Giving thanks

Tomorrow will be Corinne's first Thanksgiving.  She has experienced other holidays (well, in the way that an infant can experience holidays), but this is her first major holiday.

Holidays have been really...rough...for me the last 3 years.  My mother died in 2009, just a few weeks after her 64th birthday. She was an active, vibrant, seemingly-healthy woman who was running marathons in her 40s and 50s.  She got lung cancer without any known risk factors (didn't smoke, no family history, no chemical exposures) and died about 2.5 years after her diagnosis.  Her death was not what I had expected it to be.  It was worse.  Much worse.  I hope the images burned into my brain from those last days, hours, and minutes disappear someday.

I considered her my only parent.  I have a father who stopped doing anything fatherly when I was about 8 years old.  In fact, he hasn't contacted me in more than 2 years.  I still send him cards for holidays and his birthday, and I, of course, sent him a birth announcement when Corinne was born.  I've gotten no response.  Of course, he's been long gone, so I stopped expecting anything from him years ago.  So my mom was my parent.  Both my parents.  She was all I really needed anyway.  She was more than enough parent for both of them.  But when she died, I was parentless.  Orphaned.  I came to realize she held us all together, and now we've fallen apart.  My sisters and I spent Christmas together the year she died. It was full of hurt feelings and bitterness.  We haven't done it again but supposedly will repeat it this year.  Who knows what that will be like.  I have no major expectations, but I have had the thought, once or twice, that it might be nice to spend time with my family all together again.  Minus Mom.

Anyway, the holidays just weren't the same after Mom died.  I felt mostly empty and didn't really want to do anything at all.  Let them come and go.  Better not to even try to get excited or acknowledge them.  Just another thing in my life that was bitter and painful.

This year is different for me.  I've always dreamt of sharing the joy of the holidays with my own family, my own children and our little family unit.  This year, my excitement is somewhat renewed, knowing that I'm sharing this with Corinne for the first time.  She probably won't even know it's a holiday until she gets older, but it has a lot of meaning for me.  It's about new beginnings.  It's about reasons to be hopeful.  It's about anticipating many joyful moments with my little one in the future. Establishing family traditions.  Watching her light up at her first glimpse of our Christmas tree.  Someday helping her bake holiday goodies with mommy.  Good things are coming in the future.   For a long time I was just unable to see things that way, and now I can.

So today I am thankful for my beautiful child, who brings joy back into the holidays (and everyday life) for me, who is the most beautiful and meaningful part of my life, and who gives me reason to keep getting out of bed every morning and keep living.

Excuses

What a sorry excuse for a blogger I am.  It's been hard to maintain this blog. I feel as though I give all my time and energy to work whenever I'm not with the baby, and I try to give the baby my complete attention when I'm with her.  I always have work to do at home when she's napping or sleeping as well. Working a full-time job at around 55-60 hours per week and being a full-time mommy when I'm not working just doesn't leave much time for doing anything else. I'm sure there are a lot of moms who can relate to this.  I think I'm lucky I manage to keep enough clean laundry to clothe myself.  I'd like our house to be cleaner too, but I'm not even going to go there.  I'd like to work in time for myself as well, especially for exercise, since regularly working out was such a big part of my life pre-baby, but this is still on the to-do list. 

I'm convinced it will become easier when I'm no longer breastfeeding and pumping all the time.  I figured out that I spend approximately 3-3.5 hours every day feeding and pumping.  Sometimes I think about what I could be doing with all that extra time and it makes me feel kind of resentful, but that's quickly overridden by the many reasons I keep doing this. Nobody told me how challenging it was going to be. I don't know what I thought before.  Like "Oh, I'll just pump a few times a day for like 5 minutes?"  I was kind of clueless, to be honest.  Having gone to medical school and even done a lactation rotation for 4 weeks as an elective, you'd think I would have at least laid eyes on a breast pump before I got pregnant, but I hadn't.  The focus was on breastfeeding itself, not pumping, since I was seeing patients in the hospital before they went home with their babies.  So yeah, I just didn't know what it would entail.  For someone who was that clueless, though, I managed to figure things out pretty well.  We are still going strong.  Corinne breastfeeds whenever I'm home and then takes expressed milk in a bottle when I'm not.  I continue to overproduce on a daily basis, and we filled a large standing freezer (that we purchased solely for this purpose) and our regular freezer, with frozen milk.  It's probably about 3 months worth, if I had to estimate.  Meaning it would be enough for 3 months if I totally stopped producing for some reason.  I had to start defrosting and dumping some out every day because we just ran out of space, so I started replacing the oldest milk with the new stuff I'm freezing. It sort of makes me sad to dump it out, but mostly it makes me glad that we have so much extra that I really don't have to worry about not having enough to last at least until her 1st birthday.

I can see now why women who breastfeed are so proud of it.  It is a really big accomplishment because it's challenging in so many ways and requires a lot of dedication, likely more when pumping after a return to work is involved.  I do feel proud to be able to give my daughter what is supposedly best for her body, and I also really enjoy the connection it allows us to have.  I can probably wax poetic on the joys and benefits of breastfeeding all day.  Weird how you never imagine yourself doing certain things in life, but things like this can come to be so fundamental and important to you down the line.

Anyway, things on the work front are chugging along.  What a disappointment my job is, really.  Maybe I've said this before, but being a parent has changed my perspective on a lot of things.  One of them is healthcare.  Maybe it has more to do with the fact that I spent many months being a patient because I was pregnant, and then post-partum, and whatnot.  Having experienced more on the other side, maybe I'm just more aware of what a sad state healthcare is in.  I also work in the outpatient (clinic) setting now, having transitioned from inpatient, and it makes me more acutely aware of the limitations of my particular specialty, both in terms of treatment options and in terms of insurance and providers/access to care. I almost wish it weren't too late to run screaming in the other direction.  I often feel helpless as I'm not able to do things for my patients that I might otherwise if I could have longer clinic visits or prescribe whatever treatment I thought was best without having to worry about their ability to come back for follow up appointments or the cost of medications.  Always limited by resources and money.  This is not how I envisioned helping people. Of course, it's just reality.  But it's a sad reality.

So, that's the news I guess.  By the way, my little experiment of writing about "topics" instead of my personal life is so over.  It's just not my style, and I find it sort of boring.  At least this feels real and not like I'm writing a term paper or something.

On that note, I'm off to bed.  I'm hoping the next baby wake-up is after 5 AM...