Quitting Facebook

For the past several years, I have had serious thoughts about quitting facebook. For some reason or another, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I think I have even posted on more than one occasion, "Seriously thinking about quitting facebook," and people I never speak with now but with whom I have had close dealings at some time or another would comment some variation of "Don't go, how else will we stay in touch?" So I stayed.

But truth be told, it was becoming a problem. I was addicted. I was checking my phone every "spare" moment. 

The thing is - there is no such thing as a "Spare" moment. All the moments we have are equally important, are equally available for us to use. None of them are "spare." We do not get any of them back. We are how we choose to spend our time.

I have big dreams for myself. Cook meals, eat them, exercise, spend time with my husband and with my son. And bit by bit I was giving away my moments, throwing away my time to refresh facebook. To see what people I don't love nearly as much as my husband or son have to say about cats or banal articles from mommy bloggers or vapid memes.

Facebook was a time suck and I had succumbed to its siren call.

So finally one day, I thought, what is stopping me? Nothing is stopping me. My last interactions with this person who once told me not to leave have been overly polite. That isn't worth staying here for. So, I quit.

At first, I didn't really quit. I deactivated my main facebook, but I used my second facebook account, an old account, to log in and see stuff. I interacted a few times and even changed the name back to my real name. And I knew I was cheating, but I didn't feel that I was cheating as badly because there were fewer things on this facebook. Fewer groups, and people I met or added after I stopped using the old account were not showing up in my feed.

I got a few messages asking me what happened to my facebook account. My MIL, my husband's aunt and a cousin who said she understood, she'd taken a yearlong break from facebook once. They told me they missed my son's photo posts. Which I hadn't even made in weeks, which did not reflect the time I spent on facebook. My brother tried to convince me to come back until the election, so I could see his witty posts. It did not sway me. 

There have been moments when I've found myself reading an article that I really want to share, but I have to actually choose a person to share it with, no releasing it into the wind, no "likes" from ghosts of my past. 

Since I quit facebook, I have interacted more frequently by email and text with people I love dearly. These are people I did not interact with much on facebook. I've sent them long emails, maintained ongoing text conversations, even shared some interesting articles. I have cooked more meals for my family than I had cooked in months. I have made more plans with friends. I have read news every day and kept up with it. 

I still have moments when I miss facebook, but the truth is, my life is richer since I left. 

Grief Unfolds

Today I was marveling at how your perspective changes when you are grieving.

I went to the grocery store, the same one I visited for the first time with Papa Fender a week or two before he died. In the car on the way there, we had argued, because he tried to give me some pointers about doing a u-turn in the street (my approach was not as efficient as it could have been) and I told him I hadn’t signed up for driver’s ed.

Today of course he was not there, he will never go there with me again. He will never sit next to me in the car again, we will never argue about anything again.

I feel as though our lives are made of fabric, and someone has torn off a huge chunk of my fabric and the ragged edge is wildly battered in the wind. I cannot grasp it, I cannot tame it.

At the checkout, the bagging person asked me how I am. On autopilot, I said, “good, how are you?” and he looked at me pointedly and he said, jokingly, “Just terrible.” And I thought, I’m terrible, my stepfather has died. My father, my father has died, and I am terrible. But instead I said, “I’m sorry.”

We can’t talk about this pain that consumes us. We can, but it just brings on tears and creates awkward moments.

Today, a Freecycler came to pick up a media cabinet that was Papa Fender’s when he married my mom. She turned out to be a professional herbalist, a woman built like a tank who used to work in the steel industry and, with two leg braces, managed to take this cabinet out of our house that my husband and brother hadn’t been able to take out together.

She was so self-assured; I told her she’d need some muscle, at least two people, and she said, “I can do it,” and she came, and at every step she insisted she could do it, and we helped a little bit in our puny ways, and she did it. She got it out and I didn’t watch her but she loaded it onto her car.

She is a holistic practitioner, and as it turns out, also ordained. I told her that my stepdad had died, and this had been his shelf, and he’d love that you will be using it. And that’s when she told me she is ordained and she offered grief counseling, and said that she doesn’t charge.

I keep thinking that every little spider, every moth, that I see in our house is my Papa Fender. And now I suppose he has sent us this woman.

My husband says people look for patterns. And I have seen so many patterns now. I am looking for them, trying to make sense of what happened. And there are moments of peace, like this week when I dreamt of Papa Fender and we cried together and he told me that he is happy and that he is in heaven. I don’t even believe in heaven, not the Christian one anyway, and I assume that isn’t what he meant anyway, but in any event the dream brought me a moment of peace.

So it comes in waves, and as that torn jagged edge of fabric waves and slams against the wind I try to hem it. Somehow I must hem it, somehow I must tame it. It will always be missing a piece but maybe someday it won’t hurt so much. I hope some day it doesn’t hurt so much.

The hardest part

Grief is a strange thing. It will never be the same for everybody, and it doesn't matter what your official relationship to the deceased was, because your personal relationship is what you lose and that's what you cannot capture.

In recent years, my Papa Fender would tell me me that when he first met me, I was a different person, that I was not present.  He was the one that intuited my family dynamic, the baggage of my childhood in my relationship with my brother, with my family in Mexico. He was the one that let me be myself.

We had a funny dynamic, we bickered. I think the thing I'm struggling with is that he never hurt me, but I feel that I hurt him. By rejecting his attempts to teach me things (because I'm defensive), by rejecting some of his attempts to get close to my son (because he didn't get the whooping cough vaccine, because he was an electrician who did manual labor and came home with dust I was afraid of, because he had a cold).

He was the person that was there for everybody. He was the one everybody would call and he would always say yes. It was his greatest strength and maybe his greatest weakness.

And I pushed him. I pushed and pushed and I feel the guilt of playing a role in his running himself into the ground.

That's my guilt. And I can't work out - is it my guilt, or my grief? Is it because I love him, or because I'm just selfish?

--

When someone dies, they are just gone. One minute they were there, he was standing at the kitchen counter before I went to bed, and the next time I saw him he was dead on a bed at a hospital with a tube in his mouth. Dead. DEAD.

I couldn't bring myself to really touch him, to stroke and kiss him the way my mom did. He wasn't there. Where is he?

My husband says we are just meat suits on a skeleton and everything we are is just chemicals in our brains and when we die we cease to exist. And in many ways I do believe this, but I am struggling with it. Is a person really reduced just to everything they left behind? Things, memories, recordings, writings?

There is definitely a hole in our hearts where he was. There is pain here. We are missing a limb, a light that we had. He was the one that always had fun. He was the one that always was here. And as we deal with the aftermath, with trying to go through the rooms full of things he left behind, it all feels empty.

I touched his keys, his phone, his Birkenstocks, and I don't know if I felt his presence or his absence.

I am grappling. And it hurts.

Papa Fender

15 days ago, my husband, my baby and I put all of our belongings in storage and moved in with my mom and my stepdad, to live with them until further notice while we house hunted.

5 days ago, my stepdad had a heart attack at work and died.

He died. We lost him. We lost our Papa Fender.

My son is going to be 10 months old this week. He loved his Papa Fender. He loves his daddy, and his Mama Lili (my mother), and his Papa Fender. Those were the 3 people he would go to with open arms and not want to come back to me.

And now he's gone. He's gone and he's gone.

The Blue Book

Before I got pregnant I saw a "Line a Day" five year journal at a gift shop and I bought it, determined to chronicle every day of my child's life for 5 years.

Sometimes I have up to 4 days of catch up to do. But generally I follow through and try to write a little story every day, something new he is doing. I was hoping to somehow capture the baby steps of development, all the "firsts." It shouldn't be too hard, right? Every day, write something new.

Except it doesn't work that way. The changes are so subtle, or maybe so sudden, that I end up writing things like "A has been turning the pages of his book during bedtime story." Daddy doesn't know when he started, and we've only been reading him a book for 3 days but his grandma read him a cloth book, maybe he turned the pages for her?

I also ended up writing "A drank water out of an open cup all by himself" on several days. I guess I captured the first time he did it, but did he really do nothing new on the other days?

Babies develop at lightning speed. One day they have teeth. One day they can drink out of a cup. One day he will use a fork and a spoon and sleep by himself.

In the early days, when I was obsessed with where and how the baby slept (because he would only sleep on me, latched onto the boob), someone said to me, "The nights are long, but the years are short."

Indeed. And I'm capturing at least five of them, in slow motion.

The baby is upside down

Our baby has slept in our bed since birth. First on my chest, then in the crook of my arm while nursing.

That stopped working because it was killing my back, and the baby was crying for boob 10-11 times a night. I was going slowly insane.

Around 5.5 months we hired two sleep consultants and tried to sleep train him. It failed spectacularly after some promising progress and I was not ok with letting my gorgeous smiling baby cry so much at night time. It did not feel right. If he wasn't ready to sleep by himself, and I loved having him with me, why should I try to force him?

We went to Australia and he was back on the boob all night. At the age of 7mo, we came back home and he was still nursing all night and my back was killing me. I decided something had to be done. I decided to stop nursing all night.

I was not interested in night weaning - I believe my son needs to eat at night, particularly as his weight gain really slowed the 3 weeks we tried to sleep train and he was being restricted to 2 night feeds.  I can hardly even believe I did that. What was I even thinking? I restricted my child's feeding. I always said there were two things I'd never deny him - comfort and food. My boobs are both to him, and I denied him.

There was something I didn't get, that I get now. Just because we do things one way, doesn't mean we have to stop doing them if they don't work anymore. It means we just need to find a new way to do them, that works for both of us.

So I decided I would still feed him at night, as much as he wanted, but we would do it sitting up and when he was done I would put him down.

He cried for many, many nights. He was not impressed by the new arrangement. But I did not cave, and eventually he accepted the new normal.

Of course his sleep is still pretty shithouse. He wakes up anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours after being put down, and then every hour or two until morning. Sometimes around 3am and usually around 5 in the morning he struggles to go back to sleep; at 3 he might be awake rolling around behind me for an hours, and at 5am I have to put him on my chest to help him sleep until after 6am.

Going to bed is a production each night. We let him brush his own teeth, have started reading him a story, then I nurse him and then put him down on the bed. He rolls around. He blows raspberries on my arm. He curls into me then away from me. He touches my face. He scootches up to the top of the bed and scratches the wall. I pull him down, or roll him away, or towards me. He might cry. He grabs his feet.

Bedtime takes like 40 minutes. I often need dad to come in for reinforcement and sometimes, after long enough the baby cries and I need ot give him more milk, after which I will put him down and he will curl into daddy and go to sleep.

Other times I try to lay with him until he goes to sleep and he just won't stop playing, so I call daddy. Last night, daddy lay next to him quietly and he ended up turning himself upside down on the bed and falling asleep.

Maybe this is progress. I don't know. Sleep consultants and sleep experts would say that he has too many sleep crutches or sleep props and that's why he isn't sleeping through the night. I think he doesn't nurse enough during the day and that if he stopped eating at night, he'd not put on as much weight as he should.  But I also think, once he starts crawling it's not safe for him to sleep in our bed and we will need to put him in his crib.

All I know is that I know nothing. My kid is cute though.

Patience

Two days ago, my grandmother said to me, "Who would have said you'd be such a good mother."

The comment stuck with me. I took it as a compliment, if back handed. Who would have thought? Why would anybody NOT have thought?

Today she said it again, so I asked her about it. She said that I had a lot of patience for the baby.

I have been very intentional about being patient since the baby was just a few weeks old. He would fall asleep at the breast while eating at night. Because he ate very frequently and slowly and required a nipple shield at this age, this was VERY frustrating for me because he would fall deeply asleep and then would wake up again a short while later, still hungry, and I'd have to sit up and feed him again. I remember at one point shaking a bottle of tums by his head and being rough in moving him, trying to wake him. And I remember feeling like a shitty mom for doing this. I had this kind of "ah ha" moment - this little person was depending on me. Leunig was in my head, there are only two feelings, love and fear, and what was I afraid of? That I'd have to wake up again in 45 minutes? That I'd be tired? The main thing he needs is my love. My love and my love and my love. My love in the way I handle him. My love in the way I touch him, respond to him.

As time has wore on, the challenges are different. We always had easy diaper changes during the day - slow, calm, I would talk or sing him through it and he would cooperate. Then there were some times when I felt disconnected from him, he just wanted to wriggle and wouldn't let me change his diaper. I had to resist the urge to rush through it, to try to force him. I started giving him time. So he wanted to look at the wall - ok, he wants to look at the wall. Will something bad happen if he looks at the wall instead of finishing his diaper change right now? What was I afraid of? Nothing to fear there. Out of love, I would wait. I would try to notice.

Now I ask him everything. Is he ready? I've learned that sometimes, when he complains at a diaper change, he just wants a hug. I offer him a hug and then he lets me get on with it.

Patience. It's a funny thing, something all my life I thought would elude me, and then I had this child and almost 9 months later, I've developed patience.

Motherhood

So after all that I became a mother to a beautiful little boy and development has taken on a whole new meaning.

There is my son. He has changed an incredible amount since he was born. I see the changes every day. Today, he learned how to use a cup. It's the doidy cup. He communicates with me - flapping his arms means yes. I mean I love this kid - he's going to be 8 months old next week and he can drink out of a cup and say yes.

He sleeps in bed with us. After many nights of many hours of crying next to me in bed, I convinced him that he can no longer sleep all night on the boob and so now he falls asleep next to me, sometimes cuddled, sometimes not. And we can leave him in there, by himself, and I watch him on the monitor like a hawk. And I notice when his head has turned, and every so often I zoom in to make sure I can see his breath gently move in his back.

Development. He can sit up by himself if I sit him down, but not yet push himself into a sitting position. He doesn't crawl yet but he rolls himself wherever he wants to go, with a silent speed.

I watch him all the time and yet I am aware I don't really know him. He is my son but he is not mine. I try to watch him, to know him, but I am imperfect and my phone is at my hand and I don't know him. Not as much as I thought I would.

I spend a lot of time on parenting groups on Facebook, learning, preparing for when he's older and understanding how to be a respectful parent. I am in love with the RIE philosophy but I think I am letting my intuition guide me and not so much the books; my intuition and reading about other pareents' experiences.

Development. There is a concept in Allan Kaplan - it is about how life is the manifestation of the struggle between polarities. And I see this in my parenting. Part of this is learning. As you learn, you go to an extreme, because you don't know yet, how to balance. There are too many unknowns. For example, from lack of experience perhaps I have not fully integrated "do not label your children" into my parenting, so I may be dogmatic about it. And the more that I learn about it, and test it, the more I will understand it and be able to apply it appropriately. It is then no longer a rule, a dogma, but a method, an approach, respectfulness.

Development. It is all around me. My relationship with my husband has changed. As a father and partner parent he is more spectacular than I ever dreamed. He inspires me with his unconditional love and support, his willingness to step up in any way that we need for our little family.

Development. It reminds me that it's never too late, we are constantly changing, we can always keep changing, bettering.