When faced with a difficult or less than ideal situation, I need to talk it out. I need to understand and be understood. I need to fix things ASAP. And if I can’t do that, then I need to confide in close friends, have a heart to heart with someone that can share my feelings and also give me perspective, you know, talk it out…
The style has mostly worked well for me over the years… A few close girlfriends, my mom, and sister, and Mr. Urban have all had their earful over the years, as I have maneuvered through relationships, careers, and life, and they have had a few good laughs.
Until I became a mother.
Our sweet girl began crying hours after her first feeding in this world and did not stop for what seemed like an eternity… Unbeknownst to almost 10 pediatricians, she was allergic to lactose, and from the moment a drop of milk entered her stomach until the moment it left her body, she would be in what seemed like excruciating pain, sometimes lasting over 13 hours… And for the first six months of our time together, the only activities that would soothe our poor child was holding her face down on our forearms (colic hold), taking baths and of course short visits in the company of someone other than Mr. Urban or me.
This too did pass as they say… Just in time for fevers and tummy problems and somewhat loud expressions of irritability that came with each and every teething…
When I look at pictures of those times or think back to them, oddly enough I remember fond, wonderful times, which is a true testimony to the power of love and parenthood (and amnesia due to sleep deprivation).
As you can imagine, all I wanted to do while going through those tough months, was to talk about it to someone since the Baby at hand was in no mood to chat. I needed to get out my feelings and move on…. But I had hardly opened my mouth, when I noticed that such sharing makes people, especially of certain cultures, uncomfortable…
One friend would tell me in the friendliest way she could, each time we spoke, how I wasn’t “easy going enough”.
When I would call my mother to let her know of the “fussiness” and the “tummy aches”, she would interrupt me mid-sentence and say how much she adored the UrbanBaby, what a good, normal baby she was…
And another friend would smile and say, “Oh, All babies are like that”. I wanted to tell her that none of the babies in our Blanket Babies group that met at Café Barrone on Thursday mornings, or in our Stanford Baby group, was experiencing such discomfort… But I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like a bad mommy.
As I said the other day, what you need the most finds its way to you. That is when I met
Karen Maezen Miller. It is my belief that she has written a book and has workshops created, just for me. There is so much she says that sticks right to my heart… but one in particular has really stood out…. “Life is periods of light, followed by periods of darkness, followed by periods of light”. This is true for all. It is Inevitable. And everything will come and will pass.
And what was so troubling to me during those months of irritability, and the bouts that always seem to come and go, and come and go, was and is the fear of what the irritability would mean to my sweet child’s future… And as we are getting close to 2, the question of figuring the right discipline plays in the background…
And then I remember to first discipline myself. Let go of the fear and embrace what is in front of me. What two years of parenting has taught me is that we can deal with anything right now… Fear always screws with your head and heart!
And as far as not over-sharing matters of parenthood… well, as you can see I am still working on that one…
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