20SomethingMom chronicles of a young mom

What No One Ever Tells You About WeaningPosted by admin on August 31st, 2009

I will get around to writing about my grad school plans and pet peeves, but since most of you were interested in reading about weaning, here goes.

DISCLAIMER: If you are a man, or a woman who’s uncomfortable with nonsexual breast talk, proceed with caution.

There are plenty of things that no one bothers to mention when you’re expecting a baby, but the surprises don’t end in the first few months postpartum.  Breastfeeding is a hot topic these days, but weaning?  Not many people want to talk about that, and I’m finding out why.  

First of all, milk production is not like an addiction: it can’t be stopped cold turkey.  That is, unless you want a plugged duct or, worse, the terrible infection that is mastitis.  The only way to signal to your body that your baby is ready to slow down his consumption is to decrease the frequency of nursings gradually.  VERY gradually.  Dropping roughly one feeding a week until you’re completely done has worked for me…and I’m still not done.

In addition to dealing with a (frighteningly verbose) child begging for the kind of milk that doesn’t come from the fridge, mama must live through the ups and downs of breast engorgement and pain, extreme lopsidedness, and leaking.  It’s like the day your milk came in, for three months straight.

Here’s where I border upon revealing too much information: about five times a day, I have to milk myself just a little bit.  It has become an art form: hand expressing just enough to take the pressure off, but not enough to signal to my body that it should amp up production again.  That’s the amazing thing about the breastfeeding process — each mother’s milk is constantly adjusting in content and quantity to perfectly meet her baby’s needs.  Myths exist that discourage mothers from nursing past a certain age, like the claim that breast milk loses its nutritional value after a baby is [place arbitrary number here] months old.  The exact opposite is true, which is why it’s sad that so many new mothers buy into prevalent misunderstandings.  Breastfeeding is a personal journey full of personal decisions, but women have a right to medically correct information prior to making those decisions.

I must clarify that my weaning experience is wholly different from that of a mom who may have supplemented with formula or started her baby on solid foods earlier than 7 months (when I did).  My son took breast milk from a bottle when I had to leave him with family while I was still in school, but now he only occasionally uses a sippy cup.  No pacifiers for him; he throws them across the room.  I have been his pacifier for almost 20 months, and that is more than okay with me.  It is a personal preference, and a unique relationship dynamic: Mommy as teddy bear.  He is just now demonstrating signs of independence, and the associated manipulation skills.  Weaning is one part of the transition out of baby stage, like moving to his toddler bed and picking up his toys.

After over three months of nighttime waking to the sound of my son screaming “daychay!” (leche), I am feeling ready to let the breastfeeding relationship go.  I think there is more than just a physiological reason that my body has not fully ceased production.  My heart hasn’t been up for it.  The hormonal shifts of lessened production (and the hormonal hell that is just around the corner after I fully wean) are enough to make a woman weepy, but it is more convoluted than that.  

As a mother, I can’t explain my need to mother.  It just is.  Breastfeeding is an element of the instinct to protect, nourish, and encourage your baby, and stopping it is like going through a slow grieving process.  Knowing something is about to die doesn’t make the death less painful.  

As far as the mechanics of weaning are concerned, I wonder how my slippage down the slope from exclusive breastfeeding to practically none at all would have been affected had I known more about the needs of body and baby from the start.  I think I may have been less inclined to go with my gut.  Luckily, I learned about slowing the flow the hard way.  While that has often meant walking around feeling like I have rocks in my bra, I’m okay with things being hard for awhile when I see the happy, healthy boy my body helped to create.

Technorati Tags: baby, breast milk, breastfeeding, motherhood, nursing, parenting, toddler, weaning

Help Me OutPosted by admin on August 29th, 2009

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And Now I’m 23Posted by admin on August 24th, 2009

This weekend, I turned 23.  Milestone?  Not necessarily, but it offered more than a moment’s reflection on my life and all the things I thought I knew.

One of my favorite books is Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chodron.  No matter how many times I read through its wise snippets of compassionate teachings, though, I have trouble reminding myself that uncertainty is eternal.

Though it may be a byproduct of my environment, I feel there is part of me that is simply hard-wired to expect and long for consistency.  My gut makes me freeze like a proverbial deer in headlights when a surprise presents itself.  (Surprises I can plan for — like Christmas — are thrilling, however.)  I have to condition myself (the stick) out of this muddy place, which is a beautiful, oxymoronic idea.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to move if I focus on moving.

I’m slowly questioning the little dichotomies that piece together my world, and there are a lot of them.  A trusted friend recently put it like this: I need to stop focusing so much on WHO I am and become more comfortable with WHAT I am.  There is a human essence within us all, a sort of package that comes with mere existence.  Along with many others who are trapped in the confines of definition, I tend to first consider the best way to mold my self into the self I think it should be.  The self that I’ve been told I have, or some supposed ideal that I don’t even want.  Instead of constructing a WHO and charting a path via conscientious decisions to that end, we should all be relaxing into the WHAT that is there when we peel back layers.  

It’s the peeling process that I’m undergoing right now.  Rather than adding another year of gunk as I add a year to my chronology, I am stripping away the unnecessary details that I once thought were so vital to getting along in the world.  Birthdays become less of a partying occasion and more of an opportunity for contemplation as we get older, and older.  On this birthday, I contemplated the ways in which I can just let go and allow some of my soul’s varnish to strip itself.  With no encouragement of a forward flow, the tide can take me in circles if it so chooses.  I have to let it carry me, or risk achieving a dangerous level of narrowness.  I’ve tested the limits of my WHO, the me that likes things to be in place, and now I want to readily accept all of my WHAT.

Who’s with me?

Technorati Tags: birthday, comfortable with uncertainty, identity, Pema Chodron, twentysomething

Nurturing UrgencyPosted by admin on August 15th, 2009

I wonder if I was born impatient.  When I get an idea, I have to make it happen immediately.  I can’t wait around for other people to help me, or for something to occur naturally.  It’s a control issue, no doubt, and can be quite dangerous.  I’ve been known to make decisions that appear rash, though I have clearly considered every angle — for a good day or so.  

The intersection of urgency and motherhood is a most interesting place.

Not only does a baby never cooperate with the desire to rush…out the door, through a meal, or down the street, but he understands the exact method that will test your plans the most.  There will be no lazily traipsing down the sidewalk to the park hand in hand; he will refuse to be touched and head for the middle of the street, where he’ll proceed to sit quietly until you attempt to move him.  Here, and in the bathtub, the store, the car seat, he’ll then engage the one move we all know as urgency’s worst enemy: the I-have-no-muscles move.  He’ll become a blob of back-breaking weight, and you’ll never get to that urgent thing.

Toddlers are also especially good at playing independently until you have to work, or until you make an important phone call.  Then, all bets are off.  

Impatience can be about more than just the daily grind, though.  It can drive our short-term and long-term direction, and babies are along for that ride.  We’re all familiar with the first tenet of parenting that people like to tout when one is with child: a baby changes everything.  By that, they mean you’ll never so much as decide to walk out the door without considering this fresh creation’s needs and feelings.  True, but somewhat exaggerated in its novelty, I think. 

Shouldn’t we treat ourselves as gently as we do our children?  Or is there some greater value in painstaking rumination when children are involved?

This is that inherent danger in wanting to indulge in urgency.  Great things can come of spontaneity and a purposeful lack of foresight, but we often ignore our own need for emotional gentleness.  Like anything else done in haste, there is a risk of leaving something behind.  Too often, children forge ahead, while we look back at the piece of us that we left along the path to…where?

Technorati Tags: baby, decisionmaking, impatience, motherhood, parenthood, toddlers, urgency

Study Skills = Life SkillsPosted by admin on August 7th, 2009

Call me the anti-tutor.

I simply don’t believe in: doing someone’s homework for him/her, teaching to the test, sticking to one subject in every session, and making students feel like subordinates.

Whether or not my clients and their parents can always see the goal I have in sight, I rarely veer from my determined course, which is not to have a course.  I have been a tutor for almost ten years, and I have discovered that the greatest thing about tutoring is that you have access to the parts of a person’s brain, and heart, to which a classroom teacher does not.  Because I only work with one person at a time, I have the luxury of paying attention to their signals.  Even if we’re meeting online, I can tell if my clients are tired, distracted, or having an off day.  I react immediately and shift what we are doing or the way we are doing it.  This is why I never have more than rough lesson plans.

We all know that there is nothing worse than sitting through a lecture or meeting when all we can think about is the argument we had with a friend or spouse earlier in the day, or how much we need coffee.  So, why not respond to those personal problems, and teach people how to navigate pleasant and unpleasant days alike?

This doesn’t mean dismissing school when we notice kids are falling asleep in first period.  It might mean starting school at a later hour so they can actually think.  Biorhythms are the first things I ask my young clients to pay attention to.  If they do not think well right after school, I do not want to work with them at that time because, although they may sit quietly and obey, they will not absorb or engage in the lesson.  I ask them to complete their assignments in an environment that makes sense.  If their parents insist upon them sitting at a desk in silence for a few hours until all their homework is done, but they are obviously auditory learners who do better with a beat in the background, I encourage them to change it up.  If School, and its sidekick Busywork, is all about preparation for Life, we should make sure our kids are experimenting enough with study habits, organizational skills, and environmental factors to create lifelong patterns that work.

I see too many kids copying down notes word-for-word from a PowerPoint, and not understanding them when they read them a second time.  I see too many adults scribbling illegible minutes in an unorganized fashion.

I see too many kids wasting hours making flashcards and never really learning the vocabulary words.  I see too many adults writing lists for themselves that they never look at.

I see too many kids who cannot write a coherent paragraph.  I see too many adults who cannot write a coherent e-mail.

Those kids become those adults.  Many adults, though, don’t see any other way than the way they were told to do things: write your appointments in a planner, read concepts over and over to memorize them.  The truth is: there are a million ways to be more efficient with time management, and a million ways to memorize things.  Once you figure out the tricks that are required for the way your brain is wired, you just use muscle memory forever.

For me, saying something out loud or teaching it to another person is as good as stamping it in my brain for life (or at least for a good long while).  I learned in high school that I was not a note-taker.  If I wrote, I didn’t listen, which meant I didn’t learn.  So, my notebooks were sparse and teachers probably thought I was daydreaming.  I kept the same habits, though, through college, and I still use them every day in non-school-related ways.  A phone number, a grocery list, a date: say it aloud.

In order to take full advantage of your academic attributes, you must recognize and tread lightly upon your weaknesses.  My most glaring one is my complete incapacity for spacial reasoning.  I cannot imagine distinct shapes, faces, or places in my head.  I can’t judge distance, which means I can’t estimate.  I hate visuals, especially in the form of cute little drawings in math books.  I want things to be concrete and logical, so when they aren’t, I feel myself getting antsy.  I have learned to work around this by translating things into terms that work for me, and moving a little slower with geometry than I do with algebra.

It is unlikely that you have the exact combination of strengths and weaknesses that I do, but it is a fact that you can use both to your advantage.  Granted, I employ my skills every day because it’s my job.  Still, I think we could all benefit from a heightened awareness of what works for us, and forget what the boss or the teacher is telling us to do.  In the end, all that usually matters is that we arrive at some endpoint, and nothing is left out.  The mode of transportation is an individual choice.

Technorati Tags: children, learning, learning style, life skills, multiple intelligences, students, study, study habits, teaching, tutoring