trying to balance.

The one question that I get most often from the professionals involved in my children’s lives is, “how do you do it all?” This inevitably comes after I explain that I work full time in academia.  Yes, my schedule is flexible, but my job is demanding. I don’t “do it all” well.  That is the short answer.  In fact, I have been struggling with the fact that I cannot do it all well. I am starting to think of all the things I have sacrificed while trying to balance my career and my kids. For a while, I was putting my job first.  I was waking up at 4 am to work for a few hours before the kids woke up, and then working at night after they went to sleep.  I had M in daycare about 6 hours a day and was making up for the other time in the “fringe hours.”  Then arrived M2 and they spent more time in daycare, I spent less time working nights and mornings and my job performance has suffered greatly.

With my two kids, there is no down time at home. Because  of M’s aggressive tendencies, I have to be watching him at all times. This makes things like getting the dishes or laundry done while the kids are awake near impossible.  I now clean and do other household tasks in the time that I used to use to grade papers and plan lessons and write emails.

I feel like I missed a lot of M’s early days because I was too preoccupied with how to answer emails and grade papers on time. I would check and answer emails while giving him a bottle, in the middle of the night after a midnight feeding, etc.   But in the times between those emails, I would worry about all that I was missing at work. Then I just gave up.  I suppose this is where my downward work spiral began. I stopped using my time outside of the office to do work.  I spent all of last summer catching up on things I couldn’t get done during the school year and then prepping for the fall so that I could better manage my time.   That works well for the most part.  When I can plan ahead, I can manage.  It is the work tasks that pop up with little notice with immediate deadlines that I just can’t do.  I can’t just make time for the unexpected things or then the tasks I planned to do become late.  It is an endless cycle. If I leave the office early to take M to an appointment, I often miss the committee email conversations that happen between 3 pm and 8 am the next day (when I start checking email again).  By then, decisions are made, and I just look like a slacker who didn’t participate in the discussion.  It is hard to fight against this perception and there has been 4 of my colleagues who have made comments about this to me.  Dear colleagues, I want to participate, I do.  But we are just running on different schedules.

In my line of work, at a university, trying to get tenure, one of my most important tasks is to research and publish.  I have yet to be able to figure out how to squeeze this into my schedule. We don’t actually get “paid” for this work.  It is an expectation but one that is outside of our normal work schedule.  I have been told that this is what I should be doing with my summers.  My first two summers,  I had tiny infants to care for and during my third summer at this job, I was playing catch up from caring for two kids with special needs.

Unfortunately, there is no leniency for motherhood in academia.  I am not making excuses for myself, but this is a system that is generally unsupportive of mothers.

Check out this article: Fathers and Childless Women are 3x More Likely to Get Tenure than Women with Kids

I am not sure what the stats look like for getting tenure for women with kids with special needs.   This week, between M and M2, there are an additional 8 appointments in my schedule. EIGHT.   Speech (x2), Occupational Therapy, Mental Health Services, a visit with Regional Center for a transition from IFSP to IPP, Infant Stimulation Services, a social worker visit to my home, and a visit with the pediatric naturopath.  There are six that are regularly occurring.  Every single week, I have at least six extra appointments to transport to and from or the work involved in arranging for someone else to get the kids there.

I do feel like the odds are stacked against me in my current position.  But I am raising my flag of surrender and taking a less demanding job.  I can’t even put into words how difficult this is for me.  I am a terrible quitter and the feminist in me feel like I should be fighting the structure of this system. I should be the success, not the woman that can’t “lean in”.    At the very same time, I have such a peace with this decision.  My family NEEDS this. My children NEED this.  The one thing I have been truly sacrificing is my own self care. See this post. I am looking to regain a part of myself that has been lost in this shuffle.  I am proudly stepping down, giving up, leaning out, and simplifying my career for my sanity and my family.

As I have said before, I am writing this blog to keep track of our challenges and successes. I truly hope that I don’t look back on this job decision with regret. I know it will be difficult to remember all the stresses that I feel now. When my new job is stressful, I want to be able to come back and read this and remember why I made the change.

 

trying not to cry.

One of the hardest things for me to reconcile about raising kids with a trauma background, is that they need me and I need to work. In particular, I need to get to work on time in the mornings. This morning is entirely my fault today that things didn’t go well.  I hit snooze and then I turned the alarm off the second time it went off.  I got out of bed at 7:30. I normally leave the house at 7:45. But everyone slept in this morning after a relatively good night sleep and I was not about to give up a precious few moments of sleep after so many terrible nights in a row.  At least that is how I felt when my alarm went off at 6am.  I know better.   I know that my morning goes 100 times better when I get myself ready before the kids get up and then give them plenty of time to transition between steps in the morning.  In any case, I seemed to just make a ton of mistakes this morning.

G handed M an old iPhone at some point as I was getting myself and M2 dressed.   I was already disgruntled when I got out of the shower and found that happening.   However, I used it as a distraction to get him dressed quickly.   We were ready to walk out the door by 8:15.   Already a half hour late, but not too terrible.  Despite the fact that I told M twice that we were almost ready to go and he would need to leave the iPhone home.  That got lost in the shuffle out the door and the iPhone ended up in the car with him.  About 30 seconds in the drive he started screaming because he needed help with the game he was playing.  That proceeded to just escalate through the whole drive to school.   At some point he threw the iPhone at my head.  At least I didn’t have to pry it from his hands.   He was then upset that he didn’t have the phone and already in full blown meltdown mode. We pulled in to school I got M2 out of the car. She always takes her shoes and socks off in the car and it takes me a minute to put them back on. M is screaming that the buckle on his carseat is “hurting him”  I reach over and unbuckle but then he rages about not wanting to get out and not wanting to go to school.   At this point, I am still reacting calmly.   I get M2’s socks and shoes on and get her out of her seat and walk over to get him out on his side of the car.   When I open the car seat he just says “no, leave me!”  I reshut the door.   He is already unbuckled so he climbs into the drivers seat.  I go to the driver’s seat to get him out open in and he punches me in the face, hard.   At that point, the calm left. I grabbed  him around the waist while holding M2 and M’s blankie in my other arm. I marched to the front door of daycare crossing the drive but M2 has an amazing ability to go completely limp so that she is like holding on to a jellyfish and can just squeeze her way out of my grasp.  She was falling from my arms just as we finished crossing the street.  I let her climb the stairs alone but she was dawdling and I yelled at her to “hurry up!”  Normally I am not in the habit of yelling commands at my children, but I knew that I would lose the wrestling match with M any minute.  As I got through the door, needing one hand to open the door and one arm to hold M, he wriggled free.   His classroom is directly next to the front door.  I brought M2 into that classroom quickly where she went and started playing with the kitchen set peacefully.  In the meantime, M ran back out the front door back towards the parking lot and two staff members ran to retrieve him.  The whole time I was dragging him inside, he was screaming. “Stop hurting me!”  and “You are being too rough with my body!” I sit with him for a few minutes out in the lobby but then realize it is not helping and I should just get him settled into his classroom.  When I bring him into his class and start distracting him with toys, he grabs a toy from another kid and then hits him within 30 seconds of me putting him down to play.   He gets settled in relatively quickly, still saying “Stay, don’t leave!” every few seconds.   He refused my hugs and I left.

Now, back in my office, I am just too distraught to work at the moment. I cried for a minute in the car before I walked in.  I stopped and got some ice for my eye at the coffee shop below my office, hoping that punch doesn’t cause swelling or bruising. I can still feel the anger in his tiny fist as I type this.  My other eye has a significant set of scratched on it from where he scratched my eyes because he was frustrated trying to get to sleep. My face seems to always wear the marks of his frustration.

I am hoping this post will help me settle in to my day. It definitely gives me a minute to reflect, perhaps this is the little “me time” that I can allow.   I am now an hour late in starting my work for the day.   Which just means I will skip lunch to finish what I need to do.  Either that or work after hours.  Actually, both.  I usually need to do both.   I can’t help but feel like, if I didn’t have to work, these kinds of struggles wouldn’t exist in my day.  There would be no hustle out the door. There would be time to transition without someone else’s clock imposing deadlines on my day.   There would be the allowance to sleep that extra hour when the nights have been so rough.

 

trying to go beyond consequences

A few weeks ago when I was struggling with my parenting techniques, I wrote a desperate email to a local parenting coach asking for help.   I wanted to set up some one-on-one meetings with her to discuss our issues with M’s aggression.  I was informed that they have classes starting January. Great but what do I do today, tomorrow, next week.  She also recommend Heather Forbes’ Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control.  That book had popped up in my “People who bought this item also bought” list on Amazon a few times.  I remember reading the description and thinking it was for “attachment challenged” children and thinking that doesn’t apply to us.  M is ATTACHED.  We have more of a problem with him being too attached.  But, being the researcher that I am, I decided to download the eBook and check it out.  And I was wrong about my initial opinions, the parenting techniques in the book are very applicable to us.

I couldn’t put it down and in fact it made me rethink about what trauma is caused by adoption.   We were M’s first and only foster home but in his first week alive, his 3rd mom. His first mom, his birth mom, hid her pregnancy from her family, had no prenatal care and even denied his existence for MONTHS  after he was born and DNA tests confirmed their relationship.  I’m not sure how those feelings were transmitted to him in utero but I think there is some trauma there. He was also sold/traded/given to another woman at birth.  She spent several days in hiding with him while investigators were hunting for them. Traumatic? probably. I also think the flood of chemicals that gets transmitted to the baby when moms are using meth create a sort of trauma.   Surges of adrenaline to a fetus, who knows what that feels like but I am theorizing it made him feel that he was in danger. Heather Forbes’ parenting advice is based in the theory that there are only two primary emotions: Love and Fear.  M does have a very fearful way that he interacts with the world.  That fear turns right into fight when it is strong enough. He is often slow to react and I can see on his face the transitions from fear to frustration or fear to anger.  M is hypersensitive to many sensory experiences and most of these things he perceives as a threat. For instance, he hates having his diaper changed.  We told the pediatrician this a long time ago when he first started telling us that wipes hurt him.   At that point, his sensory issues were not as evident and she thought wipes could not possibly be hurting him.  These days, if I mention a diaper change, I see the flash of fear and then I see the flash of anger and then I often get hit or scratched before I can even react to him appropriately.   But after reading Heather’s book. I changed my diaper change approach.  First, I give him a several minute warning before a diaper change.  He hates transitions so he needs this at pretty much any directed change in action.   At that point, I tell him I am going to be very gentle.  When I walk him into the bathroom to our changing table, I reiterate that point, I am going to be gentle and you get to tell me if you want to take a break.  I won’t lie, I used to hold his body down with one arm, gritting my teeth in frustration and change him as quickly as I could before he could wiggle free and bite me.   I was never rough, but I was trying to stay in control of the situation and thus causing him to be more fearful.   Now, for most changes, I can let him have more control while I talk gently and take our time, pausing if he needs it.  I have seen his whole opinion of diapering change in just a few weeks.  I can’t say he likes the sensation but it is so much more pleasant. Just in time for potty training!

 

 

 

trying to maintain his story pt. 1

M came to us April 27th, 2013 just 5 days old.   We had been waiting for his arrival for some time, but the call still felt unexpected.   G and I were working in his studio making a bookshelf for the then unoccupied nursery.   G answered the phone. Our agency got a call about a newborn baby boy who needed an immediate placement.  There were very few details about him. We were told that they didn’t know who his mother was and some woman apparently tried to kidnap him from the hospital.   The latter detail was really a major generalization of the facts.

G and I were prepared for a baby exposed to drugs.  We had taken extra classes to learn to care for drug exposed/affected children.  In fact, the only thing I thought I couldn’t handle was FASD.  I didn’t know as much about FASD as I do now.  To be honest, I thought of it as equivalent to significant intellectual disability.  I had no idea about the FASD spectrum. I’m glad we didn’t know, I love that we jumped into this experience feet first. Of course, we quickly fell in love. By the time we found out he was exposed to drugs, his history didn’t matter.  We were only focused on his future.It was only the second or third visit by our agency worker that she mentioned that his facial features were indicative of FAS.  I remember spending hours searching for infants with FAS to compare his facial features to.  They weren’t as prominent as the textbook examples, but it was relatively easy to see the flat philtrum, the epicanthal folds, and the thin upper lip.

But, M was a dream as an infant.  Other than the fact that he hardly slept and ate tiny amounts constantly, he was happy and easy going.