Why am I so ugly?

Inability to sleep. Insomnia.

For weeks, I've been unable to fall asleep before 2 a.m. I get up at 6:30 a.m. The two days a week where I find some free time that's supposed to be "housework time" I end up in bed. Not napping. Instead, I lie there totally fatigued wondering why my brain won't shut the hell up.

It just keeps listing things. Things to do. Things I should have done. Things I ate. Things I'd like to do. People who I haven't talked to in a while. Things I'm worried about. Things I love about my kid. Things I wish I had, etc.

I give myself 30 minutes of trying to do a relaxation technique I learned in dance class, oh so many years ago. It used to work all the time when I couldn't sleep. Now, maybe it works 3 nights out of 7. When it doesn't, I pick up my laptop. And here I am... restless, thoughtful, frustrated.

Why am I so ugly? I so don't have my prerequisite amount of beauty sleep required to look better than a crazy feathered chicken. Look in my eyes. I'm only vaguely aware of what's going on.

I guess now that MacTroll's home for the next week, I can find some over the counter meds to help me sleep. Tylenol PM or whatever. I don't feel right about doing them when I'm home alone with X-man. I'm a wuss. I get drunk on one light beer. One Unisom usually makes me completely miss my alarm, even though it goes off for an hour.

More Insomnia issues: Babies, babies and more babies

So, a while ago, my friend Lavender wrote a post about being one of the few parents she knows who has three kids. What I am starting to notice is that I'm quickly becoming one of the few parents with only one child. 

I have a number of co-parents who said that they had only planned on one, but in the end biology and sex drive took over and now there are two. 

When MacTroll told people he'd been to the urologist within six months of X-man's birth, people looked at him cross-eyed. "Are you sure you're done?" 

And the answer is and always has been -- from both of us -- yes. I was a lousy pregnant woman. Lousy. I was excited about X-man, but it was the worst time in my whole life -- and truthfully, I've never quite recovered (physically or mentally) from the trauma. 

But as most of my close friends become or are already mothers of 2.2 kids. I find myself in a weird place. I went shopping a couple weeks ago and ran into a very, very nice woman I knew from my old gym. Loved seeing here there. She is a great woman. And we talked and inquired about each other's kids. And after she asked me how old X-man was, she immediately said, "Well, it's probably time to get to work on another one." The implication that by only having one my life would be missing something.

As a mother of 2.2, I know it seemed like a rational thought to her. Like if you love the first one so much, why wouldn't you want to have more? And the truth is there are so many parents out there who are WONDERFUL at having multiple children. They handle five with an amazing ease. 

Me -- I'm pouring all my love and energy into the one I have. I worked really, really hard to get him and keep him safe and healthy. And it takes all of my energy and mental capacity to raise just him. I would not be one of those parents who is great at multiples. But I feel like for some reason to the outside world where 2.2 is the social norm, I will always have to justify my choice. 

And I think that sucks.

Naming Rights

X-man woke me up an hour ago with his 3:30 panic. He's back to sleep now, but I can't seem to keep my eyes shut. So I thought I'd blog about the stupid thing in my head that is keeping me up -- Naming children.

One of MacTroll's three older brothers and his very cool wife had a baby this week. (Congrats!) It's their second and probably the last baby on MacTroll's side of the family. The baby's name is Emmett Steven. There are four other boys on that side of the family: Nathan Michael, Owen Kenneth, Samuel Frederick and Xander Cruz. 

Everyone except Xander has a middle name named after their father or grandfather (or father's middle name). Xander's not named after anyone. Plus, he has my last name. 

So my current insomniac wonder is why boys are more often named after the males in their family, while girls usually aren't named after their mothers. For example in the same family, only one girl out of three shares a name with a mother/grandmother (at least that I know of). 

Had X-man been a girl, he would have been Kady Cruz. Kady was kind of a combination of my first name with my best friend's first name, but he would have had MacTroll's last name. 

I was apparently expected to be a boy before I was born. Had I been one, my name would have been Daniel Grant. Daniel is the name of my father and my paternal grandfather. Grant is the last name of my mother's favorite grandfather (and technically my maternal grandmother's maiden name). They kept the Grant when I was born and shortened the Daniel to Dana. Soooo, I guess I'm a girl named after men. (A shout out to others with gender neutral names, who might have been put in the wrong gender dorms when she/he entered college on an "oops.")

Anyway, I just wondered what it was in culture that made us label our boys with the names of their forefathers -- but not label girls after their foremothers. I mean, you just don't meet a lot of Carol Marie Smith III out there, ya know?

P.S. I know there are exceptions: I have a friend who is Karen Ann (Ann is her mother's name) and the name Ann has rotated between first name/middle name in her family for daughters for a few generations. 

Photo Booth Addiction

What to do when you have insomnia at night... stalk people on google, read a book... or play on Photo Booth. Mmm, Photo Booth won.

The Willie Letdown

It's after 1 a.m. and I'm lying in bed completely awake. I have no good reason for not wanting to close the computer and get some sleep. All of my friends packed it in hours ago, as we're all getting old and gray and have trouble staying up past 11 p.m. 

But here I sit anyway. I'm not motivated to read a book or get up and get things done. My eyes and head feel completely wiped out, but my body is buzzing. I just keep listening to the wind and the rain outside.

It's Mother's Day. And I'm not quite sure what that means yet, even though this is technically my third one since X-man was born in early 2006. 

The first Mother's Day was hard. I found a lump in my breast. My 2-month-old son refused to breastfeed due to several muscular genetic conditions, and I was feeling like a huge failure. I had started physical therapy with him. Something we'd do every week together with a PT and every day at home until he was 12 months old. Everything was spinning out of control, and I had big hopes for my first special day. I hoped that something would happen that would tell me that the last two months of fear and failure and freakishly strange coincidences would somehow brighten the very dark tunnel of postpartum depression that was descending. 

Instead, I got a book written by Willie Nelson. MacTroll swears it was worth reading and a very appropriate Mother's Day gift. But I didn't think a book written by Willie Nelson said, "Thanks for going through 24 hours of labor with our son who weighed over 10 lbs, giving up your body for it, putting in the late nights and the hours at the breast pump, holding our son still on a table as he screams bloody murder to get scans done of his head to make sure his sutures weren't prematurely closing, doing daily PT exercises and we love you and will hold your hand no matter what the ultrasound of your breast says."

I don't think I ever got over the disappointment of Willie Nelson. And so I fastforward to last year's mother's day. Of which, I believe, although for some reason the memory is foggy, that there were several gifts purchased off of an Amazon.com wish list in order to be safe from the same crying wreck of a mother I was from the year before. 

And now we have the third Mother's Day. Where MacTroll diligently started asking me what I wanted to do five days prior. (That's a big step for him. I was thinking he wouldn't even remember given all the travel that's been happening. But apparently he roamed NYC in the rain the day before coming home on Friday to look for a suitable gift, now that the ugly secret is out that I'm not a fan of cut flowers.) 

The only answers I could think of were sleep, time to get stuff done, a family walk and breakfast. I know, he asked and I came up with lame, lame, lame.

I have a friend who tells me that fantasy is always better than the reality. I had a therapist who told me that my expectations of myself as a mother were way too high. I have a spouse, who is kind and smart and funny, who also feels like I keep raising a bar that is too high when it comes to our marriage. I have another friend who is constantly wondering why she ever bothered to get married, and another one who thinks his life would be perfect if could find a good woman. 

I'd really like it if for a short time, I could just stop thinking about the things I don't have and just appreciate the abundance I do have. And although the postpartum depression is gone (there's no more crazy lady in my head telling me the world would be better off if I slunk into isolation), I still think I could do a better job. I still want better for my family and for myself. But what happens when what Looseyfur needs/wants doesn't benefit the family? 

What happens when it's in direct opposition to what the family needs? Because up until recently it's felt like there's been no outlet for Looseyfur, the woman, to exist. It goes kid, MacTroll's job, house stuff, marriage, friends, etc. I'm not even in the top 5. 

And maybe that's okay, because if you were to ask me what I want and where I see myself in the next five years, for the first time ever -- in grown life -- I'd have no answer. 

There's this quote I identify with right now from "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin (Yes, I'm pre-reading book club books for CARE). 

"She slept but a few hours. They were troubled and feverish hours, disturbed with dreams that were intangible, that eluded her, leaving only an impression upon her half-awakened senses of something unattainable. She was up and dressed in the cool of the early morning. The air was invigorating and steadied somewhat her faculties. However, she was not seeking refreshment or help from any source, either external or from within. She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility."