Music Therapy

There are soundtracks to many stages of my life. That is, I associate music with various chapters or events in my life, as I'm sure many people do, and I've been listening to new music lately. As you know, I'm also in a new phase of my life.

I think High Highs "Open Season" is keeping me sane. It's my daily guarantee of forty minutes of inner solitude, and a fortunate reminder that love is all you need.

Despite what I said, this is hard (I fear I didn't make that clear last time we spoke). Even on the days when Liam is at "school' I feel like a waiter in the weeds; and having Liam in the mix makes it that much harder to rise to the challenge (he's a twelve-top upstairs when your downstairs section is full). Surely we're feeding off one another's energy, and the morning sets the day. The mornings have been rough, and so have the days. I'm exhausted. Still not hysterically so, like I'm not slap-happy or simultaneously laughing and crying, but that's because there isn't a lot of happy or laughing connected with this kind of tired. I'm mostly just pissed off and crying.

I can feel myself attempting to squelch the Nasty-Yelly Mommy, and by the end of the day - which doesn't really have an end because they all just bleed into one another - I have a pounding headache as a reminder of all the frustration I've suppressed trying to maintain my inside voice. I don't like yelling, and I find yelling at children futile and damaging. So, of course I want to keep squelching this ugly person inside of me. My husband would chime in here to remind me, in the midst of my being hard on myself, that I've been recovering from major surgery (the C-section), post-partum preeclampsia, and some nasty, unrelenting virus that Liam brought home from school. And he's right. I haven't been in good health, and that's contributing to my lack of energy and patience. But the problem remains, and those are the causes I can't control.

I'm not really sure what to do to make this better. I'm still mulling it over, trying to figure it all out. I'm taking little steps to see if I can get a handle on things by just doing a bunch of small, practical things to make getting through the day a little easier. But there might be something inside me that has to change; maybe my attitude, maybe my expectations, maybe something deeper. In the meantime, I'm using music  therapy, and it's likely that I'll always associate the sometimes melancholy, sometimes upbeat, always nostalgic "Open Season" with the first couple months of Eliot's life.

And then there were four.

We brought our second baby boy home almost two weeks ago, completing our family of four (five, if you include our dog, Cecilia) and sending my husband and I into the fog of exhaustion that accompanies caring for a newborn. Eliot is an easy baby, he sleeps soundly and long enough that we've managed to mostly avoid the cognitive dysfunction of sleeplessness. Sure we're tired, but not hysterically so. As far as he's concerned, we're on familiar territory. Trekking a path we've already carved out and memorized. The challenge, this time around, has come with the unfamiliar territory of navigating the emotional landscape of a toddler whose entire world has been turned over. The same toddler who, only a couple months ago, asked if Baby Eliot would "have his own Mommy", and who is now struggling with appetite loss, difficulty sleeping, and a harder time playing independently for short periods of parental unavailability. He toggles between love and aggression, wanting in the same moment to kiss his brother's foot and hit him in the face.

It's not as bad as I thought it would be when I was crying myself to sleep countless nights during trimester three, wondering if my son would ever forgive us for bringing another child into the family, and whether I would be capable of loving another child as much as I loved the one I already had. Alas, I have put those fears to rest--our big boy still loves us, and I am deeply in love with Baby Eliot. But the signs of Liam's emotional upheaval are unmistakable, and because I love him and want him to be happy, I feel it's important for me to help him to both understand and overcome the way he's feeling. Of course, in order to do that, I have to understand how he's feeling. And I'm not sure I do, but my best guess is that he feels insecure. He realizes that he is now not the only priority, and that our attention is split between his demands and the baby's, and that there's absolutely no going back to the way things were.

I was pretty well convinced that the only advice I needed in order to make the transition/addition go smoothly was to be sure to incorporate Liam in the management and care of the little one. So that he could feel like he had an important role to play in his baby brother's welfare. And to be sure, this is good advice. But when it took more than a week for Liam to even want to touch the baby, I realized that there is much more to it than just getting him involved, and much more to his emotional response than just feeling left out. Even more important than letting him help with lost pacifiers, diaper changes, and burping duties, we have to be attentive to his emotional needs, and consistently and compassionately remind him--with words and actions--that we still love him as much as we always have, that we'll always be there for him when he needs us, and that eventually his baby brother will be his best friend.