Stomachs & Zzzzs

They say it takes nine months to gain the weight to make a baby, and nine months to get it all off. So I still have a month and a half to go. I am actually back to the weight I was pre-pregnancy. But I still have a belly bulge that I find unduly distressing. It's been a fixture for the past few months and doesn't show any signs of leaving, in spite of the ab tightenings I do throughout the day and situps when I think of it, so I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be able to get rid of it. Plus, there is a dark vertical line down the center of my abdomen that appeared halfway through the pregnancy and has only slightly faded.

Back when I was a runner, I used to have a great stomach, flat as a pancake. Now there's a lot of extra skin there and it sags. When I wear tight jeans, it blops forward over the waistline. For the first time in my life I'm buying nonfat dairy products and feeling guilty about eating cookies. I'm thinking about all the skinny little tops I have in my closet, some of which I bought just before becoming pregnant so I've never even worn them - and maybe I never will be able to. And what will I wear to the pool this summer? If I wear my bikini, I feel like everyone will stare at me: "what's up with that line on her stomach?" And some women might be all smiley and ask me if I'm expecting.

Sleep, sleep, sleep. I'm losing heart just as the end is nearly in sight. Ever since June, I've been getting up every 2-3 hours all night long feeding the baby. Coupled with late nights freelancing (because that seems to be the only time I can get anything done), my window of opportunity to sleep has shrunk to just a few hours a night. It's not enough. My stay-at-home mom friend told me she goes to bed at 10, sleeps till 9:30 or 10 every morning - and her baby sleeps through the night. She looks rested, relaxed, and happy. I feel like I'm getting the crazy-lady bags-under-her-eyes look.

Last night I didn't finish my 'lancing until 1 am, went to bed, and slept till 5 am when the baby woke up. She is the only baby I know who still wakes up this often at this age. The books, pediatrician, and other moms all assure me that she's capable of going 12 hours without a feeding. So I have started feeding her a big meal with rice cereal and all the milk I can get her to take, just before midnight, then refusing to feed her again until morning. It means that she wakes up and screams her head off in the middle of the night because she's used to nursing ot get back to sleep. This is what I mean by the end being nearly in sight - if I can teach her to put herself back to sleep without being fed, we will all get more sleep. But right now is the toughest time because instead of just getting up to nurse her and going back to bed 20 minutes later three times a night, I'm now getting up to rock her and shush her and rub her back and do all the other things I can think of to comfort her short of nursing - then putting her back down and listening to her scream bloody murder for the next hour. Last night, she screamed from 5 am till 7 am. I should mention that because we live in such a shoebox, our bed is less than a foot away from her crib. My husband put in earplugs and went out to the living room to sleep on the couch, shutting the door rather hard behind him. I lay in bed for two hours listening to the screaming and trying to sleep. Finally it was 7 am, officially morning, and I could feed her - then had to head out the door and go to work.

Because I am so sleep-deprived, I have taken to falling asleep whenever I have an opportunity. I sleep on the half-hour bus ride to work in the morning, and on the way home - and I mean I really sleep, I dream during that time. Magically, I always wake up just before reaching my stop. I also sleep while I'm pumping milk at work, slouched over the pump with my hands holding the bottles. Sometimes I lie down on the floor with her and sing Christmas carols with my eyes shut to try to entertain her. This counts as a nap for me. I look forward to a day when I will actually feel rested with desperate eagerness.

I'm sorry for complaining. But I feel like I spend enough time being lit up with enthusiasm about her accomplishments (she is crawling! she is laughing! she is totally delightful.), and telling people, truthfully, how happy I am these days and how much I love being a mom. So this is my place to whine a little bit.

In other news, yesterday I heard about a mom who has four children under the age of 1. Yes, you read that right. She had twins, then another set of twins ten months later. I can't imagine what hell her daily life must be. Children are wonderful, they really are - but I have trouble understanding how mothers with just two children manage to have any time or energy for themselves. So I guess that puts my gripes in perspective.

Erin's Favorite Themes

I was thinking recently about themes that really appeal to me in literature, movies, etc. Our Netflix queue is just about empty - even when we searched their massive archives, we didn't turn up much that we wanted to watch. And at my last book club, none of the suggestions for the next book to read really sparked my interest. So what is it that I like, anyway?
- Coming of age stories. I love that complicated time between childhood and adulthood when everything is fresh and emotions run high. It was scary at the time, but now I can look back on it and enjoy dissecting it.
- Stories about people who are isolated in some way and not sure how to fix that, who in the end don't have to fix it because other people reach out to them and build social networks that involve them. I'm intrigued by the idea that all you have to do is exist, and others will bridge the gap. I don't think that's true in real life, but it's a plot device that I wish applied to my life.
- Revisionist history. Time travel stories where people get a second chance to live their lives and make different choices. I tuned into the Lexmas episode of Smallville on the basis of a 5-second trailer that suggested that theme, the only episode I've watched from that whole series. And I rented Sliding Doors, which otherwise looked unpromising. Neither was really great, but I still like the theme.
- Teenagers with supernatural powers. I must be interested in this, based on my eager watching of Buffy and Roswell.
- Stories about people who work hard and have a good sense of humor. That cuts out a lot of the classics, unfortunately.
- Lately, stories about pregnancy and birth. Not so much kids - everyone writes about their kids, but it's somehow not that appealing to read about other people's kids. I never think they're quite as cute as the authors do. I do like reading about pregnancy though, because then the future child is unknown and could be anyone, and it's easier to imagine myself in the story. And birth, because it's still so amazing to me that it works.
- Young adult fiction, because it's written taking the audience into consideration. I use that as the criterion for a lot of stuff. My husband laughs at me for it - like any cultural product is created in a vacuum without the audience in mind. But some of it is! Young adult fiction, for example, is written to inspire, entertain, or instruct, which makes it pleasant to read, whereas a lot of adult fiction is written to express some great unwieldy theme in post-modern culture.
- Books or movies with rich themes for discussion. They don't have to be unwieldy. Just rich.