Better Make It A Double

gray matters

By coincidence, Snickollet posted today about something I’ve been thinking about ever since I read this article in a copy of Time that was lying around at work.

Snick found a fistful of gray hair recently, more than she could pluck, and after she posted about it, she got many helpful comments about choosing and applying hair dye.  I'm gonna not-quite-join-the-chorus over there and say that while I don’t think there’s anything wrong, per se, with choosing to cover your gray, gray air is also normal and natural, and it's perfectly OK to learn to love it if you'd rather not dye your hair.

The Time article is an interesting article, though perhaps a bit over the top in describing gray hair to the mommy wars, and I did question her premise that gray hair was such an issue for only boomers. A quote: Catherine Clinton, 55, a dyed-red college professor in Greenwich, Conn., [ ] says, "I have seen friends who have stopped dyeing their hair, and although one or two look really good, others mainly look less like themselves, more drab and less vibrant." I don't have a problem with hair dye itself (What the hell – go purple! Or green! Or both!), but obligatory beauty requirements  do bother me. I think that what she says is only true because most women dye their hair after age 40. Lets face it – if most women dye their hair, then the rest of us are going to look older if we don’t. If we all had the money and desire to get face lifts the same could be said for them, and already can be in Hollywood and among TV news anchors.

About a year ago, I decided to stop highlighting, and I'm still trying to find a hairdresser who doesn't spend the whole time trying to convince me to dye my gray and "lighten things up a bit". I’m going to be honest here and say that before I had the boys, I resented my early gray hairs mightily. First kids, then gray, I said, but the kids didn’t come when they were first beckoned. I faithfully had my roots done and my highlights touched up. I did look a little younger, a little “brighter”. It did feel good, until my roots started showing, and I started dreading the 2 or 3 hours and $60-80 it took to get the look back. And now, now that I am a mom, now that I’m pretty content with my lot in life and I know my spouse could care less about my hair color, well, I just can’t really justify it anymore.

Last winter, if finally occurred to me that nothing terrible was going to happen if I didn't cover the increasingly frequent gray hairs, and so I stopped going for highlights altogether. I think I’m ready for a little gray. I’m 33, and I don’t think anybody ought to give me crap about it, especially not for “my own good”. I resent the idea that having clean, brushed hair in a style that suits your face isn’t good enough, isn’t even enough in some cases to prove your basic self-respect. I know my own mother feels that way, and at 61, she keeps saying she’s going to stop dying her own hair but then can’t do it. I’ve been trying to escape my mother’s notion of beauty for at least two decades, (her recent response to my saying I’d lost 15 pounds: “You are going to be so beautiful!” As a size 5 at 5’9) and I don’t think she’s going to be please to have a gray haired daughter. In many situations, I’m not sure that women who have “careers” even have much of a choice but to dye, especially if they go gray early.

Yet, despite all the pressure, I have something besides stubbornness keeping me out of the hair dye aisle and the colorist’s chair. I had a few women in my life growing up who were gray in their 30's and 40's, and I always associated gray with wise, artistic, intelligent, freethinking, or kind. When I think of a 40-year-old gray haired woman, I think, teacher, professor, intellectual, pastor, activist, all potentially good things to be. Besides, does a birch tree look drab? Does a snow-capped mountain range, or a flock of white birds? Isn’t it more likely that we are just training each other to think so?

I belong to a Mennonite Church, and while you couldn’t pick any of us out of a crowd and we’re a pretty progressive bunch, it is true that very few of the women dye their hair or wear makeup. The longer I sit in the pews or at the potluck table on Sunday mornings and look at these women looking pretty much like God made them, the more I see, really see their beauty. It is as radiant as anything else, the beautiful gray and white steaks in their hair and the lines on their faces show strength and experience, and these women, in their collective inattention to the color of their hair, their rejection of the camouflage of agelessness, give me permission to do the same. I am grateful for that.

So, Snickollet, go out and grab that box of dye or make that appointment if that’s what you want to do, or maybe even if that’s what you have to do. But if not, if you don’t have to and you resent it, you can come on over here and join me in embracing the look that says: 

I am alive. I have lived. At least on the outside, I am just what I appear to be.

Edited to add: Snickollet's follow-up is here. Here's the comment I left there:.

I think your feelings make complete and total sense. I find it interesting that when I was dealing with the uncertainty and pain of infertility, it was important to me to look young, healthy, and, I dunno -vibrant? on the outside. I needed that desperately, because on the inside I was a total mess, and felt like my chance to have my body do something other than let me down was slipping away. It is only now, now that I have those children, and now that I come from a relative place of strength, with the support of a loving spouse, that I can accept how my body changes and see it as something other than a betrayal. There's a lot that's not settled for you right now I'm sure, a lot of unknowns and a lot of new territory. I think if you'd feel better getting your old hair back, than you should go for it without hesitation, and with an open mind about how you might approach it at any point in the future. Thanks for the reminder that we all come at these types of dilemmas from different places and for different reasons.

 

odds and ends

I’m so glad we followed this crazy idea we (OK – mostly I) had and got hens. It’s truly been a lot of fun. The girls are pretty mature by now, and done molting, so they’re big and fluffy. They’re also obviously hardy, as they haven’t seemed to think twice about hanging out in the snow. Now that there are no more bugs to eat, they are especially excited to get any kind of treats, especially carrot peelings and leftover noodles, which they seem to think are worms by the way they pin them down as if the “worms” were going to escape. We now get 3 or 4 beautiful eggs a day, and give about 9 or so a week to the IL's. The eggs have real flavor, and have the brightest yolks. J and I were joking that someday, the boy are going to go off to college, and when they receive scrambled eggs in the cafeteria, they’ll think, “What the heck is this?”

I have a heat lamp installed for the really cold nights, and lights on a timer to get them to lay during the winter. Yesterday, I went outside to collect eggs and give the girls some fresh water, and on the way there, I sat down on the back step to tie my shoe. The ladies were out enjoying the sunshine, and within moments, I had one on my shoe and another in my lap! They’re such sweet, friendly birds. They seem to think I’m the mama chicken – kind of funny since I’m really the one that steals all their offspring. If I do yard work, they follow me everywhere, but unlike my own children, they neither whine nor argue with me.

 

 

I figured out that both boys are getting their back molar teeth. I thought they were done, but I was wrong. N is complaining of a sore mouth, and they also have a lingering cough, so they’ve been quite cranky. We did have a nice trip to the zoo yesterday. We did both big indoor loops and the boys got a ton of much needed running around time. We stopped and looked at the gibbon monkeys for a long time. At one point, N said, “I’m sad, mama.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because for some reason, I don’t have a tail!” Then we went by some hog-like creature they have at the zoo, and a lady came up next to us and said to the man with her, "Holy crap! That thing is butt-ugly!" N repeated very word and she didn't even notice, but thankfully, he seems to have forgotten that fine use of the English language.

   

We’ve been doing the Tropical Trail loop without the stroller since the boys were about 18 months old, but back then we only did it when it wasn’t crowded at all, and we did have harness backpacks just in case. Now, we go whenever we want with no harnesses, and it works out fine. There are SO many twins and triplets at the zoo—they are everywhere—but always in strollers. Even older three year olds, and this in a totally kid-safe environment and often with both parents along. I can’t imagine driving all the way to the zoo in a car seat, then sticking my kids in a stroller the whole time, then driving back home. We were right behind two sets of twins who weren't together, and they were in strollers for the entire loop. My kids would go nuts – they need to move. Neither of my kids are runners, so that helps, but honestly, I'd rather have a couple of squirrelly kids in harnesses at least moving around than in a stroller for an hour. I know some people hate them, but don't they have a lot more freedom in a harness than in a stroller?

   

Even though we had a nice time at the zoo, we did spend about a third of our zoo trip in the bathroom. N had an accident because he was scared by the automatic toilet, which flushed as soon as he sat down (so he didn’t really pee). We went back into the brand new, completely automatic-down-to-the-soap, bathroom. After we got N dressed in new pants, we spent a good half hour in there talking about how all the contraptions work, trying out first the faucet, then the soap, then the hand dryers, then checking underneath the sink to see how the bottles of soap screwed in underneath, talking about sensors and the difference between “automatic” and “manual”, and so on, until we got to the toilet, spent a few minutes talking about that, and then N went just fine. And then of course, we did the whole hand washing thing again. Next time I’m remembering the trick of bringing a post-it to put over the sensor, just in case, but at least maybe we’re past that particular fear. Then the whole rest of the time in the zoo, the boys were talking about what happened “automatically”, like the sliding doors, and the door locks when they press the key button on the key fob for our car. N was clearly still thinking about this when we got home, because then he said, “Mama takes care of us automatically.”   

Friday, J informed me that he had arranged a sitter for Saturday night so that we could go to a concert at the Fitz*gerald Theater (the one where Prairie Ho*me Compan*ion is taped). We went to a wonderful concert of Trio Mediæv*l, a renowned Norwegian choral trio. There were many Minnesotans in Norwegian sweaters there whose surnames probably ended in "seth", as ours does. We have such a fine choral tradition here in Minnesota, so it was really neat to hear some of the folk music from which that tradition began. I think it was the second concert that J and I have been to together since the boys arrived. We used to go pretty regularly. I've never found it easy to leave the boys with a sitter, but I'm working on it, and J's sister and I are trading babysitting and date nights. I'm really happy about that, because it not only allows for at least one or two date nights a month for each of us, it also keeps us connected with each other's kids.

I'm been feeling much better the last couple of days, but I felt like crap on Friday, and was quite depressed about it. Every few days, i still feel awful - nauseous with bad heartburn, and exhausted. I haven't felt good for well over a month now. I'm not supposed to eat for several hours before bedtime, which means a major shift in habits for me. I just don't really get hungry for the first half of the day, and I really don't have much time to sit down and eat until the boys are in bed. I'm having a really hard time sleeping propped up the way I'm supposed to be. The realities of this condition are starting to hit me a little. Yes, it could be much worse, but it still sucks.

Today both boys took a lousy nap (nap woes could be a whole nother post) and then got up late, so it was dark by the time we could get outside. We took a little drive to see the Christmas lights in the area, which they absolutely loved. They were so excited. I'm going to put some up this year, and we're getting a tree when my mom comes. I think we'll make construction paper ornaments, though, and no presents under the tree until the night before. Age two and impulse control are relative strangers to one another, but Christmas can e a lot of fun when you have little kids, I'm finding.

Here are a couple of old pictures from early October. I can't believe how much younger O looked just 6 weeks ago! I'm still undecided on the picture issue, but for now, I think I'll at least brand them so they're a little harder to steal.

Thanksgivings

I am thankful for my beautiful, sweet, healthy children.

I am thankful for my and my family's relative health, and for access to medical care.

I am thankful for employment, and for the fact that our family doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket during these uncertain times.

I am thankful for relationships, chosen and unchosen.

I am thankful for people who sacrifice for the greater good, who ask difficult questions, who dare ask and fight for justice and for peace.

I am thankful for people who do the quiet, often invisible work of extending grace and mercy in this world.

I am thankful for the roof over my head, for our warm, cozy house, and for access to healthy food and clean water.

I am thankful for my husband, who has picked up a whole lot of slack around here lately without complaining, who supports me in countless ways, and who so often shows me a new way to look at things.

I am thankful that while I am at work, N and O are in his competent care, learning things from him they won’t learn from me.

I am thankful for the good and important things I have learned from difficult experiences.

I am thankful for my church, for the body of God’s people that we choose to be together, for the people who are helping us pass the peace of Christ on to our children.

I am thankful that though my family of origin is far flung, we have the resources to visit one another and keep in touch.

I am thankful for discovering a love of writing, and for being part of a generation of mothers that talks and writes about the realities of motherhood, both terrible and wonderful, profound and mundane.

I am thankful for God’s love, a gift of the most extravagant sort, which knows no bounds.

update

I'm OK, I think. It's not Crohn's, or cancer or anything, anyway. My esophogheal sphinchter muscle is apparently on a permanent strike, and I may need a proton pump inhibitor for the rest of my life to deal with the resulting GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), but it could be worse. I'm feeling better already with the new medication and I'm just so relieved to know what it is. So relieved. That's it for now - am very tired. Thank you for the kind comments and e-mails.

a guitar with no strings

It’s not E.Coli

It’s not C. Diff

It’s probably not H. pylori.

I’ve lost about 15 pounds in three weeks, and I really wish I had a tall friend who wore a size 6, because the last time I was this skinny was when I was about 13. My slightly baggy acid-washed jeans and matching jean jacket from the mid-80’s are probably in a dump somewhere in Massachusetts, being kept from their decomposing potential by a sandwich of plastic bags and disposable diapers. Besides, I was shorter then.

There are bright spots. The acid-blocker and anti-nausea meds I’m on are helping a bit, and I’m eating more. I went to church today, and I not only didn’t throw up, but I rehearsed with the Advent Choir. People have been really kind and helpful, and I was by sheer chance able to get a Monday appointment to get an endoscopy. They were booked out for weeks, which freaked me the hell out, because by then, I should be able to float there on the North wind, but somehow a cancellation opened up just after I called, and they gave it to me. So maybe tomorrow or soon thereafter I’ll find out what the reason for the pain and nausea are. I can’t believe I’m back on Zofran.

Meanwhile, O is on a nap strike that is threatening to send me over the edge. It would be one thing if he just didn’t sleep, but he’s loud and wild up there, and a giant, whiny pain in the ass for the rest of any afternoon that he doesn’t nap. We enforce “quiet time”, but for him, that means standing on his bed and dropping books from as high as he can, his room being directly over his brother’s. He’s also been spying on the neighbors, though I confess to being more entertained by this than upset. I’ve been hearing him babbling about “a lady that keeps walking back and forth, and another lady that sits and reads a book” and whatnot, but I finally figured out what the hell he was talking about this week when we he pointed to their house and said “those are my people I see from my room!” That evening, I could hear him on the monitor babbling about the “biiiig computer!” (big-screen TV), and when I went upstairs to see what he was doing, I found him perched on the footboard of his bed, staring out the window with an excellent view of the neighbors’ living room. It’s a huge TV – I hope he doesn’t see anything violent on there. Isn’t that just great: we have no TV, but he watches someone else’s. Every day, and from his own room. At least he can’t repeat the jingles.

O is such an interesting kid sometimes. He’s actually pretty defiant, even though he’s usually so willingly compliant in public that most people would never know it. Discipline is not a very straightforward thing with him; he’s pretty immune to time-outs and the like (though time-outs work very well with his brother). He’s not the chatterbox his brother is, but he says the most amazing, creative things sometimes. The other day he told me, “If you take that butternut squash and slice it open, it looks just like a guitar with no strings!” If you show him something new, he immediately wants to know how it’s put together. He also wants to Take. Everything. Apart. He’s a moody kid, who often has crying fits that seem to be about little more than a needed hug, though that hug would have been gladly given him had he thought to ask rather than burst into tears. He's so very happy to have time alone with just one parent, and the other day, he said to me when we were alone together in the car, "now I am your only boy." I wish I could give him more of that, but our situation makes that difficult. 

He’s also in a “baby phase”, where he pretends he can’t do anything because he’s “only a little baby”, and asked to be rocked. I’ve pretty much indulged him with this phase, because I haven’t minded all that much and I can see how all this ambivalence about growing independent works. I’m re-thinking that a bit, though. Being a baby is OK, but whining constantly is not. Being a baby is OK, but sit-down strikes in the middle of the sidewalk saying “pick me uuuuuup, mama!” are not. I cannot rock him when I’m on the toilet or driving the car. And no matter how much he begs and whines, he cannot have the vase holding the last of our garden blooms to use as a baby bottle. Cause I’m just mean that way. I do have all kinds of sympathy for his clinginess, though. He never showed much separation anxiety, but he’s shyer than he seems, I think. Having such a very outgoing brother serves as a bit of a foil, but really, all the new people and situations he’s dealt with since the beginning of September have been a lot for him to handle. At night, when I put him to bed, I lie with him for a minute or two, and sing him a song about the subject of his choice. After the "jeep song' or "doggie song" or whatever, he takes my cheeks in his hands, pulls his face to mine, and then give me kisses all over my face. Then he sighs, and says "Mama! Maaaaaama! Maaaaaaaaaaama!" in this quiet, slightly desperate voice that kind of breaks my heart. I hug him and I leave, and he doesn't seem unhappy to see me go.

Can you tell I’m short on patience in general, though? Because I am, at the moment. Life inside the house with these two is very high maintenance lately, and I haven't had the proper energy to go places and wear them out. There’s only so much whining, tantrums, crayon-breaking, play dough on the couch and down the heating grate, overturned full potty seats, matchbox cars in the full mayonnaise jar, stickers on the window, screaming over a broken cracker or a lost bunny, climbing upon or swiping things off the counters, ordering mama around, defiant retorts, and pee-on-my-lap incidents I can take. I am officially a little sick of this age, and ready for the promised relative equilibrium the next few months may bring. Or at least the ability to digest my food. I haven’t eaten chocolate in weeks.

ugh

I have no energy for pretty words. I am dealing with some kind of stomach issue that can no longer be ignored. For about 2 weeks, I've felt like total crap about 1 out of three days, kinda crappy for 1, and mostly fine, though without appetite for the other third of the time. Every time I think I've stopped feeling nauseous and crampy and exhausted (and no, it's not that) it comes back. I'm exhausted, but also dealing with insomnia. I'm frustrated, perplexed (weird endo stuff? Thyroid? IBS? Some kind of damage from almost three decades of undiagnosed celiac? Crohn's?) and just kind of stumbling through life in a very messy house until I figure out what's going on. Today at church, I got so nauseous sitting in the pew that I had to go to a (thankfully deserted) restroom and throw up. While I don't have diarrhia most of the time, my stomach feels just like I do. I've lost about 8 pounds and I can barely eat an entire meal over a day. Two weeks is a bit long to be a virus, so I'm going to try to get in to see my doc tomorrow.

Forgive the whining please, but I hate this. I know full well that it's not always clearcut to figure out what's going on with digestive issues, and I'm worried that I'm going to have to undergo a bunch of scary, uncomfortable tests. I'm also scared of not getting a clear answer and just having to feel like this for the foreseeable future. Since the pregnancy, I've been able to stay away from doctors and diagnoses and procedures for the most part, and I'd like to keep it that way. Hospitals and doctors and tests don't have the most positive associations for me, even though all that stuff resulted in ultimately having my boys. I think I just need to quit obsessing over it, call my doc, and let her do her job. She's good, she's been my doc for 7 years, and I like her. I'll post if I know anything, but I may not be posting for a while otherwise.

wait

I asked N today whether he'd rather walk over to me to have his shoe put on or have me carry him. He said "not both!", which is, I suppose, the toddler version of "neither". Varying versions of that scenario played themselves out all day. The strategies I have at hand are ever changing, and I guess he's on to me with that one.

The boys have been quite challenging lately. Quite. They've also been so very smart, so articulate, so independent, but I barely have a moment to behold their new skills before I have to rescue some object, pet, or one brother from another. Sometimes I think that the really bad weeks we have here and there are partly just the bridges between one thing working well and then no longer and then figuring out what will work instead. More experience would serve me well here, and I'm left with that sinking feeling like I'm making every mistake twice only never to get the chance to try again.

O's switch to a bed has been, well, interesting. The first few days were quite challenging. No naps, lots of banging around, yelling, and giggling. He didn't even try to come downstairs, but he did try to climb the safety bars on the window like a ladder, move his bed to the other side of the room, and jump off the bookcase onto it. At one point, I was so desperate for him to nap, I threw the mattress back in his crib, zipped him in, and told him to go to sleep. He did, but not before he wrecked the crib tent, meaning there was no going back after that. the crib-tent wrecking is the only reason we're even trying this transition right now -- we're simply out of options. We're making real progress, though. J and I have been listening to him carefully on the monitor and wordlessly putting him right back in bed every time he gets out, as well as talking about our expectations during other times of the day and right before bed. I toddler-proofed the crap out of his room, so it hadn't even occurred to me to make him stay in his bed, but making that expectation clear changed everything. After many, many trips up the stairs, we are making progress. He's going to sleep about an hour after the lights go out, and he's napping again. Praise God, because he's a mess when he doesn't nap. We all are.

On Monday, I was driving with N in the car, and he said from the back, "I want a big boy bed too just like O's!". I told him that we'd get him one, but that he had to sleep a whole night with his crib tent open first. That night, J put him to bed, and N asked him to leave the crib tent open, something he'd refused in a panicky  voice ever since we first brought up the idea. I found him a  toddler bed on Craig's  List that very evening (got two well-made wooden toddler beds for $45 and $35 apiece, both used from different sources!), and we put it in his room the next night. After adjusting a few things to his exact specifications, we tucked him in, said goodnight, and he slept all night. And has every nap time and nighttime since then.   

In general, it's the day-to-day transitions, not the big ones, that are really tough right now. This week J and I have both independently come to the conclusion that some logical consequences are in order. If they're that uncooperative about getting out the door to their favorite place to play, then maybe we won't go. We won't rub their noses in it, we'll even empathize with their frustration and sadness, but we won't go. If we have to go somewhere, and N's refused to have his shoes put on, well the shoes go in my bag, and out we go with no shoes on until we get into the car. With a smile on my face if I can manage it. it does seem to help, but only if I can stay calm, and hey, we do get out the door that way, shoes or no shoes. Sometimes discipline is actually just a means to an end in a particular moment: so much of the challenging stuff they're doing right now is developmental anyway and will pass no matter what exact (reasonable) thing I do. I forget that sometimes in my fear of raising bratty, rude kids.

My little almost thirty-two-month-olds also seem to need more verbal encouragement than they used to, and I, with my sincere aversion to empty praise, find that a bit exhausting. I'm trying to be both specific in my praise as well as spare enough that I'm not saying "good job" every darn time we go through a doorway or take a bite of food. "Thank you boys for being so patient and waiting for me to pay for our things in the store! it made shopping a lot more fun!" The more specific the better - they eat it up. Who knew? Today N told O "keep trying and you can make it work!" when O was struggling with his mitten. And then when O got his mitten on, N pulled on his hood, hard, and sent him barreling into the coat hook and shoes...

We've discovered "racing" this week as well, as in "Ready! Set! Go!". They love this, and N, who is more than a mite faster than O, will get there first every time and say, "N won!" Then O will catch up and they will both say "O won!" They simply don't yet understand what it means to win or to lose, that there's even such a thing as winners and losers. There are many ways in which the grownups in their lives are wiser than they are, but it's a beautiful thing to live in a world where we can all be cheered at the finish line, whenever or however we get there.

I think, that for these times, these bridges between times of more equilibrium, the times that leave me grasping for answers, strategies, patience, and my own equilibrium, I just need to wait. The tools will come, the aggravation will pass, and the ways in which they're changing will bring blessings both long awaited and wholly unexpected. Meanwhile, I will put them to bed right on time, write, sleep as much as my restless mind and body will let me, talk to other moms both online and in person, and eat as much chocolate as possible.