For as long as I can remember, I’ve always gotten headaches. They’re not the sort that leave me stranded in a dark room with an ice pack across my eyes OR seeing these delicious sounding auras, but they’re more an irritation, somewhat like a burn. You know, the sort that just always reminds you that “Hey, you have a headache, idiot, isn’t it fun?”
Unless you have a migraine, headaches aren’t something that tends to elicit much sympathy. I should know, as The Daver gets ‘em as well. And despite his pleas for sympathy and possible BJ’s to “make them go away,” I never feel particularly sympathetic towards him. They tend to be more an irritation of the highest degree, a thorn in my side, and occasionally a fight-provoking ailment.
Mainly because he tends to get them (in my mind) in order to get out of completing annoying tasks. Am I being a bitch? You be the judge.
He has gotten headaches right before the following tasks (and subsequently having to lay down):
*Packing our loads of crap into boxes before the movers came
*Painting the walls before we put the condo on the market
*Packing our stuff AGAIN before the movers came
*Scooping for Cat Box Crunchies
*Familial birthday parties
*Cleaning before we had guests over
and my personal “you will never live this down so long as you live and I may put it on your grave stone, motherfucker:”
*While I was in labor with Alex.
It’s not that I don’t care that he has a headache, on the contrary, if he got them while we were just farting around the house trying to complete absolutely nothing whatsoever of any importance, I probably wouldn’t say a word. BUT, one’s sympathy dwindles after being in labor for a full 12 hours with the lights down low and the television set to an inaudible frequency WHILE having to worry that no one will hold your leg when you have to push.
That said, I obviously can’t expect to get much sympathy for the headaches I’ve been having with alarming regularity now that I am taking Vitamin Z. They’re not really bad enough to make me want to go to the doctor and demand a different SSRI, because really, the benefit outweighs the cost in terms of my mental health here.
But shit, I just wish I could make them go away for a day or two. The NSAID’s I have don’t touch them, and I don’t have the sort of life that would allow me to just rest and relax them away (I’m not certain it would help anyway).
What do YOU do when you have a headache? Any and all assvice would be highly appreciated.
Walking (er, STUMBLING) into motherhood for the second time, I knew that I had some extremely complicated feelings about nursing. Now, I’m not the sort of person who claims to know what is best for anyone else in regards to parenting and all of the choices that come along with it, to me, I still engage in the Whatever Gets You Through The Night (Or Day) school of parenting.
As such, I don’t find fault in the decisions of other parents that I know that are not the same as my own. Co-Sleeping? Whatever, not my personal cup ‘o’ joe, but if it works, go for it. Baby Wearing? Again, whateves.
Feeding evokes the exact same feelings of ‘meh’ in me.
Now, this isn’t to say that I didn’t spend the first 5 years of Ben’s life wondering what the fcuk was wrong with me that no matter what I tried, I couldn’t nurse him, because I did. I convinced myself that I had low milk supply, inverted nipples, and likely a nasty case of BO, and THESE were the reasons I never got to nurse him.
Until Alex was born with a latch to beat all latches and an appetite like a teenager, I was sure that I was at fault for being unable to nurse Ben. My milk supply was pathetic (according to the pump) and my dinner plate (hubcap) sized nipples would certainly have turned ME off, were I in his diaper.
It wasn’t until later when I realized that any issues I had with nursing Ben had nothing to do with me.
It was his own fault.
I am blaming all of his nursing issues squarely on him alone.
(anyone who has had issues nursing their own children can understand the magnitude of this statement. If you have not had issues, it would make very little sense as to why this would be a big deal. Just roll with me, baby. Or ignore me. It’s cool.)
My feelings about nursing are now not so complex. Alex is weaning himself, and down to about one nursing session a day (if that), and aside from once again being amazed at how quickly he’s grown up, I’m having a hard time pegging which emotion I feel about it (I need one of those ‘match the emotion with the proper face’ chart right about now).
On the one hand, the thought of him turning one is freaking me out a wee bit, mainly because I am pretty certain that this is our last baby, and therefore I should have savored some of the baby-ness a bit more. The late night nursing sessions were annoying, for sure, but as with even the good parts of having kids, they never go back to that kind of intimacy again. Pretty soon, he’ll be getting his own food from the cupboard and begging for Dino-Shaped fruit snacks and Cap’n Crunch (with Crunchberries, if he’s anything like his Momma–which is is.), and when I blink again, he’ll be chugging shitty beers with The Dudes (just like his Momma) with the same intensity that he went after the boobs.
On the flip side, being one is so much more interesting (and exasperating) than being an ickle baby, and I’ve always preferred kids that I can interact with to those who are a drooling mass of baby.
I guess the only real emotion that I can see right now is relief. Plain and simple relief.
I’m glad he’s weaning himself, I’m glad he’s turning one, and I’m glad those all nighters are gone for now (until he hits college. But by that time, I will be relaxing by the pool, and likely asleep while he’s drinking his braincells away). I’m glad that his favorite game to play right now is “ball” and I’m glad that I can feed him whatever I am eating (without teeth, to boot!), and I am glad that he is in my life.
Maybe my heart will always skip a beat when I see (or hear) that newborn cry or smell their special smell, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just be glad that my time is over and I can focus my time on enjoying my children, who, while they are not getting any younger, are two of the most enchanting people I have ever been fortunate enough to know.
And maybe I will just thank the powers that be that I was deemed fit enough to be the mother of these two fascinating souls.
I cannot wait to see what new-ness today will bring.
I fell into parenting in the same way I’ve fallen into everything else in my life: an opportunity presented itself to me, I made a choice, and have reaped the consequences ever since. I don’t pretend to be Type-A enough to have a five year plan unless it involves the phrase “Don’t Die” as it’s sole criteria, and this is fine by me.
Alex was a deliberately executed child, although the circumstances surrounding his conception were, of course, up in the air (the whole marriage thing didn’t matter to me as much as it did to The Daver), but even after having had one child, I was in no way prepared for having another.
I’ve always expected to write off the first year of a child’s life as not having much real joy in it, between the colic, the sleepless nights, and the formidable task of having to learn all about a new person without so much as a guidebook to consult. It seems easier to me to have the defeatist “everything about this is going to suck” attitude than to try to piss rainbows and sunshine about it and be disappointed when things don’t work out exactly as planned.
But today, after prying the Wii controllers out of the hands of the Elder Sausages and interrupting their Saturday morning Sitting On Our Asses Routine, I packed all three of The Sausages into the Meat Wagon and led the way to a local bakery to select a cake for Alex’s first birthday party (March 30th for those local and expecting an invite, which should be arriving this week sometime).
After carefully selecting a cake that is quite reminiscent of our wedding cake (see, I have a Cake Fetish. I don’t like to eat it because I am insane, but I require fancy-assed cakes for most occasions), and paying the approximate cost of a down payment on a house for it, I was overtaken by an emotion that I couldn’t quite place.
Suddenly, I felt light and buoyant, like a rather chubby balloon floating in the breeze. I could hear the birds singing (no small feat in the dead of winter here) and smell the teeniest hint of spring on the air. Alex’s babbling became the most adorable thing I’d ever heard, and Ben’s incessant monologuing suddenly seemed the perfect backdrop for the day. Hell, even Dave’s Rank Ass became more tolerable to my delicate girlish sense of smell.
For the first time in several years, I felt completely at ease with myself and the world around me. Life seemed to be more for living and less for surviving.
It’s really a glorious feeling, and it shocks me to think that normal people probably walk around like this all day, every day and take it completely for granted.
Life is sweet, baby. Just sweet.
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