after not completing a knitting project in the entirety of 2021, I FINALLY finished a blanket I started in 2020. It’s for Bats, and if you look closely you can see his influence on the pattern. I skipped a line once which threw off the whole flow of the pattern! It happened when we were sleep training him and I was trying to distract myself… it didn’t work. ðĩðŦ… anyway, maybe next time before I start knitting a blanket I’ll remember how much I hate working on blankets!!! (Boring)
In the last two weeks I’ve had the most consecutive time off my full time mom job since I started this gig. Byron took the baby to the beach with Gran and Grandpa, then two days after they got back I went to Boston to visit my boo @karabux. What do you think I did when I got the whole house to myself?? Chores, lol! And it was glorious. So one thing I’ve been trying to come to terms with since going back to work full time is the fact that it is not realistic for me to see Bats every moment of his life. Like I’m having to remind myself that he is a different person from me??? I think he has a better handle on the whole situation than me. He was inside my body for 9 months and then he was so utterly dependent (udderly? Lol) on my body for so many months that I’m just sort of on autopilot. One thing that is constant is change!!! And he is growing and moving and I am back at work and it’s awesome but still sort of weird. I am listening to the audiobook “Nightbitch” and it is like MomKafka. A mom turns into a dog? A great commentary on early mom life and how everything starts feeling totally bonkers. Do I feel like I’m turning into another species??? Maybe, lol. I find myself wanting someone to write about what it’s like being a first time mom in Covid. Story time at the library?? I don’t know her. Bats doesn’t really go anywhere in public yet ☹️ maybe we’ll learn the parenting landscape soon, but maybe not……
I think I knew this before, but maybe not as much as I do now… the world of parenting is full of landmines. There are So Many Decisions to make at every turn, all of which seem to have EXTREMELY DIRE CONSEQUENCES. Sleep? Stressful. Eating? Stressful. Play??? Stressful. Every time you make a choice it’s like you’ve picked a side somewhere and now have an entire online community of enemies lurking somewhere. The minute they sniff that I (am/am not) sleep training… attack!!! Even me posting this picture will show which types of toys I buy for my kid and which shirts he wears and that I let the cats fully put their butts on all of his toys etc etc etc. I feel like every little piece of information I leak out about my parenting journey just adds up a little wall to the box I’m supposed to exist in as a parent (for the sake of this metaphor let’s pretend that’s how boxes work). It makes me uncomfortable and it makes me stressed because it seems like it’s very hard to find a neutral ground. I heard a mantra a long time ago that I think I need to bring back- there are a million ways to be a good parent. There are!! I have done so much research and care so much about the specific ways I’ve figured out how to go from day to day raising a kid, but I have no vested interest in anybody else choosing my exact system because everyone is unique!!! Obviously we don’t/can’t all raise our kids exactly the same. Basically what I’m thinking is I’m glad I’m not an *~influencer~* because then everybody would yell at me all the time about why my baby choices will be terrible for my kid and maybe I’d lose this sense of chill. Not sure where I’m going with this but I have just been mulling this over and figured I’d put it out there somewhere. Also nobody has been pressuring me I think I’ve just been seeing various TikTok moms being thrown to the wolves and it’s stressed me.
Something that’s been on my mind a lot is identity- how we identify, how our identity shifts through time, and what experiences influence how we see ourselves. My doctoral research has been focusing on science identity (feeling like a “science person”). A lot of that research finds that being recognized as a science person by people around you is a strong driver of identifying as one yourself. So I keep applying that to my own life in other ways (even if that may not be technically supported by the research ð ). Having basically been stuck inside for a year, the only people I’m really interacting with are people that I know. I barely saw anyone new when I was pregnant, and have never taken Bats anywhere except the doctor’s office. There have not been extended opportunities for me to meet anyone new in my role as “pregnant” and as a “mom”. I’m posting on social media, but it’s all sort of negotiating the old Emma with this new baby accessory, which isn’t doing a lot to change how I identify. I was thinking about this because I visited family out of town this weekend and had the chance to meet people who have never known me except with a baby and as a mom. I had absolutely no clue how to socialize in this way. I have never introduced Bats to anyone really and have never negotiated my identity as his mom. I was sort of lost? Like- I am a lot of other things, but the mom things are such an easy thing to start talking about, especially with the baby right there. I can’t quite get at why I wasn’t good at it but this could also just be general rustiness in small talk. (Side note: someone said “go heels!” to me at a grocery store and I said “thanks” ðĪĶðŧ♀️) I bet I’d experience this identity crisis anyway but covid has really delayed and warped it I’m sure. I am not feeling recognition much in this new role, at least by new people, so I’m sort of in this limbo and not sure how to identify in relation to other parents. I have more thoughts but this is already so long ðĨī
Looks like it’s time for the ol’ blogstagram to make an appearance again! Now I’m a parent to an actual human being... wild. Parenting is so overwhelming I don’t know how everybody with a kid is not constantly spiraling about something. Maybe they are but they’re just hiding it well... in which case, kudos to them. My current spirals have been about sleep. In my pre-parenting life, I saw that there were so many sleep consultants but I didn’t understand why... I certainly do now ð ð ð this shit is wild. In order to protect the online reputation of my small child, I will not go into details about his sleep. Let’s just say it’s been difficult and it’s driven me into a bit of a phase of anxiety that I don’t love. What I *do* love is that I have the pleasure of getting to parent with Byron who allows me to spiral for a little bit while also making me commit to one specific tactic for a while. Without him, I would be flailing from one “tried and true” method to another. What the bb and I both need, though, is consistency and I feel so glad I have Byron the rock there to calm me down. This post was inspired by the fact that I wanted to give up on one tactic but Byron made us commit to 4 days and it worked on the 4th day ðĪŠ I also don’t know what it’s like to have a baby in a non-pandemic, but this shit is wild also. A lot of the advice is like “get out of the house” and it’s like... and go where ð This is not a very deep post but maybe I should get back in the habit of writing my thoughts so I don’t feel so cooped up. (p.s. this is a pic of 4 of my 5 kids ðĐ)
I guess since it’s a pandemic, I’m pregnant, and I have a million thoughts swirling around in my head, I thought I might come back to this space to write some of those thoughts down. Right now I’m at the stage in tiny bb development that I can feel occasional wiggles from my midsection. I don’t know if bb is flipping around or not, but based on where stuff was located on the last ultrasound I can kind of distinguish the punches from the kicks. Last week after a particularly noticeable bout of movement, I was struck with the feeling that I was proud of the little bb in there, and sort of proud of myself. Proud that they were conquering these little developmental milestones and that I was giving them a space to do that. Growing up I’d always sort of balk at people’s compliments for things I perceived to be normal and expected. Like graduating high school. To me, that was not a feat and I was just supposed to do it so I did. (I can now see that this shows my privilege that provided me very few obstacles to succeeding in high school.) But now that I’m looking at this life that I ðĪðģðĶðĒðĩðĶðĨ (?!), every little thing seems like something to be proud of. I made it one more day!! Little bb has fingers!! They wiggle around in my body!!! These are feats and it’s okay for me to be proud of them and maybe one day Lil’ Cutie will experience that in some way too. So maybe it’s weird to feel proud of feeling baby movements but I’m okay with that and am ready to keep feeling proud of the steps we keep making!!
My favorite books of 2019!! This was hard because I read a lot of good books this year, but not a lot of them stood out. I chose these because they affected me more deeply than the others, I think. I listened to An American Marriage on audiobook which was really interesting. There were two different narrators and they would change their voice based on the ages of the characters. This story is heavy and deep and gritty and very well told. Red, White & Royal Blue is a modern romance novel and it was SO FUN. So uplifting, so well-written, so witty... I wish I could read it again for the first time. With the Fire on High was another audiobook, which I listened to simply because Elizabeth Acevedo is such a good narrator. Emoni came alive and I loved watching her learn and grow. The Overstory was such an interesting structure and it made me start thinking like a tree and I don’t know how to say it other than that. I listened to Evicted for my Intro yo Qualitative Research class this spring. Such an amazing feat of ethnography. The issue of eviction is so much more serious than I’d known, and Desmond does a great job with the stories he tells here. Finally, another nonfiction! This one was really important for me to funnel my political anxieties into productive thoughts and conversations. It was like listening to a very long podcast series ð Thanks for joining me! Shoutout to Hoopla, the library app with audiobooks you don’t have to wait for (!), and Libby, the library app for books you do have to wait for. I think I’ve transitioned to be an ereader... what has this world come to.
