How I Came to be Attached: Ch. 2

So how did I get here? As with most things, change didn't start with a bang and a flash of light. That would have been easier in some ways, but how many of us have that story? I started reconsidering the way I'd always planned to raise my baby--the way I'd spent my afternoons in high school and college raising other people's babies--when there was something tiny, smaller than a lentil growing inside of me. People are always saying how you shouldn't raise a baby by a book but I needed books, direction, some kind of plan. For those of you who have been pregnant and taken stock of your life in that particular way, you already know what I'm talking about. You go through a process of dreaming, fantasizing about you and your baby in that rocking chair then you watch "Bringing Home Baby" and you freak out.

Just kidding (although that show is a bit of horror movie packaged in a chocolate box).

The more I read, the more I questioned what I'd seen and what already seemed "obvious"--nurseries, bottles and cribs. I think the cracks really started to appear when I read Happiest Baby on the Block and Dr. Karp's idea that newborn babies are happiest in scenarios that feel like the womb. They want to be tightly held together, they want skin, lots of skin, they want the smells and sounds of mommy talking, walking around the apartment, her heart beating close to their cheek as they nurse. All of this made sense to me. Why wouldn't babies feel safest in an environment that mimicked their old home? Why wouldn't they need a gradual transition?

After that, I suppose it was just a slippery slope into attachment parenting land. Once you decide that you're going to try and see things from a munchkin's perspective, the obvious falls apart. Here's what I used to believe and preach all over town:

• Babies cry. It's just what they do.
• You have to teach your child to self-soothe--it's an essential, fundamental skill that is best learned young.
• Teaching your child to sleep on their own is a gift they will thank you for for the rest of their lives.
  

While my baby grew from the size of a lentil to a chickpea to a fuzzy peach I read and I read. My sister directed me to the Sears family library and the cracks grew into gaps that couldn't be glued shut. I questioned whether babies slept in cribs instead of arms because it was safer or because the middle class had expanded and so had people's houses. I questioned whether crying was really the same as self-soothing. I questioned why it was so important to everyone to wean exactly at one year--earlier was failing and later was just plain weird. More than anything, I wanted to know how all these parenting norms had become so rigid, so certain, so singular. Where was cultural difference? Where was personality? Where was regional variance?

Of course, these differences existed but the norms, the "how to" books and the parenting magazines—in fact, public space--largely did not reflect it. You couldn't say in a restaurant that you were planning to breastfeed between two and three years. You couldn't describe a nursery without a crib. You couldn't find a bed rail for your family bed that didn’t contain strong words about the ills of infant co-sleeping (although explain to me why these same bed rails were offered for queen and king size beds?) In other words, the options out there were not really presented as options: there was the right way--the obvious way--and then things only espoused by the unsound, the obsessive, the unenlightened mother.

Except of course for Sears and Pantley and the other warm attachment voices. Sears reminded me that attachment style parenting is not some new, outrageous invention but rather a philosophy based on the oldest of days and most traditional of mommas; a time before womb-noises mps3's and vibrating bassinets. It enlightened me about global practices—most of which include some kind of baby-wearing and tight sleeping arrangements. It helped me see that attachment parenting is what most mommas do if someone isn't telling them not to. There is nothing instinctual about cribs and bottles--they are learned behaviors. Rocking, nursing, responding to cries--these are our instincts.

Tired everywhere

Today I can't talk about attachment parenting. I am tired everywhere.

I can't talk about my poetry. Take the lot and burn them in the back.

Today I have my cup of tea and this one thought:

I have my life over there
my life that caravans made then went on their way,
and here I have my life as my bread's worth
and my questions about a destiny a passing present
tortures, and I have a beautiful chaotic tomorrow
~Mahmoud Darwish, (trans. Fady Joudah) "We Walk on the Bridge", from The Butterfly's Burden

How I Came to be Attached: One of Many, Many Chapters

Since starting this blog, I've been trying to write this story of how we came to be attached, what it has meant for us, cost us and how deeply it has shaped us as a family. The more I have tried to write it, the more impossible it seems to write. First, because I don't want to be judgmental or seem like I think I have all the answers. I really, truly, don't. Parenting is a bit like faith--there is the stuff you know to be true without any reservations, the stuff you choose to believe in even though you can't prove it, and then also some other stuff in a corner that you don't quite know where to put or how to face and so it just sits there in your living room, unaccounted for.

The other reason I think I'm having trouble getting this down coherently is that my views on parenting are big and circular with tendrils curling off into all these other bits of life and identity and ethics. I don't know where to start because it is all mixed together, in the same story, of me, and my out-of-sorts-edness with the middle class American world I live in.

So please don't ask me to start at the beginning. I'll just start with where I am, right now, on my couch in my pyjamas on a Saturday afternoon while Chad and Munch-Munch take much-needed naps, and church bells ringing into the fog outside.

Attachment Parenting started out as something I considered doing a little bit of and now it is everywhere in my house and no longer really a choice. AP has become necessary. We own three carriers and one stroller we rarely use. Why? Because MM refuses to be in there for more than a few minutes, just like he 's refused the swing, the crib, the playpen, and even the exersaucer. He refuses babysitters, he refuses to sleep in a carseat, he refuses long drives, and basically all other scenarios that involve him being alone or seperated from us for long periods of time (translation: more than 15 minutes). Our parenting style has taught MM beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is one of us. He has a voice and an opinion in our family.

Of course, when I say I have no choice in the matter what I really mean is that we've already made up our minds, absolutely, on a couple of things and now there's no going back. We've decided, for example, that we're not going to cry it out. I can't remember how we decided this. I think it was more of a cumulative effect--like after soldiers die in a war you have to make sure that it meant something, that it wasn't for nothing. That's how we feel about the difficult nights of missed sleep that we've already been through. If we give up now, those sacrifices wouldn't count. We've also decided we're going to move slowly and at his pace. This doesn't mean that we don't try to keep things moving--like I've tried slipping out of the bed while he was asleep at night to see if he would notice, to find out whether or not he still really needed to co-sleep. If our plan to move forward doesn't work, we pause and reevaluate.

Once you make those two decisions, you realize that everything is different and you're all alone. Nobody understands why you can't attend a good friend's bbq two hours away. Nobody understands what you can't go out to dinner in the evening after MM is asleep. Nobody understands why you and your baby are both in pieces because he was crying in the nursery and nobody came to get you.

All of this is very hard. I mean, you're already doing something incredibly difficult, almost impossible, that requires every last ounce of your resources and all you want is for someone to give you a big hug and a warm cup of tea and tell you it's going to be all right, you're all going to make it. But you never get that. Instead you get weird questions about your sex life, dismissive comments about being "that type of woman," and a whole lot of anger from people who are offended that you're not crying it out. If it is this hard being an attachment momma in San Francisco, the No. 9 attachment city in the US, I can only imagine how the rest of you are holding up out there. Courage, mommas! You really can do this.

Sacramento, the city of no delivery food

While most San Franciscans like to vacation in places like Hawaii and Tijuana (or at the very least, Lake Tahoe) the husband and I decided--after much google-ing and yelp-ing--that Sacramento would be the perfect place for our very first family vacation. Main draws: easy on the wallet, hot, and a short enough car ride away that Munch Munch wouldn't cry. So off our little family set on Tuesday with our bedrail, sunscreen and three enormous smiles. And of course, way too much luggage. I'm what you might call an obsessive-compulsive packer--I can't help it, I try to limit myself to a simple, well-appointed list but I find myself shoving extra sweatshirts and emergency food supplies into shopping bags as we're going out the door, running back upstairs with the car running for second and third pairs of back-up sunglasses, insect repellant, band-aids, I could go on...

Overall, we had a pretty good time. Our goals: keep expectations low, rest up, eat lots of food. We only fought for part of one day, which I think was pretty good. Something about not screwing up the take-out order and some stuff about how the other person was raised, you know, the usual stuff.

Best things about Sacramento

1. You can stay in a 5-star hotel in Sacramento for the same price as a Best Western in SF
2. Breakfast pizza. Sounds crazy but it's actually awesome. Bacon, eggs, cheese and pizza crust, yum!
3. Not a single person offered me a single piece of advice
4. They're not above air conditioning
5. Serious fish and chips for serious eaters
6. Arnold lives there

Worst things about Sacramento:

1. Nobody freakin delivers food. Nobody. Can a nursing momma get some Chinese? Thai? Anything?
2. Most of the city shuts down by 5 o'clock
3. There are only about ten things to do and some of those are a stretch
4. Besides Arnold, I'm not sure if anybody lives there
5. Maybe a little too hot

Anyhow, glad to go and glad to come home. Already back in long sleeves and wooley socks, tucked into bed with my little vacationed-out boy.