Motherhood and other creative adventures
This picture is left over from last week, but it brings me so much pleasure I had to share it.
Aside from the great company that hosting a get together brings, my favorite part is all the party food leftovers. I’m one of those people who regularly orders an appetizer as my meal, so this is like food nirvana for me. A whole fridge stuffed with little munchy appetizers. Wonderful.
I made these little makeup bags from this tutorial as presents for the outgoing presidency. I filled them with fancy soap and lotion and told them they all deserved a rest.
Eight weeks ago I was asked to serve as the Young Womens President, and yesterday it all finally happened. Eight weeks! For eight weeks I’ve been sitting around biting my nails and obsessing over everything I had to get done, but without being able to do anything about it. It’s made my anxiety go through the roof, but it’s also made it really hard to blog about what’s occupying my mind, because I couldn’t talk publicly about the only thing I could think about.
Young Womens is the organization at church that is over all girls 12 – 18. We teach them on Sunday and have youth group one night a week, and then there’s also a whole host of other activities and responsibilities that go with it. I’ll have a group of about 8 other women who will be working with me to get it all done, so that means planning meetings and phone calls and emails and a whole lot of work. I’ve been told by people who know that it’s a similar work load to being a PTA president. It’s slightly overwhelming.
I have been so anxious about how I’m going to fit everything in. Atti has this new therapy so he now goes to therapy four times a week, I’ll have meetings at the very least twice a week for YW, and I have the two different careers I’m juggling that I can’t bear the thought of giving up. Bear and I have talked about some changes we can make to make everything work but it’s a whole lot to manage.
Every time I look at what I’ve got on my plate, I just can’t imagine letting anything go. I can’t cut back on the blog, it’s my connection to the world. I can’t cut back on the work I’m doing in the Mormon Studies world, it keeps my brain engaged and keeps my faith in tact. I can’t do less for Atticus. And I love these girls. I can’t say no to them.
I had an old bishop who used to say, “A change is as good as a rest.” He used to listen to his kids whine about doing yardwork, so instead of letting them quit, he’d send them inside to fold laundry. He used to say that using different muscles was just as restful as using no muscles, and 100% more productive. So I’m clinging to that. When my toddler gets to be too much, I can go hang out with a bunch of teenagers who love me and tell me how great I am. When I get tired of writing, I can go make something. It will all just take some careful planning and a whole lot of discipline.
And ice cream. I think I’ll need a lot of ice cream.
There is one thing that every single therapeutic professional I’ve encountered has counseled me to do. Everyone from Atti’s neonatologist to other mom’s I bump into at therapy. Every single person who knows has told me to get Atticus into the REINS program.
Similar programs exist around the nation, but we’re lucky enough to have a first-class therapeutic hippotherapy organization about 20 minutes up the freeway.
Hippotherapy sounds fancy, but it’s simply horse therapy. They take kids who have any number of disabilities, Cerebral Palsy like Atticus, ADD, Autism, Vision or Hearing impairments, Down Syndrome, kids recovering from accidents, or even just an unspecified developmental delay, and give them time riding a horse. The benefits are myriad. Often kids who are unresponsive to people will open up to an animal. It’s great for core strengthening and muscle stretching. Feeling the rhythm of the horse’s steps is great input for someone like Atti who needs to tell his feet how to move in a different way from the rest of us, and it’s a way of doing intensive physical therapy in a way that is fun instead of painful.
Some kids get scared their first time, but I knew Atti would take right to it. The instructors commented on how he had no fear. Notice how he even keeps up his steady flirting while trying to keep himself upright.
And listen to him giggle! Oh the good that does my heart!
When our time was up they walked Atti into the tack room to get some carrots and fed our pony Pancho a treat to say thanks for his hard work. Atti dug both hands right into his hair and sweet little Pancho didn’t even flinch.
This day was so wonderful, watching my little guy have so much fun and gain some independence on a beautiful clear day in the country, surrounded by orange and apple trees growing fruit for the kids to feed the horses. I just felt like I’d left my hectic overcommitted life and found a moment of peace. My cup feels full. I think this is going to turn out to be therapeutic for Atti and me.
I’ve really wanted to make more time for a social life this year, and so far I’m doing pretty well. My friends Chris and Sandra came over for a big knitting party, and then last Friday I threw a get together for some LDS internet friends.
It was a little bit of a challenge because nearly everyone there were vegetarians and Bear doesn’t consider a meal over until meat comes on board, but I came up with a couple pretty wonderful things that I’ll share over the coming weeks.
Meeting up with these internet friends made me so grateful I had Atticus when I did. I have to say, I haven’t felt that new mommy isolation for one minute. All my friends told me about how lonely that first year can be, and it wasn’t for me in the slightest. Which is especially wonderful given how much time we have to spend at home doing his therapy. I am so grateful for this window I have into the world, and the wonderful friends it’s brought me.
Taken from my backyard. The neighbors didn’t have a pot of gold, though.
It’s been awhile since I had one of my breakdowns worrying about Atti reaching milestones. When a premature baby hits two years old, they stop adjusting for the prematurity. Most of the time that delay has sorted itself out by then, and when it hasn’t, counting them a few months younger isn’t going to mean a lot.
Now that he’s nearly two, he’s missed pretty much all the milestones I think he’s going to miss. And that brings an odd kind of freedom. I no longer have to panic as another skill whizzes past us. Now I just get to dig in and focus on what he can do. For Atti, I feel pretty confident that his ability right now is as bad as it’s going to get.
And we still have time for things to get a whole lot better.
Atti has mastered the commando crawl. He races around this house crawling on his belly like a soldier in the mud, winding up in the oddest locations. He seems to be growing unsatisfied with this method, because finally, after years of failed attempts in therapy, he’s discovering his hands and knees. This kid is on a schedule of his own and he will not. be. rushed.
I’ve really been working on his little thigh muscles lately. Lots of stretching and pull to stand exercises, and it is paying off big time. It doesn’t hurt that he spends more and more time playing with friends who stand up and run around, and heaven forbid someone do something that he can’t.
He can’t stand on his own yet, he still needs a lot of support, but what this all means is that he’s going to do it. He’s going to figure it all out, and he’s going to be just fine.
When we lost our sweet Lobo last year, it was a major loss for our family. We hadn’t had him that long but he was such a good boy with Atticus we loved him twice as hard.
Back in July we bought our newest little Gizmo. We picked a brand new kitten because we knew that we would be asking a lot from this little cat, and we thought that if we started young, we may be able to train him. As much as a cat can ever really be trained.
When I look through the photos from 2009, it’s amazing how often some little part of Gizmo pops up in all the pictures I take of Atti. Particularly when a mess is involved. They seem to egg each other on somehow.
Gizmo never ventures far from his boy. He eats his table scraps, chases the balls Atti throws, sniffs at the robot Elmo while he wiggles, and supervises any therapists that come to the house. He’s very protective.
Atti’s often covered in cat scratches, but never anything painful. Just little warning jabs when he gets especially rowdy. This sweet cat puts up with an awful lot. When Atti starts to pull his fur too hard, Giz will reach out and put a paw on his forehead and push, just like a bigger kid on the playground saying, “Try and get me. I dare you try and get me” While Atti flails away getting nowhere.
People often ask me how I get so much done in a day, and the truth is that Gizmo handles most of Atti’s therapy. Atticus chases him from one end of the house to the other, and when he catches him, Gizmo just gets up and moves a few more feet away.
It’s almost like Atti has a really fuzzy older brother.
During our epic eight year battle with infertility, I would regularly make little bargains with God in a last ditch desperate attempt to make things work. “God? If you give me a baby, I’ll stop swearing at other drivers.” “God? If I get a baby I’ll donate all my Christmas presents to Goodwill.” “God? If it works this time, I promise I’ll give a penny more often than I take a penny.” But the one thing I could never bring myself to bargain over was the potential ability of my child. Never once was I ever even tempted to say, “God? You can give me a baby with whatever challenge you’ve got. I’m willing. I just want a baby.” Never once. I was so terrified at the thought of raising a child with special needs, so sure I did not possess the mix of tenderness and patience and ferociousness it requires, that in all my fruitless bargaining I never even hinted at the offer.
I had known a few of those moms over the years, and I would marvel at their capabilities. I’ve known families that adopted child after child with profound needs, sacrificing wealth and worldly ambition to nurture these little spirits. Their lives seemed holy to me. I was sure that these were a special type of people, gifted with benevolence that the rest of us mortals could never obtain. They seemed like saints.
Despite all my fear and the certainty I had about my own limitations, my own calling into the Sisterhood of the Special Needs came. My son Atticus was born at 28 weeks via emergency C-section, spent 3 months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and a couple months into his hospital stay the doctors found some brain damage that resulted in Cerebral Palsy.
If my life were a movie, this is the part where I would go out walking through a late night rainstorm, railing at the heavens and cursing the God I believed in. But nothing so cathartically dramatic was available, so my husband Jared and I spent two days catatonic in front of the television, the floor littered with Cheese-It crumbs and Ho-Ho wrappers as we tried to eat our feelings. Once we found the strength to leave the couch and wash the orange dust off our hands, we made our way back to Atti’s bedside to discover that he looked exactly the same as he did before the diagnosis. He was still our teeny little super guy. He was still the hard won little blessing that we had rejoiced over before. He now just carried this label that left everything else up in the air. I was overwhelmed with love for him, but the visions I had of my future were terrifying. I had no idea how I could be the mom a kid like this would need.
Suddenly I found myself in this club of sainted women, only I was a bundle of neurosis with a short temper and serious self-doubt. But since I was still in the club whether I wanted to be or not, it meant that you didn’t have to be some paragon of virtue to belong, which meant that those women I had always admired weren’t some rare breed of perfection but regular old women who were just doing amazing things. And since I was just a regular old woman, maybe I could get there too. This realization gave me the faith I needed to straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath, and get to work.
It’s been nearly two years since he was born, and we’ve spent three or four days a week shuttling between doctors and therapists of every stripe. Every few months Atti accomplishes a new skill on his way towards independence. His progress is slow, so slow that if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think he was stagnant, but it is progress nonetheless. We have become cheerleaders for every independent movement, recognizing how many muscles and systems have to coordinate just to eat, and thrilled on a day when he poops. He’s growing into such a motivated and stubborn little kid, I think he’s going to prove the doctors wrong with a smirk on his face.
My journey into motherhood was so very arduous, on the surface it probably seems to bear little resemblance to the majority of mothers out there. I still find myself choosing to say “when Atti was born,” instead of “when I gave birth” because that emergency trip into the operating room and then three months away from my baby seems to have almost nothing to do with the typical experience. But I think my experience carries what is true for every mother, just compressed.
Motherhood seems to carry those moments for everyone – moments when you are convinced you don’t have it in you, moments when you feel at the absolute limit of your capabilities and you’re still being asked for more. It’s easy to put moms like me in our own category of saintly special cases, but it’s just not true. Getting this diagnosis did not come with a special gift basket of great character traits. When my worst fears were realized and I was forced to confront what I was going to do, I didn’t do anything more or less than most mothers do daily, I discovered more in me than I thought was there, and I did what my child needed.
This face. Surprised and proud at what he can do. Looking up at us to witness his big triumph. This little guy is amazing.
I made a whole lot of stuff this year. I didn’t complete all my crafty goals, but I came close enough to feel pretty durn proud of myself. I’ve always had a tendency to overextend myself, I’ve gotten pretty used to it by now. Plus, I made a whole bunch of things that I didn’t exactly foresee last January. I really loved having a written list of things I wanted to accomplish. It satisfied the OCD in me to have any kind of a list, but it was also a way of quieting those crazy-making voices reminding me incessantly of the projects running through my head. I’ve got a whole new list just waiting to be written up for 2010.
And to satisfy all you adoptive internet Aunties….the year of Atti.
Looking through this mosaic, I can pinpoint the exact moment he went from baby to boy. Oh my sweet little lamb. How I have managed to avoid gobbling him up is just a mystery to me.
I feel like I should do something totally massive for my 500th post, but I don’t really have anything up my sleeve. I’m still lolling around in the blissful aftermath of the holidays. Long days lounging in my jammies and working on projects I don’t normally have time to devote to.
This year has been a big deal for me, full of all kinds of new opportunities and paths I see stretching out before me. It’s hard to really describe because there aren’t really concrete things I can point to, just a lot of good friends, supportive readers, and great experiences that made me realize the things I want to accomplish aren’t so insurmountable after all.
Happy New Year