Anne Nahm

I’ve hit that strange hormonal crossroads of post-baby.  My smallest child turned 16 months yesterday.  She’s started sleeping a little more reliably, and she’s hit that developmental milestone where she can occasionally entertain herself quietly for fifteen minutes or so.

This is causing me to freak out.  Some tired, beat-down portion of my brain is now occasionally freed up for thoughts beyond caring for another human. Can you feel me?  It’s not a big portion or anything, but some axons are no longer firing on AIR RAID mode anymore.  My hair has stopped falling out.  When a car backfires in the middle of the night, I only wake up gasping for air and half out of bed, instead of finding myself standing above the baby’s crib, arms outstretched, nursing bra unlatched, and leaking milk on my toes.

Of course, the sleeping/entertaining herself combo arrives jaggedly, with two awesome days followed by three nights filled with screaming, or some family wide illness that throws everything into the toilet.

You know that feeling when you go to Vegas and gamble?  And everything is exciting, and sometimes you lose, but you are always thinking about winning on the next game and everything is kind of drunken and magical?  Well, if that feeling was a sock, what I am going through is that sock inside out.  The sock’s evil twin.  El Diablo Legging.

On the good days, I don’t know what to do with myself and all the energy suddenly available.  So I sleep and lie fallow.  The baby can sit in the bathtub and entertain herself while I sit on the toilet with the lid down and read instead of watching her hawkishly or staring at the bathtowels and drooling on myself as I’ve done in months previous.

I’ve read Sookie Stackhouse books like they are crack (possibly doubling the amount I’ve been able to read this year.  Whoo-hoo), and OMIGOD.  After years of being clean, I have gone on a Tetris bender that has left me with claws for hands and twitching in my sleep. Yesterday, I hallucinated the refrigerator landed on the linoleum in the kitchen and the whole floor blinked out of existence.

Of course, the moment I get it into my head to actually do something with all this extra energy, the baby goes on a two day crying jag, or gets shots.  And then I am back in Vegas, watching somebody sweep away the very last of my free time chips that I foolishly laid down on the PLAY TETRIS FOR TWO HOURS square and wishing I had placed those tokens somewhere useful.

Sorry.  I had to leave the writing of this post for a few minutes and go play Tetris.  AM back.

This is the third time I’ve been at this crossroads (what with this being the third kid and all), and I am always stunned at how base and animalistic it is, the time when my body has recuperated enough to get pregnant again*.  Have periods!  Am preoccupied with sexy stuff.  Have noticed guys looking at me – for a while I was completely invisible to the male population (maybe it was my special Amulet of Baby Carriage, or my Sweatpants of Invisibility, but I could have robbed an all male bank and no one would have been the wiser.  Too bad that the brain power needed to come up with this idea arrives just as my physical body seems detectable again.)

It is somewhat unnerving – like despite all the polite society, and me obviously being married and teeming with children, I am wearing a sign that says Womb for Rent:  Inquire Within.  Like somehow this is the opportune time to get me knocked up again, when I haven’t really had a chance to get my wits about me.  Anyway, I get the feeling this is overshare: y/y?  Oh well.

*Oh, I would beat my own uterus with the Detroit section of the Yellow Pages, screaming Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?!? If I thought it would help.

I fell face first into unexpected breastfeeding wank on the internet earlier this week.  Usually, I avoid wank unless it makes me laugh, because that stuff has the unfortunate side effect of making me walk around the house all angry rooster style.

Anyway, from the depths of wank, I discovered something surprising about myself.  I am a militant breast feeder!  Who knew?  All this time, I thought I was a mild mannered and shy nurser, but it turns out?  When someone tries to tell me I am rude if I nurse in public, what I want to do is run outside and throw a breastfeeding parade.  Wheee!  And once I realized this about myself, I kind of had to join the wank fest.

As I was sitting there in front of the computer, with my heart doing flip-flops and my adrenal glands pretty much trying to electrocute me, I typed out my opinion and submitted it to a public forum.  And that is when I realized something had changed in me.

When I was a younger woman, it used to be that I could see everybody’s point of view.  Trying to know what I believed was like looking into a prism of light, with a thousand variations on what could be true, and I could be swayed by a smooth talker with a strong opinion.  But as I typed, all nervous about being contrary, I started to realize that my vision is no longer like a prism.  I know what I believe, and it does not matter to me as much anymore if someone else thinks I’m wrong.

In fact, I was kind of writing from that place, seven years ago, when I had just started nursing.  I remember so vividly going downtown with my ten-day-old infant to get a breast pump.  From what I had read in all those pregnancy books, she should have only had to nurse every two hours.  But right there in the middle of the plaza, my baby started crying.

Sleep deprived, still wearing a giant diaper pad from having given birth, in baggy old maternity pants, I stood in the plaza like a deer in the headlights:  I was ten minutes from my car, the closest bathroom was in Barnes & Noble (which I knew always had a line because there are two stalls and it is the only public bathroom in the plaza) and I was surrounded by people eating and shopping.   The baby crying was like an ice pick in my brain.  People started frowning at me!  And I didn’t have any formula, because I had my boobs. I guess I was a foolish, unprepared new mother.

In the ten days since I had left the hospital with a tiny new person, the only thing I knew for sure was that despite all the books I’d read to prepare, being a new mom was kicking my butt with the things I hadn’t expected.   And here I was, on my first outing (which had been so easy a month ago when I was only pregnant) was resulting in angry stares and no help in sight.  I really, really, really didn’t want to expose my boob in public  – I had spent all my adult life using them as playthings, but I did at least know that breastfeeding was legal, and as embarrassed as I was, I was within my rights and expectations of acceptable public behavior.

As I trudged to an outdoor bench and tried to nurse my baby, next to a trash can and a security guard, I  was too shocked to cry.  In that moment I realized that unless I wanted to nurse in public, I was going to have to a) feed my kid formula or b) stay inside until the kid was done nursing.  There was simply no place to go that was private.  The bathroom suggestion was a joke:  First of all, keeping one of two available stalls occupied for 20 minutes wasn’t going to be looked upon well by anybody.  Second, an industrial strength power flush by the other stall every time it was used wasn’t going to be like a lullaby for the baby.  Third, trying to hold a baby in my arms on a seat with no back and no arms?  Yeah right.  That is physically miserable.  And fourth?  Hello, germs.

My whole future crashed in on me.  How would I handle going to the grocery store if this kid was going to get hungry any time she felt like it?  Would I have to leave my cart in an aisle and go to the parking lot?  What about the other people walking to their cars?  Would they be offended to see me nursing in the front seat with my transparent windows?  What if I wanted to walk in the park?  All these public places, by definition, do not allow much in the way of privacy.

I knew in theory I could pump and bring breast milk with me in public, and I did do that in the beginning.  But the truth about that was that every time my baby cried, my milk let down, and when she didn’t cry, my milk didn’t let down.  Trying to pump before leaving the house (when my kid wasn’t hungry and crying) didn’t work very well, and when my kid was hungry and crying, I fed her instead of pumping (because hello, she was hungry).

It took a lot of trials and errors for me to come to the epiphany: eff it, cut out all that middleman BS you are keeping up to avoid offending perfect strangers and nurse that kid.  It is, after all, what my body is designed to do.  And seven years later, as I was reading through the wank thread, I realized that someone like me might be reading all the anti-public nursing comments and feel alone and embarrassed, like nursing was wrong.  Public shaming is the refuge of dissenters who do not have a legal leg to stand on.  They are hoping you give up what is yours by rights to pacify them.  I am so glad that I am old enough to see this for what it is.

So I had to sign my name that I nursed in public and had (so far) not been burned as witch or… I dunno what else.  Horrified people with the fact that my baby exists on milk that comes from my body?  Maybe I did do that.  I guess they will have to be horrified.  I suppose they may feel obligated to give me a dirty look when I nurse in public.  I am glad if they do – their behavior lets me know what kind of people they are just as my behavior lets them know what kind of person I am.

I don’t feel like I’m breaking with reality, but I do have that spacey feeling lately, like I’m in the back bedroom at a party, and for some reason I’ve tied a necktie around the doorknob and have decided to creep slowly into a strange dark room and swing my free hand through the air until I find my coat.  Don’t worry – I’m tethered!  Necktie!  Just a little spelunking.

I suspect one of the reasons is that the baby is 14 months old now.  A year must be how long it takes my body to recover enough so that it could consider getting pregnant again without losing its damn mind.  You’ll note that I (Me! The one holding the tie) am certainly not considering another pregnancy.  It is simply the biology of my body (that creature in the dark, barking her shin and cursing), finally getting to the place where I am (we are?) no longer (as much of a) sleep deprived lunatic.

Here are some ways my body has decided to let me know it has recovered:

*Periods!
*Leg hair!  Growing like a chia pet.
*Sudden interest in painting my toenails.
*Coffee works a little!  To make me happy (instead of merely keeping me from falling face forward into the carpet).
*Wearing high heels occasionally. And not immediately tripping because whoa! Those ligaments aren’t quite tightened up there yet, Anne.

Also, my brain has been asking me all these Job Interview questions, and I have been sweating it out.  Dude!  I know the right answer.  But when you ask like that, I freeze up.

One of the stupidest and also painful Job Interview episodes this week was while reading this link from Jezebel, which in turn links to the NSFW Playboy online article When Your Breasts Go Out of Style.  I like Jezebel, because I can read something that pisses me off and while I usually point my finger and stutter and then scream into a pillow, usually someone in comments is able to convey what I wanted to say.  But, you know, using words.

So I was looking at Playboy,  I could possibly get my boobs to look like those pictures if I were photographed under water.  Or naked on a space station in zero gravity.

And I know that looking to a spank magazine to feel good about yourself is like falling into the stupid well and complaining about the lack of smarts at the bottom.

But it happened anyway. This Job! Interview! moment: If I am not listed in any category of attractive boobs, do my boobs exist anymore?  Am I attractive?  Or do I need to turn off the lights when I have sex now? I felt so embarrassed that I had been walking around with these curdled milk type boobs that are clearly past their 20 year-old expiration date.

And here was kind of the worst part: I’m fairly sure I know intellectually that whether I am attractive or not to someone else, I should still be able to be attractive to myself.  Or really what I mean is: ain’t nobody should take my O-card.  Here, let me try again, since I’m apparently having difficulty owning up to this:  I should be able to continue to have orgasms and sex even if my tits look like prunes and my vagarnicle looks like an old man who has been lost at sea.  There!

But somehow, while trying to locate my 35 year-old boobs in Playboy, I was as lost as I had been in 8th grade – standing in the mall in front of one of those cursed You Are Here! Maps and near tears of desperation, all WTF is Sam Goody?!?!  I will die if I don’t get my hands on some Def Leppard! Except now the thought that was tied to that bewildered feeling this time was I think they can take away my O-card, because as I’m patting myself down to check, I seem to have left it in my other pants pocket.

*I was reading this article about sexual innuendo in the Bible.  It claims that the word “testify” is from the Latin “testis”, which apparently means both “witness” and “testes”.  And, get this!  When you would testify in old times, you would do so by swearing an oath while grabbing the testicle of another.  LOL Old Times!  Although I must admit that if someone grabbed me by the balls and swore something, I’d be inclined to believe them.

*I’ve been seriously considering making a baby book for my youngest kid that is comprised entirely of LOLbabies.  Like LOLcats, only featuring my daughter in candid shots, with poor spelling (LOLbabehz! ), and lots of invisible fight scene captions. There are clearly a lot of good reasons not to do this, but I keep thinking about how funny those ’70′s pictures my mom took of me are, with the powder blue tuxedo ruffle shirt, bowl hair cut and collars that tipped out at my shoulders.  How could I not treat my child to the same type experience?  Plus, as embarrassing as LOLbabehz might be, it’s not like I’m doing something really cruel like giving her a mullet.

*So if you are still here, you must be bored, and so I’m hoping you will take a moment to advise me on something if you have knowledge.  Anybody out there quit their career and start a new business?  If so, any advice to impart?  Why did you do it and how did it turn out?  Good or bad, and also feel free to email if you don’t want it splayed across comments.  What do you need to know to give up a job and start something new?

Yeah, this whole post makes me feel like I’m in this Seinfeld Clip.  Enjoy!

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