Rivki Silver

It’s like I’m extra perceptive and witty until I’m completely useless. How do we function, take care of a family, run a household, keep up various extra hobbies (cough cough blogging cough cough) when sleep is but a wish? Don’t commit to big things (let’s not talk about how I’m going to be in St. Louis in less than a month to give a talk on Using Your Unique Abilities To Be Your Best Self, this is a “do as I say and not as I do” kind of post). And a lot depends on how much sleep you need, your baby’s disposition, the general neediness of your other kids, etc.

There was a decent amount of overlap in some of the classes/books, and they all claimed to be the way to be the best parent and get your children off to the best start in life. Once I realized that my child’s behavior didn’t mean I was an unmitigated failure as a mother, but that there were deeper causes at work, I started opening up to friends about my challenges, and found that, as so often happens when we open up, I was not alone in my struggles. Finding a therapist, realizing the therapist isn’t a good fit, thinking about changing the child’s diet, realizing that it’s not something that is realistic for our family, find another therapist, get support from the school, discuss medication, stop therapy, restart therapy, look for a psychiatrist, start medication, stop therapy, restart therapy… 7. Realize that all that effort doesn’t make the challenging behavior disappear It helps, for sure, and for that I’m grateful, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still supremely challenging moments.

It’s a little embarrassing to look back at my months and months sour moods, even though I can now recognize that it was due to hormones and physical discomfort (did anyone else realize that at the time? It’s humbling to realize that I wasn’t so self-aware about that. It seemed like a very long time when I was not myself, physically or emotionally, but now that I’m feeling better again, I can remember that these things are temporary, though we can’t know how long any difficult phase will last. So those are a few things that I’m able to realize now that I feel human again.

This is where it gets kind of graphic with labor details so if you don’t want to read the specifics of my delivery, skip down to where I let you know it’s safe to resume reading! ] Finally, after eight or nine hours of waiting for labor to progress in any meaningful way (during which time the day shift went home, the night shift came on, and I finished Ng’s novel), staying in contact with people (“ When my water broke and my baby’s head came down, it didn’t come down in a great position (not only was she in posterior position, her forehead was tilted kind of funny), so her head wasn’t putting the kind of pressure on my cervix that it needed to open up, which meant….more waiting. It wasn’t hours of pushing (thank G-d! ), but it did take about four contractions worth of pushing before she came out, which was so different than my previous experiences (that’s like, the theme of this delivery, in case you hadn’t noticed –