all writing is lies...good writing is lies skillfully told.

 It's never occurred to me before this very moment to do this, so I'm doing it before I lose my nerve.

There are some things I did right. Well. Correctly corresponding to my abilities and inclinations. They are not absolutes. I don't think there are many absolutes in parenting. I think there are people who hit their kids in a way that lacks evilness and I know there are quite a number of ways to carry on societally acceptable relationships with your kids that verge well into the dark side. Disclaimer aside, there's some shit I didn't fuck up.

Yet.

I conceived her. Yep. First thing on the list I didn't fuck up. Knew my timing, did my visualizations, got it in one. Lucky, lucky bastard.

We'll skip right ahead to after she was born. Say, I don't know, two months after she was born. I stopped fucking pumping. Pumping breastmilk was really fucking with my head. Pumping around the clock for an ounce or two in one breast? Yeah, not the best way to start your relationship with your kid. "So, I only have to keep you alive at this point, and basically, I can't. Sorry!" But I kept nursing, so I guess it's a twofer: stopped pumping, kept nursing without any pressure. Nursing has turned into one of my greatest following-my-gut accomplishments.

Fast forward again. Right around five months old I started signing. Gods, I love signing. I'm not sure this is a thing that works for everyone; I was always madly intrigued by ASL, by talking in a physical language (never a strong suit for me), by structuring language kinetically. If I hadn't always wanted to learn ASL, I doubt I'd have been so in love with it for the seven months I signed without any replies from her nibs. (It is inconceivable to me, now, that there were days before E could talk with her hands. There isn't a period of ten minutes now where she's not talking or babbling with her hands. Just like verbal language, signing involves an awful lot of seemingly-nonsensical practice. Just now she came running up yelling and making a sign, then pointing at my breast. By which I understood she meant, "I really need to have some chocolate and milk right now, Mom, like right now, like I gotta get some chocolate right the fuck now, Mom!" Breastmilk, should you wonder, is apparently the perfect chaser to a bit of Butterfinger on a Thursday morning.)

Around the time I started signing, she started eating food. Mm, avocado, sweet potato, squash (gross, people, gross) - E loved all food immediately. I kept her off dairy the first few months and gluten until she was one (she still doesn't eat egg; I think it's the only thing she has a current intolerance to), but otherwise I put very few limits on what she can eat. She shared my meals right away. Now I can't imagine doing it the way we did with C: baby food, in jars, sometimes mixed with rice cereal. It seemed so normal. Now it seems out of this world bizarre. But I'm lazy, and I don't really like food, so adding a new bunch of foods to my daily life (to say nothing of my grocery list) wasn't ideal. So E ate my oatmeal, my pasta, my avocado. And then I began to cook things for her, like sweet potato fries, so you could say I ate her sweet potato fries, her squash (...), her almond butter rice cakes. And chicken. I would have never touched a raw, dead, slimy-ass piece of chicken were it not for her (and I would have never done it again, were it not for my cousin K going, "Yeah, I love my George Foreman, you hardly have to touch anything!").

Feeding E whatever she wants, as much, and whenever has been a massive learning process. It's ongoing. And it's a mixture of the baby-led solids philosophy and the unschooling food idea that if you give your kid access to everything they will be better prepared to make choices about what works best for them. But mostly it's just that I want her to love food. I want her to delight in tastes and textures and scents. I don't like anything about food, it stresses me out, it's a constant struggle to eat enough. So naturally I'm trying to engineer a child who will not struggle with this issue of mine. If she wants some of my chocolate shortbread (or, indeed, my mini Butterfinger), I give it to her. If she pulls a bar of chocolate and a bag of watermelon out of the fridge, she gets some of each. It's a huge experiment. I have no idea if twenty years from now she'll be bitching to her therapist about how I never told her how to eat well, but the truth is, I don't really know. Eating's not my strength, so hopefully with enough good food around her (a category in which I include chocolate, naturally), she'll work out what it means to her. 

Except coffee. "Babies can't have coffee," I tell her. She knows the sign for coffee, of course. And she hugs coffee cups with the same passion with which she hugs stuffed animals. They are, of course, something every adult in her family holds very, very dear.

I'm not great with moderating my behavior. I am either everywhere, watching, following my people around to their worlds, or I am in my own isolated world trying desperately not to interact with the checkers at the grocery store. I am either so sucked into a novel that I won't leave the room without it, or I'm trolling the internet like an addict, looking for my next fix. I knew coming into this parenting thing that my instinct would be to hover, ever-available, obsessed with making her every moment developmentally perfect...or...

Neglect. Seriously. I'll play with her, you know, if she gets bored entertaining herself, but I mostly wait until she initiates a game. Except ball. I'l play ball any time or place, and not always with actual balls. The thing is, true confession, I'm not a huge fan of playing. Never have been. Reading a book, writing a story, having a cup of iced coffee - yeah, those are nice. And all except the last have been pastimes of mine since I leaned to read and write. But playing? Not really my thing. (Playing, to my mind, was always about stories: characters, plots, conflicts, even when I was very little I was addicted to playing out conflicts with my My Little Ponies and stuffed animals.) So right now E's across the deck, standing in between an empty propane tank and the barbecue, trying to drag a gigantic plastic tub somewhere. Before that she was playing a game of dubious safety with the puppy, whereby she steals a ball out of his mouth and gives it to me to throw for him. The puppy is learning that if he gives her a minute, the game gets good again. This after two or three tackles yesterday that left her in tears and him in ears-down confusion.

I'm still working on taking deep breaths, but I try not to intervene where I'm not necessary. I try to let her navigate the stairs on her own, even though I hover nearby, body on red alert, allowing myself to flood with adrenaline or endorphins or whatever the hell it is that lets people lift cars in the heat of the moment, just waiting to dive for her should she lose her footing. It hasn't happened yet. I let her play on her climb-up plastic thing, even though it's like two feet off the ground and falling would be bad. That hasn't happened yet, either. Mostly she starts to fall, halfway catches herself, manages to get down only impacting her but, or swinging around so she doesn't really fall but it scares her. And then she hugs me and goes back to playing.

It's a hell of a process, 

E doesn't have a bedtime and we cosleep. I'm pretty stoked about both of these things. They feel related, but I suppose they aren't, really. She has no bedtime, again, because I'm lousy at sleeping and trying to let her follow whatever patterns she naturally has in the hopes it will lead to better sleep. Some things, it would appear, are genetic: E goes days with a ten minute nap here, a twenty minute nap there, sleeping when I sleep and waking when I wake. She doesn't get the fabled hours and hours of baby sleep, but she remains in good spirits, so I suppose it's just the way she is. Letting her stay up till whenever accomplishes two things: we don't ever have terrible bedtimes, and she sleeps until 830ish, give or take half an hour, nearly every morning. There are mornings when I get almost a cup of coffee in before she wakes up. This is a miracle, for a mama whose kid doesn't nap.

Cosleeping is necessary. I wouldn't sleep at all without it. There are long stretches during which E only sleeps with a breast in her mouth (replay: "She's using you as a pacifier..."), and it seems like perfectly normal behavior, so I'm not stopping her, but man, if I had to wake up for that - well, I'm still an insomniac, I'm awake enough on my own. It's nice to sleep when she sleeps. And cuddling is pretty cool, too.

I think that's eight things I don't regret. Eight parenting decisions I'd make the same again. All right. Good. Maybe there will be others, but I'm really impressed that I came up with eight.

 #15 Harvest

 So when we run out of salami sometime tomorrow we'll be starting a TED, or total elimination diet. I find thinking of it as TED makes it less intimidating.

The diet, as structured by Dr Sears, consists of rice, turkey, squash, potatoes, grapes, one oil, salt and pepper. We're fucking with it a little. That much turkey isn't good for me, so we're going with fucking free range chicken. I'm not giving up my milk supply supporting oatmeal, and E loves it, so we're keeping that, too. Along with the applesauce that favors and counteracts constipation. That should be "flavors", but I can't edit backwards. Also, we're keeping cinnamon and coconut oil. Basically, we're keeping E's breakfast. I'm giving up my super awesome brown sugar. I'm sad.

Our shopping trip today was this: chicken, red and green grapes, orange and white sweet potatoes, and one acorn squash I have no clue what to do with. Picture posted.

I'll miss my sandwiches. And I don't know what I'll do when I want something sweet or crunchy. I'll need to pre-cook some small bits for E to eat as finger foods (to replace all the Cheerios and peas she eats during the day). Yeesh. 

The idea here is that after four weeks of just these foods our systems will be clear of all reactions and we can start carefully reintroducing foods to see what causes the eczema  and screaming and gas. I was really great for a long time about keeping us clear of the top eight, but I've gotten pretty lax about it lately. We've been eating a lot of cheese and mustard and cookies, and things that have soy and egg issues.

One one level this is a desperate measure. I'm really worried about squash. I don't know shit about squash. On another level, there's a simplicity to this that pleases me. If I can figure out what to do with squash.

Okay, I can't see what I'm writing anymore, so we'll see. I'll keep you posted.

 #12 New Reading Spot

 #11 Dinosaur, 11:23pm

 #8 Birthday Gifts

#6 A series of posed gifts

One: "Huh. What's all that, Mama?"


Two: "Mama, is that a new book?"


Three: "Wait, Mama - is that *two* new books?"


Four: "Nevermind the coffee. I've got two new books!"

 #4 Reading material

 #2 Reclaiming her big cousin's old trike.

 So I have this book of Virginia Woolf's essays and letters and writings. I bought it on impulse, one of the very few impulse purchases I've ever read. Seventeen dollars. I'd been driving home from seeing my cousins and The Indigo Girls song about Virginia Woolf came on.

What? You haven't heard it? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjgnZco5riI

That capital "t" in "the" up there is going to bother me, but no matter.

I stopped off at the Barnes and Noble in Pleasant Hill and tracked down Virginia Woolf. And bought the book that appealed to me most. Seventeen dollars, an unplanned expense. And you know what else? I never read it.

Here's the thing. I probably shouldn't read the essays of a writer who killed herself to prevent the madness from stealing back in and becoming her. It's too close. I have too many moments of feeling that tide rush in, slapping my ankles, freezing my toes. Seventeen dollars and it hangs out on my shelf. I want to devour it whole, absorb all her words through my skin. But I don't.

Writing, specifically the drive to write, is one of the strongest forces I've ever felt. It beats the wind on Half Dome. It is equal to the undeniable urge to push during labor. Wite or perish. I'm neither kidding nor over-dramatizing. Writing is how I keep the madness from rising to swirl around my waist, pull on my clothes, chill my blood. But the writing has always seemed dependent on the madness. Is it really? I don't know. But I might work on this a bit in August, too.