Secrets

This time the carnival theme is Secrets.  Participation this time around means sharing deep, dark parenting secrets.  Again.....fun. 

It seems that most of my deep, dark sharing on this blog has been in the personal quirks department.  You know that I am weak in my resistance to horrifying reality television and that I am a terrible hypochondriac.  I've (briefly) shared my reservations about the fact of my college girlfriend's gender transition and the surreal fact that I learned of it via Face Book (what a brave new world indeed).  In fact, you even know that I've had the very same (somewhat elaborate) thing for breakfast for the last 9 months.  I mention these things to make it clear that the fact that I am an anxious, frequently compulsive bundle of fun is hardly a secret.  The ways in which that manifests in my life as a parent may however be less clear.  Thanks to the Love Makes a Family Blog Carnival, I can clear all that right up.  ;)

So.  Where to begin?

First there was my consuming preoccupation with Yogi's schedule as a newborn.  Those days were filled with lots of "What am I doing here?  The baby doesn't need ME for anything" angst and so I fell back into my safety zone.  Order.  After reading The Baby Whisperer (which I am confident is not the manifest Universal Truth that I thought it was at the time) I was armed with the categories of Eat, Sleep and Activity and I crutched around on that knowledge until I could stand up on my own.  Which took awhile.  A few weeks ago I found the notebook that I used to record all of it and I could feel the desperation in the pages.  I scribbled to-the-minute records of when Yogi did everything that he did.  I even recorded the details of breastfeeding sessions (time on each side, use of nipple shield, and frustration level for both of them - my perception of course).  I was aware of the fact that in times of stress and crisis I tend to get hyper detail-oriented, but I had NEVER seen it like this.  That little notebook was what I could DO and damnit I was going to do it.  Looking back I am so grateful that my wife never questioned this practice.  I think in her shoes I might have been tempted to ask what exactly she was going to use that information for, but she never did and that was a blessing.

Then there was my out-of-nowhere "flick on the light switch" decision that Yogi must ONLY nap IN.THE.CRIB.  One day I was happy to share a snooze on the couch or watch him nod off in the bouncy seat while I folded clothes and one day all of that became not.OK.  Just like that.  Oh the black-and-whiteness of it all.  Again I was blessed with a (mostly) accommodating Yogi and a supportive wife.  The boy took a little convincing, but after the initial boot camp period (yes, I did think of it this way and I'm pretty sure I even talked about it in those words) he was convinced.  I believe that took a little more than a week.  I was pretty hardcore about it (surprise, surprise) and those days were devoted entirely to the "Nap in the Crib" goal.  All other priorities followed along behind.  Maybe we got to the grocery, maybe we had frozen pizza.  Again.  But, when Yogi gave Nap-ready cues (thank you Baby Whisperer), the crib was waiting.  The good news is that these days Yogi is an eager napper (likely due to his own nature and having little to do with me, but it's nice to think otherwise) and we all survived Boot Camp with limited scarring. 

Around that time I also started a meditation practice in earnest.  Meditation is something that I have flirted with for the last 10 years or so, but only since becoming a parent has it emerged as an essential part of my daily routine.  I like to think of it as a tool I use to help me be calm when I'm actually anything but.  One thing I knew for sure before I ever became a parent was that I wanted to do whatever I could do NOT to model anxiety for my child.  The only way that would be possible would be for me to actually BE less anxious, which if you have read this far you can see would be a challenge.  So....I spent much of my 20's trying all sorts of things from Bikram Yoga and aromatherapy to massage and morning journaling.  I took Paxil and made sure there was time each day for a good, brisk walk or a jog.  Each of these strategies had something significant to offer, but none of them have come close to what I have gotten from 10 minutes (twice a day when I can swing it) of seated meditation.  Although I've read all sorts of books on the topic, what works for me is nothing fancy in the way of approach.  I just put Yogi down for nap, walk to my bedroom, set the stopwatch app on my phone for 10 minutes, settle in a cross-legged position on the floor and stare at the tree outside my window.  If Yogi starts to fuss and I get agitated about that I just remind myself that fussing for 10 minutes or less never killed anybody and get back to the business of no-mind.  I would love to spend more than ten minutes, but that's what I've got for now and mostly it's enough.  So, although it's not the first thing I mention when asked how I've transitioned as a new parent, meditation has been one of my best (and most secret) weapons.  And yes, I do get the irony of referring to meditation as a weapon.  ;)

A few final silly secrets that are worth mentioning include:

I sing so loudly in the car when I think Yogi is going to fall asleep and interfere with nap time that it borders on harassment.

I hand Yogi a jar of sprinkles (the colorful kind in the baking aisle) each time we go to the grocery store so that he can shake, shake, shake instead of pulling things off the shelves.  And no, we never buy them.

I occasionally listen to audio books while the two of us are playing together.  I felt zero guilt about this when he was an infant, but now I know that it would be much better if I were wholly focused. However, it is the case that total attention to activities like stacking blocks and zooming taxis around the room for hours on end will rot your brain. 

I often break eye contact with people when they start talking about how beautiful Yogi's eyes are because I know they are looking to find out that my eyes are the same and when they find my brown eyes they almost ALWAYS have the same response.  It gets tiring to say again that "No Daddy's eyes aren't blue, but my wife's are."

There are a surprising number of days each week in which Yogi eats banana at every meal.

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Disappointment

The carnival is back in town and this week we're reflecting on..... disappointment!  Sounds like a carnival, no?  ;)

I've had the theme rolling around in my head since it was announced last week.  Disappointment.  Not the easiest thing for me to write about.  Outside of my comfort zone you might say.  I make an effort not to spend too much energy entertaining disappointment.  Of course I get disappointed about lots of things, but most of those things are pretty ridiculous.  Everyday bummers along the lines of "Why didn't my wife sound pleased to hear from me when I called her out of the blue at work?" or "Man I spent an hour making that pumpkin soup and it tastes like an orange bowl of nothing.".

My efforts not to dwell on these kinds of feelings works well when I've wasted the afternoon on a boring soup.  It's a strategy that isn't quite as effective when it comes to more meaningful and significant disappointments.  Although it continues to be true that at some point (and who knows when that point will come) you do have to move on and let go, there are disappointments that demand to be felt deeply.  To be acknowledged and not brushed aside.

In all of my baby-related experiences so far, my most significant disappointment came during Yogi's first weeks.  More than a year later it's still hard to write that.  I'm pretty sure it boils down to one thing.

It wasn't what I expected.

If you've been reading here for awhile you won't be surprised to hear me say that I'm a planner.  I think ahead.  I prepare myself.  It's what I do in every situation.  It took us five tries to get Yogi and one of those tries resulted in a chemical pregnancy.  I would never tell you that those negative tests weren't disappointing and sad and, in the moment totally devastating.  But..... I was ready for them.  I was the poster child for "This is going to take awhile/We're in this for the long term/It's not up to us to say when".  These kinds of chants began months before we even did our first IUI.  I was ready to struggle for our baby.

I WAS.NOT ready to morph into an alternately depressed and hostile zombie after my son was born.  It's still hard for me to believe that I felt the way I did.  Only weeks before he arrived I had cried (a bit embarrassing actually) on the hospital tour when we visited the nursery.  There was a tiny boy in the window and looking at that little guy filled me with the kind of joy and excitement that is hard to contain.  I didn't even know that kid.

So, what I expected was immediate attachment, pervasive bliss and head over heels love.  Yeah, I guess it was a set-up from the start.  What I got was life at a distance.  That is the only way I have to describe that time.  I was there, but I wasn't there.  There were really lovely moments of warmth and affection, but those moments were not the norm.  Mostly I was tired, annoyed with every visitor we had and permanently braced for the next round of crying.  I felt like the maid.  My wife's immediate attachment to Yogi also made me feel disconnected from her.  It was really ugly.

It was also a blur.  I don't really remember it and what I do remember looks the way I've described.  That is the most disappointing part - I feel like I missed our first few weeks with Yogi.

Read the next post in the carnival here.

You can also visit the Carnival blog for a full listing of participants.

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Donor Sperm

It's carnival time again and this week's topic is Donor Sperm.

I guess this is the post in which I reveal that I don't have sperm.  It's true.  ;)  As much as I would have LOVED to have created Yogi in a moment that involved only my wife's body and my own, that was not possible for us.  As is the case for many different kinds of families, we needed help.    Supporting straight friends through the heartbreak of infertility I am struck with the curious gift we are given as gay couples.  We KNOW from day one that we need help in creating our families.  We don't lose years operating under the assumption that we should be able to do this thing on our own.  Our bedrooms don't become the kind of anxious, hopeless spaces that they could were we able to create our families within them.  We've certainly got our own set of obstacles, but at least those are not among them.  I try to think about that when a well-meaning stranger tells me (for the millionth time), "He must have Daddy's eyes".

When my wife and I were getting serious about baby making we had a few conversations about sperm sharing with some very close friends.  This couple were a part of our wedding and had recently had their first child.  I will always wonder if things might have evolved differently had we made the ask before their daughter was born.  As it was, all three of the women were gung-ho about the idea and the possibility of a new kind of family connection between us.  He felt differently.  I know that he would have done just about anything to help us, but fresh from the fierce Daddy love he was experiencing with his daughter he was concerned that he might not be able to play the kind of backseat role we wanted for him.  He couldn't imagine it and we all had to respect that. We did respect that.  I'm not sure I would feel any differently if I were in the same situation.

Once that door was closed, it was time to move on to the bank.   The process of selecting a donor has got to be one of the strangest experiences a person can have.  For starters, it primes all sorts of questions about nature and nurture.  As a couple who puts a lot of stock in the value of nurture, I was surprised with the fervor with which we approached our options.  After all, what does it mean to pick the "right" donor if we believe that nurture is where it's at?  Anyone who has successfully donated sperm to a bank has undergone a fairly extensive screening process, at least from a medical perspective.  This is not to say that every donor is the perfect specimen of health (whatever that is), but that as a consumer (yikes!) you are provided with considerably more information than many, many people have when they reproduce the old fashioned way.

The reason for mentioning that is to point out that you are pretty unlikely to get a dud or otherwise "bad/wrong" donor from the standpoint of nature.  At least, this was our thinking.  So, what you're left with is information about things like hair and eye color, height, weight, two generations of general family medical information (all self-report, humm....), and if you're willing to shell out some extra $$ (as if the whole thing weren't pricy enough), you can get a baby picture or Myers-Briggs typology.  While we customized searches and honed in on what did and didn't matter to us, I tried to tell myself that this wasn't SO different from the largely unconscious process of attraction that we all go through.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

Ultimately we used some perhaps quirky variables to narrow the field.  In spite of the fact that my eyes are brown, I wanted a blue eyed donor because I loved the idea of our baby having eyes like my wife.  Which he most definitely does.  Yay!  We picked height and weight parameters based loosely on how we imagined my male self (a fun exercise if you haven't considered it) and combed family medical history weeding out those with checks in what to us were particularly scary boxes like alcoholism and early heart disease.  After this point, it was a gut game.  We read through responses to questions like "What are your hobbies and talents" and "What are your life goals?" and set aside the ones with answers that we liked.  I actually found myself going to bat for one donor because his favorite animals were monkeys and he liked pizza.  The process is a weird one.  We even scanned through the staff impressions looking for secret messages that would tell us "Don't pick this one!".  There were weird conversations about things like what it might mean if the staff described a donor as "intriguing".

All of this got us down to two donors and we paid extra for their MBTI results in order to break the tie.  It's hard for me to adequately explain how weird this is.  No one knows whether personality is heritable and most psychologists consider the Myers-Brigss to be far from an ideal measure of personality, but for some reason being able to know an E from an I or a J from a P mattered to me.  I can't really explain it.  Lucky for us, we got two very different profiles and the choice was an easy one.  We picked the donor with the profile that suggested (to me at least) that he would be a good fit for our family - sensitive and thoughtful, but also practical and outgoing.

Now that Yogi has arrived it's clear that whatever crazy roads we took to get here, this is  precisely where we were meant to be.  It wasn't possible to get him here without help, but this is our boy and we are his Mommies.  The contribution that someone whom we will never know made to our family is one for which I am deeply grateful.  I imagine myself to be in the minority here, but I think of his donation as a gift (for which I paid $, I know) that is both entirely personal and entirely impersonal.  It is true that in spite of what I'd like to believe, this gift is not (technically) the gift of a loving universe but a donation from a person who is very real and who shares genetic material with my son that I do not.  In this way, his role in our family is quite personal.  But in every other way, his donation really had nothing to do with us at all.

The three of us became a family in that moment when the embryo that would become Yogi nestled into my wife's body while the two of us held hands and hoped.  We loved that little boy into this world and that is an important piece of what makes us a family.

Click hereto read thoughts on the same topic by the ladies at That's A Lot of Essess. 

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