Confessions Of An Unfit Mother: January 2017

Daycare is the. best. thing. ever.

We had always planned to send Marlowe to daycare, because we always planned for both of us to be gainfully employed. Then, I parted ways with my former law firm in the middle of my maternity leave and ended up opening my own law firm. As a result, we stupidly told the daycare lady that we didn’t need her.

On an unrelated but important note, I would like to ask my friends to go out and get sexually harassed by their bosses, including but not limited to: having their boobies touched and/or be the recipient of dick pics (preferably on a workplace computer or server!) and/or be propositioned for sex and either 1). Have lots of friendly witnesses or 2). Get it all in writing. Marlowe needs to go to college some day. Go Michigan!

Let me tell you what a joyful period of time it was to have a premature newborn at home while opening a business, recruiting clients from my old firm, finding new clients and then finding the time to do all of the work. Thank God / Spiderman / Harry Potter for Ativan.

We quickly realized it would be impossible for me to be with Marlowe during the day and run a business. Thankfully daycare still had room for us on all days but one, so about a month after Marlowe came home, we shipped her ass off to a stranger.

To be fair, Ms. Joan is not a total stranger. Prior to Marlowe’s birth, when we went to her home to check it out, she pointed out that I looked awfully familiar. I am not the all-American girl next door looking type of person, so I assumed she knew me from somewhere. After about 5 seconds of discussion, we realized we knew her because she used to be the bartender at a bar in Chelsea we hung out at all the time. Obviously we hired her on the spot.

So anyway, on the first day of daycare I diligently packed Marlowe’s bag, dressed her in something totally fucking awesome and brought her to Ms. Joan. (Most kids call her Joanie, but not in this house. We fancy.)

Drop off took 10 seconds, give or take. I threw her car seat on the table, unloaded bottles and formula, gave Ms. Joan very little instruction and hit the ground running. I figured she’s raised 4 kids and the Commonwealth has allowed her to run her business for 7 years so she should be able to figure it out. Or text me with questions. Basically I couldn’t wait for Marlowe not to be my problem. Jeff texted and asked me if I cried. HAHAHA. I sped home and took a nap.

I fucking love Ms. Joan. She loves my baby. Seriously, she coddles her way too much. Every day when I pick her up, she’s snuggling with her. This actually works in my favor because I regularly sprawl myself out on her couch, drop my puse and whine to her about my day, all the while she holds the baby. Did I mention she is also my therapist? And, she seems to like Jeff and I. Her own children are cool kids - involved in our community and make an effort to play with Marlowe and speak to me when I see them. But I seriously considered firing her when I found out she supports Trump. Ummmmm, lady. You run a SMALL BUSINESS that is SUBSIDIZED by the GOVERNMENT. Trump is not your ideal candidate, you fucking idiot. But, keep keeping my baby alive please. Dummy.

She also has no tolerance for “new school” parenting. I once gave her bags to steam Marlowe’s bottles in and told her they are good for 20 uses. It’s been about 15 weeks, and she is with Marlowe four times per week, and feeds are at least twice a day…and she’s yet to ask me for another. I let that one slide. In my head I know I she is going to encounter a germ or two, especially given that the other kids in Ms. Joan’s daycare cough in her face all day long. So not steaming the bottles seems fine, btu I feel better telling myself that if she gets sick, its not my fault. Because clearly blame needs to be assigned when your child gets sick.

Here is another good example of Ms. Joan’s no bullshit approach to co-parenting my child. When Marlowe started solids I explained that we were starting with oatmeal and then would move on to fruits and vegetables after waiting three days in between each to see if she develops an allergy. That afternoon I got a text, “Marlowe loves pears!” and then next day “She loves squash!”. Jesus lady, know your role. Except I thought briefly about it, discussed it with Jeff and we were like, “Cool, now we don’t have to feed her pears and squash and monitor for allergies.”

Plus, finding her a new daycare would be hard and I’m just not willing to commit to doing anything hard. So, Marlowe goes to daycare and gets loved on by an opinionated, somewhat ignorant woman who seems to think Marlowe is half hers and it is the best thing ever. I seriously don’t know what I would do without Ms. Joan.

Given that all of my readers are smarter than I am, I’m sure that I don’t have to explain that the “Fourth Trimester” is considered the first three months after a baby is born.

Given that all of you can also do basic math, I’m sure that you guys are all like, “But Suzie, Marlowe is almost SIX MONTHS. That’s WAY MORE than just the fourth trimester!” Thanks, dick. Got it. Feel free to go away and never visit this blog again. I’m sure my sponsors, investors and advertisers will all be sad to see you go, but I certainly will not.

Alrighty. Now that we’ve cleared up that I really don’t give a shit if anyone reads this blog, lets get to discussing my really important thoughts. Shall we start with breastfeeding? Is that okay with everyone? Great.

Breastfeeding

As I have previously mentioned, I did not breast feed. And not because I had no supply, or because my baby couldn’t latch or for some other “legitimate” reason. I did not breast feed because I didn’t want to. A large part of this was because I was really not interested in being the sole provider of nutrition for our kid. “But Suzie… Breast is best….!” Yep. Heard that a bunch. Want to know what is best for Suzie Herold? Having Jeff Herold feed Marlowe Herold half of the time. It’s fucking glorious. He looks super cute stumbling back into bed at 4am every other night. And by every other night I mean that he fed her overnight the majority of the time, because he is truly, truly the most decent person I know and because I truly, truly am a selfish asshole. Do I deserve him? Certainly not. Did I do anything to make his life easier while Marlowe was a total fucking monster for the first 3.5 months of her life? Certainly not. I actually repeatedly told him that I gestated her for the first 34.5 weeks of her life so her first 34.5 weeks on the outside were all his. And to an extent, I let this happen. I’m so fucking awesome.

Anyway, Marlowe is a really mellow baby. I know this because of all of the other babies in my life that I have spent significant time with. Meaning… zero. But I do believe is she a pretty chill kid. So, one night when it was my turn to get no sleep, she started to freak the fuck out about who knows what. Maybe she doesn’t like the color of our living room walls. After doing everything I could think of (short list), I decided that obviously what she needed was our first skin to skin experience. So, she got naked, I got half naked, and we snuggled it out. She did calm down pretty quickly, given that her sole focus was how to get one of my nipples into her mouth. I almost felt violated. Given that there was no milk in there for her, the session wrapped up pretty quickly, but it did lead me to think about what I had missed out on. And then Jeff got up, pushed a button on our Baby Brezza and tagged me out for the rest of the night, and I haven’t really harped on it since. And also, now that I think about it, I don't even think he even asked me what I was doing sitting in the middle of our living room in the early morning hours with my Ts hanging out. It must have been the sleep deprivation.

Sleep Deprivation

Those of you that know me well understand that if I am tired, I am a raging fucking bitch, and that is putting it nicely. When I was a little kid my family used to rotate who had to wake me up because it usually went something like this:

Unfortunate soul: “Suz, wake up. Mom made French toast!” [Or insert anything nice… “It’s time to leave for Aruba!” or “We are getting a puppy today!” etcetera.*]

Suz: “I will seriously fucking kill you if you don’t get out of here in the next 8 seconds.”

U.S.: “But,,, you need to eat. It is noon and you need to take insulin, too.”

Suz: “Did I fucking stutter? 7, 6, 5….”

U.S.: “Fine. Don’t eat. Don’t take insulin.”

Suz: “4,3,2…”

*On a side note, please understand that using etc. more than once is ridiculous. It means “and so on” so writing “etc. etc.” makes you look fucking stupid. On second thought… keep doing it.

So anyway, I hate to leave this magical story behind but I have a point to make, and that is that sleep deprivation is real.

Now that Marlowe is sleeping through the night, our lives from just a few months ago seem like distant memories. But while we were in it, we were absolute zombies. At one point neither one of us could remember if either one of us had fed her overnight, let alone how much. On multiple occasions we would wake up and point at each other like, “did you?”

So we had to start washing all of her bottles before we went to bed so that we could keep track of how often we were feeding her. I don’t even think on my wildest night of partying did I black out whether I got out of bed for water. Jeff keeps saying that there is a reason that we use sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic in the military, and I believe him.

Birth Control

I assumed after Marlowe made her grand entrance, her mere existence would be all of the birth control we needed. And, although I had a C-section, I also assumed that I was going to treat my vagina as if I had delivered naturally… i.e. a war zone. Jeff assumed he was entering the world of gratuitous blow jobs. Right. Either way, it didn’t occur to me that this was going to be a talking point in our household for awhile.

But, at nearly all of my many post-op / blood pressure checks / after the baby OB appointments (and even one or two while Marlowe was still living inside of me) everyone kept asking what I wanted to do for birth control. I kept hearing things such as:

“Breastfeeding is not birth control”

“You can get pregnant before your cycle returns”

“You’d be surprised… it can happen” (False. Almost nothing surprises me.)

“You don’t want to get pregnant again for awhile… you need to be careful”

And on. And on. And on.

So finally I said to my doctor what I say to people all the time. I won’t tell you how to do your job if you don’t tell me how to do mine. (This particularly perplexes my hairdressers, and also the lady that did the flowers for our wedding, because obviously I need to have some input, but in reality, I just really don’t really care. Like, you're the expert. I will defer to you. Please do a nice job. Thank you and goodbye.) I assumed that my doctor would pick the best method for me, so I just threw all of her pamphlets into the trash and ignored her.

So, she settled on the Mirena for me. On the day of the appointment, I hadn't given it much thought, other than I was told to take an Advil (which I decided to ignore). I arrived at MGH where I was promptly told to piss in a cup so that they could give me a pregnancy test. Holy fuckballs, did I have a panic attack in the 3 minutes it took to confirm that I was, thankfully, without child.

t cannot fathom having another child so quickly. Marlowe is such a home wrecker as an only child… I just kept thinking about what in the fuck would I do with two babies? Clearly pick one to love more than the other and make them both Jeff’s problem.

So anyway, here I sit with an IUD (to be clear, not an IED, which is an entirely different device) in my whooha, free to practice making another as we see fit. In order to get knocked up again I’d have to sneak this piece of plastic out of my uterus and lie to my husband about it. The foundation for creating Marlowe was not exactly sound (“Let’s do it so people stop asking and we can just get it over with!”) so I’m not sure I should get pregnant with another based upon this scenario… but…

I would love to give her a sibling. I mean, think bout how much less I will have to play with her if she has a sister or brother.

MIC DROP.

Well, not quite.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

1. My house is full of kid accouterments and I fucking hate it. It is all so colorful, and loud and takes up SO MUCH SPACE. Christmas morning I unwrapped at least 324 presents for her and while inspecting each one thought, “how soon before I can throw this away?” She definitely got a set of finger puppets that went directly into the garbage can. But Kellie, thank you so much for those.

2. I really don't like feeding her solid food. It’s gross, it’s a pain in the ass process and given her coordination is that of a typical 5.5 month old, it’s fucking messy. She is like dining next to a tornado. No thanks.

3. Her doctor no longer considers her premature. That part I love.

4. Baby girl pajamas are the ugliest articles of clothing of all time. Why does everything have to be an obnoxious pink / purple / ruffley / ballerina inspired cheap textile? And then I’m like, “Yes, but it’s bedtime!” and immediately stop caring what she is wearing so I can throw her in her crib and pour a glass of wine.

Here are some pictures of my little bunny. (Her nickname became Bunny really early on. I always asked her if she was a hungry bunny, or a sleepy bunny etc. It has now morphed into just calling her Buns or Bun Bun. She is going to fucking love it when I'm screaming that to her on the lacrosse field in 10 years.)