1) I had 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night. My dearest A. took the first nighttime shift with my new dearest baby C. who is taking a bottle like a champ. 2) Rather than trying for 2 hours to put C. to sleep between the hours of 5 and 7 a.m., I just held… Read More Small victories for a new mother of 2
Over the past few years, I’ve developed an increasingly intimate relationship with my brain. Thanks to my friend D, who introduces me to at least half of the things I love the most in the world, I started going to meditation and dharma talks led by this guy. The practice of just sitting with my… Read More Why I take my brain out for dinner. And what we talk about. And what we eat.
Remember the video I posted of my conversation with T when she was 38 weeks (roughly 9 months) pregnant? Well, here she is a month after we had that first talk–3 weeks after giving birth to her baby boy. I love her willingness to share and how she captures that kind of floaty, coming-back-down-to-earth feeling… Read More What becoming a mother looks like for T at 3 weeks post-partum
I started taking Zoloft when I was a 5-month-old mother. I had been depressed before, in adolescence and in college, but this was the first time I’d chosen medication. It worked. And now I’m slowly tapering off of my dose because I want to know what life is like without it. Will my long lost… Read More My sadness project
Other than a couple brief moments of rocking a swaddled newborn to sleep, I just started having some moments of, “now THIS is what I thought being a mom was going to be like.” And J will be 2 and a half next month. Do tell, what were the images you had in your head… Read More What I thought motherhood would look like
I met a friend for beer the other night. It felt pretty momentous. She was the friend I vaguely referenced in an earlier blog post with whom I’d had a schism. Our schism was about our children, and our different styles of raising them. And after a couple of emotional conversations, several weeks of emails… Read More On judging other parents
I’m all awash in thoughts of birth and pregnancy because I just finished assisting a birth class for the doula/childbirth educator/lactation consultant extraordinaire, Janaki Costello, and every couple of days we hear from a new couple who has just had their babe. I’ve been talking with one of the moms from the class who is,… Read More On pregnancy and birth
Before I became a mother, I was grotesquely good at taking care of other people. I credit my naturally empathetic, sensitive nature, my incredible-caretaker mother and my co-dependent upbringing. In the months before I got pregnant, it dawned on me that my constant tracking of other people’s emotional and physical needs could be an asset… Read More On taking care of myself
We just got back from Sudan. Not exactly a trip I ever expected to make, but my sister went and fell in love with a man from Sudan, and they wanted to have a wedding there. Before we left, we agonized about whether we should take J or not. In the end, we decided to… Read More On our trip to Sudan!
If sleep was our million dollar question when we had an infant, discipline is the biggie now that we have a toddler. Since my initial love affair with time-outs in this post, I’ve decided that I want more options in my toolbox, and I’ve been trying other things I’ve been learning from reading the discipline… Read More On discipline
Stephanie Mackley 