Category: notes from a house frau

Notes From A House Frau III

RRBB trying out his chair for the first time. He lasted about 10 minutes before getting fussy. My lesson for this week? Appreciating stillness. I have been sitting in this same position, feeding, trying to get SOMEONE to sleep longer than 25 minutes and NOT on me, since noon. A lot of thoughts go through your head, especially when you’re by yourself, and there’s something about stillness, sitting, in one place, for so long that lets your mind wander and wonder.

A couple of friends from work came over yesterday. They brought beautiful presents for the baby. And I got to pass along some of the stuff RRBB has outgrown (he’s out of newborn sizes!) to one friend as she is due in January. It was good to see them, but it was even better to hear about work — it’s everyone’s dream to have time off, paid (albeit the misery that is UI) from work — because I never thought I would miss it as much as I do. It’s not just the routine. The very get-up-and-go and the nature of having something to do each day where there are expectations on you to get there at a certain time and be a certain kind of productive. No, it’s something I realized about myself over the last little while. I am at a place in my career, and yes, I’m actually using that word now, where I truly, honestly and completely love my job. It’s fast-paced, I have great colleagues, and I was doing really interesting work. Work that got me excited and thrilled to go in to the office each day.

But it’s also a blessing to be able to stay home with the RRBB. It’s a different, much harder kind of job, with no fixed schedule and little breathing time, even when you do sit for hours. In the last few, I’ve been resenting the disease a lot, and I think it goes hand-in-hand with my resenting the doctors (as excellent as they are) for all telling me, repeatedly, since the beginning of my pregnancy, that everything would be fine. Funnily enough, everything was so far from fine it’s as if fine is the moon and I am the earth and there’s no hope in hell of us ever colonizing it for human life. Does that even make sense? Probably not, I’m sleep deprived and therefore metaphorically challenged.

All I know is that from the very moment the disease was diagnosed, it started taking things away from me. Dance, my appearance, my sanity at times (the prednisone crazies), and even when it gives something back — like our wonderful RRBB — it takes so much just to get here. My energy, my good health (I was so HEALTHY when I got pregnant; the healthiest I’d been in 15 years!), and now it’s still so angry that it’s even taken away all of the stuff I was looking forward to about having a baby in the first place: birth (don’t mock me; I wanted to experience it) because they didn’t want the stress on my body so up comes the epidural and then the pre-eclampsia put the kibosh on a natural delivery; and now it won’t even calm down long enough for me to feed the baby if I have to take stronger meds because all my levels are going in the wrong direction. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize the disease. To turn it into something separate from me — a Jeckyll to my Hyde (have I got them right?). The devil to my right-shouldered angel. Yet, the still teaches you things. It teaches you to reimagine all of this in a way that’s necessary. They have me on a higher dose of prednisone right now and I’m hoping that’ll kick-start the remission again. By Wednesday, I should know what they’ve all decided but I’ve decided somethings too.

1. I need to go back to restorative yoga.

2. I’m dying to get into a pool for a swim.

3. There are lots of people out there who love me and the RRBB a lot.

4. Blogging is a form of writing so it’s okay if it’s not the novel right now. I’m moving my fingers, forming sentences, and the rest will follow. I am willing to wade through the rejection. The book is worth it. It will eventually get published. I have to believe this, it was my one regret last year when I almost died the OTHER time, you remember, the whole appendix nightmare. All I kept thinking was: “I never published my book.”

5. Every day RRBB gets older, bigger and more experienced. And so do we as parents. These are not small steps.

6. We made it through three weeks in the hospital and more than one near-death experience. And now, weeks later, that seems like a world ago. Time heals. It’s cliched but true.

7. The stillness encourages patience. Patience is something that I could always use more of, and it’s something that only comes when you least expect it.

8. Books are wonderful and necessary to my life. They are worth losing sleep over.

9. Television, not so much.

10. When you come to visit me, please, always bring food — I can barely get dressed in the mornings I’m so exhausted. Having a meal, a snack, a drink, anything, means so much. I can’t even tell you.

That’s all from the House Frau today. No tears.

Oh, and the baby has started smiling. We’ve tried to catch it on the camera but he’s like Snuffle-smile-agus, every time he does it the camera’s either just missed it or he won’t do it again. Sneaky RRBB.

Notes From A House Frau I

Something strange has happened to me now that I am spending so much time at home. I just want to get rid of stuff. Like, all kinds of stuff. I want to clear up, clean out, and reboot. Maybe that’s what happens when you have a near-death experience. You simply want to take all the crap out of your life and symbolically take all the crap out of your system too. It’s been a short weekend to a long week — not a lot of visitors this week, which was good. I really needed to rest, but I am also starting to get bored of being in the house all the time, which isn’t surprising. The other day, we walked to the Dufferin Mall and that was actually my favourite walk of the week. Not because we were in a mall but because we had great conversations along the way and my RRHB made me laugh. In fact, the two of us being at home so much has brought out a lot of patience and heightened sense of humour. There’s a comraderie between us when it comes to the RRBB — there’s patience and understanding, the odd sharp word or misconstrued tone/meaning, but for the most part, it’s been really terrific to have this time together.

Anyway, that’s not the purpose of Notes From a House Frau. I’m trying to find ways of fitting my own life back into this new life we have created. Whether it’s getting a closet back in order or finding a moment to write a new opening sentence to my novel (it was recently rejected by not one but two agents; I’m not giving up — both of their feedback was excellent but I can’t say I’m not disappointed). There has to be a way to balance what I want out of life, all of the things I had planned pre-RRBB and what I know I need to provide for him. Tips, tricks from experienced mom/writers out there?

On the whole, I haven’t found a good moment or a good writing routine yet. Colour me silly for imagining that would be the easiest part of mat leave — that the baby would have to nap sometimes and I’d be all awake and intense and ready to go. Writing for me is an amazingly slow process. I mean, I write quickly, but it takes me a long time to get what I write, well, right. I know the problems with my book and how to fix them, now I just need to find the right house frau routine to work that in with the other more intense things I’d like to do in a day.

It’s amazing how just accomplishing one or two things from your to do list makes you feel like a regular person despite the muddy, foggy loss of true distinction between night and day. Right now baby has those mixed up and therefore so do I — I take my iPad to bed and get email finished at 3 AM. I’ve got a whole whack of projects, knitting projects, getting out my mum’s sewing machine and sharing my writing desk with it, clearing out all kinds of crap I’ve been carrying around for decades. I mean, I don’t need my Nancy Drew books. I’ll never re-read them and RRBB won’t either — as it’s a well known fact in my industry that girls will read boys books but boys won’t do the same, so out they go (to a very good home and a very lovely girl, mind you).

The disease has taken its toll on me in so many ways. At the height of the baby’s fussiness, I sent an email to a friend stating, “How did you do two, TWO!” and she wrote back, “How have you almost died X number of times and survived!” It’s all a matter of perspective. Right now, my world consists of very little sleep, a lot of words bashing around my head, plenty of unread Globe and Mails, and entire bookshelves full of titles I am going to work my way through. I’ve gotten my reading back or, rather, I’ve managed to fit that back into my life, now I just need to find a nook and a cranny for the writing because if I don’t get this book done and dusted this year I might just have to shelve it — and I don’t think I want to do that at all. There’s value there, there’s a book there, it just needs another draft. And maybe an agent willing to work with me to get the book into better shape.

I also would love to start writing articles again. I miss that a lot — I did a lot of it when I worked for Alliance Atlantis, lifestyle-type fluffy pieces on road trips and lipsticks. The first one I would pitch, should I ever pluck up the courage to actually pitch anyone, which so isn’t me, is a bed rest/hospital stay survival guide for high risk pregnancy women. It’s such a hard situation. When I was on the 7th floor of Mt Sinai there were women there for months. I mean MONTHS. Can you imagine spending that much time in a room you have to share with another person or, at the worst, three other people. Walking the same hallways, eating the same poor excuse for food, finding a way to feel human isn’t easy in those situations — everything about it makes you realize just how sick you are, and the implications for your mind when your body is failing are very hard to come to terms with, especially with 52 doctors coming in and out on a regular basis. Somehow, I think it would be a good story for people to read — mine, but I’m not sure how or where it could go.

Anyway, I cleaned out a closet yesterday and it was very rewarding. It added more items to the rolling to do list, which is the greatest organization invention of all time as every intern who ever worked for me knows (I make all of them do them), but I now know where my other Michael Kors strappy sandal is, and that actually felt like an accomplishment. Not that I have anywhere to wear them, but at least they’re a pair instead of being stranded and lost within my own house.

My second favourite photo of RRBB. He’s finally started to semi-enjoy the bath.