first photo friday--any lovely photo will do next friday: yellow!

This is my first photo Friday post--I hope to do one each week. I didn't get around to taking the photos until last night, so these first entries are of a predictable subject: a reluctant-to-sleep three-year-old who was more than willing to pose if it meant he'd be able to stay up.

I hope to have a very broad and memorable theme each week, like a color or a mood. So next Friday, how about: yellow. If you want to participate and have a theme you'd like to photograph, just let me know. I'd be thrilled to get a suggestion.

If you wish to link your photo Friday post here (I'm only really expecting Julia), please use the link form below. I hope to create a group posting with one photo from each blog linked. This post probably won't go up until the weekend. We'll see how the project reveals itself in time.

sleep

It's mostly quiet
now, although occasional
moans and wails
pitch themselves down
the darkened hall
in my distinct direction.
The blue stars have turned
off. The window is open
to the cold winter night,
to wheels passing on
wet streets, a siren.
I am awake.

How doctrinaire you have become,
everything always leaning
into your lack. If only I could
orchestrate your soft rhythms:
mollify the monsters
and magnificent tantrums,
quell the voluminous time devoted
to your ripening.
Pacify the city night, ceilings
thin as wooden drums.
Sleep! Unfurl this rewinding mind,
lull the wakeful feet of
students' feet upstairs,
cradle my coughing baby,
my panicked little boy.

what's not a revelation is still worth repeating

I need to go with my instinct. The more I think--the more I depend on reasoning and not on my gut--the more confusing life gets.

And I tend to think a lot, as one might well have guessed.

Here's a very current example. Ike has been screaming like a tortured animal at night again. This is no big surprise. We moved to a new apartment and then a week or so later we went to Germany and France. He returned from Europe not only to an unfamiliar home, but to a bedroom that is not adjoined to ours (as his room was in our old apartment). We anticipated this reaction. So when we got home I put a pack-'n-play next to our bed and we all got some sleep while Ike adjusted to our new apartment. But we've been back from Europe for three weeks and I think he's got the idea that this is where we live now. He plays in his new room happily most the day. So we put him in his new room to sleep two nights ago, and voila, he's screaming himself hoarse at bedtime. His face is covered with little red broken blood vessels from the exertion. Last night he went to bed at 7:00 pm and screamed until 11:30 pm. Sigh.

My gut says he's got to be gently weaned into sleeping in his new room. But my head, my patience and my husband say "let him scream it out, he'll exhaust himself and fall asleep. He'll adjust." He doesn't, though. At least not easily. My gut says I can't let him get so worked up when he needs to wind down. So tonight put my thoughts aside. I went to his room time and time again, saying the Our Father, the Twenty-Third Psalm, singing, leaving the door open, talking to him loudly as I did the dishes, soothing and soothing and soothing. I drew the line at physical comfort. And he only screamed until, well, 9:45 pm. And I'm exhausted.

I know in my head that he has to learn to fall asleep by himself. And every time I help him fall asleep I encourage him to depend on me to put him to sleep. But my gut says that if I gently move him toward more healthy patterns--even while depending on me to put him to sleep--that he'll move back to falling asleep on his own. And I think I have to just listen to myself, even if putting him to bed this way is time-consuming and exhausting.

My gut has a lot to say, really. It told me that Ike was a boy when I was pregnant the first time. And with this current pregnancy I suspected I was pregnant with a girl, and yesterday that was confirmed. It told me to walk out of the sonogram office last week, long before they told me it was against their policy to reveal the sex of the baby or allow husbands in the sonogram room. Of course I did walk out when I heard that, but I should have left before. My gut told me something was wrong with my second pregnancy, and I knew the moment I got a headache last September that I was going to have a miscarriage, which began a few hours later.  My gut also told me marriage to Charles would be hard but worth it, which has been true as well.

I am writing this mostly to remind myself.

It's not so much that my gut is always right, it's more like my gut is me. It is me inside and out and takes everything I know and feel and believe into account. My head is about information; and while the information is usually factually true, it doesn't always apply in a useful way. My gut is also not my feelings. My feeling about Ike's screaming last night was that if he continued one minute longer I'd go in there and smack him one. My feelings usually revolve around comfort, anger, fear, pleasure, desire.

My gut uses the knowledge in my head, but conversely my head doesn't want to muck things up by acknowledging my gut. My gut registers my feelings, but my feelings don't want to take the time to deal with the quiet (and perturbing patient) certainty of my gut.

I know nothing I'm writing here is a revelation, to myself or anyone else. It's just that when I write it here it becomes more and more true to me. More and more alive and active in my life.

And that all said, I am so so happy to be having a baby girl!

nighttime + separation anxiety + tantrums = the vaporization of motherly love

As I write this Ike is screaming god-awful bloody-murder. His wail is relentless and unnerving, like a wild animal in heat. It doesn't help much that he is in his own room: in our Manhattan-sized apartment his crib is less than 12 feet from where I sit. Last night he did this for four hours, despite all our attempts to comfort him. When Charles and I went to bed at 11:30, I wheeled his crib into our room next to our bed. I dozed off at midnight, with Ike still standing upright, holding the rail of his crib, gazing intently at my face. As long as I lay facing him he remained mostly quiet.

It has been a few weeks of this behavior. I know I'm not the first mother who has faced a wailing child who will not sleep. But this is the first challenge I've faced as a parent--Ike was always a good night sleeper, even as an infant. I'm rather unnerved by how viscerally I hate him after he's screamed a mere hour. One hour and I'm ready to donate him to the Goodwill. A few mornings ago I could not even look at him. I was pissed that he'd screeched like a barbarian for more than three hours that night; lacking sleep, and any warm motherly feeling, I drank my coffee and looked out the window, ignoring him.

Today I bought a CD player & night-light that attaches to the crib. I burned him a CD of the choir of the Convent of St John of Kronstadt in St Petersberg. They have a very calming sound, almost like the pouring of water. I found a small icon of St Herman of Alaska which I placed in his crib. And now, after putting him to bed at 7:30, I have my prayer book ready and plan to read through it until (God willing) he falls asleep. As I write this, I go back into his room every five minutes or so and read a little more to him. He calms down while I pray, watching me. I'm nearly finished with Vespers at this point.

I have done a lot of web research. I don't think we're dealing with night terrors, he isn't necessarily asleep when the howling begins. I think it's some combination of separation anxiety, fear of the dark, lingering sickness, and a stubborn tantrum-prone nature. And the fact that, while he was sick, I let him sleep in our bed in order to better monitor him.

But the news for this evening is good. By the end of Compline he'd succumbed to sleep. I had to hold him down a bit to get him on his back, then violently rocked the crib so that he couldn't get back up on his feet, all the while reading Compline over the soft singing of St Petersburg nuns.

Ah. How wonderful he is when he's asleep. I might even love him again.

ah, to be single again...

I'm not cut out to be a wife or mother. I lose my touch with projects more demanding than watching snow fall or drinking coffee, although I think I could manage drinking coffee while watching snow fall.

This afternoon I fell asleep after buckling Ike into his bouncy chair in front of a Baby Einstein DVD. I had originally thought he might fall asleep on the bed with me, but he seemed more interested in whimpering while attempting to eat my hair. So I decided, despite the dire predictions of Neil Postman, to raise my child in front of the television. At least in front of Baby Einstein, C-SPAN, and the sleazy 1970s crime movies that Charles keeps bringing home.

Ike cooed while purple zebra puppets painted Monet scenes, and I fell asleep thinking worried thoughts about the laundry I'd left in the laundry room. When Ike started crying, I was behind the glass wall of sleep. My limbs were too heavy to move, and besides, I was involved in a dream where my neighbors were rummaging through the sheets in my laundry basket. A xylophone version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was playing over and over. I don't know how long Ike cried, but I must have finally got up and brought him back to bed with me, because when I woke up an hour later he was there, still crying and tugging on my hair.

The sun had set, my laundry was hogging all the dryers in the laundry room, xylophone Vivaldi trilled from the menu page of the Baby Einstein DVD, and Charles has sent a text message saying he was staying late at the office. Something had to be made for dinner.

I think I was a lot better at being single.