Impasse

All this angst about not being able to get pregnant again, all these hours spent Googling "secondary infertility", all these doctor's appointments and blood tests, and in the end I'm no closer to knowing what's wrong... and it all may be moot anyway, because my husband doesn't want to have another kid.

All this time, he thought I was trying to get my period back just so I could be normal again. When I said, "no, I don't care about that, I just want to get pregnant again," he said he thought one child was enough. He pointed out how exhausting it is to care for her, how we're barely holding it together. It's true that our lives aren't peaceful and well-ordered like they were prekid. We no longer have the ability to go out in the evenings, do fun stuff together, meet friends for dinner, or plan trips. Because I can only get freelance work done after she's in bed, I'm scrambling to meet deadlines all the time, perpetually sleep-deprived, and frustrated that I'm never able to have time for myself. He pointed out that just putting her to bed is a hassle - she malingers so badly (and fights each step of the way). It takes forever and usually ends in her crying. Listening to him say this, a number of thoughts went through my head:

"Yes. He's right. We don't have fun any more. And it's putting a strain on our marriage. We used to look at each other with such affection - now we're too tired to feel anything but resentment, because we're convinced that being this exhausted means the other person must be slacking."

"Well, but he IS slacking. He's complaining about the hassle of her bedtime routine, but I put her to bed six nights out of seven. I do the morning routine, every day. I didn't even get to sleep in on Mother's Day, damn it - even though I was up late freelancing the night before, as usual, I had to get up early with her while he slept in until 10 am."

"Yes, but he's also working full-time at a demanding job and trying to launch his career in science. He works harder than I do, even if I work longer hours. He's just as tired at the end of the day as I am."

"Besides, if I want to convince him to have another kid, and the sticking point with him is how much trouble it is to care for her, maybe I need to take on more of that work. Maybe I should put her to bed every night, and not ask him to pitch in on the weekends."

"But how will I ever keep up with my freelancing if I never get a break from the childcare? There's a limited number of hours in the week and I'm already a zombie."

"Besides, is it so much of an imposition to ask him to spend some time with his daughter on the weekends? Shouldn't he want to do that?"

"If stress IS the reason I'm not getting my period, and if I try to do even more work, I'll never get it back."

"I still want another kid. Even though it seems totally illogical to want that."

"Maybe we don't deserve another one. Sometimes I run out of patience with her and I'm sick of her asking 'what?' ten million times and never listening to the answer, and I just feel like crying. If I can't do a good job with one, maybe we shouldn't have any more."

"But everyone else who wants two kids gets to have them, even if they're not perfect parents. All my friends are pregnant with or have already had their second. We're falling way behind the curve."

"At least once a day some well-meaning person asks me whether we're having another kid. I laugh it off with 'oh, maybe, we'll see, this one keeps me busy enough.' If only they knew how much it hurts me to be asked that question. Just today my mom was on the phone with a friend who asked her if she was getting any more grandchildren, and she had to laugh it off the same way. How can he be insensible to that kind of pressure?"

"If we get divorced, it will be much more difficult for me to find someone new if I've got two kids."

"Maybe having another baby would keep us together though."

"Does that ever work? Celebrities are always trying it, and it always seems to fall through."

"Divorce? What am I thinking? Surely things aren't that bad. That's like my worst-case scenario (after him or my daughter dying). I'll do whatever I can to avoid that."

"But what if staying with him means never getting to have another child - and what if I could get divorced and have another with someone else, someone who would pitch in more and be more affectionate?"

"I don't want someone else. I just want HIM to pitch in more and be affectionate like he used to be. Anyway, all our friends have these perfect marriages where they totally love each other. How could we stand the shame of being the first to fail?"

"Arggggh. This shouldn't be so hard. No one else has to fight tooth and nail to get their guy to propose, to get him to have the first kid, to get him to have the second kid. Why doesn't he just naturally want the things that I do?"

And so on. I didn't actually say any of those things out loud, and the discussion was never resolved. He asked me how bad I wanted another kid, and I said, "I really, really want another. If I never have another child, it will be something I'll always regret." Then I tried to convince him that it would be a good idea by suggesting that this time around we could try for a boy, and he got sidetracked into researching online whether you could time conception to increase the odds of a boy, and was reading scientific papers instead of listening to me. Displacement activity to avoid finishing the conversation. He was absorbed in his computer after that and I couldn't get his attention back on me. At some point he left and went to clip his nails, his other stock activity when he wants to avoid finishing a conversation. He will clip them nightly if necessary, and he will spend half an hour or more doing it. I waited for a while, then couldn't afford to wait any longer because I had a deadline, so I gave up and went to do some freelancing.

I wish things were different.

Freak of Nature

I went shopping for a new bra a few days ago, because none of mine fit any more. I used to buy B cup bras, the kind with stiff cups, just to look like I had a shape. They didn't actually touch my breasts, let alone support them - just curved stiffly around them. Then at some point I decided to embrace my natural flat-chestedness, and started buying A cups. But even my A cups don't fit any more. They just slide around on my flat chest and the straps are constantly falling down, like every five minutes. When I'm at home or on the weekends, I wear sports bras, which at least stay in place.

Anyway, I decided a racerback was what I needed, so off I went to the store. Alas, the bra companies of the world do not appear to make bras for people my shape. I need a racerback 36A, but A cups only come in size 32, which is much too small, and B cups are definitely too big. I would go braless if I could, but now that it's t-shirt weather I can't go around in public without one. I guess I'll keep wearing my old bras and pushing up the straps every few minutes.

I also was unable to find pants that fit when I was in a pants-buying flurry a few months ago. All the pants I tried on gapped in the back and looked egg-cuppy from the side. Size 2 is ridiculously tight, size 4 is tight in the crotch but gappy around the waist, and size 6 falls right down. I went to lots of different stores and tried lots of different brands, and they're all like that.

Between not being able to find clothes that fit the top or the bottom of me, and not having periods any more (my doctor is frankly confused and says she can't find a physical reason for it), I am starting to feel like a freak - no longer a "real woman." What is wrong with me?

My Kidlet

It's Mother's Day and I want to write about my daughter. So often these days I'm charmed at her perspective on the world, which is coming through now that she's got more language to express it - and surprised at how much she really does understand and remember.

Yesterday, she was eating a slice of cantaloupe. She bit it into the shape of a crocodile - with bumpy eyes and even a slit for the mouth. Then she made it lollop across the placemat toward me, saying "Watch out - aump, aump, aump!" (biting noises) I said, "Ooh, what is that, a snake?" She laughed, "Aaoh, nooo, Mama, issa cocodile!" And at once I saw that it was indeed shaped like a crocodile. She made it gnaw on my arm for a minute before she efficiently dispatched it.

She's potty trained now (although she still wears a diaper at night) - for a while I thought it was hopeless, until all of a sudden she got it. The key was just putting her in underpants, even though she didn't seem to be ready. Once she was wearing the underpants she learned very quickly what the point of the potty was. Anyway, she'll occasionally wake up in the night needing to pee and will call me. A few nights ago, at 3 am, I heard her calling to me, so I took her into the bathroom. She pulled off her diaper, which had Disney princesses on it, and chatted away quite gaily to me as she peed. My eyes were half closed but I did pick up enough to realize, after a while, that she was pointing to Ariel on the diaper and singing an approximation of "Under the Sea." She has seen the Little Mermaid (actually just the first half of it) only once, and it was several weeks ago. I said, "What are you singing?" She said, "Singing like c'ab. In the water! da, da, da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da..." I said, "Oh, you mean Sebastian, the crab? When he sings 'Under the Sea'?" She got a huge smile on her face and said, "Yes!" I couldn't believe she had actually retained that from the one time she had heard it, weeks ago.

Another time, when we were walking around on the deck outside, I was being cavalier and not wearing shoes, and I got a big splinter in my foot. She heard my indrawn breath and said, "Mama? Hurt cherself?" I said, "Yes, my foot," and sat down to examine the sole of the foot. The skin was broken and the splinter was lodged in it. She leaned over it and kissed the sole of my foot. "There - all better?" she asked. And it was.

I have so many hopes for her. I hope she'll grow up strong and healthy, and be surrounded by friends. I hope she'll be pretty, because life is easier for pretty people. I hope she'll find work that inspires her. I hope she'll be more ambitious and self-confident than I am - I feel so incapable of confrontation in its various forms, particularly managing and directing other people, that many career options are closed to me, and I don't want her to be limited like that. I hope she will love the outdoors and animals the way I do (although I worry that she might not - so far she is clearly more interested in tractors and trains than in living things). I hope the world that she grows up into will be resilient enough to survive the harms that human societies continue to inflict on it. I hope she will find a man who appreciates and loves her and whom she can love as well - and that they'll make me some lovely grandkids. Mostly, I just hope that I can keep her safe as she grows up - guard her from all the perils - so that she'll at least have the options to achieve her desires.

Screaming

I have a bird who is 20 years old. He's a gold-capped conure, which means he can live to 30 years or more. Sometimes that seems like such a long time, I wonder if I’ll make it to that point with my sanity intact.

The issue is that, being a conure, he screams. Piercing, deafening screams that ricochet off the walls of the room and make my ears ring. I think I have actually suffered some mild hearing damage from having him scream in my ear so much. He generally screams and bites me if he’s on my shoulder and I try to remove him. I can’t figure out a way to get him off my shoulder that doesn’t result in the scream-in-the-ear, so I try not to let him get up there any more, but sometimes he sidles up anyway.

Here’s advice to anyone who does not own a conure: For the love of God, don’t get one.

His screaming upsets me the most when I’ve just taken care of his needs and I feel like he should be satisfied for a while. I can understand screaming if he’s hungry or neglected. But after I’ve brought him out of his cage to share breakfast with us, petted him, cleaned the cage, fed him, left the cage door open so he can hang out on his platform if he wants, and given him some veggies or fruit to keep him busy, I feel like he has no right to scream. Yet he often does. Moments after I’ve left the room, he erupts in a volley of deafening shrieks.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly saintlike, I go back in the room and say in a gentle voice, “Please don’t scream,” and cover up his cage (even though he was just covered all night, and it seems ridiculous to be putting him back to bed just an hour after he got up). If I am feeling slightly more frazzled or my daughter is whining and pulling at me or we’re running late and need to get out the door, I close the door of his room as a way of at least muffling the noise so that we can carry on (though the screams through the door are still loud enough to make it difficult to hold a conversation in the house). Some days I just lose it altogether. I walk back into his room, intending to tell him nicely to be quiet, but instead I yell, “SHUT UP! YOU BASTARD!” and wish I could wring his little birdy neck. I feel really ashamed of myself after I've done that. He's just a bird - I shouldn't let him get to me like that. But oh - if you could hear the intensity of the shrieks and how difficult it is to accomplish anything else in the house while it's going on - you would understand.

It amazes me that I harbor such angry feelings for this bird. There was a time when he was the light of my life. When I got him, I was just a kid, and he was my best friend. He would sit with me while I did my homework after school. He was my baby. I really missed him when I went away to college and couldn’t take him with me. In those days, his screams didn’t bother me so much – what bothered me was that my parents would yell at me: “Can you do something about your BIRD!” I would defend him, saying that he didn’t know any better and was just trying to communicate.

Now I feel like I’m completely unable to see inside his birdy head to figure out what he’s trying to communicate. Why is he so ungrateful that immediately after I’ve spent time with him, he’s demanding more? Why can’t he understand that I can’t attend to him every minute of the day? There are times when he makes the house virtually uninhabitable. He screams so incessantly and so loudly that we simply can’t stay indoors – I hustle my daughter out the door and we go shopping or go to the park to “wait it out.”

A true animal lover and ethologist would look at the pattern of his screaming and develop a compassionate plan for teaching him to change his behavior. Hmmm, he generally screams at the following times:
- in the morning after I’ve taken care of him
- around noon during or after the two hours of classical music that the radio is programmed to play automatically for him
- when anyone comes home (it sucks to step in the door with your arms full of stuff, tired and looking forward to sanctuary, only to get screamed at)
- when anyone is trying to talk on the phone
- when my daughter is being rambunctious
- when he sees a shadow that he thinks might be a hawk, or possibly a leaf
- when we have friends over
- when it’s “too quiet”
- in the late afternoons when the sun is slanting into his cage
- when anyone walks past the door of his room
- in the early evening when he’s getting tired.

The screaming can be silenced sometimes by covering up his cage, but not always. He definitely knows I don’t like it – when he’s been screaming and I approach the cage, he scuttles back into it like he knows he’s in trouble. But why does he keep doing it then? The ungenerous part of my brain wants to interpret his behavior as malicious: doing something he knows is aggravating.

Maybe he is just lonely and bored. Maybe he screams more than he used to because he doesn't get enough attention. I feel bad about that - after all, he's my pet, and it's my responsibility to meet his emotional needs. But I don't see how I can give him more. Like I said, I'm trying not to let him get on my shoulder any more because of the inevitable scream-and-bite, and having him on my hand makes it difficult for me to get stuff done. And most of the hours of the day I am either at work, busy freelancing, doing housework, taking care of my kid, or running errands. If I had any extra time to sit around... I'd use it to sleep.

So it's tricky. Besides the time issue, I am not sure I can really work with him to teach him anything different. For one thing, it would require me to be in perfect control of myself as I respond to each of his screaming fits – and that’s a time when I’m usually feeling furious. For another, I don’t think he is smart enough to learn anything. The way he screams when he knows (or should know) by now that it’s not the way to get what he wants, and the way he still freaks out about hawks or imagined hawks or falling leaves (when nothing has ever hurt him), suggest to me that he’s not the brightest bulb in the light string. Also, I would have to be really consistent about my response to his screaming. And that’s exactly why his screaming upsets me so much. I can’t drop what I’m doing every second to attend to him – that’s what I think he is demanding with his screams, which is unreasonable and spoiled of him, and I want him to understand that he can’t have that. I will give him daily affection, keep his cage clean, give him fresh food and water, regular baths, time outside, and toys – but I can’t be at his beck and call every moment.

Of course, my unwillingness to try to change his behavior means that the only course of action is to wait it out. It’s another 10 years, or more, if I take good care of him. It feels like a punishment.