Today

Today is my first presidential election as a U.S. citizen. Today I cast my vote without any reservations, without feeling that I have to pick the lesser of the two evils. Today I vote in a swing state, where my vote will matter.

Four years ago, almost to the day, I cast my vote for a person who I believed could transform my old country, my country of birth. That election turned into much more than just an election—it became a revolution, a peaceful revolution, one for the history books. The man I voted for was eventually named President. I still have a lot of respect for him, but it has become painfully obvious that one man, no matter how genuine and good, is powerless against a hundred years of corruption, brainwashing and fear-mongering. I believe there is a bright future for my country, but it is generations away.

I don’t want to be disappointed again. Not today, not tomorrow, not a year from now.

Today I can smell the change in the air.

The fastest year of my life

Over the last few days, on more than one occasion, I found my mind drifting off to “a year ago today…” The contractions that woke me up one night and then faded away within a couple of hours. The movie screening we went to on October 25. The heart-shaped banana-bread ‘birthday cake’ I made for Husband in the morning. Getting my hair cut and my toes painted a year ago yesterday.

And a year ago today, just a few minutes ago, meeting my Baby for the first time.

He is my perfect baby. My miracle baby. I love him something fierce. And if I dared to ask for anything more from the universe, I would only ask that the time would not go so fast.

Happy birthday, my sweet Baby.

October 15

Today is the National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Today is also the day that two years ago we conceived the baby that we never got to meet. I remember that day—Husband came back from a business trip that afternoon, and I was leaving for a trip the next morning. We had one shot that month, and the fact that it worked—after months and months of ‘unexplained secondary infertility’ failures—made that pregnancy such an amazing miracle. And maybe that’s what made the loss so tough to bear. Only within the last few months I stopped thinking about that baby on a daily basis. Maybe it is the passing of time, maybe it is the new sadness that plagues me these days.

But I will always remember that baby. I will always remember how overwhelmingly happy I was to see that + sign and the afternoon I spent trying to figure out a creative way to tell Husband. I will always remember how devastatingly chilling it was to see no flicker on the gray ultrasound screen.

And while I am not a religious person, I really want to believe in life after death. I want to believe that my dad got to meet this baby and the babies he lost. And that he is there to comfort them and play with them until the rest of us get there, long, long time from now.

11 months

This past weekend Baby turned 11 months old.

A month from now, he will no longer be considered a baby. He will be 1, and he will be a toddler. This is his last non-birthday birthday, the last time we count his age in months instead of years. One, three or six months from now, we will tell people that he is 1, not 12, 14 or 17 months. The end of his babyhood is no longer a distant dot on the horizon. It is here, right in front of me, and I am overwhelmed by how fast we got here.

This realization has caused me to hold him a little longer each night before putting him in his crib, to comply more frequently with his requests to be picked up, to spend a little extra time giving him a bath, to kiss him even more, to rub the little peach-fuzzy head a little longer as he nurses. I am trying to soak it all up, to breathe him in, in an attempt to hang on to this fleeting babyhood.

Stages

On my flight back to the U.S., I was reading an article in this magazine about coping with loss. It said that the five stages of grief don’t necessarily come in order, and you can keep skipping from one stage to another and back again. This describes precisely how I have been doing—from feeling fine, to feeling completely devastated, to being angry at the unfairness to it all, to wondering if this is all a bad dream. Most of the time, I feel so emotionally exhausted that I am numb.

The four days and some odd hours I spent in my home town were the most emotionally exhausting days of my life.

Two hours before I landed, my grandmother (my dad’s mom) died. She was 93. Her mind has been slipping for quite a few years now, and when I saw her in the fall of 2006, the last time I was home, she could barely remember my dad, who was taking care of her. But she remembered me—and she remembered so many details about my life that my dad and I were stunned. Grandma and I shared a special bond. She always made me feel so good about myself. She was so proud of me. Even when her memory began to fade, any time my name would come up, Grandma would begin her sentences with “In a foreign land, in a foreign language, my amazing Kate built a life for herself.” We teased her that she sounded like a broken record, and she just smiled and looked at me, shaking her head as if in disbelief that I am real.

Her death was the last drop for me. I didn’t have as tough of a time accepting her death as I did with my dad (she was in her 90s, after all, and I expected that she may go soon), but what hurt me beyond words is that I did not get a chance to say goodbye. Not to my dad, nor to my grandma. I missed both of them by a matter of hours. I could have called my dad at the hospital before he died… I could have caught an earlier flight that would have brought me home before she died…

Two funerals. Two cemeteries. Two coffins with people who looked nothing like my dad and my grandma. Too many tears. Too many anxiety attacks to count. Too few hours of sleep. Going through their apartment, sorting through decades of memories, deciding what to keep, what to toss. How do you decide? In three days, that entire side of the family—gone. Our last name is no more.

There is a lot to be said—or written. A lot I need to come to terms with. But where these words belong, I am not sure. Here? In a folder on my laptop? In my head? I’ve been putting these thoughts aside. I have been focusing on the kids and work and the day-to-day of temporary single-parenting. My husband returns tonight after being away for a month. And for better or for worse, this means that the flood gates can now open.

Untitled

My mom called this morning while I was on the way to the office for an hour-long meeting. You better pull over, she said. I did. Your dad has cancer. He had surgery yesterday, completely unrelated, and they found cancer. Very advanced stage. They could tell just by looking at it, without running any tests. You should be prepared for the worst.

I cried, called Husband who is away from home for a month. What should I do? Should I go now? I want to see him before it’s too late. I want to bring the kids, at least Baby—he hasn’t met Baby, and I know it would mean so much to him. But Baby doesn’t have a passport, so I need to figure out a way to get one soon.

Let’s talk about it this weekend, Husband said, when all of us are together for Baby’s baptism.

The plan was for me and the boys to fly to Midwest tomorrow for Saturday’s baptism, spend a week there to help break up my five-week single-parenting stint, and come back home on Labor Day, with Husband returning home two weeks later. OK, I said, OK, just keep breathing. I got myself together and walked into the office.

And hour later, my mom called again.

Your dad just died.

I have SO MUCH to say about how I feel. About how much this hurts. About how the memories I suppressed from my parents’ divorce 20 years ago are resurfacing now. About how the guilt for not keeping in better touch with him is tearing me apart. About how completely unprepared I am to deal with a death of a parent; most people my age are just starting to lose their grandparents, not parents. About how hard it is to fall apart in front of your kids without being able to fully explain to them what’s happened. About how much I’ve simply needed a hug today, a simple human touch.

But I have to pack. Not the kind of packing I was planning to do for a leisurely week at the in-laws' house, but a suitcase full of black, full of grief. We are still heading to the Midwest tomorrow, but right after the baptism, I will be getting on the plane alone to go half-way across the world to bury my dad.

On breastfeeding

[Note to anyone who may stumble onto this post: Sensitive subject ahead. If you wanted but were not able to breastfeed your baby, you may want to skip this post. In it, I talk about my struggles with breastfeeding, but the fact is, I was able to nurse my child for nine months and counting, and I fear that women who were not able to nurse their babies at all may find my rant pointless, insensitive and ungrateful. I fully realize how lucky I am to have made it this far, and I don’t want to offend anyone.]

Today, I did not bring my breast pump to work. And unlike the time when I forgot to put it in the car during the morning rush, this time I actually meant to leave it at home.

My already meager supply has really taken a dive in the last six weeks. The week I spent away from my boys was the beginning of the end. I tried to pump as much as I could, but that’s difficult to accomplish when you are running a conference of more than 20,000 attendees. But even after that, especially on weekends, there were many a time when making a bottle was so much easier than finding a private spot to nurse him. For the last month, I’ve been down to one pump session a day, plus nursing him in the morning and at night.

About a month ago, after trying to nurse with great frustration, he finally pulled away, reached for his pacifier and turned away, calming down immediately. My heart ached and I quietly shed a few tears. He no longer needed me for comfort. My mid-day pumpings dropped to three ounces total, less than half of what he takes in one feeding. So it shouldn’t have come as a total surprise when yesterday he refused to nurse at lunch. He gave it a quick try, and when it resulted in nothing, he pulled away. “Be patient, baby, it will come,” I tried to coax him, but he would have none of it. At bedtime, he seemed unusually frustrated while nursing and then had trouble falling asleep, making me wonder if he was still hungry.

So this morning, I decided to leave the pump at home. What’s the point of spending 20 minutes pumping plus washing, when the results are meager? But the voice inside my head is casting doubts, “If you just try harder, if you increase the number of pumping times, you can make the numbers go up.” But why? What for? He is almost 10 months old; I’ve made it so much longer than I thought I would.

I am not entirely sure why breastfeeding is such an obsession for me. I suspect it’s the baggage that I am carrying from breastfeeding Child. Bouts with mastitis in both breasts, the never-ending thrush that wasn’t responding to medication, continued pain even after the infections had cleared (now I realize it was the result of his tongue-tie), round-the-clock pumping—six months of this physical and emotional nightmare and feeling that I failed him so miserably. When I finally emerged on the other side, I wondered why I didn’t quit earlier. I could have been a better mother if I weren’t pushing myself so ridiculously hard. I would have enjoyed my newborn so much more. I promised that I would not put these ridiculous demands on myself again. If it doesn’t work, I will stop. But I secretly hoped that I would do it right this time, with this baby.

I was determined not to make the same mistakes: not to let him comfort nurse so that my nipples wouldn’t crack and let in infection, not to wear too much lanolin, which can trap moisture and let yeast grow; not to scream in pain every two hours for weeks before calling the doctor; to massage out every plugged duct to keep it from turning into mastitis. But while I worried about me, I forgot about him. I was happy to let him sleep longer because it gave my achy breasts a break when he should have been eating. I ignored the fact that he looked a little yellow—he just has his dad’s olive skin, I told everyone. And two weeks later, when he was still almost a pound lighter than his birth weight and his bilirubin was way above normal, I, once again, felt like a failure. We went on a two-day feeding spree, feeding every two hours and pumping after every feeding. I slept a total of 4 hours during that time (as a side note, I doubt complete lack of sleep does any good for one’s milk supply), and the pain was unbearable. I bit my lip and stomped my feet on the floor at every latch (causing my mom, who slept in the basement, to run upstairs in panic in the middle of the night, worrying that the thumping noise of my feet was actually me dropping the baby). But his weight barely budged, and the dreaded words came, “you have to supplement.” I have nothing against formula, but to me, these words meant that I failed once again. A few days later, a dear friend sent a lactation consultant to my house. She took one look at Baby and said, “Did anyone mention his frenulum?” That’s where the pain was coming from. After she left, I called a dozen ENTs, hoping for a next-day appointment. Every single one offered to get me in in four weeks. I could not wait that long! I finally found a place that had an opening in five excruciatingly long days. After the appointment, the relief didn’t come immediately, but within days, things improved. I was not longer screaming at latch-on, just wincing. But I still had to deal with the supply. I researched dozens of ways to increase supply, and I tried many of them, but I would lie if I said I did my best. I could have pumped more, but it’s tough to do when you have a four-year-old running around. Looking back, I blame myself for not trying harder. Maybe if I tried harder, I could have built up my supply completely, and he would not be frustrated with my low flow now. If I didn't ignore his cues in the days after his birth, maybe I would not have had a supply problem to begin with. Having a low supply issue with a second child while there were no such issues with the first is very unusual, from what I've read. I could have avoided all of this if only I tried harder. At least I kept the promise I made to myself four years ago that I will not let the pump run my life.

I will continue to nurse him morning and night as long as he still wants to. Anecdotally, I know it’s possible to continue doing this for a while. But somehow I doubt he will want to for much longer. And I have to come to peace with this. However, the simple fact that I found it necessary to tell this entire story tells me that I am far from being at peace with this. And honestly, while my heart is breaking, my brain tells me that it's irrational to feel like this: I was hoping for an easier time this time, and I got it—I hated the entire six months of nursing Child, and I loved all but the first month of nursing Baby. My mistake was hoping for a perfect experience. And what hurts is that most likely, I will not get another chance.

I no longer do this for him. I do it to satisfy my selfish desire to keep him a baby a little longer, to keep this connection between just the two of us. It’s just another way I am having a tough time letting go.

Reunion

At half past midnight, I crept into the dark room.

In the glow of the moon, I could barely see them. One curled up like a little ball, his face pressed against the side of the pack-and-play; the other sprawled out on the big bed, looking so much longer than I remembered him. They were wearing their striped pajamas, the only matching set of clothes I’ve ever bought for them.

I laid down on the big bed, trying to take up as little space as possible so that I wouldn’t disturb him. Creaky floors, creaky bed springs, and then finally quiet again, only the swooshing of the ceiling fan interrupting the silence.

Several hours later, as he was changing position in his sleep, his hands brushed against my shoulder. He froze for a second; then his hands moved again, trying to figure out the obstacle in his way. When the hands reached my hair, so much thicker and curlier than his grandma’s or aunt’s, he finally said, “Mommy! Mommy, it’s you!” “It’s me, baby.” “I’m so glad you are here.” “Me, too, baby. Let’s sleep now.”

Several more hours passed, and when the sound of the fan could no longer muffle the songs of the birds outside, the pack-and-play next to the bed began to move. Its little occupant was tossing and turning, eventually giving way to soft coos. As I sat up on the bed, he looked at me cautiously, and as I stood up and approached the pack-and-play, he began to cry. After a week away, he did not recognize me. But as I leaned down to pick him up, he stopped crying. “Hi, baby. It’s me.” When I picked him up and held him, his whole body literally melted into me. Every minute or so, he would lift his head off my chest and look inquisitively at my face, as if to confirm it was still me. Then he would smile and lower his head back down.

As I stood there, I wondered how my heart could keep from bursting when it was so full of love.

Empty

This morning, my husband and my sons got on the plane to travel half way across the country to see Husband’s family, where the boys will be spending a week while Husband and I, as we do every June, work at our company’s largest conference. After taking the three of them to the airport, where I quietly shed many tears as they boarded the plane, I came home to an empty house, and it has been nothing like what I expected. I knew I would miss them. I knew I would feel sad. But I was also looking forward to this time, two days—48 hours!—at home on my own before I leave on Friday morning to travel to the conference. I thought about how much I could get done: organize the closets, upload some pictures online, set up the crib (yes, Baby is still sleeping in the bassinet, even though he is way over the weight limit), replant a bunch of plants, get a haircut, get a pedicure, put away maternity clothes and outgrown baby clothes, and the list goes on—not to mention hours and hours of uninterrupted work time (I work at home most days). For two days, I will be a free woman, I thought to myself.

Instead, I sit here, feeling completely empty.

I caught myself looking at the clock to see how soon 5 p.m. will be here so that I can go pick the kids up at the babysitter’s—before realizing that at 5 o’clock, I won’t need to go anywhere. I reminded myself to return my friend’s phone call tonight, thinking that I could do it around 8:30, immediately after the kids go to bed—before realizing that I have no one to put to bed tonight.

It’s amazing how certain things become so ingrained in our minds. After four and a half years, motherhood is more that just part of my life. It is my life. It is in everything I do. I am more than a mother, but I am a mother first and foremost. I know that not every mother feels the same way, and I really respect that. Looking back, I think this may have been the toughest transition for me when Child was born. I felt like I was losing my old self, that it was being ‘invaded’ by the demands of motherhood. But with time, it became more comfortable, more natural, so when Baby was born, I was able to delight in the joy that a new baby brings instead of dwelling on what this addition is doing to the ‘real me.’ The ‘real me’ is very different now, and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Today, in an empty and quiet house (exactly the type of house I crave so often in the chaos of everyday life), I feel so completely incomplete.

This time will pass quickly

“Enjoy your newborn. Sleep when your baby sleeps. This time will pass quickly.”

This was written in bold at the bottom of the hospital discharge instructions from my midwives’ practice. My guess is that most women see the last sentence as an encouragement of sorts, a pep talk: when you feel like you can’t take one more minute of this, remember that this will pass and things will get better.

But perhaps that’s not what the midwives mean at all.

“This time will pass quickly...”

...and in a blink of an eye, your baby will be six months old, and you will wonder where half a year has gone.

Half a year. With Child, I was always looking for the next thing. When will he roll over? When will he crawl? When will he stand? When will he eat finger foods? With Baby, I celebrate these milestones, but I am not waiting for them with anticipation. I delight in the now. I want him to remain a baby as long as possible. I realize now how fleeting this baby stage is.

This half-year point marks my three-month anniversary since returning to work. I dreaded the return to work, and I was right. I have been away from Baby on a daily basis for half of his life, and it breaks my heart. A parent’s decision to return to work or stay at home is such a personal thing, and I honestly believe that there is no right answer. The so-called mommy wars—stay-at-home moms vs. working moms—frustrate me greatly, and I have no interest in debating this issue. But for me, right now, being at work does not feel right.

When I went back to work after having Child, staying home was not an option. Back then, we recently purchased a house in one of the highest-priced markets in the country, and living on one income was out of the question. I started a new job after my maternity leave, and although it was incredibly difficult to leave my four-month-old baby boy at a daycare on that first day at work, I never considered the alternative. I was sad, I cried, I thought about him a lot, I hated the fact that he didn’t smell like my baby when I picked him up at the end of the day—he smelled like daycare, and so I cried again. But somehow, it got easier with time. Maybe it was because the time I spent on leave with Child was far from blissful. Breastfeeding was an absolute nightmare, what with mastitis in both breasts and the never-ending thrush and incredibly painful latch-ons that eventually forced me to pump exclusively, which, OMG, takes so much time because you spend 20 minutes bottle feeding, then 20 minutes trying to get the baby to sleep, then 20 minutes pumping, and then the cycle begins again. But I digress... Maybe part of me was eager to get away from that—and being at work provided a much-needed break.

This time, with Baby, it may have been possible for me not to return to work. I never actually sat down to do the math, but with some major cutbacks and fewer trips, we could probably make ends meet without my income. But I had to return to work for a different reason. As we contemplate moving out of this area in the very near future, my job provides stability. I could do my job from anywhere in the world, and being able to keep the same job when we move will be a major benefit for us. So I never let myself go too far down the road of contemplating staying at home.

But the thing is, I hate it. I don’t hate my job, but I hate being away from my boys. I miss them, and I will admit that I miss Baby more than I miss Child. Child loves his preschool, and I know that he is having more fun there than he would at home with me. So although I would love to spend more time with him, I am more content with him being away from me because I know how happy he is in school. But Baby—oh, how I miss him. I know he is happy with our wonderful nanny, a woman who’s been with us for more than three years now. I trust her completely. But selfishly, I miss my time with him. I want to be the one feeding him as he watches the spoon so intently and opens his mouth wide in anticipation. I want to be the one holding my hand on his belly as he drifts off to sleep. I want to be the one listening to his happy cooing as he wakes up. I want to be able to nurse him during the day and watch him get so excited about a meal that tries to latch on to my bra. I want to be the one taking him for walks and watching him observe and react to the world around him. I want to be the one hearing the compliments from passer-bys about how gorgeous and happy he is. I want to be the one playing with him and listening to him babble and giggle and laugh. I miss him horribly, and I resent being away from him. I hate, hate, hate the breast pump. Most of all, I hate feeling like I don’t have the ability to do anything right. When I work, I worry about missing out on my boys’ childhood or about finding enough time to pump between endless meetings and unfinished projects. When I am home, I worry about how much work I have to do after the kids go to bed. When they are in bed and I am frantically trying to do the laundry, pack lunches and wash bottles, I worry about how little attention I give to my husband. When you spread yourself too thin, you feel like you can’t give your 100% to anything.

Right around the time I returned to work, I read this post by Dutch (from Sweet Juniper), a former lawyer now stay-at-home dad, describing a day with his daughter. “I still have anxieties, concerns that I am ruining any chance at a career. But I can only hope that there will be enough years to try to recapture what I've lost by leaving the working world, and trust in the fact that there will never be any way to recapture any of this.”

Right now, my boys love being with me. Child begs me to play with him. Baby smiles the second he sees me. In a blink of an eye, six months have passed. Another blink, and my boys will be much more interested in hanging out with their friends or playing video games than spending time with me. I can’t recapture this time later, and I don’t want to regret it. I don’t want to miss it.

This time will pass quickly…