Montana Momoirs

A very good friend of mine who had a baby just over a month ago was bemoaning the fact that she was still wearing her maternity clothes. “It has been a month!” she exclaimed. “I have such a long way to go!”

I pointed out to her that she had just grown another human being inside of her and that, perhaps, she should worry less that she’s still wearing her maternity clothes and be thankful that she had a healthy pregnancy and a beautiful healthy baby.

“You’re only saying that because you can see your toes,” she sneered at me.

Perhaps she’s right. I remember during both pregnancies fretting and worrying about the weight that I had gained and secretly hoping that I would have a 37 pound baby so I had less weight to lose when all was said and done.

Both of my boys were big when they were born, but they certainly weren’t in the 37 pound range. During my first pregnancy, a friend of mine, who also happens to be a model, told me that I could eat whatever I wanted and gain one hundred pounds. As long as I breastfed my babies, the weight would just fall off! In a matter of weeks!

That sounded pretty good to me. So, in spite of what my doctor told me and in spite of everything I read about keeping my pregnancy weight gain to around 35 pounds, I chose to listen to my model friend. I also chose to ignore the fact that she was born with infinitely more perfect physical genes than I have (hence the modeling career which, just in case you were wondering, no one has ever approached me about).

The result? I gained a lot of weight – 68 pounds to be exact. And in spite of the fact that I had actually given birth to a nine-pound baby and breastfed like a crazy woman for six weeks, when I returned to my doctor’s office for my postpartum check-up, I had 56 pounds to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight.

Fifty-six!!! Surely though, because I was nursing, those 56 pounds would disappear from my body while I was sleeping, right? “Ha!” I say. “Double HA HA!”

Here’s some news for those mothers who claim their pregnancy weight just magically disappeared: I think you are liars. Because my 56 pounds stayed stubbornly on my body. Part of the problem was my near constant state of delirium due to waking up 378 times each night to breastfeed. I was being denied sleep; I could not fathom denying myself sustenance.

When the time came for me to go back to work, I had no choice but to wear my maternity clothes because I couldn’t fit into my regular clothes. I remember contemplating just gaining another 44 pounds and signing up for gastric bypass surgery. But then I decided to buckle down and lose the pregnancy weight the way nature intended.

By going on a fad diet.

I started the South Beach diet. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this form of torture, I'll give it to you in brief. No sugar. None. Like not one crystal of it. Not from fruit. Not from milk products. Not from carbs -- oh, glorious carbs. Here's what you eat on South Beach: lean protein, lettuce, eggs, low-fat cheese, and low-glycemic vegetables.

By the third day of it, I was ready to shove a pixy stick right into one of my arteries. I had never experienced withdrawal before but the South Beach Diet brought it on: night sweats, crazy dreams, irritability. Actually, irritability is a rather mild understatement. For example, on day four, the cat made the mistake of walking in front of me; I was so incensed that I wanted to swing him around the room by his tail and then draw and quarter him.

It took me nine months, but I eventually shed every ounce of my pregnancy weight. When I became pregnant a second time, I swore up and down that I would not gain more than 25 pounds.

Of course it didn’t work out that way.

I ended up gaining another 68 pounds. But, I told myself, after having baby #2, I would be back at the gym in less than a week and losing weight so quickly that I would be able to see a visible difference from hour to hour.

Pregnancy hormones – they obviously cloud your thinking.

The reality of it? I spent the first six months of Peter’s life sleeping an intermittent four hours a day and trying to figure out how to fit in working out and dieting in between keeping my newborn fed and happy and my toddler from crawling the walls – not to mention laundry, cooking, some cleaning, and – oh yes – work.

So I wore my maternity clothes for an embarrassingly long time. In fact, it took me an entire year to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight that second time around. No, I definitely do not have those model genes, which must burn calories at light speed, which my modeling friend has. But eventually, I was able to toss my maternity panel pants and fit into jeans I do possess – the kind that button and zip.

Montana Momoirs

Over the last ten days, my two year-old, Peter, has regressed. For most two year-olds, regression may mean that they want to once again use a pacifier or that they start peeing on the floor after appearing to be potty-trained.

But for my son, regression means something else completely. Peter has been diagnosed with something called “verbal apraxia.” If you were to look up apraxia in a textbook, it would say that it is a neurological disorder that results in the inability to carry out skilled movements despite having the desire to perform them.

Here’s what it means for us: Peter cannot talk. He understands language, but is physically unable to form sounds, syllables, and words. We have had to teach him how to chew food. He still has issues swallowing food and aversions to food textures. He cannot move his tongue in ways that “normal” kids do. For instance, he cannot lick a lollipop or an ice cream cone.

Accompanying his apraxia is his “sensory integration dysfunction disorder,” which is a fancy name for balance issues and a bizarre need to have extreme input into his five senses. My son rarely walks; instead he hops because of the extra pressure hopping puts on his joints. He doesn’t just like salsa; he likes the kind of salsa that burns your lips and makes you sweat. While every kid in the world loves to swing, for Peter, a playground swing is a torture device because the motion of it seems to set off his balance issues.

What seems to have spurred his recent regression was a trip to the dentist, where he had fluoride painted on his teeth. We left the fluoride on for several hours per our dentist’s instructions. Soon after we brushed the fluoride off, Peter started gagging and choking on food again. We had to remind him repeatedly to chew his food up. He insisted for days that he had a hair in his mouth, though there was nothing there. His speech also regressed and he began to slur the few recognizable words he had acquired.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got worse. We had a therapy visit that triggered his balance issues. As we walked to our car, he held onto my hand. The next thing I knew he was laying on his head in a heap. Throughout the day, he just seemed to tip over and collapse as he walked along. He ended up sobbing himself to sleep in my arms that night.

Of course I love Peter just the way he is. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t change this if I could. Having a “normal” child is hard enough. Having a child with special needs of any kind that require constant treatment and monitoring is crushing. It drains you in ways that until you have done it, you have no capacity to understand.

I didn’t ask for this. Nobody asks or plans for a child with special needs. When I was expecting Peter, I envisioned him walking across the stage at Harvard to accept his degree as valedictorian of his class. A few short years later, I imagined helping him write his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. Not that he would have needed my help, of course.

What I didn’t imagine was somebody quietly suggesting that special ed preschool would be the best place for Peter. What I didn’t envision was spending my days shuttling him to therapy appointments, learning sign language, and dutifully checking off Peter’s chart of daily prescribed exercises. What I never even considered was being delighted at my two year-old son’s newfound ability to chew food the right way or to swallow a minute-sized bite of chicken.

I also never expected to experience the profound sense of disappointment, loss even, over Peter’s development, or lack thereof. When I look back at my older son’s life, so many of my memories of his development revolve around his acquisition of language – how he pronounced things or made up words or sang silly songs. I am a language person after all, someone who delights in words and uses them to make a living. How ironic that I have a child who is unable to communicate.

I know I am not supposed to wonder what Peter would be like without this disability, what he would talk and wonder about. I am just supposed to accept him the way he is. And I do accept him as he is, but I can’t help wondering. I know I am supposed to talk about Peter’s special needs as a blessing, something from which I can learn. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t look at it as a curse either. It is simply something with which we live, every day, every minute.

I feel helpless and hopeless today but Peter’s long-term prognosis is good. With the right and consistent treatment, he will more than likely be ready to enter a regular kindergarten class by the time he is five. This week, as we take what feels like a hundred steps back and double-up on our work with him at home, it is hard to believe that it is predicted that someday he will talk, that he will be able to tell us what he is learning at school and drive us crazy with the amount of questions he can ask.

And when that day comes, I swear that I won’t take a single word for granted.

Montana Momoirs Column

The words I utter over the course of the day more than any others are: no, stop, get down, get off of that, get out of there, stop, no, that’s not safe, stop, I said stop, I told you no, and no.

In fact, some days, it seems that all I do is find new ways to say “no” over and over again. “No” – it is my rallying cry, my call to battle.

I am the mother of two very busy boys – boys who consistently amaze me with their ability to find unique ways to hurt themselves in their exceedingly child-proofed environment. They’re not drinking drain cleaner, but Peter does hurtle himself from one piece of furniture to another. And I can’t begin to tell you how loudly I said “no” when I found Mike shooting down our very steep hill, crammed into the bed of a Tonka dump truck.

Most of the time, I tell my children “no” to protect them from themselves and their complete lack of sense. But I also often say “no” completely out of habit.

For instance, when we visited the library the other day, Peter wanted to check out every Curious George book on the shelf. Every single one? Was he kidding? How much reading about an unsupervised monkey can a person take? No way. Mike often wants to make his own lunch. But he just turned five! Make his own lunch? He’d probably stab himself in the eye with a butter knife! Forget it.

When a friend of mine, who just happens to be a child development expert, was visiting, I mentioned how there are days that all I do is say “no.” She listened intently and then made what might just be the most preposterous suggestion I have ever heard: “Why don’t you try saying ‘yes’ more often?”

I wanted to take her by the shoulders and say, “Are you completely INSANE, woman? Say YES???! Why don’t I just hand them some matches and kerosene and leave them alone for the day?”

But she continued, “If their health or safety are not in jeopardy, what’s the harm in saying yes?”

I could think of the harm in saying “yes,” like complete mutiny. But I thought my friend, who has actually gone to school for this kind of thing, might know more than me, since I am generally learning about children in a trial-by-fire manner. So I decided to give saying “yes” a one-week trial.

The results: Peter wore the same sweatshirt that was too small for him nearly every single day – in public. Mike ate a lot of mangled-looking PB&Js with enough jelly on each one to give him his fill of sugar for the week. We managed to avoid the Curious George collection at the library, but not the truck book collection. And we ate lunch an hour late one day because they were having too much fun sledding to stop.

All in all, not exactly mutiny. I still spent a lot of my day saying “no” since it has been proven that 99.99% of two and five year-olds are not exactly superstars in the logic department. When Peter hopped on the cat, holding the cat’s ears as if they were reigns and shouted “Yee-haw,” I had to step in and say “No!” When Mike began ruminating about tying his new bike to his sled to test if he could go fast enough down our hill to blast into space, he heard a resounding “No!”

But, and I really hate to admit this, saying “yes” worked. Nobody lost an eye and my kids did not take over my house and lock me in the basement. And, best of all, life was a little easier. There was significantly less whining and complaining, which resulted in significantly less stress for me. Could it be? Could saying “yes” instead of “no” make parenting easier?

Parenting is a funny job. Your objective is to shepherd your kids through their childhood so that as adults they can manage life without you. A big part of fulfilling that objective is learning when they ought to say “no.” Whether it’s no to drugs, drunk driving, a bad date, an unfulfilling career, a loveless marriage – learning to say “no” at the right time is an important part of making good decisions.

Failure is part of learning. Trying is part of learning. And if kids aren’t given the chance to try and fail, how do they learn?

As for me, I’m still learning too. Trying, failing, and learning – that saying “yes” is sometimes much more effective than saying “no.”