Separation Anxiety

I once watched a program on one of those educational channels about a company which is using spider's silk and weaving it together to make bullet-proof vests, among other things. This thin, seemingly delicate and fragile thread, translucent and fine is actually one of the strongest substances on earth. It seems to me that is what a mother's tie to her child is like; even in sleep, when she is at work or at play, whether the child is in the next room or across the country, a thin thread connects her eternally, viscerally and fiercely to her child.
I was reminded of this especially last night. It's no secret that we (and everyone else who has a child of this age, I suspect) have been working on sleep, developing patterns etc., and for us, instilling confidence in the sleep process in general [read: without crying it out]. She'd been doing so wonderfully, often going to sleep on her own and for weeks she was sleeping from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. without a feeding...and then it all fell apart. We really didn't know why, we couldn't figure out what it was. We've been feeding her 'solid' food now for about a month, which she has taken to brilliantly, but it didn't really seem like hunger. If anything it seemed like she was perhaps seeking the comfort of nursing since she was doing less of it due to having real food. But weeks of too much night-waking were really starting to get to me and I was getting exhausted and cranky. I finally decided last night to put her into her own bed at night for the first time. She's been having naps in her room since the beginning, but has never not slept by my side at night - but I was feeling desperate to see if it might help. So, we put her to bed as usual, her ocean waves playing, her gro-bag sleep bag snug around her to keep her warm--and she slept until 6:00 this morning! The only problem? Mommy and Daddy barely slept a wink. I was literally sitting there, staring at the baby monitor, prepared to leap through the walls in case she started mysteriously choking or something. It took forever to fall asleep in the first place, I kept wondering if it was right, if I were rushing her, rushing me. She woke briefly at 2:30 but put herself right back to sleep and I went back too until 4:45 a.m. and when I woke and realized I hadn't heard her I was tempted to panic. I lay awake in the green glow of the monitor's light, thinking crazy thoughts like: "Oh god, maybe she's dead - I should go check on her. No, if she's dead she's already dead and if she's just sleeping you should leave her be and don't screw her up. But what if she suffocated and I didn't hear her? What if she climbed out and fell on her head? What if..." Seriously insane thought process, right? But this was my first night without her by my side since the moment she was born, she has always slept in my arms, or beside me in the co-sleeper and that thread, that invisible spider's web of mother silk that connects me to her would not let me sleep. I finally got up at 5:15 and went in to check on her. At first the panic set in again--oh no, she's not breathing, her arm is limp, oh my god, I knew it--and then she let out a huge sigh, as if to let me know she was just fine. Which, of course, she was. Absolutely fine. I went back to bed but lay awake, thinking of her, of what an amazing and resilient little girl she is. When she peeped at 6:00 a.m. I flew out of bed to rush her into my lonely arms - I missed my little girl! I scooped her up, all warm and groggy and pressed my lips to her silky head, inhaling the scent of her. She gurgled and smiled her enormous smile and hugged me tight. I wrapped her in my spider's silk for another day, already feeling the pull of her independence against it. I spun a tale into her ear of how I would always be there for her, no matter how far, how my mother silk will protect her like kevlar, but will still let her go when she is ready.

These are for you Mom...

You know that saying 'a face only a mother could love'? While obviously not true of my gorgeous little one, it calls to mind that some pieces of this blog will only be interesting to mom, lola, grandma...you know. I think maybe this is one of them--just a little slice of the quotidian things that they miss being so far away. I have been regularly lamenting being so far from family in general, but especially while Nahanni is so young and such a fun age. She does these cute little things and I think how my mom or Ez's mom should be here, they should be seeing this, enjoying this wonderful little girl like we do. Sure friends like her, maybe even love her, but no one loves you like grandma...

A side effect of Motherhood?

Is it possible that a side effect of motherhood is a loss of ambition? I suppose it could be a spurious correlation that has more to do with lack of sleep, but I really am wondering what happened to the vibrant, energetic, ridiculously ambitious woman I used to be? How could it be that I am, for the most part, suddenly content to simply be a mom? I feel like having a baby somehow siphoned off my desire to accomplish something big(ger), like the invisible ambition liquid that used to fuel my engines was washed away with the blood of childbirth.
It certainly is hard to want to pursue wild dreams when I can often scarcely string a decent sentence together, I'm so tired. It certainly isn't helping with any aspirations I have as a writer...and as for on-camera auditioning--forget it, I'm only interested in doing it for money right now, which scares me on many levels. Not to mention the fact that then I'm back on the quest-for-perfection train and I've missed a lot of stops. Now I'm not saying all ambition is completely absent; I've been toying with how I might make and LA pilot season trip viable (and survivable) but at the same time, I wonder if I really want to be away from her as much as I would have to be to be successful in the way that I want. And of course, this brings up a myriad of questions about what to do otherwise, what adventure to embark upon, where to live etc.
I have always clung to the notion of living a life less ordinary like a life raft in a raging sea of potential mediocrity. It seems especially true nowadays that the ultimate sin is to simply live happily and quietly--and I know that it makes it that much harder for me to consider just buying a townhouse (for over half a million dollars, but that's another story) and la-di-da-ing my way through the next twenty years. I want to explore! I want to live! I want to dream big again!
The only question is how? We talk about walking away quite often, and I am the one who is unable to let go and dive into something else. It feels like one of those times in life when you jump off the cliff, flailing against a clear blue sky and hope that the water below doesn't kill you. It feels like the time to embrace something new and exciting (besides having a baby) and yet...I don't really know what it is and I certainly am having trouble discovering it when I barely have the energy to drag my butt to Mother Goose. Ez talks a lot about getting a boat and a bunch of land up North and starting a mothership business and...although it is less ordinary, somehow I can't bring myself to get over excited about living in the middle of nowhere...in Canada. Now if the same scenario were pitched in, say, Costa Rica, I feel like I could jump on board. Why is that? Why, for me, has everything always had to be the most, the furthest, the oddest? Where has it really gotten me? While I suppose it has technically taken me around the world--living in Ireland and Paris, filming in Istanbul, partying in New York, kayaking in the Yukon--hasn't it also broken my heart in so many ways? There is a reason I don't watch scripted television--it reminds me too much of all the 'coulda been a contenda' possibilites, all the ifs and wishes and coulda-shoulda-wouldas. Now it goes without saying that everything I have done has led me to this beautiful and remarkable child, and I know it is my journey, but still...how do you know when to jump once things get more serious? I guess ambition is a double-edged sword...and mine is very sharp on one side and increasingly dull on the other...

Nahanni cracks up -- beautiful

It's the little things, those little moments in life when you discover something that makes your child absolutely convulse with laughter. It was magic, it made me feel good all over.
Ahhhhh,Thanksgiving's gonna be easy this year....

A little Happiness Update

Yay!! Last night Nahanni slept (and therefore so too did mommy) 8 hours straight!!! Eight hours! Ocho horas! Huit heures!! It was like...food for a starving person, I really needed it. I'm not out of debt yet, but I have great hopes. And...I saw that she was tired this morning and lay her in her crib--and she put herself to sleep!
And, to top off the day, when I returned from my audition this afternoon she was sitting in her bumbo on the counter eating organic peas and rice for the first time and when she saw me her face lit up in a fabulous smile and she threw up her arms and exclaimed 'ma-ma!!' OOOOOOOOOOOhhhhhhh, I love her!
Quel jour!

Dark days too...

Okay, now the purpose of this endeavour is not to present some utopian view of parenthood, as anyone with kids would see through that noise in about two seconds, so I do want to maintain that I am still in touch with reality, and specifically the difficult reality of being a parent. So yes, I have moments of intense love and adoration for this child and this new role, and I also have commensurately dark days as well - and certainly yesterday was one of those days.
First of all, it seems that we have a few days of good sleeps and then we have a few really ugly ones, and this weekend, while I was alone, we had some of the ugliest. Now I suspect that they were a direct result of a little girl getting her first tooth, as I noticed on Tuesday that sharp white points had begun to poke their way through her little pink gums, so I have been indulgent with respect to that discomfort, especially considering she's been remarkably happy considering. But Friday and Saturday nights she went down well as per usual but was up every hour from 11:00 pm onwards and every effort at leaving her to find her way back to sleep that has been working of late only served to increase her agitation - and mine. By Sunday morning I was a zombie, I couldn't even really manage to play with her, I just set her up on the couch beside me with every toy in the arsenal and tried not to fall unconscious. I was embarassingly impatient with her and I can admit that some insane thoughts passed through my head while she was fussing and screaming and not napping for the entire day. Every time that I put her down and thought I might get a moment to clean up, or better yet, pay off some sleep debt--up she was again, it was almost uncanny, like she knew. Once, I put her down (for the umpteenth time) at around three in the afternoon, asleep in her crib and crawled into bed, desperate for a few minutes of sleep and I swear, the second I fell into sleep she awoke, it was positively maddening. I thought I might go crazy, I was so out of it, so exhausted, so at the end of my tether. It was one of those days when you call your mother and say 'come get this kid before I strangle her'. Now I know it's not very PC to say that you've had thoughts of gouging out your child's eyes (or your own for that matter)[obviously not literally] but I'm trying to illustrate a state of mind - how you can waiver between cloying adoration and incomprehensible frustration within hours. And though you may be tempted to call the PPD police on me, I know every mother has felt like this at some point--if not they're either lying or not really present in their parenting. Naturally I am able to separate the crazy feelings from the sane ones, I obviously would never dream of hurting my child, but it was shocking to me to see how easy it is to become a bad parent, how easily I was short with her yesterday. I feel awful about it, and I really had to concentrate yesterday to keep level about it, to speak calmly to myself and remember that she is a baby and doesn't mean to scratch me in the eyeball with her sharp little fingernails or yank my hair like a pro-wrestler. To remember that she only knows what she wants and needs and hasn't yet learned patience or how to communicate pain or fear. I had to breathe deeply on many occasions and more than once had to put her in her crib and walk away, get some air. It goes to show you what a challenge it is - but thank god the rewards are so grand. To see her smile her wide, wet still toothless smile and babble 'mumma!' over and over again wins me over very easily. That and when she sleeps like last night from 8:00 pm to 4:00 am without waking up, that's very helpful too. Now the only problem is that lately I'm having terrible insomnia too - I couldn't sleep until almost 1:30 am last night, I was feeling even more crazy. I'm wading through it though, we'll make it.
On a lighter note, we spent some time on the Sunshine Coast last week (loved it) and had a wonderful family time with her - she was as good as gold and happy as a clam, even with the tooth coming in.