to work today, listening to NPR when Richie Havens started singing Here Comes the Sun. His gravelly voice reminded me of my mother because she loved his music and I couldn’t help but cry. If she had let herself accept that music wasn’t going to pay her bills, it might have offered her some of the solace she was looking for. There are a lot of things about her that I don’t know and never will know. She didn’t often let me in on a great many of the troubling things that kept her from living a normal life, one where she could have kept her house and been able to retire in peace and comfort. I hope now that she will be able to rest in peace, that she realizes that what was so painful down here on earth really didn’t need to be. And I hope that I did right by her in the end and that she forgives me for all the times that I didn’t give her the understanding that she so often needed.

Both of us want to give Madeleine the best start possible, so we were advised by Leigh’s stepmother, Martha, that we need to make sure we get her (and read her) many books. We also shouldn’t talk baby talk (which is a little hard not to do sometimes). So we immediately bought her a number of board books!

Now, of course, she’s old enough to reach for and put the death grip on many, many things, including the book you are reading to her at the time. Reading doesn’t seem to be her first priority, however. She seems more interested in seeing how the pages taste.

We looked forward to our visit to SF for Quinton & Alex for months, and having had a trip to Tennessee for Leigh’s dad’s funeral the month before, we knew that Maddie would weather the trip well…except for the fact that we got in to Oakland after 11pm and didn’t get to the hotel until after midnight. Totally screwed up her sleep so that was a hard lesson learned.

All in all, however, it was a terrific trip with too few pictures and too little time spent with many of Leigh’s and my good friends. It was wonderful to show off little Maddie, and just as wonderful to leave her with a terrific nanny for a few hours of downtime, especially after two days of very fussy baby not so down with napping all of a sudden. 

We took a trip to Japantown for some culture, Korean food and Q&A’s wedding gift. 

 We ate breakfast at what apparently is an SF institution, Mel’s Diner. And managed to have some breakfast before she broke down the first day, and while she was sleeping the third day.

We were able to meet up with Leigh’s good friend Jeff and his wife and kids at the Exploratorium. Though she’ll likely have no memory of her time there, Maddie will be able to see herself in some good pics. I can see how parents would want season passes to this place. You can’t possibly take it all in over the course of a single visit and there’s no way to stay longer than a couple of hours before you go through system overload.

Neither of us really wanted to leave when it was time, especially because it meant that I had to start working and Leigh had to go back to work. Ah well. 

When we were in Tennessee after Leigh’s father passed away, we decided to find a bunny costume for Maddie for Halloween. We are always calling her bunny and thought that would be a cute idea. Needless to say, I looked online and found something acceptable that would require a little adjustment (addition of pink to the ears) and then just never got around to it. All of sudden it was Halloween and I told myself that we didn’t need a costume for a 3-month-old baby who wasn’t even going to know that day was any different from any other day.

Then I got an innocent email from our friend Tricia asking what Maddie was going to be for Halloween. She has a daughter just 3 weeks younger than Maddie and they were going to dress her up like a hot pepper. Nothing in that email was meant to make me feel bad, but all of a sudden I remembered some of my childhood when my mother forgot to sign me up for softball my 6th grade year and I was devastated. I never played softball again and it was something I was good at. I just remember how I felt, like I wasn’t important enough for my mother to remember something that was hugely important to me.

I pictured Maddie, years from now, in therapy because her mother couldn’t make the time to get her a costume for her very first Halloween. After all, she would at least have pictures of it, even if she didn’t remember it.

I know that having a child really does make you relive and work through your own issues and, while my mother did a lot for me and sacrificed a lot for me in her own way, she wasn’t always able to give me what I needed. I don’t want to make that mistake with Madeleine. I know that I will make my own mistakes, maybe in the name of making up for what I lacked when I was growing up, but hopefully I can give her all of the opportunities that I never had and give her the love and support that I sometimes feel I lacked. I know that she will have regrets in life, but I hope that  she will always make the most of her time here on earth for travel and education and sports and music and drama or science or whatever piques her interest.

So I went right down to our local Wal-Mart intent on finding a kick-ass costume that I could be proud of…well, I went to the evil WM after trying our local used baby clothes store where I couldn’t find anything her size. I was actually excited about the costume I found.

This was just how much she naps according to schedule!   

When I took Madeleine in for her 2-month checkup, I also asked the doctor about her naps. We hadn’t really, at that point, thought too long or too hard about exactly how long or when she should be sleeping. I had just let her sleep when she fell asleep or when she seemed cranky. I didn’t really know about the “science of sleep” for babies.

I wasn’t really prepared for her response, because it made me feel like a neglectful parent for one thing, and her advice was contrary to the way I had decided to parent Maddie. She said that Maddie had to have two 3-hour naps each day, one in the morning and one in the evening and that if she wouldn’t go to sleep on her own in the crib, that I should let her cry herself to sleep.

I know that’s the advice a lot of people give, but it just wasn’t going to work for me. It broke my heart to hear her cry and there was no way I could do that, especially because the first time I tried it (and yes, the dr. made me feel bad enough with her speech that I had to try it to see if it really worked as simply as she said it would), she cried so hard that she lost her breath and I felt like a complete schmuck.

So, the bottom line, the discussion at the doctor’s office got me thinking, reading and talking to others about what I really should be doing about her daily nap schedule. And I realized that I had to start a routine for bedtimes.

Since we also didn’t really have a bath routine down, we decided to go with Emily’s and the No Sleep Solution recommendation and add bath time to the nightly bedtime routine. Luckily she loves her bathtime.

We are starting to get back into a routine that we hope will be interrupted by a move to portland. My perfect day would include an early-morning walk, followed by breakfast. Short nap for Maddie, then some play/bonding time. Next would be a 3-hour nap for Madeleine and yoga, meditation, and possibly time to take care of dinner prep for me, then more bonding time. Short late afternoon nap. More bonding time. The rest of it can be up in the air.

Wednesday we had a mostly good day. Walk on a beautiful, sunny fall day with a happy baby.

The summer flowers were still hanging on in most of the neighborhood.

Madeleine’s nap lasted 1.5 hours which gave me enough time  for a nice yoga session and she was happy and googly most of the day. The next day, of course, was a full-blown scream fest in the afternoon when I tried to get the sleepy beepy to nap and then again that night when we tried to put her down …. Ah well. You can’t win every day.