Leftover Oatmeal Banana Almond Muffins

3/4 c cooked oatmeal

3/4 c Pamela's baking mix

1/3 c almond meal

1 mashed banana

1 egg

1 tbsp melter butter or coconut oil

1/3 c almond milk

1-2 tbsp maple syrup (optional if oatmeal or almond milk is sweetened)

Fill greased muffin tins 3/4 full. Bake at 375 for 20 min. Yields 12 muffins. 

to do list

Numbers

42 years old. 39 years old. 15 years lovers. 10 years married. 9 years in Portland. 8 years in this house. Five years trying. 7 week miscarriage. 8 week miscarriage. 10 week miscarriage. 5 week miscarriage. 7 week miscarriage.  9 months gestation. 16 hours labor. 1 four year old. Three years trying. 8 months gestation. 19 hours labor. 2 9 month olds. 

30 minutes reading books. 5 minutes snuggling. 10 minutes sitting here. And my big boy is asleep. 

Here

I keep thinking of topics I will write about for my blog. Essays. Vasectomy after infertility. Postpartum Depression after Infertility. This transition to the other side where I now facilitate infertility support groups. How infertility is so hard on sex and sexiness. Parenting and anger. Identity as a feminist stay at home mom. The list goes on. I have not large chunks of time to write. But I know need to write. Sometimes people come to my house and I have been alone for long stretches of time. I mean really long stretches, because turns out it's hard to get out with two babies. Turns out three kids means we are all sick more often and it takes longer for colds and such to cycle through. There is more quarantine. So I am alone with small children a lot. And my thoughts and ruminations jostle around my brain, bumping into each other, styling on each other, sometimes fighting and snarling at one another, climbing the walls with no let outlet. When people come to my island, this mess of thoughts starts to spill out. And it is not a conversation. It is me using a friend as a slate upon which to verbally chalk. It is unfair and embarrassing, this verbal processing. I sometimes make myself inappropriately vulnerable, sometimes stir nests of bees Eihout knowing it because I am too busy talking. Maybe I need to write so I don't bug the shit out of people. But I need to write. And for me knowing someone may read it makes it more real. Throwing a stone in a pond. So maybe this blogging is going to happen on my phone while waiting for food to take up to my husband at his work. Today is Thursday. The day I have a sitter so that I can spend quality time with my eldest, and on occasion with myself.

 Lately all the time not engaged with children has been focused on organizing the house: clearing out the attic.  Shuffling rooms, moving my oldest into the attic and the babies OUT OF OUR ROOM! Hallelujah! It has happened. There are not cribs and a cosleeper smashed up against my bed. I am not spending most of the night patting the bum of my daughter as she mewls in her sleep. She is mewling in the next room, not waking up, sleeping sans butt pats. I am still up a lot for wakings and soothing, but less. And my head feels a bit clearer with some physical space in my home. We ditched some furniture, took down the pack and play in the living room. And erected baby gates to pen the crawlers. One phase gives way to another. They move of their own accord now! My daughter chants mamamamamamam. My youngest son does downward dog, collapses on the ground and then drags himself towards the object of his desire. 

And I continue to steer the ship. And dream of sleep. 

The end of breastfeeding

My babies are now six months old. The time has passed in a blur of feeding, bouncing, changing diapers. It has not been long since I began to feel as if we were emerging from our small cocoon. Part of this emerging has been letting go of my tight grip on breastfeeding my babies. It was a huge struggle. They did not nurse well, both having tongue and lip ties that needed to be revised. I, having the hormonal issues I do, did not produce well and it took drugs and herbs and pumping to make even enough for one baby. But I did, for a time. We found a rhythm where I fed them on the pillow, then they got a bottle, and it worked. Until it didn't. As happened with Caden, as their appetites and interest in the world grew, their patience at the breast dwindled, and they began to nurse for shorter and shorter times looking around for the bottle. I tried supplementing at the breast with a little tube, nursing them individually, and these things worked for a time, but I didn't have a lot of fight left in me. Having a hungry baby cry at my breast is an awful feeling, and not one I could tolerate. I began to give them bigger and bigger bottles, and offer the breast only occasionally. Through all of this I pumped. I pumped because I hoped it would turn around and I wanted them to have as much breast milk as possible, but I found that time at the pump meant I wasn't able to squeeze in one on one time with my older son, get the bottles washed, or fold the laundry. I really had to look at the health of our family as a unit, and it became clear that breastfeeding could not be the highest priority anymore. Tonight may be my last pump. Jude still nurses in the wee hours and each time I wonder, will this be it? I don't know that I have much milk left for him, now that I have stopped the drugs and herbs, the pumping and frequent nursing. I feel very sad about this chapter ending. Breastfeeding was something I looked forward to, and both times it didn't work out the way I wanted to. Both times I struggled with feelings of failure, frustration, inadequacy.

This is the end of my reproductive journey. I have three beautiful, healthy children. My body did not fail me. It grew and birthed these beautiful beings. I get to mother these incredible children. And yet I resist closing the door. Even here, 42, with my family complete it feels as if there is something I need to do, something I need to prove, some hurdle to leap before I can be free from my years of loss and infertility. But maybe healing doesn't mean being free. Maybe it just means moving forward. 

Feed the baby

I have watched so many friends nurse their babies. The baby cries, they pull a shirt up or down, grab a breast, pop the baby on, and Voila! The baby gets fed, drops off the breast milk drunk and content. When I had Caden I was completely unaware how hard breastfeeding can be, how it is a learned art, how it takes practice and perserverance and hours upon hours trapped under a newborn, and how, for some of us, it doesn't work out. Not because we are lazy or duped by the formula company, but because our bodies don't quite work right, or there has been surgery, or the babies don't ever get the hang of it, or life does not allow for the time it takes to nurse or pump or whatever needs to happen to protect the milk supply. I was never witness to the struggle.

I suppose in many ways breastfeeding worked out, as best it could, with Caden. I nursed him til he was past the 6 month mark, and pumped for a while after that. I never had enough milk, so he was never exclusively breast fed, but he had 1/2-3/4 of his food from me, and the rest was an amulgation of donor milk, home made formula, and commercial formula. I feel good, retrospectively, about the choices I made and the work I put in to give him the amount of breast milk I did. 

And yet. I was sad. I spent so much of his early infancy crying and wishing things were different. I felt like I was failing him as mother because my body could not produce enough milk. When people asked me if I was breastfeeding, I said no, even though I spent hours of every day doing so. It was as if that bottle trumped the breast, and if I wasn't doing it completely, I couldn't claim to be doing it at all.  

The other side.

Today was my due date. July 13. A date that never meant all that much because I knew they would be on the outside by now. They have been earth side for two weeks and 4 days now, each day its own microcosm of a lifetime. There was the end of the pregnancy, all the monitoring, the blood pressure scares, the sheer enormity of my belly and the challenge of moving around. Then there was the induction, the labor, the birth. And then, the other side. 

I have two babies. They are beautiful and small and sweet and strange. They do not nurse well and have floppy heads and dark blue grey eyes. I struggle to make milk for them. Ada is slender and fair and long with scrawny limbs that scare me sometimes with their skin on bone quality. Jude has a darker complexion, rounder in the face and belly and meatier all around. Jude is currently asleep in a hospital crib with an IV in his arm. Today we are in the microcosm of my baby is sick, but he is ok. He has a UTI, and because he is till so new they have to make sure the infection has not travelled to any other organs. We originally brought him to the doc for a fever. I woke at 4:00 am the night before last to feel heat emanating off his little body. Before that moment I was lost in a sea of failure around breast feeding, and now I sit on this vinyl purple rocking chair and know that I can only do my best to keep all of my children safe and cared for. There are so many decisions to be made each day, each moment, I can't possibly always make the right one. It is a horrible truth that I can't expect to get it right all the time. That I will inevitably fuck up. All I can do is try and try, and keep my heart open to the love, and accept the rest of it too: the feelings of inadequacy, the anxiety, the sheet need of two infants and a four year old. 

I fret. Should I go home now from the hospital so I am there when Caden gets back from his time with friends? Or is it more important to feed Jude once more and possibly be here when the doc comes to talk to us about the kidney and bladder ultrasound?

I go. 

Home now. The drive offered sunshine, Andrew Bird, and time to cry. I nursed Ada, greeted Caden and heard about his day, and then handed both children off so I can pump. This is the majority of my reality: nurse, soothe, pump. Nurse, soothe, pump. Maybe insert eat ice cream. It felt terrible to leave my baby in the hospital. Home is a relief.