Scrubbing off the rust

I didn’t mean to disappear into the ether like that, but to be honest I’m not sure if I’m back for real. I’m missing blogging, but also am feeling really hesitant to write again because of The Thing That Happened That Sent Me Over Here in Secret.

And I have all sorts of things to write about – my college reunion, my new realization of the sheer enormity of the bullet I dodged by not marrying my ex-girlfriend, the amazingness and total fucking frustration of parenting an almost-two-year-old, the exhiliration of training for my first triathlon, and lots of other things.

But really what’s pushing me to write today is our upcoming trip to see Bubba’s birth family. We’ve told friends, including friends involved in open adoption, but it feels lonely not to get to have a conversation about it with the blogosphere (even the itty bitty blogosphere that even knows I’m over here in this mostly-anonymous corner).

This is our first time meeting Bubba’s dad, and the second time meeting his mom. Last year before we met his mom I was terrified. I wanted desperately for her to think we were good parents to him. And it was a wonderful meeting, so much more relaxed and easy than any of us would have dreamed. So I’m nervous about seeing her this time but also excited. As for dad, I have no idea. They’re together, but the roles they have played have meant that we’ve had very few conversations with him, really haven’t gotten to know him at all. So I have no idea of what to expect, what to say. He’s more intimidating to me, somehow – maybe it’s the mystery factor?

They have a lot of things going on right now that I can’t blog about, even anonymously. It’s painful not to be able to share this anywhere, but the things they have going on are things that we decided we won’t share with anyone until Bubba is old enough to understand and can decide for himself who to tell. It feels like the right decision but I feel like we’re being tested. It’s very difficult to watch what’s happening in their lives, to think about how we will tell Bubba about it someday, without getting to talk to people who get it.

Cryptic much?

We leave Saturday. I’d like to be able to write more about this when we come back. For now I’m mostly hoping a few folks will read this so I can feel like we have some back-up.

Cranky

Bubba has been pretty cranky for a while about day care. We’ve assumed it’s been about adjusting to the obvious issues around having a day care in your own house, with the biggest issue being the sharing of his Mama. Since we had this reading done a week or so ago we’ve been talking about it a lot and thinking about it a little differently.

(As an aside – I still don’t know if I believe this woman – or anyone – is actually psychic, but we both like her a lot and trust her immensely as a person, so we figured that whether she’s pyschic or just perceptive, if she struck a nerve like this we should probably listen. So that’s my I’m-not-off-my-nut caveat.)

It’s so hard to know at this age when a bad mood or bad behavior – like biting – is about adjusting, a developmental stage not necessarily related to the external stuff, or just personality. Every couple of months he’s a new person, so if he has a bad week or so we do what we can to make it better for him and hold out for growth and change.

Baby Mama has been trying to hold him a lot more during day care, which is helping. He’s still resisting the sling and the ergo except outside of the house, so it’s hard, but he does respond well. We also just arranged a kid-swap one day a week with a friend who sends her child to our day care one day a week – we’ll send him there and stop billing her. He’s completely enamored with this little girl (and we’re completely enamored of her parents and decided our kids should get married so they can be our machatunem), so maybe it will feel special to him to have a day a week when they get to hang out all day.

We’ve also tossed around the idea of sending him to a local daycare one day a week, which would probably (given the neighborhood where we live) have the advantage of being largely black and Latino kids and probably bilingual English/Spanish. But sending my little tiny guy off to be cared for by people we don’t know just strikes fear into my heart – is this what it feels like for people to enroll their kid in daycare if they don’t have their own?

Friends who are parenting adolescents tell me they would trade the emotional work for the physical work of diaper changes and bedtime routines in a minute, but I find the emotional work now to be a huge learning curve. We’re relying on a pyschic to tell us what’s going on with our kid. I wish he could talk – the current spoken and signed vocabulary of animals, methods of transportation, and foods doesn’t smooth the process much.

/Ramble

Monkey on my back

Last night I actually had a dream about a monkey on my back. I was in a place that was sort of Whole Paycheck and sort of a zoo. I was walking down a hallway trying to see – I have no idea – something important? – and a baby gorilla jumped on my back with his arms around my neck. It was a hug, not an attack, but I was afraid of his mama, since mamas are protective of their babies, and I tried to get him off. Baby Mama told me I should say “No gorilla! Down! No jumping!” But it didn’t help. He wanted a hug. When I finally got him off my back I went to the staff room at Whole Paycheck to ask for their advice on how to get the gorilla off my back so I could go back down the hallway for whatever Very Important Thing I needed to do on the other end. This all made sense in my dream.

Yesterday we had a phone meeting with a friend of my sister-in-law who does, um, pet readings. The psychic kind. We are worried about the cats because there has been some snoring and pooping outside the litter box and other things that sort of indicate all is not quite right, and it started around when we started the day care. This woman is one of my favorite people, even though I don’t know her well, and so I tried to be open to a psychic pet reading even though it sounds pretty cracked even to my own ears.

The reading ended up not focusing just on the cats because she informed us that the cats were acting out on Bubba’s behalf, and responding to some things we’ve all been experiencing by having 4 or 5 kids (and more importantly, their parents) in our home every day. And then she told us that the work is sucking all of Baby Mama’s energy, and that the work you’re truly meant to do should replenish your energy, not suck you dry. It’s hard to argue with that one. Bubba hates sharing his Mama and all the recent biting is the only way he knows to get his Mama and own space back – makes sense, right?

Again, it doesn’t take a psychic to figure all of this out but she’s a perceptive person and I do think, psychic or no, that she was probably right on all of it. By the end of it we were both in tears because we called her about the cats and she ended up telling us so many things about what our life looks like right now, both the things we’ve been talking about openly and the things we haven’t been able to talk about or even admit to ourselves. She told Baby Mama to try to be open to different opportunities, that maybe the day care wasn’t a forever job but that the alternative didn’t have to be a full-time job away from home with Bubba in someone else’s day care.

So I dreamed about a Monkey on my back after that. Baby Mama went to sleep hoping to dream about what might come along for her, and dreamed about fishing with a big net. She told me this when she got up and ended the description of her dream by saying: “I don’t think that fishing is my next career.” We looked at each other silently for a minute before she got it and then both burst out laughing.

And now what? It feels like we’re standing on the edge of something big but I can’t begin to imagine what it is.

And now you think I’m certifiable.

Jaws

 I am the mother of The Kid Who Bites.

When I was about 3, I remember looking at the window, seeing another little girl on the sidewalk, and informing my mother: “There’s Nicole.” She asked me which Nicole, since there were two in the neighborhood, and I told her: “the one that bites.” That was 1978 or 79, and I still remember that Nicole was The Biter. Now my child is The Biter.

Crap.

When he’s sick, he gets angry. He’s been sick since, um, October. First winter in daycare. Fucking brutal. He made it a year and a half without an ear infection, then we called the doctor about pink eye, they insisted we come in (despite our cursing the new pediatrician who was going to make us schlep him to the doc for stupid pink eye), and then diagnosed him with a double ear infection. First time on antibiotics too, which made us v. sad. The homeopath predicted that the antibiotics wouldn’t work, and would probably make him angrier. Right and right.

And it turns out he’s allergic to amoxicillin. It’s a regular carnival around here.

Last Thursday Baby Mama stopped counting how many times he bit when he got to 20. I raced home from work unsure of which of them would be dead on the floor when I got there. We called the homeopath in a panic, begging for help. He told us what to give him and we fell over ourselves trying to stuff it in his mouth.

Friday we were down to 10 bites. Saturday and Sunday, no day care, huge effort on the part of both moms to make sure Bubba had a really fun weekend and got lots of attention. No biting. Monday 3 bites. Tuesday 2 bites. And so on. This is serious improvement, and it definitely seems to run parallel to how he’s feeling. Apparently the solution is: Don’t Let Him Get Sick.

Argh.