Medium Pink
Cassie has a cold. I have to admit that from my perspective, this isn't a wholly bad thing. Feeling a little under the weather means that Cassie's a bit lower-key than usual, which is easier for me to keep up with at the moment. It also affords me the opportunity to be all maternal and doting in a sit-down-and-speak-in-a-low-loving-voice way rather than a chase-around-the-playground-pretending-to-be-a-mama-bunny-running-with-my-baby-bunny-away-from-a-loud-sound way. I'm afraid I've kind of been falling down on the job in the latter category of motherish responsibilities.
My shrink has, predictably I suppose, been adamant about my not taking this on. She even wrote it out for me as an assignment on the back of an appointment card: "Stow maternal guilt." The thing is, it isn't really even guilt--it's more plain regret. Cassie and I are, at baseline, so easily and fluidly connected, with about as much mutual understanding and respect as an adult can have with a not-yet-4-year-old, that a disruption in the relationship just plain feels crappy. I've been tense, I've been cranky, I've been tired. My patience with shenanigans has been minimal (which--surprise, surprise--does not in any way lessen the child's propensity for shenanigans; rather the opposite), and my sense of humor wan and flickering like a faulty fluorescent light. I've been less flexible, less creative, less energetic. I've just been less.
For whatever reason, this pregnancy is kicking my butt in a way that my first pregnancy never did. I'm tired enough, with these weird spells of shortness of breath accompanied by large-muscle achiness/weakness that actually feels ischemic, that my midwife sent me to my primary care doc to get evaluated.
In my doc's office, my oxygen saturation was 98%, and my peak flow reading (a test usually used in asthma or COPD) was in the high 500s (=good/great), and she decided she basically wasn't worried. She offered to send me for dopplers of my legs, just to rule out clots (which can then go to the lungs as pulmonary emboli, which can lead to shortness of breath... oh, well, and death), but given the situation, that seemed like overkill to me, and she really wasn't attached to the idea. She thought a little, then said well, let's go ahead and draw a CPK (an enzyme that, if elevated, could indicate muscle breakdown)... And a calcium? I chimed in. Yes, she said, and let's get a potassium, too. She sat looking at the computer screen a moment. Anything else? she asked. No, I said, I couldn't think of anything. (To that point, I hadn't really formed much of an opinion about my doctor one way or another, but I am an absolute sucker for being treated like a colleague by my health care provider. I'm now perfectly content to see her instead of the nurse practitioner I usually try to get in to see.)
The upshot is that the blood tests came back normal, and I seem to be doing a little better fatigue-wise the last couple days, though I still seem to need an awful lot of sleep. And as the fallout of being fired settles, I'm probably less uptight. (Though I still haven't been able to break myself entirely of spending stray moments ruminating somewhat obsessively over the stupid details: she said that Mr. F was one of the most medically stable patients, but that's just not true--on my last day they moved him to a private room because they thought he was getting close to dying; I told Claire about missing Mr F's NPH, and he only ended up getting it 2 1/2 hours late; blah blah blah blah ad nauseam). And as Cassie and I have a little more time together, I think we're finding our way back to each other.
The past couple days, Cassie has been sweeter and more tractable. There were a couple weeks where she would regularly get very oppositional, as well as precociously and maddeningly passive-aggressive (does she know she has Minnesota roots?) when I was trying to get her to, say, wash her hands before supper or get her pajamas on. That behavior has substantially receded, though. For my part, I've been able to simmer down and spend more time doing things like voicing Valentina, Cassie's red bear with whom she likes to have long conversations. (During the dark days, Cassie was even having her plastic dolphins peck viciously at poor Valentina's button eyes--I mean, jeez. Showed me where I stood, boy.) We sit and draw pictures together. We look through the Delia's catalog and pick out our favorite t-shirts (Cassie favors the one with the zillion little cartoon hamburgers and the light blue hamster one; I myself like the Fantasia mushroom one). We talk about the various different shades of pink, and which precise one is her favorite color.
It's all making me kind of have to recognize the blessing-in-disguise aspects of losing my job. I really was exhausted and strung out, and it was having repercussions. And now I get to recuperate and reconnect and stuff before having to face being the mom of a newborn. So that's all fine.
I would like, however, to remind the powers that be that I am also quite receptive to entirely undisguised blessings. Painfully obvious blessings. Stark naked blessings, even.
Well. Of course there's Cassie. Stark naked and otherwise.
My shrink has, predictably I suppose, been adamant about my not taking this on. She even wrote it out for me as an assignment on the back of an appointment card: "Stow maternal guilt." The thing is, it isn't really even guilt--it's more plain regret. Cassie and I are, at baseline, so easily and fluidly connected, with about as much mutual understanding and respect as an adult can have with a not-yet-4-year-old, that a disruption in the relationship just plain feels crappy. I've been tense, I've been cranky, I've been tired. My patience with shenanigans has been minimal (which--surprise, surprise--does not in any way lessen the child's propensity for shenanigans; rather the opposite), and my sense of humor wan and flickering like a faulty fluorescent light. I've been less flexible, less creative, less energetic. I've just been less.
For whatever reason, this pregnancy is kicking my butt in a way that my first pregnancy never did. I'm tired enough, with these weird spells of shortness of breath accompanied by large-muscle achiness/weakness that actually feels ischemic, that my midwife sent me to my primary care doc to get evaluated.
In my doc's office, my oxygen saturation was 98%, and my peak flow reading (a test usually used in asthma or COPD) was in the high 500s (=good/great), and she decided she basically wasn't worried. She offered to send me for dopplers of my legs, just to rule out clots (which can then go to the lungs as pulmonary emboli, which can lead to shortness of breath... oh, well, and death), but given the situation, that seemed like overkill to me, and she really wasn't attached to the idea. She thought a little, then said well, let's go ahead and draw a CPK (an enzyme that, if elevated, could indicate muscle breakdown)... And a calcium? I chimed in. Yes, she said, and let's get a potassium, too. She sat looking at the computer screen a moment. Anything else? she asked. No, I said, I couldn't think of anything. (To that point, I hadn't really formed much of an opinion about my doctor one way or another, but I am an absolute sucker for being treated like a colleague by my health care provider. I'm now perfectly content to see her instead of the nurse practitioner I usually try to get in to see.)
The upshot is that the blood tests came back normal, and I seem to be doing a little better fatigue-wise the last couple days, though I still seem to need an awful lot of sleep. And as the fallout of being fired settles, I'm probably less uptight. (Though I still haven't been able to break myself entirely of spending stray moments ruminating somewhat obsessively over the stupid details: she said that Mr. F was one of the most medically stable patients, but that's just not true--on my last day they moved him to a private room because they thought he was getting close to dying; I told Claire about missing Mr F's NPH, and he only ended up getting it 2 1/2 hours late; blah blah blah blah ad nauseam). And as Cassie and I have a little more time together, I think we're finding our way back to each other.
The past couple days, Cassie has been sweeter and more tractable. There were a couple weeks where she would regularly get very oppositional, as well as precociously and maddeningly passive-aggressive (does she know she has Minnesota roots?) when I was trying to get her to, say, wash her hands before supper or get her pajamas on. That behavior has substantially receded, though. For my part, I've been able to simmer down and spend more time doing things like voicing Valentina, Cassie's red bear with whom she likes to have long conversations. (During the dark days, Cassie was even having her plastic dolphins peck viciously at poor Valentina's button eyes--I mean, jeez. Showed me where I stood, boy.) We sit and draw pictures together. We look through the Delia's catalog and pick out our favorite t-shirts (Cassie favors the one with the zillion little cartoon hamburgers and the light blue hamster one; I myself like the Fantasia mushroom one). We talk about the various different shades of pink, and which precise one is her favorite color.
It's all making me kind of have to recognize the blessing-in-disguise aspects of losing my job. I really was exhausted and strung out, and it was having repercussions. And now I get to recuperate and reconnect and stuff before having to face being the mom of a newborn. So that's all fine.
I would like, however, to remind the powers that be that I am also quite receptive to entirely undisguised blessings. Painfully obvious blessings. Stark naked blessings, even.
Well. Of course there's Cassie. Stark naked and otherwise.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 11:47 PM
1 Comments:
You're more tired this time because you are not just pregnant; you are the pregnant mother of a toddler. There is no need to feel guilt. Wanting to check out is entirely natural and what's entirely worse (you poor thing) is that you can't even binge eat to compensate! Hang in there and remember Nora Ephron - "if pregnancy were a book they'd cut the last two chapters."
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