Friends...how many of us have them?

Lately I've been thinking about friendships. I think of the changing face of my adult relationships - how, if I were to throw a party today, how different it would look from a party I threw two years ago. So many of my old friendships have waned - and I've also met a ton of new people, and gotten close to people I only knew slightly before, all because of having kids.

The other day a friend I see a couple of times a month remarked how when I first told her I was pregnant with B that she immediately thought she'd never see me again - being older and childless I'm sure she's been witness to this scenario dozens of times, as I was even in my thirties. Turns out I see her more now than I ever have - because she's available during the day, loves my kid(s), and of course I do enjoy her company. I find I work a lot harder to maintain my friendships now - but this is due to a couple of unique circumstances: I don't work outside the home, so access to friends is my only way of being around adults, and there's no husband or partner to fulfill that need. I also don't want to become that woman who has kids and immediately drops all her friends.

I have to say, though, that I'm lucky that most of my friends now have kids. There are only a couple of hold outs. I could have been one of them, but went down a different path. I often think if I had been surrounded by a big group of perpetually single people I could hang out with and travel with and spend holidays with I may never have had kids...but where, after thirty or thirty-five, do those big groups of single people exist? People want to pair off, and most people who pair off want kids, and most people who have one kid want another. I had an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality, and that worked for me. I hate feeling left behind.

I look at the people I spend a lot of time with now and realize with sadness that even some of them will fall away; once these kids start school, especially, that'll be a whole new crop of friends that will eclipse the old mommy & me group friends. The sort of random people I hang with these days may drift away as our children's lives become more complex. 

One thing that will hopefully keep things a little more consistent for us will be the fact that I plan on not moving...ever. We moved many times before I was ten; until fifth grade I was in a new school just about every year, sometimes twice in a year. And for no better reason than my mother just couldn't stay still. I do feel like all that disruption early on had a major damaging effect on me. To this day I have hardly any friends that I made before the age of twenty; I so envy those people that have big groups of friends that they grew up with - it's like having a whole other family. I want that for my kids so badly I'd do just about anything to make sure they have it - same house, same school, same friends. In that one area I really do want to give them everything I never had. 

Two Months

Baby T is two months old today. I cannot believe he was born two months ago - it seems like a million years ago. Sometimes I go back and read some of my posts from that time and I am rocketed back to how I felt then - but my brain has moved on; it's had to. I believe most of what is called "mommy brain" is just sleep deprivation, but I think part of it too is your brain just doesn't have room for all that information. When you're trying to remember how long thawed breast milk will keep after sitting out a couple of hours and then being refrigerated, suddenly the name of that actor guy who was in that thing just doesn't seem that important. 

I have had a major revelation about infant sleep. This is life changing. If only I'd known this with Bumpus! For the last week or so I have been putting Theo to bed shortly after B - tonight it was at seven. And he has consistently gone to sleep within minutes and not woken up until about one AM, and then wakes up for a couple more feeds (3 and 6 typically). It's completely amazing to me that a baby just a few weeks old can have, and wants, a bed time. Why did I not do this with B, and kept him up with me all night? A few reasons:

I honestly thought infants didn't need a bedtime because they were up all night anyway. I had anxiety about being separate from him and relying on a baby monitor. And I was lonely and wanted to hang out with him. But our evenings were torture - he would just fuss and fuss and mangle my nipples. All he really wanted was to be asleep. Who knew???

Bad vibes? Bring it!!!

I have this thing where when more than one weird/awkward/trigger-type thing happens, I just chalk it up to it being a bad vibes kind of day, which helps me deal with the feelings. The last twenty-four hours have been full of bad vibes. Last night I was kind of freaked out about it, but today I just say, bring it!!! Your bad vibes can't bring me down.

So yesterday had weird mother issues despite having a nice time at my friend's house. Unfortunately on my way home all hell broke loose - I checked my email and the German couple I work for, who said they wanted to close business last December but then kept changing their minds, caught wind of the fact that I have not been managing their affairs for a couple of months, freaked out, and are implying I owe them $600 in late fees and other penalties, some kind of my fault, others not. It's extremely complex so I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say I spent the entire night trading angry, accusatory emails with them, finally culminating in my having to cry out I just had a baby, give me a fucking break! It was very unpleasant and I was a ball of anxiety all night - but I decided to take responsibility for having dropped the ball during the time T was born (can you blame me???) and spent all day today working on dissolving their corporation which is what they want. It's going to be a ton of work for me, but I have to do it - I am the president of their corporation so leaving this stuff hanging only means more misery for me in the future. To get all their crap shipped back to them, freeing up a ton of space in my office, and wash my hands of this once and for all, would be wonderful. So I am going to resolve to leave my personal feelings out of it and just fix it.

Then this morning my sister told me she got wind of the fact that due to rising costs of living in Rio in anticipation of the World Cup, my mother is planning on moving to Florida. So...there's that.

Then I tried to set up B's overdue two year checkup...only to discover the medical group I was assigned for B is an HIV/AIDS clinic and the doctor isn't even a pediatrician. Huh? So I spent about two hours on hold and then finally in discussion with someone at Health Net to find an actual pediatrician - she wanted me to research the names and call back, but considering the fact this had been probably the tenth attempt at calling and never getting a live person ever, I kept telling her to not hang up on me until we got this resolved. So with a screaming baby in the back seat the whole time I managed to pick some random nearby pediatrician and make an appointment. Done and done!

Then we went to my favorite park for a nice relaxing afternoon, but a really unpleasant incident happened. The park was empty because it was so hot and dry. B was bored stiff. But then this brother/sister combo came in and started playing with him...kind of. The girl said to someone she was six and the boy was probably four or five. They were running away from B and kind of shunning him - but he just chased them and thought it was great, so I didn't mind. And then there were times they and other kids all played nicely together - at one point the girl pushed B and he started crying and she hugged him and said she was sorry, so I thought they were ok. But I just had a bad feeling about those kids. I had this phrase in my head, "I don't like the way they're playing with him." But poor B had been trapped in the car all day while I made that stupid endless phone call, it was way too early to go home, I had nothing else for us to do, and B was happy and playing, so I thought, what's the harm? Well, when it was time to leave, the girl shouted out as we were walking past, "Finally that guy is leaving, yay!!!" And the brother parroted, "Yay, finally!" I stopped, gave her the meanest look I could muster, and shouted back, "you know what? That wasn't very nice!" I could tell by the looks on their faces that they were chastened. But man, I wanted to throttle that little bitch. Where were the parents, you ask? Nowhere to be found, of course! Thankfully B was utterly oblivious and happy and thought they were his friends. Ignorance is bliss. But I've spent the whole night seething. The next time I get that feeling that I just don't like something about the way another kid or kids is interacting with my kid, that's it, we're doing something else, even if B has a fit and doesn't understand why we're leaving. I would do this if I felt weird about an adult, why not when I feel weird about a kid?

Anyway, so the bad vibes are just piling on around here. I say mother-fucking bring it. I've got a nice little family and we're a unit and we love each other and none of this shit can touch us. The end. 

Happy ******* Day

Randomly last night I checked out this blog's stats (I rarely do this) and saw with interest that many people had googled and found last year's Mother's Day post, Estranged Mother's Day. I read it and was surprised by how bitter I still was even just a year ago. So much of that bitterness has dissipated in the past year - I'm sorry to say, largely because I simply have too much on my plate to expend a lot of energy on that anymore. Time and distraction heal all wounds...?

For the record my mother sent me a lovely e-card and wished me a happy day and I wished her one back. And later with friends convinced them the benign neglect we all suffered from our mothers was kind of de rigueur in the 70s and not an indication of any malice on their part. So, things are good between me and my mother. I send her pictures of the kids, she says they're cute, done.

So why did I cringe while scanning my Facebook feed today? Why did I stay radio silent there when I normally post multiple times a day? Why did I put off returning all the kind, thoughtful texts and emails I got wishing me a happy day? Why didn't I use the term "mother" in that last sentence?

Obviously I still have a lot of unresolved feelings about my mother. Seeing everyone praising their selfless, loving mothers online today was profoundly depressing to me. I recently re-watched an HBO documentary about Sondheim in which he details a letter his mother sent him before going into major surgery stating she had but one regret in life and that was "giving you birth". I was terribly disturbed by this - and then remembered the letter my mother had sent me that was in a similar vein, which was why that story struck me like it did. That hideous moment of realizing that your mother resented you. Ugh!

My friend's husband and I were talking about this stuff today and he said psychologists say the first seven years of a boy's life are almost entirely shaped by his mother in the sense of helping him to feel good about himself, and after that age the father helps the boy feel good about his world. It made me think again about mothers and sons and how important I am to them and how I must not screw this up. They must never ask themselves if I love them. They must never worry that they are not good enough or that they could do something that would cause me to not love them anymore.

Recently I had the thought that I stopped being someone's child when I became a mother. I do believe this is true for me. But then there are days like today where I just feel like I've taken one step forward, two steps back. I still hurt that I don't have a good relationship with my mother. My life would be so different right now if I did - if she lived nearby, if she spent time with her grand kids, if she were normal. Does it even bother her that she'll never meet them? Who knows?

Being as religion is largely the culprit in our rift, I was interested to watch a show on CNN tonight that profiled an atheist "church" called the Sunday Assembly. There is one right here in Hollywood that meets once a month. I might just check it out. I love to talk about religion and atheism and anti-theism with like-minded people, and definitely miss whatever sense of community church used to give me. Also this church gets really involved in charity work which is something I'm very interested in making a part of our family life (and was non-existent in my childhood religion, if you can believe that). So I may go next month. I might walk in there and be surrounded by weirdos. Or I might meet some really cool people. Kind of how I felt going to my first swing dance - and look how that turned out!

Mama needs a raise

There are few greater joys in life than the moment your toddler actually eats something. Bumpus on the whole is a pretty good eater - again, compared to some friends of mine whose kids eat nothing but cookies and crackers all day - but dinner is always rough. There's just no predicting what he's going to like, and something that's a big hit one night suddenly isn't the next. But tonight I thought I would toss him a soy meat ball to see what happened - he immediately popped the whole thing in his mouth, and ate several more after, followed by a plate of sautéed cauliflower, a bowl of cottage cheese, and some cut up mango. Freakin' yeah. Suddenly I feel like a rock star over here.

Speaking of rock star, I auditioned for the vocal group. They sent me a couple of songs to learn, and they were hard. I studied like it was the SAT, driving all over town and singing along with the mp3s played through my car speakers from my phone. The leader of the group came over Wednesday night and listened to and recorded me, and we had a nice chat about her hopes for the group and general philosophies of music, etc. She said she had "a lot" of other people to audition so I don't know what to expect really; naturally I'll be disappointed if they don't pick me, but honestly my plate is so full that on some small level it would be a relief. It was fun to exercise my rarely used musical/creative muscle, though.

Operation Theo Sleeps is going well. I have been putting Theo down in his crib every night around eight after a good feed, wrap up in a swaddler, and paci. He typically doesn't wake until after midnight or later, which gives me a whole swath of time to myself in the evenings. He still wakes to feed a lot in the wee hours...which doesn't thrill me...but it's the price I pay for not feeding him often enough during the day because it's just so impossible with all this running around. Would I rather stop and feed him more during the day with Bumpus afoot? Nope. So here we are. Still, just having my bed back and Theo safe in his crib just a foot away already makes for better sleep for me. I think co sleeping is just one of those things that's great until it isn't. Like most parenting techniques!

I have made the decision to raise my ticket prices on my event next year. I sometimes raise them by $5, sometimes not. But it's at the point where with the cost of putting on the event going up by thousands every year, I just can't keep operating with these rock bottom ticket prices - many people get into my four day event for only $100. I know people will freak out, but I have the best excuse ever - I've been running this event since 1998 and the prices are almost the same, despite adding value every year. I think if everyone I hire gets a raise, it's time I got a freakin' raise!

Love/Hate

Today was such a love/hate kind of day, with regards to parenting. To be honest, mostly hate. But it's surprising despite all the whining, tantrums, yelling of "no", and  destruction of property, at the end of the day I can say to myself, "hey, you got him in the bath, he ate some food, and he's in bed, good job!" I did put him to bed a half hour early, though, because a) I couldn't deal, and b) he can't tell time yet. So. Yay me. 

Last night was T's first night in the crib. Although he started in the crib, as usual our night ended the following morning with him in my bed and my nipple up his nose. For a few weeks now he's had this ultra fussy time between about 3 AM - 7 AM where he just cries and squirms and won't sleep, won't take the pacifier, and I nurse as much as I can until my nipples just can't take anymore. In the moment it's pretty horrible, although by morning it's all but forgotten. I was hoping the crib transition might somehow help with this. Nope.

Tonight I did an experiment and put him to bed at 8 and sat in the living room with the new baby monitor on my lap. Now, you have to remember I have never done this - never not had the baby, Bumpus or Theo, not right with me at all times (except of course when I go out and hire a sitter). I've never used a baby monitor before. Why am I doing it now? I don't know, really - part of me wants to get a jump on instilling good sleep habits early and not having to go through what I went through with B having no schedule until he was one. And part of me feels like the baby wants to be in bed in a nice quiet, dark room rather than in a noisy, bright living room when nighttime comes. 

But maybe part of me is enjoying having some control over my younger, more malleable child, as my older child more and more develops a mind of his own. So many things that used to be so easy have become so hard lately. He has stopped being willing to sit in his high chair and refuses a bib - he will only sit at the table; or rather, will sit at the table for a few seconds before running off to play with toys and/or put his greasy hands on everything in the house. I find myself three times a day chasing him futilely all over the house with spoonfuls of food, and it drives me completely insane. I had bought a booster seat for him but then his legs wouldn't fit under the table so I had to return it. I put it out on one of my mommy groups on Facebook to ask if these mealtime shenanigans are normal and inevitable or if I should be a hard ass and really lay down the law about sitting still while eating - but everyone had a different opinion. Interestingly the ones who said "lay down the law" were ones who haven't experienced this age yet. They don't know yet that you kind of can't force a two-year-old to do anything. You can't shove food down their throat if they don't want it; you can't force them into a bath tub if they don't want to be there (they'll just jump out and pee on the bath mat...so I've heard...); and you definitely cannot force them to sit still and eat. Threatening no food if they don't sit still is useless because they don't want to eat anyway. So I endure this rigmarole three times a day, every day - B running around the kitchen like a crazy person, pushing his chair up to the counter and pulling all the cookbooks out and ripping the pages, flinging the dirty dishes with dirty water collected in them all over, starting the microwave, shaking the salt and pepper all over the counter, while I try to coax him back to the table with milk, grapes, blueberries, whatever. When I physically restrain him and force him to sit he just has a massive meltdown, flings his food all over the floor and won't eat, and then whines and cries for hours after from the trauma of being made to sit somewhere. It fucking sucks. So I let him get away with murder and chase him with food, always wondering if I should be clamping down and somehow force him to sit and eat properly, all the while knowing that's probably impossible. Oh, and as soon as another traumatic mealtime is finally over, now it's time for the baby to clamp my nipples with his hard palate for half an hour while Bumpus climbs on my back or lies down behind me and repeatedly kicks me in the kidney.

And you wonder why I prefer to spend most of my day in the car...?

The lovers, the dreamers, and me

I went to yet another packed, hot, chaotic public event yesterday. I think I need to admit to myself that certain events are entirely unsuitable for small children and I need to just skip them. You think they'll be good for kids because they always advertise kids' activities and you figure, "hey, it's something to do", but the sad reality is there is almost nothing good for kids this little. What they want to do is run and scream. So, I need to find situations where he can do that.

My boobs hurt. Correction, my nipples hurt. Like, a lot. And I'm pretty sure this coincides with the last time I had a lot of breast feeding pain which was around the time I ditched the nipple shield last time, too. It's not a dry/cracked nipple issue, it's a pain issue from the intense suction, and I'm pretty sure there's not much to be done about that except wait for my boobs to adjust and callous over. But it's very unpleasant, especially the right one, where every time he latches on my eyes cross with pain. Owee.

Today is my "free day" with B at the Baby Kennel, but of course I feel the need to "get things done." So my plan is to set up T's crib. I may not use it yet, and I hate to think of B jumping all over it and destroying it, but I've been thinking of transitioning T into it in an effort to improve our sleep. Not that the sleep is bad - it's pretty ok, considering - but I kind of like the idea of T getting in the crib and having a proper bed time. Already I have him swaddled up and sleeping on the couch in the living room next to me by 7 or 8 PM most nights - why not set up the baby monitor and get a schedule going? It's worth a shot.

I was referred to a singing group who is looking for an alto. They are a trio who do Boswell Sisters-type 1930's music, which I have actually done before with two friends just for fun. I have to learn a couple of parts and then will audition on Wednesday. I know it sounds nuts to take on something like this right now - I feel nuts even considering it. In our email correspondence I immediately brought up the fact that I'm the single parent to two small children and have another band that would have to take priority. There is a big part of me that knows there's a chance they won't even want me due to my baggage or if they just don't like my sound - but honestly, I've been to their web site and it looks like they're kind of just getting started and have very few gigs or projects right now, and I've been in the vintage music scene in LA long enough to know that young(ish) women who sing authentically with a swing-era sound are like unicorns, so really, at the risk of sounding like an egomaniac, they'd be lucky to have me. Unless I'm just not what they're looking for. Which is cool. But I absolutely love singing in groups and harmonizing - way more than singing solo - so even if there were little to no money involved, I think it would be fun. And there's always a chance that it could turn out to be quite lucrative. But this is LA, land of dreamers. If I had a dime for every time I've been approached to be in a documentary, reality TV show, run a dance venue, or be part of a band or singing group, only to have nothing ever materialize...well, I'd have enough money for an awesome new major appliance, at least.