How to Give Medicine to a Baby

How YOU doin'? 

Oh, wait. He's not winking.  No.  That's a medical issue.

So, your 8 month old has both pink eye and an ear infection.  A little medical background to start. "Pink eye," also known as conjunctivitis, is caused by poop.  Poop gets in an eye.  And blammo.  Pink eye.  Congratulations! Your house really is as filthy as you thought it was!  I know you spend countless hours cleaning, but I think we both knew that your current standards of cleanliness have taken a real nose dive in the past few years.  Way to give and and let go.

As for the ear infection, babies have very tiny ears to go with their tiny selves, and the drainage tubes in there can get plugged up.  Especially if your baby has a lot of colds.  Breastfeeding and staying at home with baby should be enough to prevent your child from having constant colds.  Unless you have a disease-y three year old who, more or less, rubs her face and hands in your baby's face and hands.  And if your house is repulsive enough that this poor child could contract pink eye from it, well, then, may God help you!  Because your babe is going to be riddled with colds and coughs.  Most moms would notice signs of an ear infection.  But, if you are particularly ill-attuned to your baby, perhaps because narcissism dictates your existence, or just plain old stupidity, you may not learn of an ear infection unless you are at the doctor for something else.  For example, if your baby's eye swells shut and crusts over; i.e. the pink eye.

Now, you finally managed to make one right move and sought medical care.  Not that you didn't try to fight it because going to the doctor is a pain! Haha, you are one funny, lazy woman. But, seriously, once you took your cyclops baby in to be seen, and he is diagnosed with pink eye and an ear infection, you'll then be armed with medication to alleviate these conditions.  How, oh how, though, will you get this stuff into your baby?

As for the antibiotic suspension, this needs to be administered orally.  Twice a day for ten days.  Now, your baby will not swallow this willingly.  He's not even going to let you get that liquid syringe near him with out flailing and screaming and whipping his head about.  So, you'll get to pin him down.  You've got to get that screaming mouth turned upwards, because you are going to need gravity on your side.  Fill the syringe, tip the mouth open, and then wrestle wildly with this freakishly strong human child.  A little squirt got in! Oh, watch it! He squirreled it away in his cheek and spit it out at you.  Rookie mistake.  Next time, after that squirt blow hard in his face.  This causes his swallow reflex to kick in.  And scares the bejeezes out of him!  While you're blowing into his stunned face, administering tiny amounts whenever you can get access to his clamped jaws, squeeze his cheeks to coax a bit more in.  Now, don't fool yourself, it's not all getting in.  A good bit will be spewed out of his mouth and will pool in his ear.  His infected ear.  But, just consider this to be a bonus on-site application.  Repeat 19 more times.

Now, don't rest yet! (Actually, just stop trying to rest.  It's not going to happen and everyone is tired of hearing about how you're tired.)  You've got eye drops to get in there.  Did you know that 45% of the muscles in one's face reside in the eye lids, making them virtually impenetrable if one is determined not to open them?  This is 100% not true, but it's going to feel true! Once that baby opts for fight, since the only thing you can even somewhat prevent is flight, you will find that you are using more strength than you are comfortable with the pry those suckers open.  Try this right before you nurse baby.  He's happy and comfortable, awaiting a warm and quiet cuddle.  And that's when you AMBUSH! Shove it in there.  2 to 3 drops, the bottle says.  You will have no way of knowing how many drops are getting in. Just squeeze! Squeeze! The drops must go in three times a day for ten days, so, try to find a way to enjoy this one.

Well, you're now on your way to having a baby with two working eyes and an ear that does not plague him with pain that you'd never have noticed anyways.  Kudos for not dropping every ball, and may the winds of fate protect your children.  Because you'll be a little too busy on Facebook to ensure this yourself.

My new hoodie

Well, after a week of existential crises and embarrassing dramatics, things are calmer around here.  I've got myself a brand new sweatshirt and I'm now at the point where I feel like I can pull down the hood and face myself again. I hate when I boil over emotionally.  Mostly, I hate it in retrospect.  It makes me cringe.  I have an abiding fear of being a drama queen, and yet I can't seem to totally avoid falling into it now and again.

Like my long-sleeved tie-dye shirt, and striped Goodwill tank top before it, my new blue hoodie is a security blanket.  And like those items, I realize that I am wearing it conspicuously often, but I just love it so much! I feel good in it.  Not good looking in like an attractive to other people sense.  But in this weird way where it is cozy and I am happy with how I look in it on an inaccessible level.  I don't know how to describe it, and I also don't know how to stop wearing it because the comfort I get in putting it on is completely irresistible to me right now.

Setting aside the blue American Apparel leisure suit fiasco of 2007, which I vehemently think we all should, this is the first time in awhile I've felt the need to find an article of clothing to hide under.  Over the years, I've grown up, gained a modicum of self-awareness, and learned to think before emoting.  It's been a very good thing.  I've grown into the habit of distancing myself from the turmoil and focusing on the desired end - feeling peaceful - instead of the toxic lure of the drama.  Hearing about my biological father's mind deteriorating at such a young age threw me for a loop, though, and I had some raw stuff that I guess I needed to let out before I could get my head on about it.

So what was going on in that crying head of mine? I think it was the big one.  You know, fear of mortality and all that.  It is rarely advertised that when you first hold your baby, your joy in their existence will get snuffed out by the like-a-brick-to-the-head realization that this means that one day you will die, and also one day they will die, and that this fleeting insignificant moment - which is so monumental to you as to be soul-crushing - has already slipped through your fingers. Hopefully this feeling only lasts for the briefest moment. But, depending on your propensity for darkness, that may not be the case.  Now it's not something most of us keep on deck in our psyches.  Because who could cope with that?  But it's there.  And there are moments - birthdays, first steps, quiet spaces where you can see that the child they are is not the little baby you still have in your mind - that it's too much to bear.  That's why we cry when they blow out the candle.  Why we weep in our cars before we can pull away from that first day of preschool.  It's because our kids aren't just precious, and they're not just the hardest job we could never have imagined.  They're also the embodiment of the sand running through the hour glass. Brutal.

Anyways, even though I've given my life over to two people who constantly remind me of my own imminent demise (wheeee!), this whole thing struck some old chords.  I'm aware that I'm always moving forward, and fast.  But it seems like I haven't totally made peace with the fact that the past can't be changed.  It's funny because my three year old has this amazing cylical view of time.  She's always talking about what we'll do one day when she's a mom, and I'm a baby.  Or when her brother is a girl.  Or when we are both adults together.  I love listening to it, and I totally see what she's struggling with.  How can her unlimited imagination grasp that this is it?  I'm sure in no hurry for that realization. But I do know. There will never be a day when child-me knows this man, my biological father.  There is no way to cultivate a history together.  And it's not that I would trade my past for it.  I have a father, and we have a history.  He is a pillar to me and loves me unconditionally.  I don't mean to Hallmark-card this up.  But I do count myself lucky in the dad department.  Just like my daughter, though, it doesn't mean I didn't once spend time imagining other realities where the I did know my biological father.  And there have been times when that felt like an important piece of the puzzle.  So hearing that the "him" I day dreamed about many years ago was, for all intents and purposes, someone who was fading away, shook me up.  I can't totally access why that is. But it did.  A chapter unwritten was closed.

While I now *think* I have a better grasp on it all now, upon hearing the news, my mind first went to fear for my family.  I feared for my own health, for the health of my children.  That somehow his brain's deterioration was in my DNA and that it was an unstoppable force that was going to take this all away from me even sooner than the far too soon I already struggled with.  It felt selfish to think this thought.  But it just burst out of me.  And I can make some sense of that now.  There are, of course, hereditary risks. As there are with so many things.  As there is a risk involved with getting in your car and driving down the road, as well.  I think hearing this news hit a still-delicate part of me, took away something I never had, and since that was all too subtle and tricky to comprehend, my instinct went straight to mama-lion.  My mind felt this pain and immediately said: you cannot take away MY family.  MY kids.  The realest things in my life somehow felt threatened by this news, even though it didn't quite make sense.  I'm in a better place with it now.  Thanks in large part to some amazingly generous and loving friends and family members who did not hide from me, write off my fears, or scold me when I said these things.  They just said they were sorry for me.  And that gave me comfort and space, which is what I needed.

Now, I have the fun opportunity to try and not be wildly embarrassed about my over-reaction.  Or at least my misdirected reaction. Not. there. yet.  But it did cause me to go through an old photo album to find pictures of the predecessors to my fantastic new sweatshirt.  Photos which immediately invoked eerily similar emotional memories of the various shame-states I used to live in over my inner dramas.  I will say I had an amazing rant against my first serious boyfriend when he dumped me.  No regrets there.  Oh, you just want to be friends??  Well, sir, I do NOT!  So. With that.  How about a photo history of my therapy-wear, set, of course, to I'll Stand By You, by The Pretenders.

(p.s. Can someone teach my how to take a selfie? You all look awesome in yours.  I always look pear-shaped - which is odd because my central body flaw is that I'm unfortunatley apple-shaped.  Plus the camera always seems to find some serious jowls and several spare chins.)

 I wore this shirt until it disintegrated.  I think I blew on it's remains like a wispy dandelion and made a wish.  

For several summers, I would go to get dressed, and if I saw this thrift store tank top in the drawer, there was just no use resisting.  It was gonna get worn.

And today.  Oh, Whole Foods blue hoodie.  I rly love you.  And I am sorry I have to wash you every single day because the children use you as a napkin and Kleenex. 

Words on which I have no words

I got news yesterday that has really shaken me badly.  It turns out that my biological father has frontal lobe dementia.  This is apparently a devastating condition.  And likely hereditary.  I fear, or maybe know, that it is callous, but I think much of the grief I am feeling is fear for myself.  Trumped only for fear for my children.  I am not someone who believes in a destiny and to think that I have one, one fraught with disability and pain inflicted on those I love, it is incomprehensible.  I may not be as wise as I generously allow myself to believe, but at a minimum I can almost always come up with a label, and explanation, for how I am feeling.  For (the deeper) why I am feeling this way.  And how I can rise above it.  I might not do all the right things with this information, but for me, a perception of understanding is a great comfort.  I am without this comfort at the moment.

As with any news or happenings with my biological father, a man who I have not had a significant relationship with, having not even met him until I was twenty years old, I feel so many different things.  He is a person who is suffering, and he has a family who is suffering, and I feel love and sympathy for that.  I feel the confusing detachment and pangs of wanting to feel more for him. I no longer feel any loss for the absence we have had in each others' lives. Or perhaps I do.  But it's not been a preoccupation of mine for a very long time.

But I think I know what I need to do right now.  Or at least I think I have to decide to do something.  There are steps to be taken to figure out what the risk is to me.  I can't even go there when it comes to my kids.  So I have to table that, otherwise I will be crushed by the agony.   I'm going to take those steps.  I do think I need to purge a bit. I need to get my head on straight, cut out the distractions, and take care of myself and my family the best I can.  If the news is bad, I'll need the reserves to come to terms with that reality.  If the news is good, I hope I can carry some of these lessons with me - some of which I can almost catch a glimpse of when I take a deep breath and the sun hits me just right.  And I think I need to create space for myself not to directly contemplate this man without whom I would not be, yet whose path so seldom crossed with my own; but to give myself some fertile ground to make peace and to send out true compassion for him and for the many around him who are hurting.

Every rough patch in my life has graced me with greater resonance with the world and people around me.  And this time may be a hiccup or a game changer.  That remains to be seen.  Either way, right now, I've got to focus on breathing.  So I must head back to my meditation cushion and to the yoga mat, give myself permission to reach out for support and permission to guard my personal resources of energy and optimism for a little while, try and cut out the white noise from constant media, and be sure to find silence when I can.  Some of these are so much easier than others.  I'm not going away.  But I am stepping back. All my love to all of you, and my eternal gratitude for all the love that gets showered on me.