Some people said I needed to let her cry it out, while others said that was a sure way to guarantee she’d resent me later in life and have long-standing trust issues. Some books said she was supposed to eat, sleep, and play—in that order, and that order only. But this threw me into a frenzy because, Oh my gosh, she fell asleep while she was supposed to be playing, and what do I do now? The whole day is ruined.
Ultimately I ended up taking bits and pieces of advice from various books and friends along with applying a dose of common sense and worked to figure out what was best for us. There were nights I’d attempt to let her cry it out, and I lasted only four minutes before I caved and ran into her room. And then there were other times when I’d actually go through with the whole cry-it-out thing, which were usually the times I’d have to leave the house and put Perry in charge because my heart couldn’t take it.
In spite of my lack of experience, the schedule happened. Through a combination of trial and error and teething and dirty diapers and why-is-she-still-awake moments, we developed a routine. Caroline had inherited her father’s Grandpa Walton tendencies and was usually in bed for the night by 6:00 p.m. By the time she was five months old, she’d normally wake up once during the night and then go back to sleep until six o’clock the next morning. And I became a person I didn’t recognize. A person who was excited by the prospect of sleeping in until the luxurious hour of 6:00 a.m. A person who saw sunrises every morning and heard the early-morning cannon go off at the nearby army base.
But those early mornings are the fabric of some of my sweetest memories from Caroline’s baby days. We’d curl up on the couch and watch Sesame Street together because that was before “the experts” determined that television before age two ruins your child. (Clearly those experts never had a small toddler and a husband who likes to eat dinner every night. Because otherwise they’d collect a stash of Baby Einstein DVDs so fast it would make your head spin.)
She would relax against me with her arms propped behind her head like she was a fifty-year-old man relaxing after a long day at the office, and we’d laugh at Elmo and I’d sing her songs and my heart would ache because I loved her so much. I look back at those days and think that’s exactly what people mean when they tell you the days are long but the years are short.
Those were the days I would look at the clock and couldn’t believe it was only eleven in the morning. Those were the days I’d count down the minutes until bedtime. But those were also the days that seemed to be gone in the blink of an eye.
Sometimes I regret that I didn’t enjoy them more in the moment, but isn’t that the way motherhood goes? Looking back, the sweetest things are often the hardest things. They teach you a level of sacrifice you didn’t know you were capable of, and for me, having a child was the beginning of a glimpse into the kind of love Christ has for us. Sacrificial love. Love that doesn’t keep score. Love that isn’t dependent on what’s in it for me. Love that is consuming and protective and unconditional. These are the early moments that bonded me forever to Caroline because we were like war buddies. There was a feeling of, Hey you, we survived another day.
Those are the days I walked around feeling like the end-of-the-movie version of the Grinch—my heart that was once small grew at least three sizes. And I wouldn’t have missed one of them for all the sleep in the world.
Unless it was on really high-thread-count sheets.
Chapter 10
Back to Work, Back to Reality
The beauty of being employed in the pharmaceutical sales industry was that it came with a sweet six-month maternity leave. Granted, not all of it was paid leave, but I had the luxury of plenty of time to adjust to life with a new baby before having to figure out how to incorporate a full-time job into the equation. Honestly, I don’t know how women do it when they have to go back to work after just six weeks, when their boobs are still leaking and they’ve had a total of four hours of sleep since the baby was born.
Before I had Caroline, I had a master motherhood plan in that cute, naive way all women have of believing they can map out their futures without factoring in hormones and blinding love. We’d found a nice, older woman who was willing to come to our house five days a week to look after Caroline and maybe even cook the occasional homemade enchilada dinner while Perry and I worked. Her name was Stella, and I just knew she was going to be the best thing to ever happen to our family. She even came by to meet Caroline while I was on maternity leave and told me that the magical cure for a baby with hiccups was to put a piece of red string on her forehead. How could I not feel comfortable about someone with that level of baby expertise taking care of my child?
But as the days of my maternity leave wound down, I began to question whether I could have another woman in my house with my baby. It had seemed like such a good idea in theory, but the reality was I wanted to be home with Caroline instead of delivering Chinese food to an angry doctor’s office staff. But that wasn’t really an option at the moment. We needed the insurance and the free car my job provided, and there wasn’t any other choice.
However, I began to realize that with Perry owning his own landscaping business and my being in sales, we had fairly flexible work schedules. So I tearfully presented him with the suggestion that we let Stella know she wasn’t needed and just make the whole parenting thing work between the two of us. He agreed.
I called Stella to let her know we weren’t going to need her or her homemade enchiladas after all and explained that it wasn’t her; it was me and all my conflicting emotions about attempting to balance a motherhood I adored and a career that I didn’t really care about but had to endure because of the regular paycheck.
It was early February when I began my stint as a working mother with a full-time job. It was hard enough just being away from Caroline during the day, but then I was informed I’d have to fly to Chicago for four days of meetings. I felt like my heart was going to break. The morning I left, my mother-in-law came to watch Caroline while Perry drove me to the airport, and I stood in my kitchen and cried my eyes out. I regretted our decision to renovate our house and spend all that money. Why couldn’t we just live in a shack so I could stay home and be with my baby? Why did I think we needed to have an electrical system that didn’t short out every time we ran the microwave?
But then my mother-in-law, a woman not inclined to show much sympathy for melodrama and self-pity, looked at me as I tried to stuff my laptop into my bag between sobs and said, “You need to get over it.”
Wow. Well, that was certainly harsh. I wanted to yell back, “Why don’t you get over it?” but that didn’t really seem to have any relevance in this particular situation. So I just let Perry steer me out the back door and into the waiting car before I said something I would most likely regret.
But as mad as the comment made me, I slowly, slowly began to realize she might have a point. This was my new reality. I’d always known I’d have to go back to work at some point, and I could either embrace it or resent it. And so I embraced it. Mostly. I spent those four days in Chicago missing Caroline terribly but at least halfway admitting to myself that I’d forgotten what a luxury it was to get in bed at ten o’clock at night and sleep nonstop until seven o’clock the next morning. I hadn’t been that rested in six months.
And so began two years of shuffling meetings and coordinating schedules and not performing my job nearly as well as I should have. My heart was always at home, and I no longer cared at all about doctors and prescription drugs.
(As opposed to the days when I cared so much that I was still in bed at 10:00 a.m. when the painters arrived.)
To say those were a long, hard two years is like saying I might be interested in a chocolate donut when I’m suffering from PMS. It was a constant juggling act. Perry and I would sit together with our calendars every Sunday night and play schedule roulette as we bargained and haggled over whose meetings were more important and whether or not the Smiths’ new driveway really needed to be poured on Tuesday because I w
as supposed to deliver breakfast to Dr. Garcia and his entire staff that morning.
It didn’t help that Caroline had decided at some point around the one-year mark that sleeping through the night was overrated. Why sleep when you can stand in your crib and see how far you can throw your pacifier? I would run that child like she was training for a marathon during the day in an attempt to get her to sleep all night, but she would still call me into her room at 3 a.m., and how was I supposed to resist a little monkey in footy pajamas saying, “Rock you, Mama,” which was her way of asking to sit in the rocking chair with me for just a little while.
Another of her favorite middle-of-the-night activities was a game I liked to call “You Find It, Mama,” where she would call me in with a cry of distress to ask me to find her pink bunny or Squeak E. Mouse or any other stuffed animal that was guaranteed to be located at the very bottom of the toy box.
No, please don’t worry that your mother hasn’t experienced a REM cycle in six months—let’s make sure we find Blue Shaggy Dog at four in the morning.
There was a point during this time that I went to the dentist hoping I had a cavity just so I could have an hour or so to sleep in the chair while it was filled.
Eventually I began to realize we couldn’t go on this way. Perry’s landscape business was growing, and I couldn’t keep doing my job halfway and completely sleep deprived. That’s when I began to explore the wonder known as preschool. Caroline was almost two, and I felt like the fall would be a great time to put her in school for a couple of days each week.
I visited a few local church schools, including the one Perry had attended as a little boy—the one everybody claimed was the best—which is where I ultimately enrolled her. The headmistress had been around since God was a child, and I was convinced that her serious approach to a child’s education and overall development would be the best thing for Caroline. When the headmistress described the school’s distinctions to me, she informed me how important it was for each child to bring a nutritious, well-balanced lunch to school each day and commented that one little boy even brought brussels sprouts. I went home and announced all my findings to Perry, including the bit about the kid who brought brussels sprouts. He said, “Oh, yeah, that was Jason Miller, back when I was there. He’s always been a total freak.”
Of course, I underestimated a few things in my school decision, such as Caroline’s love for peanut butter and jelly with a side of Cheetos and my fundamental belief that a serious approach is a boring approach that can suck the life out of a person. Because it’s all well and fine that your school is accredited by the blah-blah board of blah-blah, but preschool is really more about learning basic social skills than the Keynesian theory of economics. Let’s not take people who still poop in their pants too seriously.
Sometime in late August I packed Caroline’s new Nemo lunch box with what I hoped passed as a fairly nutritious lunch, though there was nary a brussels sprout to be found, and walked her to her new little classroom. At the time she seemed so big to me, but now I look back at pictures and wonder why on earth I was dropping an infant off at preschool. She was still just my chubby-cheeked baby, with her bouncy ponytail and her Keds with Velcro straps.
I counted down the minutes until it was time to pick her up at 2:45, anxious to see how her first day had gone. I was astounded when I walked into her classroom to discover that she was asleep on her nap mat. The teacher explained she had taken forever to fall asleep and had spent much of that time distracting the other kids before she finally passed out from exhaustion.
I scooped her up, her hair matted to the side of her sweaty little face, and carried her out to the car. As I asked her about her day, she told me she’d had fun but she didn’t like nap time. Which should have come as no surprise, considering she wasn’t a fan of naps, or sleeping in general, at home in her own bed, so why did I think she was going to relax on an inch-thick mat with her shoes still on in a classroom full of kids?
I spent the rest of the evening worrying about the nap-time dynamic at preschool, and my fears were confirmed the next morning when I dropped Caroline off at school. Her teacher met me at the door with the announcement that I needed to pick Caroline up prior to nap time because having her there was too disruptive for the other kids.
Seriously, lady? You gave us one shot at nap time, and we’re out? I found it hard to believe Caroline was the only child who struggled with the nap. But I agreed to pick her up before nap time, and that’s what I did for the next three weeks until Caroline decided she didn’t want to leave school early anymore. I explained that meant she’d have to lie down and sleep at school, that she couldn’t keep the other kids awake. She agreed, and from that point on she made it through nap time with only a few issues here and there. It was hard for me to be a fan of her teacher after the whole napping debacle, but Caroline loved her and even named the baby doll Santa brought that Christmas Mrs. Laurie. And how could I argue with that?
I mean, doesn’t it say in the Bible that no greater love hath a toddler than naming a baby that wets its diaper after her preschool teacher?
Chapter 11
Potty Training: Bringing People to Their Knees Since Forever
Preschool became a normal part of our lives. Caroline loved getting to see all her friends several times a week to make crafts and eat paste and fight over tricycles, and I was able to better balance having a career and being a mother. We adjusted. I accepted that being a working mother was what God had for me, and I was okay with it. But in my heart my prayer remained the same: I wanted to be home. I wanted to have time to bake cookies and have lazy mornings watching Bert and Ernie with a snuggly girl in pajamas who wasn’t going to be little forever.
Which brings me to an important milestone in any motherhood career.
Potty training.
I know.
Somewhere, someone just groaned as they read those words. That’s because potty training a child is the equivalent of teaching a cat to tap-dance, and there are CEOs of large corporations who have never felt that level of accomplishment. When Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, passed away in 2011, there was much talk about how he changed the world. And, yes, it’s incredibly clever that I can ask a device smaller than my hand where the closest Starbucks is or what the weather will be like the next day, but there is no app that will convince your child to enjoy the benefits of indoor plumbing as opposed to sitting around in her own excrement.
For the first year of a baby’s life the diapers aren’t so bad. I mean, yes, there is the occasional blowout that requires a gas mask and a team of people to get it cleaned up, but that’s part of the parenting deal. But it all gets a little more complex when your precious baby can walk up to you and announce, “Mama, I poo-poo in my diaper.” Because if you can claim it, then you should have the wherewithal to do something about it. Not to mention the implications of a dirty diaper that belongs to someone on a steady diet of chicken fingers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese.
(Not that Caroline ever ate a steady diet of any of those things. We were purely organic at our house.)
(If you consider organic to mean anything that comes in the shape of a dinosaur.)
(In my defense, it’s hard to think about cooking a healthy, well-balanced meal for a child who has been known to live on a single cheese cube for days at a time.)
Truth be told, I hadn’t given much thought to potty training. It was a vague destination in my mind, someplace we might venture at some point when I felt brave or had a prescription for Xanax. Perhaps we might toy around with the idea the summer before Caroline turned three. Maybe we’d get one of those plastic starter potties and let her get used to the idea of sitting on it; maybe we’d get her some magazines to read, since that seems to be what works for her father.
But then the very serious preschool where kids eat brussels sprouts threw me for a loop.
One day in May I opened up Caroline’s little Nemo backpack to find a note announcing that all children must be complet
ely potty trained by the age of three or they would not be promoted to the three-year-old class. There would be no exceptions.
You can rest in the knowledge the whole thing sent me into a tailspin.
All of a sudden I had only three months to get us all aboard the potty train. And I had a child who showed absolutely no interest in taking this step toward independence and proper hygiene. But now her academic future depended on it. She was going to get held back if she couldn’t get rid of the diapers. My baby girl was going to fail the two-year-old class. Her future as valedictorian of preschool was at stake even though she’d recently learned all her shapes and how to count to ten. Unless you count the times she skipped over six and seven.
I headed to Target that very day to acquire a plastic potty and a copy of every storybook I could find about people who use potties. Look! Ernie uses the potty! Princesses use potties! Everyone uses the potty! Potties are the new black.
That night I made a big deal of introducing Caroline to the new potty I’d placed in her bathroom right next to the adult version. I explained it was her very own special potty and that she was the only one who got to use it. Whenever she felt like she needed to go tee-tee, she could let me know and we’d race in there and use her very special potty.
She looked me dead in the eye and said, “No thank you, Mama.” And then she picked up her very special potty, carried it into the living room, and proceeded to use it as her personal lounge chair for the next two weeks. I kept hoping she would eventually grow to appreciate its function, not just the obvious comfort of the plastic backrest, but I hoped in vain. I became convinced Caroline was determined to be the first child who would go off to college wearing a Huggies Pull-Up.
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