High Needs Mother

When my son was a baby, I wanted answers.

This new little red-faced infant wanted to nurse every twenty minutes. Max was up six times a night. The ‘quiet alert’ phase that we heard about—the one we imagined where our peaceful, silk-cheeked baby would silently gaze at us—was non-existent.

Long days dripped by in a haze of milk and tears—both of ours. Our pediatrician said that he didn’t have colic because he could be soothed by nursing. And Max didn’t save his sadness for just the witching hour—any hour of the day or night was fair game. In my attempts to ‘fix’ my son, I lugged him to osteopaths and homeopaths. I went on an elimination diet consisting of brown rice and carrots. I spent hours with him hooked to my breasts while I surfed the internet for solutions. For a way to make him happier. To make us both happier.

I came across an article by Dr. Sears, a leading proponent of attachment parenting. In the article, Dr. Sears described ‘High Needs Babies.’ These intense babies tended to sleep poorly and required constant holding and attention. Max fit ten out of twelve of the criteria. The article suggested that it was possible that my son’s temperament was just who he was, who he was born to be. Not something to fix. I was a bit devastated by this theory; if I couldn’t fix it, the tears and sleepless nights would continue. We were already utilizing many of Dr. Sears’ suggestions for calming the ‘High Needs Baby’—co-sleeping was the only way for any of us to get any rest. I carried him in the Ergo so often that I felt like the straps were melding with my skin. I nursed on demand—and the demand was high.

The only thing that really helped was time. Ever so slowly, our nursing sessions stretched out. After about sixteen months, Max finally started piecing together four or six hour stretches of sleep.  

Max is four and a half now. He’s been weaned for a few years now, and he usually sleeps through the night. But he is still intense. When he’s happy, he’s down-to-the-toes effervescent. And when he’s not—which is often— he’s shrieking, writhing puddle on the ground miserable.

We have a daughter now, too. She smiles and laughs easily and often. Loud sounds don’t phase her, and she weaned with little effort. At 21-months, she still requires a lot of care. But her whole being vibrates with ease, with lightness. I sense that life is much easier for her than it is for my son.

Than it is for me.

You see, I’m a High Needs Mother.

Before my kids were born, I practiced extreme self-care. I went to yoga and dance classes. I attended twelve-step meetings and therapy. I took long walks and joined a Unitarian church. I signed up for retreats and workshops. I did all of this to help me simply feel normal, which has always seemed much easier for most people than it did for me. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert. Maybe it’s because I struggle with anxiety and depression. Maybe it’s because I’m what Dr. Elaine Aron describes as a ‘Highly Sensitive Person.’ Or maybe I’m just in touch with myself, and aware that humans weren’t really designed to withstand the fast-paced, over-booked life that much of the western world thrives on.

My husband and I vowed that when we had children, I would keep up my rigorous program. We promised we would support each other in doing the things we loved and the things that kept us sane and happy.

And then my son arrived.

And I was the only one who could sooth him.

I fantasized that my husband could induce lactation so my nipples could get a break. I pumped milk during the three minutes a day that my son wasn’t nursing. After a few months, I went to a yoga class by myself. As I backed the car out of the driveway, I felt half giddy to be on my own, and half naked, because my constant companion wasn’t strapped into the empty car seat in the back.

At the class, I breathed. I tried to root my body on my yoga mat, to let the ground cradle me like I so often cradled my son. In between surrendering to gravity, my mind wondered how my son was. If he was screaming. If he would take the bottle. If he would nap. During the closing shavasana, I felt the sharp zing of my milk letting down. In those days, I rarely went an hour without nursing.

 

 

 

I kept attending yoga classes, though I’d often return home afterwards to a sobbing child and a frustrated husband. The classes were a small burst of freedom, but it wasn’t enough. I fantasized about the day Max would start kindergarten, the day’s hours stretching ahead, all mine. But kindergarten was still years away. Between working so hard to meet my son’s high needs, and my inability to take care of my own, I felt withered.

When my son was twenty months old, we discovered that my husband’s work would subsidize part-time child care. We enrolled Max two days a week in a nearby daycare. The guilt I felt was expansive. I had wanted children, badly. So why did I so need to be away from my son? And how dare I ask other people to care for him two days a week when I wasn’t going to be filling all of that time with paid work? When I might use some of it to go to a yoga class or do laundry or lug my laptop to a coffee shop and write?

My guilt was huge, but my need for a break was bigger. When I dropped my son off that first day, I came home, melted onto the couch and cried. When I finally peeled myself off the couch, I wrote Max a letter. In my home, alone, all I could hear was the hum of electricity. For the next several hours, my body was all mine. I felt guilty and blissful, free and lost.

With time, the guilt shrunk.

I hate that as a mother, I felt like I had to choose between caring for my child and caring for myself. Because really, I can choose both. I can teach my kids—by example, which is perhaps the most potent way of teaching—that they are worthy of listening to their own needs. To the quiet, still voice that might tell them they need a break. That they need to lie on a yoga mat and sink deep into their own body and breath. To wander through a cemetery, alone, slow enough to read the names on the gravestones. To sit down and write about how they’re feeling, or to surrender to sweet sleep for an hour.

Maybe you don’t need to hear this. Maybe you are a working mother who longs to be home with her kids but needs the paycheck. Or a stay-at-home mother dreading your child’s first day of kindergarten. Or a home schooling mom who finds that the daily tasks of child-rearing light you up from the inside out. I honor you. We are, like all humans, all mothers, the same but different.

When I take good care of myself, I am more present for my babies. I can play air guitar with my son and orchestrate dance parties to Footloose. And when I don’t take care of myself, I’m a stringy, soggy, limp wash rag of a mother. Slowly, over the years, I have been able to add more and more self-care back into my life. To come back to myself and meet my own needs.

Over time, I learned that there was nothing wrong with my son. He just happens to be a lot like me.

The Head and the Heart

 

The band is from Seattle, where I lived for a year half a lifetime ago. I try and focus on the strings and drums and words, to let the music swirl around me. But most of my attention is on my son Max and his friend Iza. They shriek with joy, tossing fistfuls of grass at Iza’s dad, Patrick. I laugh, too, and I listen. I glance around the large crowd a bit; it’s an eclectic mix of families, teenagers and older couples.

 

My friend Dorota, who sits next to me, asks, “Have you ever been to Seattle?”
“Yeah, I actually used to live there.”
“Really? How old were you?”

“Twenty,” I say. This is what happens when you become friends because your kids are the same age. You start off in small conversations, a baby clamped to your breast. You talk about the babies and how they eat and sleep. Slowly, over the years, between trying to stop the kids from hitting each other or running into the road, between feeding them and fielding a constant stream of hey, mom’s, you weave in stories about your own life. The parts of you underneath all the diapers and bisected grapes, all the fatigue and fidelity, and slowly, you find out what each other’s lives were like in that alternate reality Before Children. And if you are lucky, and Dorota and I are, you find out that the Before Children versions of you would have been friends, too.

 

“Twenty,” she says. She shakes her head and smiles. “Can you imagine?” I imagine we are both thinking all that freedom. All that youth. We will both turn forty within the coming year. I think for a moment about that twenty-year-old me, and how she is both still completely me and not at all me.

 

The kids are screeching, and before I can shush, a lady with red glasses yells at us. I assume she’s telling us our kids are too loud, or that we’re outrageous failures as parents, but I honestly can’t hear a word she’s saying. I just see her angry red lips moving and her narrowed eyes beneath the red glasses. Her husband stares at us like a principal. We gather the kids and try and separate them in hopes of dampening their volume.

At twenty, I had short, purple-tinted hair, a beautiful little loft apartment, my parents’ full financial support, and I was miserable. Which seems impossible, because I was so free. So much of what I struggle with now comes from being so tethered, so owned, so consumed by our kids. I want to tell Dorota about how lonely I was, and how I used to chain smoke on the roof of my apartment while scribbling out lyrics to songs no one would ever hear. How I didn’t know how to make friends. I want to tell her about the beautiful little loft with candles everywhere, and how I couldn’t enjoy it because I was so completely untethered, so alone in that big, wet city. But I can’t say any of this because the music fills up the air and I’m trying to divide my attention between the sweet sounds and keeping my kid from making the lady with glasses yell at us again.

 

It is after nine now and Max is fading fast. He morphs from the bright-eyed, excited kid who gets to stay out past bedtime with mom, to a wiggling, pushing, irrational version of himself. Every time I try and exchange a sentence or two with Dorota, he karate chops the space between us. The sky has turned navy and the band is finally playing their hit song, “Down in the Valley.” I pick Max up and he is wriggly and yelling, “I don’t like being a kid!” I want to tell him to enjoy it, please, please enjoy it, because it feels like just yesterday that all I had to do was ride my bike in wide loops around my neighborhood, and today my to-do-list is as long as those loops.

 

Instead, I close my eyes and the music sinks into my blood and I breathe. I just want to swallow the song, but Max is kicking at my shins and I can only give the song a sliver of my attention. And at the same time, I am a little bit afraid to really let the music in because it might hurt, it might leave me restless, the way music sometimes does.

 

I look behind us for a moment. Three girls huddle close, singing along. They are seventeen or eighteen or nineteen. One has her eyes closed, and her face looks so content, so smooth, so blissful. I release Max to the soft grass. He says, “Mama, look at all the stars!” I smile wide and stare at the lady with the red glasses, daring her to complain.

 

Then I close my eyes and decide to let this be enough, this smallest moment of stars and violin and curving words: I am on my way back to where I started. The words make me want to drive and drive and drive, all the way back to Seattle, all the way back to twenty. So free.

 

I open my eyes, and there between my friend and I, is my son. His face is so beautiful in the diffused glow of light from the stage, and for just this second he is smiling and flirting with my friend. I look over at Iza, who is falling asleep in Patrick’s arms. Her eyelids flutter like Violet’s do when she’s falling asleep, and I think when was the last time I saw Max’s eyelids flutter like that? And I think of how less lonely I am now than when I was twenty, how much I’ve opened to love, and maybe right now— and maybe forever— love takes the place of all that freedom. That freedom that was so endless that I didn’t know where or how to start carving a life from it. I pick Max up again. He is so heavy, but I wonder if he will remember this, if he will be imprinted by this moment of music and mom, and that thought lifts him up, makes him buoyant.

 

And there’s that song, oh god, that song, and I feel like I might burst because this moment has to be enough, it is all we have, and so it is enough. I think of that twenty year old me and this almost forty year old me, and how we both have something the other aches for. The warm anchor of my son and the weightlessness of the music both fill my chest and I think thank you, thank you.

 

 

The Dress

“Do you want that little sundress for Vi? The one you wore in Spain when you were little?” my mom asked yesterday morning.

My mom disappeared into the basement for several minutes, then came back holding it. The small white dress boasted Spanish looking red and green embroidery and was sprinkled with pink and yellow flowers. Knowing how toddlers roll and knowing how messy I am, I found it hard to believe that I ever actually worn it, and that it survived for nearly four decades, pristine. It didn’t feel like it had been mine.

We wrangled Violet into the dress, and she prettily strutted around my parents’ condo. I looked at my mom, who has olive skin and dark hair and eyes like I do. We watched Violet and I pondered, as I often do, how this little sparkly little blue-eyed, paper-white skinned, reddish-haired girl could have sprouted from my body.

Last week, when my son was sick, I laid next to him on the couch. He was a bit sour smelling from throwing up, and he was sweaty and vacant-eyed. But when I snuggled in with him, my arms sticky from his feverish skin, I thought we belong to each other.

I don’t feel always feel the same way with my daughter. Maybe it is because she’s younger and we haven’t had the time together that Max and I have. Maybe it is because Max and I braided tightly together through the hell of his infancy. Or because Max and I are both stubborn, intense and sensitive. Or because he looks so much like my brother.

Maybe it was because Violet was a surprise. I found out I was pregnant on April Fool’s Day. At first, it did not feel like a happy surprise or a zany turn of events. The timing felt bad, and the hormone surge of the new pregnancy sucked me into a depression. Combined with the constant nausea and exhaustion while trying to take care of a spirited two-year-old, the pregnancy felt like something I couldn’t survive.

I considered ending the pregnancy. Every morning when I woke up and the nausea and thick wall of depression met me, I said to my husband, “I can’t do this.”

He said, “You can.”

I said, “I feel like I can’t and I need you to be okay with that.” He would hug me and try to meet me where I was, but if you have ever experienced depression, you know that people can’t really meet you where you are. It is a foggy, shrouded place that spouts a constant stream of distorted thoughts. You look like yourself, but inside is the worst version of you, lost and dark.

Whenever I drove by Planned Parenthood, I would stare at the building and wonder if I would be walking through those doors the next week.

I told my therapist about my doubts. “Thirty-seven-year old married people don’t get abortions,” I said.

“They do. They absolutely do. Far more often than you would think,” she said. She had sat in her chair talking with clients for many, many years, and when she said that, I believed her.

One day when I drove by Planned Parenthood and stared, I thought but what if this is my little girl? I let my fingertips touch my belly, imagining the small seed of a baby instead of a detonating hormone bomb. I made some phone calls and got medication for the nausea and depression.

I survived.

We survived.

 

When she was born, the midwife placed her on my chest. “Is she still a girl?” I asked.

I had always imagined a daughter. She would have my dark features and be sensitive and creative. She was tiny and light in my arms. She had pale skin and blue eyes. We took each other in.

 

In the first weeks of her life, we had a terrible health scare with Violet. I will write about it someday. The scare made me feel she was even more slippery, less mine. I thought that perhaps I just didn’t deserve her, since I once contemplated not bringing her into being.

 

On the Fourth of July, Violet woke up in full diva mode. She is usually independent with an easy laugh. Her eyes hold a hint of mischief. She is one of those bright spirits who it just feels good to be around. But yesterday, she started squawking demands and displeasure from the moment I pulled her from her crib.

We headed to Peaks Island to be with Scott’s family for the day. Max pranced around outside with his cousins all day long. Violet clung to me. She took quick breaks to demand cantaloupe and snap peas and cookies. I sat with her, feeling both delighted and agitated to be so tethered.

The kids’ uncle James gave us a ride back to Portland on his lobster boat. Max got to steer the boat for a few minutes, and he looked proud and wide-eyed. Violet was terrified. I held onto her tight. I had a quick dark thought of her slipping into the water. I locked my arms around her. She was still wearing my dress which was now her dress, and I felt the soft fabric and her softer skin and I thought I will never let you go. And as soon as I thought it, I knew it was a lie. I will let her go a thousand times throughout her life.

As we rushed through the glittering sea, I tried to swallow the moment. Surrounded by family, still young and lovely. My boy, proud and awed. My husband, strong and handsome, glued to Max to keep him safe. Such a good father. My girl in my arms, the surest place she knows. Just for the moment, they were all mine.

 

 

 

Girls just want to have...

Every so often, I send my daughter to daycare for an extra day to give myself a little more time.

"So, what are you going to do today?" my husband asks.

"Oh, work, tidy up the house, pay some bills," I respond.

"You sure know how to have a good time," he says.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this issue.

Why do I find it so hard to just relax or do something fun? Some of it is probably predisposition. Most of us with tendencies toward anxiety and depression aren't the carefree, go with the flow types. Some of that is that we think too much, which I believe is counterintuitive to fun.

Some of it is lack of time. Between taking care of young kids, work, and fitting in the self-care activities I require to maintain an even keel, there's not a lot of time left over.

Watching my kids is a good cue for me. My son is happiest when he's prancing around singing and playing air guitar or drums, or when he's outside running around. Basically, when he is fully in his body, engaged in activities pleasurable to him.

In my mind, I have this video loop born of American media and culture: fun is amusement parks and bungee jumping, travelling to exotic places, shopping with my lady friends. With the exception of travel, I do not enjoy or aspire to any of these things.

I like to dance and read. Listen to music. Going to the movies. Like my son, I like activities where I'm present in my body and my brain takes a break. A huge contrast to what I'm usually doing, which at a given moment might be trying to unload the dishwasher while fielding demands from the kiddos and checking Facebook (where it certainly appears as if everyone is having more fun than me!) on my iPhone.

Sometimes, when life is the busiest, it helps to add something to the mix, even though it's counterintuitive.

What do you do to add fun to this brief, beautiful, bizarre life?