givemetheusual

I've been taking careful notes throughout pregnancy, birth, and parenthood for several reasons. It helps me stay grounded in what actually happened as I process my memories and heal, it helps me make decisions about how to do things differently in the future, and I hope it can help me stay empathetic to friends going through similar things. I hope this is helpful to anyone considering having children or interesting/validating if you've already had children. What was more difficult than I expected about parenthood? For me, everything that was difficult during pregnancy pales in comparison to the challenges of parenthood and recovering from giving birth. Postpartum anxiety and depression made it hard to make decisions I felt my stress levels spike anytime Henry started crying. It always felt like a horrible thing that must be stopped and it was hard to think straight. It was hard to let go of hovering while other people took care of Henry. I felt so afraid they wouldn't feed ...

Nanny vs. nanny share vs. daycare vs. try to work from home with a crying baby? Unofficial stats based on 4 months of searching for daycares and nannies via Berkeley Parent Network, Care.com, Bananas, and an agency. Daycare I've looked at some contracts for in-home daycares in the area and had informational interviews with some. My neighbor, who runs an in-home daycare for older kids, said the California state licensing agency has advised daycares to update their contracts to include phrases about sending kids home if they seem lethargic or have a runny nose or cough. This is an update, from what I understand, to the previous policy of sending them home only in case of fever, diarrhea, or vomiting.  There is also an expected 2 week quarantine period if you travel out of state and three days quarantine after the disappearance of cold or flu symptoms in your child. If you're working full-time at an average M-F, 9-5 job and travel an average amount, you'd be able to send your ...

Recently a few challenges have pressed me to ponder what I value. We had a baby while living in a pandemic, far away from family, and my husband has a busy CEO job. I found out some painful news about my job on the day my maternity leave ended: my coworkers were having a much harder time than I realized working with me since I'm married to the CEO. It was excruciating to learn that my job wasn't working for me or my coworkers, and I decided to move on. I liked my job, and liked working with my husband. We've both been sad about this new development. I've now spent 2 months simultaneously looking for a job and looking for childcare since we kept having childcare options fall through (partially because we're newbies at looking for it, partially because that's just how it is). I started having almost daily meltdowns of crying after any job interview or childcare interview, felt incredibly dizzy and nauseous in the evenings, and couldn't fall asleep for naps or ...

For some reason, deciding to have a baby, being pregnant, and now facing birth happening anytime between now and the end of August keeps making me think of the fragility of life and how close we are to death at any moment. At first this seemed paradoxical to me; why would birth make me think of death? However, they are connected in many ways. Imagining myself going through the phases of parenthood makes it easier to imagine myself aging. I obviously would have aged even without having a child, yet I'm familiar with the rites of passage of childhood and how old parents typically are when their child graduates from high school, for example. The predictability of children's lives up until they are 18 or maybe even through college makes it easier to imagine the passage of time. It is strange to imagine myself being at their high school graduation with grey hair! Also, the process of giving birth involves so much of the fluids of life - blood, tears, sweat - which also empha...

Broken relationships  So this might be an unusual Valentine's Day post. A couple years ago, I finished going through a year of intense group and individual therapy class and learned that I had been loving people who I shouldn't love. That's right: there are people you *shouldn't* love. This concept flew in the face of everything I stood for. Didn't every spiritual leader and book of scripture tell us to love everyone and forgive everyone, even our enemies? Well, yes, and guess who's included in "love everyone." ME and YOU. I have to love myself as much as I love others. You have to love yourself as much as you love others, and invite people and things into your life that improve your quality of life (in the areas you value). If they are doing that too, then you'll end up in relationships that help both people live their values. So what do you value? That's the core question to answer. Because if someone repeatedly makes i...

Recently, a few memories have reminded me of how awkward pre-teens can be. Perhaps it's the surge of hormones that drives girls to try to kiss cute boys despite the obstacles of braces and headgear, or it's the Red 40 dye in Swedish Fish that leads young, sweaty boys with the promising starts of BO, facial hair and acne to feel as confident as Joseph Gordon-Levitt. We may never know, but here are a few memories to jog your own. Either these will make you feel better about your level of awkwardness, or you'll find that I'm another friend with whom you can commiserate. The Halloween Costume In Fifth Grade, crushes at school started to take on just the faint aroma of real attraction. It wasn't like I even knew the words to describe this, but I was aware that some girls just had what it took to get the boys really obsessed with them. We were all starting to wear training bras and put on lipgloss and there was an extra layer of heady anticipation before Halloween t...

My story About four years ago, during a summer of intense stress, I found myself staring at a bowl full of yellow turmeric powder at 3 am. I was about to pour water into the powder, mix it into a paste, and spread it all over my hands and legs. It all started out with getting eczema on the backs of my hands and the backs of my legs. The eczema began as annoying and quickly became unbearably itchy, to the point of keeping me up into the wee hours of the morning. The patches of itchy skin became inflamed and infected, eventually, like little maniacal monsters intent on driving me to the edge of insanity. Which is where I found myself at 3 am this one night. This bright yellow turmeric paste was a last resort as an eczema treatment because although it works really, really well, it also permanently stains anything it touches. Skin, clothing, bed sheets, carpet. You name it, it's yellow. If you have ever stained your clothes with yellow Indian curry, it's because the food conta...

In the future, a few survivors of nuclear war gather in an underground hideout and desperately wrack their brains, "Is there any way we could have prevented this nuclear war?" They decide that with their engineering and programming skills combined, they might be able to transmit messages to past generations and warn them in an attempt to avoid nuclear war. After years of putting on protective suits, crawling out of the bunker, and spending tedious hours sifting through rubble, the small group of survivors gathers enough supplies to create an artificial intelligence that can transmit messages to the past. They name this robot God because of legends they heard as children about a man named God who used to send messages of peace to humankind.  They set up streams of automated messages and also write hundreds of personalized messages constantly in the hopes that someone, anyone in the past will listen and take their advice. After sending billions of messages per day for a m...

When I got the fever flu in April, my dad brought me his iPad, already logged into Netflix, and pulled up Parks & Rec . There's nothing like seven seasons of a tv show to keep you company while you're down and out. I think I watched two full seasons in a week, and don't regret a minute of it. Needless to say, I had a lot of time to think about the show and came to the conclusion that it is particularly good at is celebrating the differences between people. Leslie and Ron are perfect foils for each other--Leslie is hyperactive, talkative, and bulldozes anyone or anything in her way on the quest to make the government great, while Ron is stoic, silent, and zealously committed to being a stick-in-the-mud to slow the government down. They butt heads but also tease each other, and in rare tender moments, actually help each other reach their goals (Ron always gives Leslie the best advice in her moments of crisis, and Leslie always gets Ron the best presents, including autom...

Welcome to my worst date awards! All of these happened a while ago, and my sister recently reminded me of them. Perhaps I blocked them from my memory. Note: If you happen to be featured in one of these worst dates, never fear! I actually still genuinely love all the people these stories are about, and in a strange way, these are some of the best dates I've had because they were so interesting and funny and awkward! And a lot of the awkwardness could have been avoided if I had been smarter. Let's all celebrate our weirdness! Yay! Cabela's During January one year, I had a terrible fever but for some reason was too scared to cancel a date. I thought it would seem "mean" or something (classic people-pleasing behavior). So this guy I barely knew picked me up, and told me he had a surprise date planned! Then he took me to Cabela's. I now know hunting sometimes actually helps promote the health of an ecosystem, but at the time, I was an extreme environmentalist ...

Guys, I'm finally reading LOTR, and it's the real deal. I read the Hobbit about 5 times, because I don't know why. This time I skipped to what we think of as the trilogy (although it's actually one big book divided into six parts). And I'm embarrassed to admit, but now that I'm reading the book, Gandalf has fallen from the greatest-of-the-greys to, well, kind-of-a-bum in my eyes. Because he gave Frodo bad advice! Bad advice. There, I said it, even about Gandalf, the most beloved character for many a fan. But I'll explain why, so just hear me out. In the beginning of the book, Gandalf bears grave tidings to Frodo. Frodo not only must carry the ring to its destruction, but must fearfully avoid the power of the ring over his own mind, and “keep it secret, keep it safe,” according to Gandalf. Once this responsibility fully sinks in, Frodo spends an entire spring and summer dreading his journey, swallowing lumps in his throat, and keeping it all secret. Now...

Anybody got the flu yet this year? One of you sneaky people must have skipped getting the flu, because I got it twice. Twice. But actually,  this year I don't really mind fevers. I don't know why, but I've not only gotten the flu twice but also had fevers after emotional crises; often it begins with some dream about being cleansed. Once, I dreamt that an intense elderly Japanese woman grabbed me by the throat, told me I was blind, and thrust my head into a pottery kiln. Then I woke up. With a fever. A good friend recently told me that often, when people go on a diet or a juice fast, they experience a "healing crisis"; their skin breaks out, they get a terrible headache, and generally feel like a piece of crap. Sometimes people feel like a healing crisis is some sort of punishment for trying to be healthy, and often they give up on the diet or fast because it seems like it's not working. But here's the paradox, which is actually not a paradox if you t...

She held my wrist kindly with her gnarled, strong and soft fingers, and demanded, "Keep your pinkies straight! Straight! Straight! Straight!" to the beat of my pinky fingers striking the piano keys over and over. This bent-over woman in her nineties was asking so much focus and effort that the music in front of me swam through my tears of exasperation. Pinkies are just not meant to operate independently from their sisters, the ring fingers , I grumbled to myself. The pinky finger cannot simply strike a piano key, let alone rapidly switch with the ring finger repeatedly to make the piano's strings trill, like a little soldier banging his head against a flat piece of ivory. Over and over again. Banging their little heads. Speaking of which, I felt like banging my head against the piano's music stand. The bent-over woman in her nineties was Edith Reed, and she was not only a surprisingly intense piano teacher, but also woke up at 5 am every morning to walk five mil...

On a sunny January morning last year, my sister picked me up on my birthday and drove me to go skiing. My sister and I are great friends, and we've been skiing for years together, usually with my dad, but today it was just us. We chatted the whole way up the canyon about her most recent art projects, her upcoming wedding in the spring, and other lovely things.  About halfway up the canyon, as I looked out the window at the full sun shining on the frosted hills, I remembered that a sudden warm spell in winter sometimes triggers avalanches. And an image of an avalanche came into my mind: the highest mountain shuddered with a low rumble and then released glistening swathes of snow that crash over the surrounding smaller mountains, flattening cabins, trees, skiiers, until it covered the cars at the bottom parking lots.  Completely overcome by this image, I felt my stomach sink in fear. And some arguing went on in my head between my irrational self (lets cal...

I have crazy dreams. Here's one of the most recent: I was a British sailor named Reginald, and our ship had been on a voyage to Antarctica, looking for treasure. We were to keep our eyes out for a bouy, which was connected by a chain to a gold treasure at the bottom of the icy ocean. However, there was a horrible accident and all of us were floating in the black water and quickly freezing to death. I was holding onto a broken piece of wood with my friend Bertram--and we had a bond that only comes through being at sea together on the same voyages for twenty years.   As he and I pumped our legs, he started to lose hope and said he could go on no longer. More out of love for him than out of reason, I tried to boost his morale. I asked him if he could see the full moon and how it shimmered on the broken ice floes, and how beautiful it looked. We saw that chunks of ice would freeze together, then break apart, and then freeze together again so quickly. And even when the clouds co...

Give me the usual. I've always wanted to say that at a restaurant, but haven't yet. I think I tried at Subway once, but they rotate sandwich artists too often. They wouldn't know a regular even if she hit them between the eyes! Not literally! haha