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2006-02-01 - 9.46pm previous entry next entry
Baby brother, playgroup again, and LONG emotional waffle...
Phew, it's 1.30pm and Arthur is napping, and I wish I was too (I am soooooo tired!) but he never naps long enough so here I am instead. It's a good opportunity to catch up with my diary!
In case you don't read my Pregnancy Journal, we had our big scan 2 days ago and found out we are expecting another baby boy!!! So Arthur is going to have a little brother called Matthew! It is so exciting, and soooo surreal somehow! Anyway I just wanted to make note of that in this diary too :)
Arthur is doing way better with his sleep at night!!! Woohoo! I also started making him only have one nap during the day, as he was having a short nap morning and afternoon, and then at bedtime he was messing about for over an hour till we finally got him to go to sleep. It was driving me crazy and getting me down, so I figured maybe he wasn't sleepy enough at bedtime if he only just woke from his afternoon nap between 3 and 4pm. His bedtime is around 7pm, but flexible. But I had no intention of putting him to bed later as the solution. I am a big believer in a toddler/child's bedtime needing to be EARLY in the evening for them to get the sleep they need at night. So that just left his naps. I keep him awake till after he eats lunch (he eats at 11.30am) and wait for the traditional after-lunch poo (!!) before changing his nappy and nursing him in bed. He is usually pretty tired by lunchtime if he hasn't had a morning nap, and he falls asleep sooooo fast on the breast at nap time! He tends to nap longer for his one nap - if I'm lucky it's up to 1.5 hours! I love getting a good window to just be "me" and get a few things done in the daytime. I have been slowly going insane for 14 months without it! He has never consistently given me more than 30 minutes at a time. It has been hard - harder than it sounds.
Anyway, he sometimes still only takes a short nap and then he's cranky and tired, but I can't get him to go back to sleep for anything, so that's how it has to be. The great thing is, that means he's up again by 2pm in general, and when bedtime rolls around he has started going to sleep pretty quickly - sometimes extremely quickly if he's really tired! Yay!
The other GREAT thing is that he has started sleeping very long stretches at night sometimes, and waking only once, and maybe once in the evening. This is a big improvement for Arthur!! He slept through the night once last week!!! I mean, the official definition of sleeping through the night is apparently 5 hours straight, which is just crap because say a baby sleeps 7pm to 1am - that isn't sleeping through the night, is it?!! The whole night is still ahead of you at 1am!! Tsk. But anyway, so he has been sleeping stretches of 5+ hours quite regularly now. He tends to wake around 11pm and again at 4.30, but sometimes he misses the evening waking or (less commonly) the 4.30am one. Anyway one night last week he went to sleep at around 8pm and woke up at 6.30am!!!!!!!!!!! That is a HUGE first for Arthur! But it was a one-off for now. I feel so encouraged by it though! Naturally the nights he sleeps well, I can't get to sleep till 2am so I don't even get 5 hours sleep or feel the benefits of Arthur's better nights, urgh! Typical! But one day I just know he is going to sleep great like that one night and it will coincide with me going to bed at a decent hour and sleeping well myself! I can't WAIT for that! :)
I don't know how we stuck at it, because I remember just crying over the whole "what do we do about his sleep?!" thing and thinking I couldn't possibly do one more night like it. But we just kept going. We couldn't bear to CIO with him. I'm so glad we're here with things working out and we didn't have to resort to the CIO, properly, I mean. When I thought we would have to do it, it made me feel so horrible inside. We tried it a little, to varying degrees, and I could never keep it up because every fibre of my being told me what I was doing to him was wrong, whether or not it reaped benefits for both Arthur and us. It just felt so wrong, I can't explain it :( I thought we would just have to DO it, eventually. We're not quite there yet, so I shouldn't discount the possibility, but it looks pretty positive that our hard work is going to pay off without CIO! I am sooooooo thrilled and proud and relieved!!! Phew!
So that's great! :)
Today we have been to Playgroup for the second time. We are all slightly snotty from the cold that I caught there two weeks ago, but we're better. I just HOPE we haven't come away with another virus! Arthur LOVED it again, of course! He was so eager to get stuck in, the moment we arrived. I barely got his coat off him before he took off without me and went to the big hall with all the noise and tricycles and play kitchens and stuff. The first thing he did was look around and spot the plastic iron and ironing board, and then he crossed the huge hall towards it, never taking his eyes off it, with a huge smile on his face :) He is so cute! He loves irons. He played with the iron last time too. He is always pointing at ours at home with urgent cries of, "Un! Un! Un!" (that's "iron", for those who don't speak "Arthur"!) He ironed very nicely at the ironing board, back and forth, and then he tried to take a second iron from a little girl, but I stopped him and explained why he couldn't have that one. He just seemed to listen to me and then carry on with his own iron :) I love all the social learning he is going to do at Playgroup.
Later on, he was playing with a plastic tea set at a little miniature table, and there was a little girl playing there who looked about two. She was called Abby. Abby did not want Arthur touching ANYTHING at the table. She snatched from him everything he picked up and pushed him and shouted "NO!" at him and stuff. Her mum kept telling her she had to share things. But it was so sweet - as soon as Arthur saw that she wanted everything he picked up, he started picking things up and streeetching out his arm to her as faaar as he could, he was THAT concerned to give them to her! He is such a lovely generous boy :) She would snatch them and shout, "NO!" anyway, and he immediately picked something else up and pushed it at her to give it to her. In the end I started saying things like, "Abby, would you like the teapot? Arthur is giving it to you!" and then she took them from him way more nicely. He is always so eager to please people and he seems to have such a generous nature that sometimes (in situations like today's) watching him do things like that when he's soooo tiny and young still, makes me want to cry with how proud I feel of him and how much I love him. It's just something about his vulnerability with being soooo young, and yet his earnest desire to give to others in some way. It makes me ache somewhere, but in a nice way :)
Arthur's awake after 45 minutes. Poo. I will nurse him and see what happens.
Yay, I nursed him for 15 minutes and he went back to sleep!!!! That is so unusual! He usually wakes when I get up if that happens but I managed to sneak off! ;) I am hoping he'll get a good while longer because he has had a busy morning and could use a longer nap. Plus, yay, more free time for me! :)
Where was I? Oh, Playgroup! I love this playgroup! Katie was there with Joshua, and I told her we had our scan and we're having another boy! She has hers tomorrow. I can't wait to hear what they are having! I hope they don't say, "It's a boy, and his name is Matthew!" because then, um, what do I say?! We are not telling anyone outside of immediate family his name (except you guys!).
This morning Arthur had his first HAIRCUT!!!! His hair was getting so long, and every single darn time we left the house, some nice lady would say, "Oh, she's lovely!" or ask, "What's her name?" Urgh! Yesterday we made a quick trip to the supermarket for some eggs and milk (I baked a banana and sultana cake that would have been FABULOUS if only I had read the recipe right and used twice the amount of flour that I DID! Tsk), and at the checkout, the lady behind me said to Arthur, "Aren't you pretty!" That was about the last straw (I know she would not have said that to a boy, so she must have thought he was a girl!), so last night I trimmed his hair at the back (a bit too short but very neatly), and then chickened out of doing anything with the top or sides, as they are curly and I was scared to mess them up!
So this morning I phoned the local cheapy hairdressers, and asked if they cut children's hair. The lady said yes, and I asked, "Even toddlers?!" and she said yes. So 30 minutes later we went to have Arthur's hair trimmed, right before Playgroup! When we walked in the door of the hairdressers, Arthur stopped dead and stared around him with his arms still stuck out to the sides, mittens hanging from the wrists of his coat! All the hairdressers stopped cutting and went, "Aww, look!", hehe! He did look very sweet :) They knew he had come to have his hair cut and made a big thing of it for him. All the other clients in there were old ladies having their hair set. Arthur was so cute getting his big boy haircut! He was as good as gold, as he always is with everything. He sat on my lap because it was his first time, but after this they will put him in a highchair. He got a big cape wrapped around him and then they cut the sides of his hair and a bit off the top (I kept on flapping like a mother hen and saying, "Oh! Oh! I don't want too much off the top! Oh! I don't want to lose all of his curls!" etc! Nuisancey mother! ;) But I was so nervous!
In the end it turned out beautifully. They didn't cut his hair short to his head at the sides so what is left still curls up strongly, much to my delight! They barely took any off the top so he looks very similar to how he looked before the haircut, which I'm happy about. Now the back just needs to grow about a cm to make up for how short I cut it! At least I cut it in a neat shape, and the hairdresser didn't have to touch it at all.
Anyway he was wonderful, and much admired during the procedure! Oh he's awake again. Wow, how did 30 minutes just go by?! Well, I'm happy with that for him. Now I need to make pastry (I'm making a homemade chicken and veg pie for dinner tonight!) and do some nappy laundry, and phone my Mummy. I have more to write so I'll finish this later. I just hope we have a good afternoon and Arthur will be happy while I'm doing all these things! He is getting better at that, but if he's tired he still wants my total attention all the time. I am doing more housework and baking these days which is a good thing - both for me, and for him to get used to.
Okay, Arthur is in bed (it took him an hour to go to sleep again tonight, urgh. Maybe I let him sleep too late this afternoon?) and the chicken pie is in the oven, so finally I can finish the entry! We had a good afternoon. Arthur played with pans and stuff on the kitchen floor while I did some laundry, and I made the pastry while he was eating the non-messy course of his tea! Dried fruit and stuff for dessert :)
He did a bit of crayoning this afternoon, which he has never spontaneously done - I have done it with him a few times but he would rather "sort" the crayons and transfer them from hand to hand till he has a whole handful, etc, than draw with them! Today he started trying to draw with my biro on the pad of paper I was making a list on, and so I got out his crayons. He drew one single line of brown crayon, and then looked up at me as if to say, "Is that right?" So cute :) Then he went back to sorting! He also tried playdough in the crafts room at Playgroup today, but it didn't last very long. He didn't want to eat it, as I'd thought, but he didn't think much of just rolling and pressing cutters into the stuff. If he picked a piece up, he held it gingerly between finger and thumb and dropped it down his side, as though it was dirty and he didn't want to hold it! Funny boy! He does that with actual dirty things, like used cloth wipes. He actually holds them between finger and thumb with his little finger up, says, "Ur-thur-thur!" (as in, "ugh!" and drops it somewhere like the dirty laundry pile or the nappy bin! He amazes me! Anyway then he just wanted to drop cutters on the floor and get down from his chair, so that was the end of playdough! When he's a little older, maybe? He has plenty of time and lots to occupy him till then.
Yesterday I had a crappy day. I think I was on a mega come-down after the huge emotional high of the scan (at LAST!! I had been waiting so eagerly and so long!), and I had no appetite, felt completely exhausted, and was just totally depressed all day. It got worse throughout the day, like a weight that got heavier and heavier and heavier. I'm sure it was largely hormonal, and also tiredness didn't help. If I get like that, I tend to focus on feelings that I hide away from normally, so those make it WAAAY worse too. Which is what happened yesterday.
I just felt like such a crappy mother. And wife. Lately I have been so irritable and I see myself taking it out on Neil and Arthur. I feel HORRIBLE for it. I think the guilt is the weight that presses on me more than anything else. Neil is always on at me to go to bed early so that I will fix the tired/irritable/snap-at-Arthur routine that seems to be happening more these days. But I always feel so depressed just going to bed early. I feel like I have had no space to breathe on my own all day long, and then Arthur finally goes to bed and I get a few puny hours to just relax and do things I enjoy and have no demands on me at all. I hate cutting those hours short for sleep. If Arthur is difficult at bedtime and I am up much later than usual getting him to sleep, I end up staying up CRAZY late just to feel like I have relieved my need for "me" time before going to bed. Going to bed sucks, because there's nothing fun in it, time just vanishes, I know I will have to wake a couple of times when I am tired out, and then before I know it, it's time to get up and do it all again. And I just selfishly want some time to myself to unwind and be me.
But Neil doesn't understand this (he says he does, but he doesn't), which makes this an extremely dull and tiresome ongoing argument, that we've had on and off for the last year-ish. He says he gets that I need "me" time, but me not snapping with tiredness at Arthur is more of a priority so I should basically suck it up and go to bed and get my sleep. He says that will help ME to, because if I'm less tired then maybe I won't feel so desperate for time to myself. I see why he feels that way, but at the same time, he really doesn't seem to be on my wavelength about my feelings on this, and it's like banging my head against a brick wall when I go over how I feel about it for the millionth time. He always says he understands, and then says something which shows me he doesn't. Urgh.
Anyway. So I feel horribly guilty that even though I get snappy with Arthur sometimes, and I KNOW I am just tired and hormonal and could perhaps improve it by going to bed early, I DON'T. That makes me feel like, how CRAP am I?! I put my own selfish wants above my son's needs. Even with my husband telling me clearly what I already know. I still stay up. I feel horrible about that. That's just one of a zillion examples of why I feel like a crappy mother/wife at times. I feel like I don't manage very well. I LOOK like I do, to the general public, but that isn't how it is all the time.
I particularly feel bad for Arthur because he is such a smiley happy little love, and he isn't NAUGHTY, but when he pushes my buttons by doing ten things in a row that he absolutely knows he isn't meant to do, watching for my reaction the whole time.... sometimes I lose it and shout at him. I have so much less patience these days than I ever used to. I don't know if that's just tiredness, or hormones, or - my big anxiety - could it be just ME? Just the true way I am, exposed at last by someone actually putting me to the test? Does it show up my true colours, and reveal the type of parent I am going to be, one who clearly isn't cut out to manage parenting in a nice way, especially parenting more than one child? I sometimes find myself saying "No!" and "Stop it!" to Arthur way more frequently than I ever wanted to. If he has been on my frazzled nerves for long enough without stopping, then he hardly has to do a thing wrong for me to snap at him. He's ONLY 14 MONTHS OLD. I feel such a turd of a mother :(
And I always wanted lots of children. A large family. I still do. But maybe this is showing me that I am not cut out for that, because I can't cope or behave nicely towards the ONE child I do have. That's something that I have felt guilty and unhappy about for months and months now. It weighs SO heavy on me all the time. I never talk about it with anyone, or even write it here, because if I do then I get this surge of emotion and the pain of it makes me want to stuff it all away again. So I don't get it out in the first place.
Except last night, I told Neil I was feeling irritable and depressed (which he had already noticed as it was pretty obvious when he got home from work, urgh - "good wife" issues going on here as well, only those are YEARS old). And we ended up discussing the whole snappy-with-Arthur thing. Neil didn't want to discuss it because he said it was a bad time, with me being hormonal - I would just get overly down about things and it would be better discussed when my frame of mind was more rational. Which is true. But then we'd NEVER discuss it. Until it blew up again, and we rarely resolve arguments because Neil always closes off and goes to bed before I feel like there's been any resolution or closure (completely seperate issue which drives me CRAZY!). So then it festers to varying degrees until the next argument about something similar, when it's brought up again. Exactly what we learned NOT to do in marriage counselling years ago. Tsk.
Anyway. I feel so deflated about our communication as a couple these days. I feel like it's going nowhere. We get on well and love each other and have fun and laugh together. I would definitely describe us as happily married. But we just get nowhere with our discussions. We have opposite or different views, and have no idea how to healthily resolve an argument or discussion with that issue in mind. So nothing ever gets resolved, I never feel valued or listened to in these "discussions" and Neil gets frustrated at me for not seeing his point and acting on it. Which I guess I don't do because I am so squashed by how he doesn't get my feelings on it and I'm full of resentment over it. What a mess!
Anyway we discussed this in detail last night. He said maybe we need another run of marriage counselling to teach us how to communicate better again, because he has forgotten all the things we were taught before. I love that he is so open to taking action to make things better :) But last night I was in my "everything's pointless" pit, so I didn't feel good about it.
Neil asked me what brought on this whole negative vibe I was having about being a bad mother. He noticed it has been around for a while, especially when I feel down. I told him it's partly me feeling guilty for things, like the stuff I mentioned above. And partly seeing other mothers with their children and comparing myself to them (Golden Rule of Parenting - NEVER do this!). And then the last part is things that Neil has said to me sometimes, which just compound my own feelings about my mothering skills (which I never told him about before so he wouldn't have known that).
Sometimes in the past, if I have snapped at Arthur for something, Neil has snapped back at me, saying, "Don't take your bad mood out on him!" Which was RIGHT and reasonable of him. But I already knew I shouldn't, and felt guilty for it. And then when he says it too, I feel doubly guilty. But also still snappy and like my feelings are overwhelming me and I don't know how to snap out of it and suddenly be all nice and serene with my husband and son, at that moment. So I say something like I am trying to and I don't MEAN to snap at him but I feel like I can't help it. Then Neil will say I am a grown-up, I SHOULD be able to help it, and then he's all steaming about it and usually comes back with, "If this is how you get when the pressure is on with the little one, then I don't want to have any more kids after this one (Matthew)!" and storms off. Which crushes me like a bug. I don't know if he realises that it's one of the biggest weapons he can use - the two-edged sword of guilt-over-crappy-mothering and longing-for-large-family. But he uses it well when he's worked up about something like this. He knows how much I am longing to have more children. But he DOESN'T know how guilty I feel about the way I behave sometimes.
So last night when he didn't get why I felt like he had played a part in why I feel like a crappy mother, I explained that sometimes he says things that just reflect EXACTLY how I feel about myself (in a bad way) and he'll say them in such a way that it crushes my confidence even further. He asked for an example. I gave him the one above, about the having more children. I told him the idea leaves me scared that I won't get to have more children, and then right after that the thought occurs to me that I shouldn't have any more anyway - that he's quite right and I would obviously be a bad mother to them and if I can't behave nicely all the time towards the child I have got then I do not deserve to have any more.
It sounds sooooo petty, but the above has been SUCH an intensely upsetting thought to me for so long. Typing it out is making me cry. It's about the biggest parenting issue for me of all time (so far!). It's my main family-based goal in life, and always has been (the big family) and it's under threat because of my own inadequacies, which makes me feel like *a-rude-word-that-I-never-use-in-my-diaries*
So I told Neil that I never said it to him before because it would upset me to even say it. He made me say it, and I cried. He was sooooooo sweet. He held me, and the moment that door was open with someone loving and listening and letting me open it in a safe place, alllll these feelings came out that I had shoved away because they hurt me too much. How painfully much I love Arthur and therefore how much I hate myself when I hurt him in any way. How I am even more defensive towards him in my mind than even Neil is when he defends him, at the same time as being the one I want to defend him from, which is a weird and difficult clashy way to feel.
Once the feelings were out there I realised how frightened I have been feeling that I can't cut it as a good mother, and that I don't even know WHY I am like it, and if there is even any hope for me to improve. It goes back a long way, I guess. There are aspects of my life that have always needed "working on" but which I have never been successful at improving. Things that have disappointed my family and caused stress in our relationships, like my inability to stick to ANYTHING, for one. Urgh, I don't want to get into those things. But I never seemed to be able to pull myself together over anything and just "get it done" like any other person (apparently) would have. I had counselling for a total of more than HALF my life with different counsellors and still I am the same, maybe happier in myself (except for odd moments like this!) and healed over some painful incidents in my past, but basically just as inadequate where I was inadequate before.
What if I never change, as a mother? I always hoped I would get better at it, but maybe I never will, and right now I seem to be just getting WORSE at it. What if I get worse every time I add a child to the mix, and end up being a horrible stressful mother to my brood of lovely children? And yet feel powerless to change, and crushed with guilt and self-loathing over it forever. It scares me.
I cried like.... weirdly much. You know that kind of crying where you can't breathe or talk or even let out a breath without it turning into a 3 year old's high pitched waily sobbing? Yeah. Neil just held me and held me and I stopped fighting it and trying to control my speech and breathing (!) and just cried like a 3 year old till it died down a bit. I was amazed how much was in there to get out, and it NEVER happens to me. All I wanted to tell Neil was how much I love Arthur and how much it hurts me to hurt him in any way. And how I don't even know why. And how sorry I feel about it. And then how it's not just Arthur, it's Neil too, and I'm so sorry that I bring him down with my words sometimes and I don't know why I do it. And I don't know why I am not interested in parsnips all the time, or why we aren't as intimate as we should/could be, or anything. But I am just so sorry about it and so guilty about it, and I wish things would change. And I wish I knew how. And I'm scared that I can't do anything about it because I'm just inadequate to the task.
And after I poured that and the tears all out, I felt soooooooooooooo much better. I just stopped, blew my nose (for EVER, hehe!) and lay back feeling 100% calm in my centre. Like I could take a deep breath down to a place that had been blocked up before. I felt so good having poured all that out to Neil, because it feels so right (it IS so right) to communicate so openly with your husband and not hide stuff, especially feelings-stuff. It has to be right, because the feeling is so strong.
Neil listened and was generally wonderful. I can't even remember what was said after that. I just felt drained but peaceful. And like it didn't matter what came next, because the worst part was done and that made anything else seem easy and manageable. Neil often doesn't SAY much after big discussions, especially where I reveal stuff that he hasn't realised before. He tends to take it away and think about it, and then a week or so later he'll suddenly bring it up in conversation and say he's thought about it and wondered about such-and-such as a solution. Sometimes it frustrates me because I am such an opposite type of person, I like to hash everything out NOW and can't rest till there's a solution! But I know Neil is just different to that and he works better in his own time on things, and is wonderfully committed to seeing things through. We are well suited in that, I think. Each way has its own strength. We just need to learn how to better communicate with our two different approaches.
Anyway. I cried so hard that I burst like a THOUSAND tiny blood vessels around my eyes!!! Once I had mopped up and we went into the kitchen, Neil gasped and said, "What happened to your EYES?!!" I have a panda ring around each eye of a million tiny red pin pricks where blood vessels have broken. They are over my cheekbones, eyelids and out to the sides and above my eyes. Urgh. I have had those a few times in the past when I have cried especially hard, or for a long time, but like only a few speckled here and there. I look terrible!!!! I was half tempted to wear dark glasses and not go out of the house today, but Arthur loves Playgroup so much and it seemed petty of me. So we went. Me and my "oh my gosh, what happened to her eyes!" face, and nobody asked or commented, even Katie, who MUST have noticed. It's reeally noticable! Yak. I know they will go darker before they fade, and it could take a week. Urrgh. Thank goodness we have no pressing engagements left this week or at the weekend. Oh except church on Sunday. I soooo hope they will have healed up by then! I figured that if anyones DOES ask what's wrong with my eyes, I will just be honest and say, "Oh I had a huge hormonal cry and my eyes went like this - how embarrassing!" or something. I couldn't think of an alternative that wasn't basically a lie. But I'd prefer to stay indoors for a few days!
Today I feel LOADS better, and all the more sure that hormones were the main culprit! :) The issues are still genuine and I'm glad the hormones meant that we got to talk them through and I got to get some major stuff off my chest. But yay, I feel better about it for now.
Tomorrow morning we are finally getting Arthur's single mattress delivered! Well, OUR single mattress. It's going to make our bed a triple-mattress floor bed! Then we'll transition Arthur to that part of the bed and gradually move it away from ours, but still on our bedroom floor. We are not ever going to transition him to a cot or toddler bed, he will go straight to a proper adult single bed, starting with his mattress on the floor. He needs way too much space for anything smaller anyway.
Oh I'm sure there was going to be more for me to write about, but the pie is ready and I'm sooooo hungry! So I will write again sometime soon, and I meant to update my pregnancy diary tonight as well, but there's no time now. Tomorrow, I hope! I need to take more photos of Arthur. I love him. Just because, after all that I've written today, I want to say it loud and clear. I love him so much.
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