Pneumonia and social networks, preliminary findings

I'm two weeks in to my third round of childcare-induced pneumonia. How am I feeling? I am fine while I quarantine myself inside my apartment, padding around in my socks from bedroom to living room and back again. I am especially fine when my babysitter isn't out sick for three days. But this time around the circuit, I decided to conduct an experiment. And I think I'm ready to present some preliminary findings. They are not very hopeful.

The night the sentence was handed down, I started by texting a friend while I was in the pharmacy waiting for my antibiotics prescription to be ready. Oh no! she said. Is there anything I can do? Well, at that very moment, not really. She did offer a couple of times since then, and I made several attempts to get her and her very tightly-scheduled toddler son to come for a playdate with me and Abe, but no dice.

I then decided to appeal to Facebook. I have a number of friends on Facebook. Not in the thousands, mind you, but a nice comfortable number, and a good mix of local and remote people. Now, the fact is, I tend to keep to myself, and I married someone who tends to keep to himself, and together we are a couple of loners. I've tried numerous times in my life to insinuate myself into a community, to the point that I become an indispensable part of one, and my presence is solicited and I'm missed when I'm not there. Other than my work life (where I was being paid to be there, and had a job to perform), I can't say I have succeeded at this. Combine with this the fact that being a stay-at-home mom is isolating in itself, particularly when you still have kids who nap and it is so hard to sync schedules with the parents of other napping children, and you start to see one possible source of the stress that has bounced me back to the province of the sick for the third time in as many years. So I started posting on Facebook. Pithy stuff. Gritty realism. Awww, look what kid x said stuff. Even a bald-faced attempt to bribe someone to come over and make granola for me, since I had my mind set on a particular recipe, but no energy to make it happen. What was I hoping for? What was the desired outcome? It has to do with community.

For the past two years, I have been involved with the PTA at Jonah's school. I have taken on the role of coordinator for getting meals to families who have had new babies. I have arranged dozens meals for families, many of whom I don't know and haven't even met, all because we had the same thing happen when Abe was born, and I was so bowled over by the gesture I decided to make it my job to ensure every family who had a baby had the same opportunity to feel cared for. I'm friends with a lot of parents from Jonah's school on Facebook. So, naturally, I thought some of those folks might step forward with offers of meals, playdates, or just say that they could bring Jonah home from school until I was well. I even asked to relocate a PTA meeting to my home because of my pneumonia. Everyone came. No one brought anything. I served them tea.

One person did get it. One. She made us some meatballs that were so delicious I thought I might cry while I was eating them. In fact I think I did. And she said what I was hoping to hear from others, that given how many others I have helped, I deserved a turn to get some help too. In the interest of full disclosure, and lest I understate the facts, another friend brought banana bread (thoughtfully using honey instead of sugar, because of my new self-imposed dietary restriction). And more recently another friend brought a lasagna. Neither of these people learned about my plight on Facebook, however.

Josh and I are traveling tomorrow, a trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate my 40th birthday, and we're leaving the kids behind. I'd like to think that perhaps wires got crossed, messages got muddled, and people think I am just fine now since I'm going on a trip, and that this is why no one else came forward. Yesterday, with the sitter here, I ventured out to find some new warm-weather clothes. I was only in the store for a few minutes when my chest tightened and I thought I might pass out. It felt like a panic attack, but more likely was the start of a relapse. I've had several hot flashes since then, which I have learned are just as dangerous as a temperature actually registering on the thermometer (I didn't have one, not once, this whole time). I am seeing the doctor for a followup this evening, and I'm petrified that things have taken a bad turn and that I won't be able to travel after all.

I'm taking this lack of response way harder than I should, I realize, but perhaps that's because of a very low blow from my mom this morning on the phone. She isn't nearby and is currently incapacitated, so all she has been able to do is field my anguished and stressed out phone calls this whole time. Today, she snapped and said that this is all because I've chosen to live in New York, and having made that choice, I have to deal with it. This is the first time she's been quite this insensitive. I get that she's frustrated from not being able to help me, but it felt like a wanton bridge-burning to me. She apologized, because my father yelled at her for saying it, but she hasn't called back to make things right.

I want to believe there is not some seismic shift going on here, that this is just the result of pneumonia which is the result of negligent care-taking of myself (and considerable stress), but I really feel like things have changed. I suddenly feel no particular allegiance to the community I've tried to make myself a part of for the past few years, since there seems to be a lack of recognition that being sick is just as valid a reason for helping as having a new baby in the house. Or, is it that people don't understand the extent of pneumonia? That they don't realize if your lungs aren't functioning 100%, you are simply fucked? I can be "feeling" "better" and still be up shit's creek in terms of my job as a mom. I don't have a consumptive cough or any other outward symptoms right now, other than looking like crap and inability to walk up a flight of stairs without hyperventilating.

I better stop as Jonah is coming home from school soon (I had my daily scramble to arrange someone to walk him home). I don't know if anyone's following this blog regularly anymore, but if so, and your name starts with A., I know that you've had pneumonia recently too, and I'm sorry I wasn't more proactive about helping you, as far away from me as you live. I could have sent food, could have sent some dehydrated soup packets or some astronaut ice cream or even just a book for you to read, and I didn't. I'm really sorry.

Pneumonia, round three

Here we are again. Me, one good lung, one sick one. I am starting to be able to measure out my life as a mom in the intervals between bouts with pneumonia. The worst one remains the late October 2008 one, the one that landed me in the ER and then forced me to recuperate for a full month. The night of the presidential election I lay in bed, listening to mayhem erupt across Brooklyn, crying (because I couldn't join in, not only because I was sick, but because I didn't believe in or vote for the winner... or the loser, for that matter). Jonah was 22.5 months at the time, and I remember how upset he was at first that I couldn't pick him up, couldn't go out to play with him. Suddenly he had an Invalid Mama. But then he remembered how good it was to snuggle up and read books, and all was OK.

Seventeen months later, May 2010, I also had a three month old, so I guess that explains why I hadn't been paying attention to the cold that had been festering for weeks. Bam! Back to bed. At least it was welcome relief from the sheer exhaustion of being a mom to two. And I could still nurse Abe. I can't really remember how Jonah took it, but he was in school at that point, so shielded from my incapacity a little more.

Fast forward twenty more months, and here we are again. I spent the first week of the new year full steam ahead with diet plans, giving up sugar, and somehow neglecting the cold that had been dogging me since before the holidays. I was busy, of course - birthday and Chanukah celebrations, thinking and talking about sugar in lieu of eating it, finding ways to make the scale creep lower and lower. Then one morning last week, after a short walk in the neighborhood, I found myself much more out of breath than I should have been. I had no fever, no pain, no elaborate coughing fits. I went to the doctor that afternoon. The nurse hooked up a gizmo to the computer and fitted a disposable tube into it. An illustration of a leafy tree appeared on the screen. I inhaled, then blew through the tube to try to blow all the leaves off the tree. Then I tried again. The nurse clucked with her tongue. I tried another time.

Those fucking leaves! My fucking lungs! I didn't even need to see the doctor to know what I was dealing with. The protracted period of time she spent listening to me breathe just sealed the deal. Again she handed down a sentence: rest. This time, though, I had to demand an explanation. After all, I'd gotten the pneumococcal vaccine after the first time. (The second time, she explained, "Oh, I didn't say that would keep you from GETTING pneumonia. But it keeps you from DYING from it.") The doctor asked if I was under stress. Who, me? Nah... Stress?

Stress is something that happens to other people! Me, I just get pissed off and yell a lot. Me, I just harangue my kid for having sensory issues and not always being able to pay attention when I talk to him, instead of committing to finding ways to work with him, as his teachers and therapists do. Me, I just yell at my nearly-two year old for climbing onto the kitchen table and grabbing the matches, instead of moving them to a high shelf once and for all. And I can't possibly be stressed out, because everyone I meet tells me how very calm I seem.

Yes, I said to the doctor. I said "yes" to stress. I got the name of a social worker to call once I'm well (I'm not going to stress out about the fact she hasn't returned my call. Not yet.) I'm going to try acupuncture to improve my "lung chi." I wasn't aware my lungs had that. Perhaps that is my problem. I'm going to try to remember to take astragalus supplements to boost my lung chi. I'm NOT going to go a solid week forgetting to take my multivitamin because I'm preoccupied with not eating sugar.

The kicker is that in a little less than two weeks, the supposed cure for all this stress is coming, and I hope to be well enough to take it (doctor said it would be fine to go if I promise to just sleep and lie on the beach, which are things I can enjoy, but not for five solid days!). Josh and I are taking a trip to Puerto Rico, our first ever trip without the kids, and the final nail in the coffin of my 40th birthday celebrations. My mother in law is staying with the kids, with our babysitter providing backup. I am worried that the stress of leaving the kids and of wondering what may not be getting done because of the inexperience of the caregiver is going to overwhelm our trip.

I have about ten days to get past this.

Older and wider

This weekend I stopped nursing Abe. He's a very verbal 16-month-old, but somehow he hadn't yet thought to shake his head at a boob pointed at him (only at bedtimes and wakings, at this point), so this weekend I just kind of stopped offering. He could not have cared less. I should feel grateful for this - I'm sure I actually am grateful, that this won't be some long, protracted goodbye that will make us both crazy. Instead I am wistful at the end of the useful life of my breasts, which were never much before I had kids, and as such kind of liked the limelight that nursing afforded.

But what I'm not-liking even more than the end of nursing is the fact that all vestiges of an excuse for eating poorly are now out the window. I stopped dieting last November, ten pounds short of my goal, and managed to maintain that loss... until now.

It's summer - what the hell am I doing eating this much?!

Mon semblable - mon frère!

This is how my mind functions (or malfunctions) these days - perhaps a sign of incipient senility? I think of literary quotes that are just barely relevant, like the title of this post, taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur" ("To The Reader").

Anyway, I think of it because Jonah each day seems more and more like me. He reminds me of my four year old self. Last night while we were reading at bedtime, he asked how to MAKE a book. I got all excited, and since he has today and tomorrow off from school, I decided it would be a great project. Of course, I made a book at his age, but mine was pure autobiography, drawings of my family members, my house, etc. Jonah's project is of a far more grandiose scale. It is called Coney Island Rides, and so far there are two pages of illustrations and one half-page of text I transcribed. I am worried he has lost steam, now, and won't finish the book. I have such a strong need to staple the pages together and present it to him as the prize it is. To invest it with the meaning that my mother did for my small book, so long ago, to assess it as a valuable object - something worth saving, something worth keeping away from a marauding younger brother.

Marauding younger brother is lucky he is so damn cute. Today, extreme heat kept us house-bound for most of the day, and Abe learned how to climb up and stand on the piano bench, and also learned that from the ground he can reach the piano lid to open it and (precariously) close it. Eek. Time to find the keys that lock the piano. Not sure what to do about the bench, though. He's been unbelievably lucky with all the climbing he does, but that luck will run short at some point. Right? Or does he have an angel on his shoulder, as I feel I sometimes do?

The aggravation of having a real toddler (Jonah seems to have been an overly-cautious impostor of one) is tempered by watching my boys play together. They erupt in silly sounds, chase each other around the house, and just generally delight in one another's company. It makes my heart happy, even on an exhausting day like today. I get to the evening feeling solid, competent, yea, even optimistic.

Or maybe it was just that second shower.

Melodica

Last week I conducted an experiment. I decided not to yell at Jonah, at all, no matter how much he was annoying me. It didn't necessarily shorten the length of his tantrums, or eliminate the irritants altogether, but at the end of the day I felt so much better about myself. Like I actually deserve to be in this job. Now, that's a feeling I'd like to have more often than not. Especially in the face of an increasingly risk-taking Abe (latest trick: standing up on the seat of a riding toy), I need to cultivate more calm.

Of course, by Saturday morning I was pretty tired of keeping it under wraps and I did do a little yelling. But then I decided to take the afternoon and have an outing with Jonah, to the transit museum, and it was awesome (even more so because we did not take Abe, who it would have been a nightmare to keep track of there). He stretched out our visit to two long hours, revisiting each bus multiple times, looking for the "perfect" subway train (one where you can go from car to car without getting off), and even taking great interest in the photo books of old buses (which all appeared to be self-published by a bus freak from New Jersey). We saw a birthday party set up there and it looked pretty nice. Hmmmm.

Josh needed to work on a couple of songs his mom asked him to play at her father's 99th birthday party, on Sunday, in Allentown, PA. One of the songs was, "Young at Heart." On a whim, I grabbed my melodica - a pseudo-instrument that looks and sounds like the spawn of a clarinet and an accordion - and figured out the melody. Saturday night, after the kids went to sleep, we went out to the front stoop (so as not to wake them), and worked on it until we had it. OK, maybe that sounds twee. Maybe it was. But the experience of getting together with my husband and doing something fun with music - that did not involve the kids - was so great. I hope we will manage it again soon.

Plimpton

Abe is walking now, still raising his fists triumphantly for balance. He's a prodigious talker, too, so there is a sense of importance in everything we tell him now - only words that matter! Jonah is finally shedding his bad nervous habits (picking open sores until they re-bleed, chewing on already-chapped lips). I am only nursing three times a day, hoping to drop the naptime feed soon, then the bedtime one, and then say goodbye to nursing altogether. My cycle just started up again, after two years' hiatus (my body takes breastfeeding VERY seriously, it seems - same thing happened last time), so without that benefit - and with Abe so slappy and pinchy at times - it just seems silly to keep at it.

Which leaves me wondering what my next move is. A few months ago, I was sure I'd throw my energy into inventing a new baby product - one that every set of new parents in Brooklyn felt sure they couldn't do without, would have to buy new, and could never be recalled. I checked relevant books out of the library! I did a cursory patent search! I found the exact product I wanted to invent (but made for dogs)! Annnnnnnnnd, that idea went up on the dusty shelf. The shelf that has no end. The shelf holding the file box of my collected works of poetry. And prose. And my career trajectory as a librarian. And and and.

I am feeling restless. It's spring, after all, a time of renewal. I need a bit more than a hardboiled egg, though. I find myself thinking about George Plimpton - what accomplishment of his springs immediately to mind when you see his name? It's amusing, since it could be any one of a number of them. (Probably, since you weren't there, not including the time he spilled a Maker's Mark on Josh, in the darkness of a Paris Review reading held in the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, the summer before 9/11 shuttered that phenomenal space for good). I'd love to do that. Be that. Become known for any number of things, not just one thing.

Am I gearing up for a full-blown mid-life crisis come December? Perhaps. Yet I can also remember feeling just about this way when Jonah started walking, talking, and generally not needing me as an infant needs me. I can remember the first time I headed out for some alone time after leaving my job of a decade, Jonah with his favorite sitter, and it being a freezing cold, rainy day. That day, I felt I needed to do something that mattered. Like personal performance art, maybe, but for my consumption only. I took the train to Chinatown, and wandered through a flower market (it was around Chinese New Year), listening to an incongruous thing on my iPod: the Glenn Gould radio piece, The Idea of North, which I had heard about years before and had just purchased on CD. I crossed back into Brooklyn via bridge listening to the end of it.

I took a self-portrait with my cell phone that day, which I just discovered I didn't save. Too bad. I recall my eyes lost in my face, trying to smile but looking touched by madness. Wrapped in an unfamiliar solitude, suddenly adrift with time off I didn't quite know how to use, since the "work" I was to go back to was amorphous in the way that childcare sometimes seems.

I've been unemployed for so long (in the conventional sense) that my little bits of time off no longer feel like opportunities to "work." I wouldn't know what work I'd like to do. Yet at some point in the not so distant past, I was going to libraries, to sit and work on drafts of poems. Once or twice, I was even officially toting a laptop with me, and cooking magazines, working on a freelance project that paid for our weeklong summer beach rental.

But that was eons ago. Now I'm mired to the ankles in mental sludge. And it is time to pull my feet out of this muck, hose them down, and set to work finding my inner Plimpton. No matter how many drinks get spilled.

(Speaking of which, I'm organizing a drink with other moms on Mother's Day night. If I haven't already invited you, and you want to come, let me know.)

Just wow.

I've really fallen off the blog-wagon, haven't I? Not that there were too many people out there to notice. If you are still there, thank you.

Abe is now 13 months, and not walking yet, but poised to do so, perhaps soon. Yesterday, during music class, he stood for a full 30 seconds and even did some deep knee bends (which for him passes as dancing) before tumbling down. The sitter is with him today, and I was worried he'd start walking while I wasn't here to see it. I don't think he did (or else she's keeping it from me).

Now that he's had the full benefit of Mama for 13 months, I'm ready to stop nursing. (I was going to say hang up my hat, but I don't think a hat will ever hang from this pair again...) Yesterday I challenged myself not to nurse during music class, and it went fine. Except for the long, possibly longing, look from Abe when I diverted him to clap along to the song we were singing. I remembered being in the very same place with Jonah, making the same decision, and it was hard not to cry, and even harder not to just give in.

However, this morning I was reminded why I need to end this. Abe is a delight, but he is no longer a sweet cuddly baby 100% of the time. In fact, he's a kicker, a swatter, a slapper. During the day this is merely annoying. At 6 a.m. it makes me hate him, momentarily.

Now that he's getting the hang of sleeping a whole night (after so many rounds of sleep training, I have lost count), I am aiming to cut back on the nursing. I need to be methodical about it, but I can't seem to get a handle on how many times he is nursing these days. Poor Abe. He gets changed on our bed, his clothes are housed in a bookshelf that I only half-emptied for his benefit. It's as though we weren't really planning on having another kid, and as though we have only reluctantly made room for him.

He is asserting himself through food lately - last night he plowed through an entire turkey burger while I was preoccupied with his more fidgety, finicky older brother. When I go food shopping lately I am shocked at how much more we CONSUME as a family.

Older brother has been delightful lately, perhaps owing to quieter nights from Abe. He sleeps until at least 7 a.m. these days, a great help to him during the long school day. And he's going to take a class at an acrobatics studio in the neighborhood. I can't wait to watch him do a forward roll or a handstand against the wall. He needs to learn how to transcend his body, in a way that I don't think I ever did. Last night before bed he was hopping around naked on his bed while Josh and I watched him, amused. He told us how much he loved us, and how happy he was that we all live in the same house together. Then he said, "I hope you don't fall down in dirty mud." So thoughtful.

My body is in dire need of transcendence these days. This morning I woke up achy all over. I daydream about Feldenkrais classes, but never seem to make time to go to them. I consider exercising, then wind up on the couch in my workout clothes eating a brownie during Abe's nap. The imminence of spring has me itching to do something new. I was planning to join a Brazilian percussion troupe, but missed their first rehearsal when Jonah was sick, and now I can't join until they start a new session. Just a bike ride would do me a lot of good. But it needs to stop being FUCKING COLD in order for me to consider it.

Yeah, this is turning out to be a boring read. Sorry.