and green rocker

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

we were asked to speak on a gracenet panel next week on motherhood and work – and i quote:
“Does motherhood need to feel like martyrdom if a woman also wants a career in high tech?”

and i hardly feel i have the time or could concentrate or say anything of value besides “my brain is jello at home and at work” or do anything but just sit there in general dread on the verge of lucy melting down at seven and then experiencing said melting down and then leaving the room without a goodbye (the event starts at 6:30 – actually, tonight she didn’t even make it that long…).

anyway — the woman running it asked for a bio.
i thought as thoughtfully as i could, or so i thought, and i came up with this:
Moya’s been working for 14 years in a number of different ways in the software industry in the Bay Area, most recently creating technical documentation for SAP. In high school, Moya was labeled a “Renaissance Woman” by her English teacher. She guesses that if you’re going to be labeled, you might as well be labeled broadly, but lately she wonders what she wants to do when she grows up. This question burns even more ironically on her mind now that her daughter, Lucy, is here. Together with her wife Leanne, Moya’s weathering postpartum depression and learning the value of her new family.

i guess it wasn’t good enough (she is in PR after all…) and she instead printed this:
Moya Watson and Leanne Wahldal [ sic! ] decided to have a daughter, Lucy, even though besides being designated bottle washer Leanne also is chief scientist and CEO at Otivo, and Moya commutes every day to SAP, where she is a product manager. Lucy likes to keep late hours, so we’ll hear how the mothers manage.

so i think i scared leanne the other day when i told her i was so tired i was hallucinating (bugs crawling across the table, etc) and then launched into how airplanes were landing over my head on 280. this actually wound up making perfect sense; there was a news report; they were flying low. anyway………….. i must be channeling lucy in all things, because lucy tends to want to ‘latch on’ to the knots in the knotty pine kitchen table.

rollies!

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

i get up every night in the middle of the night; i can’t go back to sleep sometimes, like last night, because of all the stress and implication. i have to work extra hard and pay new childcare, insurance – we can’t afford to save for college and i can’t afford to buy comforts for myself —
yet what i get is that ‘there’s something in the mother’s milk’, ‘lucy looks like you because she’s so serious’ (looking serious was never a compliment as i was growing up), ‘you should go on antidepressants not just for yourself, but because your mood is affecting her’ — in other words, i’m damaging lucy??? sheesh – some people don’t know when to Be Quiet.
Do Over! i wish *i* could adopt lucy just like leanne, so i could get all my friends around me and a court to say and prove it that i am a good mother.

she's a strong one...

leanne is about an hour from landing back in SF; over two hours from returning home after nearly two days away – to see the gates in NYC.  i told her on the phone today that last night was one of the ‘worst nights of my life’.  she, too, had a hard time being away.  problem is, lucy took this week as the week to flip over in her swaddle, so we immediately put her in a sleep-sack, arms free, and she immediately forgot how to sleep, freaking out with her arms waving all over the place presumably whenever she wakes up.
i had already had only 3-4 hrs sleep the previous night, big rains, lucy&i dropping lw @ sfo in wee hours, and then lucy didn’t really nap in the new sleep sacks.  then she went to sleep fairly easily, out by 8p, but woke at 9p. pacifier; sleep again; awake by 9:30, had to pick up and rock and hold to return to sleep by 10p or so.  less than two hours later, the whole thing again – this time i had to nurse her; done and asleep (me) by 1a or so.  then @ 4:30a.m. – nursed over an hour; lucy then wide awake, alert, talking. me crying, tired, thinking things are miserable. the stress is so great that when i finally climb back into bed exhausted at 6a, cold and too awake from stress, and the chills in bed again similar to postpartum, and alone with lucy, and lucy acting up getting used to her new arrangements, i could not fall back to sleep.  eventually the sun rose and at 7:30 she was chatting and awake.  the day began, without glee, for me.
when she’s asleep – such as now – i feel like this is OK.  i feel calmer with myself and my impressions of myself as a mother (i say, pouring myself a glass of whiskey for maybe the third time in over a year) are of a capable person, able to handle difficulty with compassion and remain calm.  and then it happens, i’m exhausted, i’ve gotten less sleep in the past three nights combined than i used to insist on needing in a single night, i’m awake with lucy, totally stressed, crying.