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Not now doesn’t mean not ever

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Raising a two-year-old and three-year-old, we talk a lot about patience in our house. Usually hourly. They want a juice box, the toy the other one is playing with, to watch a show. It’s not the commonplace things they have trouble waiting for, but those that are special, exciting. A treat.  

We talk about waiting our turn: “you will get it, but not yet.” We talk about asking nicely and not whining. And we expect that one day this will all click and we will no longer need to have these conversations. 

But last night I realized I probably need to be having these conversations with myself. 

Why do we expect toddlers to wait patiently when we still haven’t seemed to have mastered this skill as adults?

Sure, by the time we’re adults we’ve learned to wait for our food at restaurants, for our turn in line at the BMV, and even for the weekend–all of which are commonplace things. But what about the bigger items? Those that are special, exciting. A treat.

An essay I wrote was accepted for publication last month. Which was exciting at first but the longer I’ve had to wait to see it in print, the more restless I’ve become.  

This kind of impatience isn’t just contained to career. Some of us could be waiting on friendships, test results, perceived milestones for ourselves or our children, a home. 

In the face of rejection and silence it can be easy to believe that this is how it will always be—especially when the disappointments stack up. We forget, just because something isn’t happening right now, doesn’t mean it will never happen.

It’s usually the things that are special, the ones we want the most, that are the hardest to wait for. 

So, when the weight of another let down, missed opportunity, or heartbreak hits, do not be fooled. This is not how it will always be. Not now doesn’t mean not ever. There are more tomorrows ahead. Plenty will be filled with disappointments and rejections but plenty will also be filled with victories. 

Our turn is coming. It may not look how we initially thought it would, it may not come when we want it to. But it will come. We just have to be patient.

New Year, New Books

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I haven’t been active on this page the last few months mostly because what my writing outside of work has centered on. As you get older some things become less black and white while simultaneously becoming more clear. What and who you devote your time to pans out after some tricky negotiating. What you hold close–particularly in today’s age of oversharing–becomes more sacred.

I ended 2019 with the same people, in the same home I started it with. That simple and enormous fact I am grateful for. As Levi and I headed to bed before 11 p.m., I crept into each of our kid’s rooms to check on them (despite being able to see them on the monitor) and physically felt the weight of this gift: their tiny backs rising and falling under the palm of my hand.

I began 2019 with no resolutions and am doing the same for 2020. No sweeping transformative plans or hard-set goals. Unburdened by the confines of a resolution, I am free to follow whatever sets a spark.

For me, 2019 was a year of reading. I finished 13 books which, to an avid read, may be a typical quarterly quotient. But, as a work-from-home mom with a two-year-old and three-year-old, it was the most I’ve read in years. I also started reading five other titles and ended up not finishing them because, once again, time is valuable and I wasn’t going to spend it slugging through a book I wasn’t gleaning anything from or enjoying.

2019 Titles

  1. Circling the Sun, Paula McClain, Historical Fiction, 496 pages, 1/9/19
  2. The Witch Elm, Tana French, Crime Fiction, 528 pages, 1/24/19
  3. Educated, Tara Westover, Memoir, 334 pages, 2/22/19
  4. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti, Coming-of-age Fiction, 376 pages, 4/4/19
  5. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, Historical Literary Fiction, 6/23/19
  6. Ask Again, Yes, Mary Beth Keane, Literary Fiction, 6/29/19
  7. The Gifted School, Bruce Holsinger, Literary Fiction, 8/3/19
  8. Dominicana, Angie Cruz, Coming-of-age Fiction, 8/18/19
  9. Wild Game, Adrienne Brodeur, Memoir, 9/6/19
  10. This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger, Literary Fiction, 11/7/19
  11. Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert, Romance, 11/15/19
  12. The Family Upstairs, Lisa Jewell, Psychological Thriller, 11/24/19
  13. The Giver of Stars, Jojo Moyes, Historical Fiction, 12/13/19

2019 Top Three

  1. My favorite book of 2019 was Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. A switchback narrative centering on the lives of Yale Tishman, a gay art director living in 1980s Chicago when the AIDS crisis hits and Fiona, the younger sister of one of Yale’s closest friends who is grappling with her own family in modern-day Paris. Eye-opening and heartbreaking, The Great Believers had me missing the characters for weeks after I turned the final page. The Great Believers won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie medal, the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
  2. My runner-up read of 2019 was The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti. This switchback narrative tells the story of former con Samuel Hawley and his teenage daughter, Loo, new-to-town outcasts who are running from and reasoning with their pasts in an attempt to build a more settled future. Tinti masterfully captures place, painting vivid images of Alaska, Wisconsin, Arizona, and a fictional Olympus, Massachusetts that made me want to pack my bags and head to Gloucester, Massachusetts for a long weekend.
  3. Rounding out my top three is Educated by Tara Westover. A memoir detailing the incredible arc of growing up in an isolationist household with no formal schooling, escaping those bonds, and fighting to discover knowledge and receive an education–no matter the cost.

Reading is an active pause from our everyday lives and own narratives. The direction our culture is headed–with social media becoming enmeshed in our day-to-day–is a breeding ground for a self-centered and comparative society. It doesn’t lend to empathy.

When you read a book you step into the complex story of another person–not a picture or post of a single moment or experience. Spending time in the mind and life of someone else–whether real or imagined–and considering their problems and motivations demands perspective of our own life.

In 2019 I read over 5,000 pages in which I got to glimpse into the life of a Dominicana child bride immigrant in 1960s New York City, a girl who grew up in colonial Kenya in the 1920s and became a record-setting aviator, and a man who lost everything to the AIDS crisis in a time when there was little to no support to those who were suffering.

New year, same me. But hopefully 2020 will be another year filled with new books that prompt me to see things differently, connect me with people from other places and times, and remind me to be grateful for my own story.

To the movers

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In our eight years of marriage Levi and I have had seven addresses. We’ve moved a lot and started over a lot and we still have a significant amount of hand-me-down furniture with layers of corporate move stickers on it.

After living in Missouri, Illinois, and South Dakota, we bought our first home in Centerville, Ohio. That was four and a half years ago. At the time, I didn’t want to buy a house, but Levi said it was a better investment than continuing to rent. So, after reluctantly looking at listings online, I told him I’d go see one house. One. We ended up buying that house and we lived there for a little over three years.

It was the longest we had lived in one place and it was our first home. We gutted and finished the master bathroom, hand-scraped thousands of apples off the kitchen walls in what can only be described as a truly amazing wallpaper print. We repainted every cornflower blue room, fixed up not one, but two nurseries, and Levi hand-dug 40+ postholes and raised a fence in our back yard. We did a lot of these projects with the help of family and friends.

We hosted family dinners, birthday parties, and cooked and shared meals with our closest friends around our dining room table. I finished writing my graduate thesis on a barstool at the kitchen island. We rode out heatwaves, ice storms, stomach bugs, and sleepless nights with newborn babies.

It went from being a house, to being our home.

When we first talked of moving—leaving the house I didn’t even want to buy–I immediately began crying. We didn’t lay the cement block foundation or raise the walls of that colonial, but we had built our home there. I had built a business there. We had built friendships there.

We had built our life there.

It takes both time and work to stake out a corner of the world and call it your own. To know it as home. To have that and choose to leave it–to uproot with a toddler and an infant and move hundreds of miles away to a new city where you know no one and your closest family is hours away—is tough.

This kind of move is different than moving to a different home in the same city or the next town over–that comes with its own set of challenges. But this kind of move, the one I’m talking about, is where you leave behind the life you know and start a new one. And this is its own kind of heartbreak.

At first it feels like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes. Like your luggage was lost and you are borrowing someone else’s sweater and pants for an unknown amount of time until yours arrive. You’re just waiting for a new house and a new town to feel like yours.

You spend the first two months learning your way around with GPS. Making mental notes of street names and landmarks. Figuring out where the good grocery stores are. Finding new doctors, pediatricians, veterinarians, hair stylists, babysitters, and dentists. You so badly want it to immediately feel like home and it’s easy to forget that “home” feeling from the place you knew before, your old home, only came with time.

Slowly, you paint a room, hang a picture, become less dependent on Google Maps. You learn to love the way the morning light creeps through the windows when you sit in your favorite chair. Then, you build a fire in the hearth when it snows. You sit on the patio on a cool spring night and look for Cassiopeia. You sit on the same patio and watch your babies run through the sprinkler on a warm summer day. You put yourself out there and meet new people. Some turn out to be people you want to see again, others turn out to be people you won’t. Some eventually become friends.

This starting over, hewing a new life from a fresh block of wood, is one of the most difficult things you will do. But it will open you up to more experiences and people than you knew a mere matter of months ago. It will force you to see the world differently, to have more empathy. It will challenge you to prioritize what is important. It will make you ache for your old home, the one that smelled like home and you already knew which floorboards creaked and what windows rattled in the wind. It will make you envious of the people who’ve never moved—the ones who’ve never had to figure out where the grocery store is, or start over from scratch with friends, or not have family close by to help out in a pinch. But ultimately, it will teach you things you wouldn’t have otherwise known.

This is for the movers. The ones who do what most others haven’t and won’t. The ones who say goodbye to one life and take their young families somewhere they’ve never been to create a new one.

It’s that young family you’re doing it for. To give them every opportunity. But it’s you who unexpectantly also ends up with new opportunities. Your circle grows, your perspective grows, you grow. It’s hard, but you do it. And finally, one morning, you wake up and realize there is more than one corner of the world that can become home.

World Breastfeeding Week misses the mark

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Happy World Breastfeeding Week to all the moms who have chosen or are choosing breastfeeding for their families.

For just over 20 years, World Breastfeeding Week has been celebrated during the first week of August. For the past 10 years, it has been an opportunity for many breastfeeding moms to share pictures on social media of them nursing with captions exclaiming the special bond they have with their baby, a list of obstacles they’ve overcome to breastfeed, along with a few sentences sprinkled in about how magical and amazing it is that they’ve been able to feed their infant with their breasts. 

Truly, healthy mothers and babies are something to support and celebrate. But, World Breastfeeding Week is missing an opportunity to empower and enable ALL babies and families to be supported and healthy, because breastfeeding isn’t always an option, and it isn’t always the best option for every family.  

As a mother who has both breastfed and formula fed, I’m wondering why a separate week solely for breastfeeding needs to exist? Wouldn’t “infant and child feeding week” equally educate and appropriately celebrate all parents and families?

Why choose a week to focus on what sets us apart and creates division, rather than advocate for a week that provides awareness of all feeding methods as well as supports and recognizes the health and well-being for all families?

First things first.

Breasts aren’t required to bond.

To believe women who breastfeed have a stronger bond with their children than parents who formula feed is both ill-informed and pretentious. Bonds are created in the love and time you give a child, and that love and time 100% does not have to include breasts. 

Moving on. 

All of parenthood is filled with overcoming obstacles and making sacrifices. 

Breastfeeding families work hard and make sacrifices. So do formula feeding families. 

Every time I’ve gotten up to make a bottle in the middle of the night, every evening I hand washed and sterilized bottles from the day, every time I bought and mixed formula with nursery water, made sure bottles were prepared and packed in proper refrigeration for a quick trip out or week-long stay, I was doing so for my babies. Bottle-feeding takes planning and time and effort, just as breastfeeding does. 

And you know what? When I gave my babies a bottle and rocked them to sleep at night, or took pause from a busy afternoon to sit down and feed them, I felt every emotion that every parent feeding  their child feels: love, sacrifice, pride, and joy in the knowledge that my child was eating and growing and thriving.

Next. 

Breastfeeding isn’t magic, it’s biology.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines magic as “a special, exciting quality that makes something or someone different or better than others.”

Now, let’s take a minute to look at another definition. A mammal is defined as:

“A warm-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that is distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of the young, and (typically) the birth of live young.”

There are over 5,000 different species of mammals. All of which have nursed their young since the beginning of time. 

Every day 5,000 different species are feeding their babies with milk secreted from mammary glands. It’s interesting, but it’s also a natural, biological process. 

You know what’s really magical? 

That one species of mammals, humans, have used science to develop and provide an alternate option to nourish their young.

For adoptive parents, for parents using a surrogate, for foster parents, for mothers who have survived a double mastectomy, for mothers of multiples, for mothers who jeopardize their own health in attempting to breastfeed, for mothers who simply know breastfeeding is not the best choice for their family… formula makes it possible for these babies to be nourished and these families to thrive. 

And know what’s amazing? 

Babies. 

Being a mother. 

Parenthood.

To know a love so deep and pure that you choose to put your every need second to that of someone else’s—that’s amazing. 

Three cheers for families who breastfeed. And three cheers for families who formula feed. At the end of the day, we’re stronger as a united front. What if we could support each other in simply doing what’s best for our own families, and understand that looks different for every parent and every child. 

When your child needs ear tube surgery

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I am not a medical professional. This information is from our personal experience and a medical professional should be consulted in healthcare decisions. 

When Your child needs ear tube surgery-7

 

Almost one year ago our son had bilateral tympanostomy tube insertion surgery—more commonly known as getting “ear tubes”.

During this procedure a small hole is made in the ear drum and a tiny tube is inserted which allows air to move in and out of the middle ear.

We had always assumed ear tubes were only for kids who had excessive ear infections.

Garrett had his first ear infection at seven-months and he had five more infections over the next 11 months—for a total of 6 ear infections (two of which were doubles) in a year.

At this time we went to a large pediatric practice where we usually saw a different pediatrician each visit. Each doctor would look in his ears, note they were fluid-filled and infected, and write a script for another round of antibiotics.

Whenever we took Garrett in for follow-up appointments the infection would have cleared but the fluid remained in his ears. Each provider assured us sometimes it takes longer for fluid to clear after an ear infection, but the good news was the infection was gone.

On Garrett’s sixth ear infection the pediatrician spoke with us about tubes and said Garrett was “on the fence” for the number of infections that suggests tube surgery is necessary. This pediatrician said we could wait and see how Garrett does and if he got another ear infection in the next 8 weeks he recommended moving forward with tube surgery.

As we waited to see if Garrett would get another ear infection he started having falls. He fell down the stairs, would fall off a chair while seated, and trip when playing. As most 18-month-olds take tumbles while learning to navigate the world around them, we initially credited this clumsiness to Garrett’s young age.

In addition to the ear infections and balance issues, Garrett was also behind in speech development, saying very few words and most of the words he did say were approximations. My husband was a late-talker and many others assured us that all kids start talking at different ages, so again, we were operating under the “give it time” notion.

But it all just felt off. It wasn’t adding up. There were too many separate flags signaling something wasn’t right.

When Garrett fell down the stairs a second time I made an appointment with the doctor to discuss balance concerns as well as bring up Garrett’s speech development.

The pediatrician we saw this time looked at Garrett’s entire history and completed a full physical exam. Garrett didn’t have an ear infection at this time but he still had fluid in his ears.

This pediatrician explained to us that persistent fluid in the ears can impact the vestibular system—which controls our balance, how we know where we are in space, and how we move our bodies. The presence of fluid in the ears can interfere with how the vestibular system works. She also shared that fluid in the ears can also cause hearing loss and result in a speech delay. And finally, that persistent fluid in the ears creates ideal conditions for infections.

And there it was. She put it all together. The ear infections, the falls and balance issues, the speech delay—it was all related to the fact that Garrett had had persistent fluid in his ears for the past 15 months. The pediatrician said we should schedule tube surgery as soon as possible.

The ENT ordered two hearing tests with an audiologist prior to the surgery—both of which revealed Garrett had a hearing loss.

When we brought Garrett home from surgery he put a small blanket over his head and continued to pull a blanket over his head or cover his ears with his hands for three days. He was fully hearing for the first time in nearly a year and a half and the volume and noise was outright overwhelming.

Within a month after surgery Garrett’s vocabulary took off. Most of his words were still approximations but he was saying new ones and saying them daily. He was no longer falling off chairs and was tripping less often. He stopped getting ear infections.

Tube surgery is one of the best things we’ve done for Garrett and had we known sooner that it addressed more than ear infections, we would have scheduled it earlier. 

My hope is this finds another parent somewhere who is on the fence about tube surgery. Or another parent who is desperately trying to identify perceived silo issues with their child that are actually all connected. As parents, we can research, ask for advice, and take our kids to a dozen different doctors, and still feel like something isn’t adding up. That gut feeling—mother’s or father’s intuition—is one of the best things we can rely on to keep pushing for answers for our kids.