Today I decided that my patron saint of motherhood is Lady Macbeth.

No, no, come back. Hear me out.

You all know that I become periodically obsessed with creating slogans for myself ("Aleta is Job #1" is still being used in some parts.) And because I was teaching Macbeth when I was the most pregnant, I got in the habit of pondering a lot of Lady Macbeth's speeches and metaphors. See, the Lady is supposed to be the AntiWoman, and part of that is her stance on mothering. When she invites demons & spirits to "come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall," she uses the language of lactation – which is fundamentally the language of nurturing to a Shakespearean audience that never knew scientific formulas with "comfort proteins" and the like. She connects it to Satanic witchcraft and refutes the whole works in one compact phrase. She is not only not offering nourishing milk, she's exchanged her milk for poison. She is not afraid to use others' perceptions of her femininity to lure them in and kill them.

This is not why she's my hero.

She also has a whole convoluted rant to her man that uses the nursing metaphor to describe her resolve. It's the one about loving the babe that milks her, but still being ready to dash its brains out while it still smiled at her. This is certainly not why she's my hero.

No, I love Lady Macbeth because she says all of these horrible things – things that push her right off the feminine map, so that her own husband tells her that any children she bears would have to be male as there's no female in her at all – and when it comes right down to it, she can't act. She can't kill the king because he looked like her sleeping father. Then she goes crazy & kills herself. In the end, she just couldn't maintain the fiction that she was just as brutal and deadly as a man.

That's why I love Lady Macbeth. She's like, the worst mother on the face of the earth. And as long as I'm doing better than her, I'm an excellent mom. Sure, I suppose you could say that my standards are pretty low. Those of you who haven't had little babies will have to trust me on this one: the most innocuous moments of the first days of parenting will make you feel worse than Hitler.* Sometimes you need to keep an example of a really really bad mother in front of you, just to pick up your spirits. And hey, she wasn't so bad after all. If the Lady can feel remorse, maybe there's hope for the rest of us.

I'm really stating to like co-sleeping (or "sharing sleep" as the attachment parenting types would say). I've spent the last 5 years getting used to sleeping with the Boy; before he arrived on the scene I was nearly pathological about staying in my own space while I slept. He gradually broke down my barriers until I got used to the relatively minor annoyances of resettling myself everytime he moved. By the time the Sprout was born, I quite enjoyed sleeping with the Boy. I even missed him when he wasn't there.

But from the moment the Sprout was born, his newborn needs have kept me from a night's sleep with just my husband. During the first few days, we were psycho – we actually traded off in 3-hour shifts all night & day so that one of us could hold & soothe the Blake 24-hours a day. After 4 days of that, the system broke down (that was the night when I woke up 20 minutes into the Boy's "shift" to find him sleeping soundly while the Sprout screamed into his face.)

Then we entered into the phase when we tried to put the Sprout into a cradle while we both slept. The problem with that was that we were deep into "Sprout needs to gain weight!" anxiety and I wasn't too comfortable with breastfeeding. So every 3 hours I had to turn on the lights, sit up, mound up pillows on the bed, fetch the baby, feed him through a growing headache, and then pump for 20 minutes after he dropped off. Night feedings lasted over an hour and it was wicked hard to sleep after all of my milk responsibilities were satisfied. He also wasn't waking on his own, so I had to set the alarm for 3 hours & drag myself over to wake him out of a sound sleep more often than not. The Boy, bless him, slept through most of this despite my vicious crankiness.

I grew to hate the nights.

Then his nighttime pattern evolved into "every 3 hours" and we decided to try co-sleeping. Imagine me, a girl who spent most of her life completely unable to sleep if anyone laid so much as a finger on her arm, getting desperate enough to try a system where I had to guard the baby all night long. At first it really sucked. I lay awake for long swatches of time, afraid to move & break the latch, while my hips & back began to ache. I could never get myself back to sleep. I watched the clock obsessively, trying to figure out how much I was sleeping.

But in the last few days we've done really well. I'm developing the ability to relax into the nursing posture, so much so that I can usually fall asleep before he does. And I've discovered that my fabrigee egg of a baby is a lot more resilient than I'd given him credit for. Sure, I can't move away without waking him immediately. But if I keep holding him, I can move him from one side of me to the other as needed to keep the pain out of my bones. He won't even wake up. Much. He'll sleep for most of the time I want to sleep as long as I keep a nipple in his mouth...and the night goes so much faster when I'm not watching the clock.

So, yeah. I'm starting to get a lot more sleep. And I've also stopped wishing that my partner was a lactating woman (so that she could feed the baby once in awhile, of course). All of this makes me much easier to deal with during the day, and it increases the odds that I'll be able to talk about something other than lactation & night schedules when I do talk to other people.

* For example. When Blake was 3 weeks old, he was sucking on my finger. I got distracted for a moment, and my finger twisted. He cried harder and I became convinced that I'd wounded his little palate beyond repair. I had to hand him off and cry for 15 minutes before I recovered. Compare that to last night, when I accidentally biffed him in the head while we were sleeping. Neither of us completely woke up.

- 0 comments/hedgehogs -

- Rocketbride's adventure of 2/09/2004 11:56:00 p.m.