I Caved...

There's a TON of things I haven't written about, and I'm really sorry. Being a mother means non stop material in terms of milestones reached, breakthroughs occurred, and - not least - the inevitable scatological explosions, urine fountains, and parental neuroses that are terrifying and absorbing at the time, but in retrospect, hilarious.

But I haven't written about any of those things because my son is a total douchebag* and the merest hint that I might be enjoying myself doing something that isn't IMMEDIATELY and DIRECTLY working towards his greater happiness, comfort, or amusement creates in him such a level of fury that he screams until he breaks tiny blood vessels in his face.

You think I'm kidding. I'd heard about petechial hemorrhaging on Law & Order...now I've seen it in the flesh.

Anyway. I am writing to you all now, to let you know that it is quite probable that I will be writing to you more OFTEN in the near future. Because after months of Sandy yelling, "WHY WON'T YOU ACCEPT HELP?" and me whining, "women have 18 children and still work in the fields all day I should be able to DO THIS by myself! I don't even have a job! He's one baby!! I CAN DO THIS!!!" I finally gave in, admitted that I could not, in fact, do this - and allowed him to call in back up.

Back up in the form of a night nurse. Someone else to share the load of sleepless nights so that I might regain some shred of sanity. Because the aforementioned douchebag recently went through a phase where, despite being in my arms all night, and despite being allowed to hang upon my breast like a lamprey ALL NIGHT, and despite having his every need, whim and suggestion catered to, he still woke up screaming like a banshee 14 times a night. Let me repeat that. FOURTEEN TIMES A NIGHT. Between 8 pm and 7 am. 14 times. As you have probably realized, that is more than once an hour. And it would take anywhere from 5-30 minutes to calm him down and get him back asleep again. I'll let you figure out exactly how much sleep I was getting a night.

You guys, I looked so totally hot while this was going on. I was always immaculately coiffed, clothed, and made up...I wore tight jeans and low cut tops and I had dinner on the table at 6 p.m. sharp every night when my loving man got home from work. He would walk in the door and say, "I am the luckiest man alive..."

Yeah. That's a filthy lie. The truth is I stayed in my pajamas all day, I didn't bother changing the sheets even if Rhys peed through his pjs until the second or third time he'd done it, and I frequently had spit up in my hair. And I legitimately didn't care. Women would say, "Oh my what a BEAUTIFUL baby!" in the grocery store and I would say, "Free to a good home!" And I would only be about 65% kidding. When Sandy got home from work to a house that looked like a small, furious bomb had gone off, (because it had), I would thrust Rhys into his arms and say, "I need at least one hour of baby-free time or I will drown myself under the pool cover." And then I would run and hide and do deep breathing exercises. Because I was so far out of my depth with Rhys that I was passing fish with enormous teeth and little glowing balls on their heads. There were nights when he would wake up screaming, and I found myself saying to him, "yeah, yeah - cry me a river, Justin Timberlake..."

A Justin Timberlake reference is a terrible thing to do to a 6 month old at 3 in the morning. (As he certainly let me know.) But I was so tired I had reached the end of empathy. I didn't even know that was possible. And let me tell you, I'm empathic. I'm so empathic that if empathy were telekinetics*** I could lift the Empire State Building with my feelings. That's how empathic I am. I cry at commercials involving people hugging in hotel lobbies because I am thinking, "they love each other so much! And they have probably been apart for weeks and weeks and now they are so happy and it's just so damned beautiful!!!" But after 6 months of not sleeping more than 3 hours at a stretch, I had run out of feelings. I'd run out of everything.

I mentioned his night waking to his pediatrician - she said, "yeah...he's a troublemaker."

That, ladies and gentleman, is the least helpful thing a medical professional has ever said to a new parent. IN ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she just couldn't see the armies of exhaustion marching across the alluvial plain of suicide in my eyes, but to be truthful, I think she's actually a sadist.

And so, like Sandy in the Yucatan peninsula, I caved.** Enter Erika. Erika who got Rhys to take a bottle, (and thus removed the enormous load of anxiety from my shoulders that centered around the dreadful little nightmare in which I became incapacitated or ill and couldn't breastfeed and he starved to death). Erika who convinced Rhys that pacifiers weren't a ploy to remove my breasts from his purview forever. Erika who helped me get him to sleep in his crib WITHOUT using the dreaded Cry It Out techniques. (Yes ladies and gentlemen, it is possible to get your child to sleep in his own room/crib etc without Ferberizing and potentially scarring his or her brain for life.)

All hail Erika!



*Anyone who is going to get upset about me calling my baby a douchebag probably shouldn't read the rest of this post. Sorry. I have great faith that at some point in the future, he will stop being a douchebag and start being an awesome little person. He becomes significantly less douche-y every day.

**He totally did, too. Cenote scuba diving. Very cool. I did not do this thing, because I was 5+ months pregnant at the time and was barely willing to heave my enormous bulk from the room to the dining area of the resort we were staying at three times a day.

***Thanks Mark...