Ask Moxie

Q&A: Grieving and loss with a second child

Marina writes:

"Last week there was a post on second child Shangri-la which I read in earnest, hoping to find some help with my own issues around having a second child. I am having much, much sadness over a loss that I could not anticipate with a second child. With my first child, I was "ready" for losing a bit of my identity and having to give up certain things, which I embraced, and I actually enjoyed that transition and moving into a new role for myself. I found such enormous satisfaction in giving 100% to another person and I was able to manage that intense love for a child with a wonderful relationship with my husband, a terrific job, etc.

Now, with the second baby, I'm having another identity shift that is hitting me harder than I expected: the loss of intimacy with my first child. I miss him, our little family of three, our quiet (and loud!) times together, the attention I was able to lavish on him, and so on. He seems unphased by the change, so I think it is just me and my own feelings of loss. I cannot believe how much I am grieving over the closeness that I shared with my first child, a closeness that we barely are able to glimpse these days with a new baby in the house.

I need help processing and coping with this -- all my friends tell me that it was so much easier for them to move from the one child to two children than it was from no children to one child in terms of identity, transition, life, etc. I thought I was a "pro" at being a mom and now this has just knocked the wind right out of my sails.

If you have any advice regarding this, I need it. My family is across the country, I live in a rural area, and I don't have many mom friends. The Moxie community could really help me process this; perhaps many parents out there have experienced this to varying degrees and have some data points about "letting go" or "renegotiating" the relationship with the first child .....It's causing more "blues" than I really need right now."

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Having my first was tough and really broke me down, but at the same time it taught me how to love another human being. It taught me that I actually could love another human being. And my son and I clicked so well that it just felt natural to be his mother.

And then the second one came, and I loved him instantly (probably sooner than I loved my first one), but our personalities just didn't click as perfectly, and I missed my older one. Those first months were difficult, with a baby I didn't feel I was doing a stellar job with (because there had just been this magical thing with my older son, so comparatively speaking I wasn't as good a mom to the second, I felt) and wanting to be closer to my older son, but not having the ability to with the second one.

It was a rough time, and I also felt like there was something wrong with me because other moms said going to two was so much easier, and I didn't feel like it was easy.

What helped things for me was:

1) The passage of time. As the baby got older I got things together more, got my routines down, and felt like I could have a better balance of time between the two kids.

2) Realizing that my older one needed me less anyway. He was a big boy, and wasn't so dependent on mama. It wasn't bothering him not to be spending as much one-on-one time with me, and maybe that was OK.

3) Working things out with the baby so I could feel that closeness with him, too. I felt like there was a disconnect between us, something that just made us miss each other. What fixed it for us was an offhand remark I made to my therapist (isn't that always the way?) that let him see that what my son was missing from me was something I'd never gotten as a baby (and, guess what--my mother had never gotten as a baby, either!). As soon as I started giving it to him we started to click. And some stuff shook loose in my relationship with my mom at the same time. It was a win-win-win.

I think negotiating the divided mind and affections of having two kids is the biggest problem of having a second child, honestly. (Others might disagree, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who agree with me.) And it takes awhile to find your peace within it, with being a mother of two, with not being the end-all-be-all to your older child, and to having to let this new person into your psyche. Be kind to yourself while you're going through it.

Readers, help for Marina? How did you cope until it started to be OK to have two?

Q&A: Second child Shangrila?

Annette writes:

"Am I missing something? I had my second baby (a boy!) 6 weeks ago. My daughter is 3. So far the new baby stage has been tiring and intense, but nowhere near as horrible as it was with my daughter. Even the growth spurts and Gas Wars (DH's term) have been easier to deal with. My daughter is annoyed that I always have the baby attached to me, but she's been doing lots of playdates and seems basically fine with the situation.

I can't shake the feeling, though, that the poop is going to hit the fan one of these days. Don't people go nuts with two kids? Is it just because the baby is so young? I don't want to get cocky and then end up developing PPD later on because things got hard and I wasn't expecting it."

If there was ever a good question for a group to answer, this is it! We need data points.

For me (and my kids were the same age spread as Annette's) the first 2-3 weeks were a piece of cake, comparatively (but then I had a home birth the second time with no tears and a nice snarky midwife and my mom, and my milk came in like gangbusters and he nursed from the get-go, so it was the dream situation and I was grateful for it the entire time and still am). And he was an amazing sleeper from the get-go.

Then the new baby stuff started to kick in, and my little guy was teething in painful rashy earnest from 6 weeks until his first tooth came in at around 6 months. I'd say that the entire first year of my second son's life was really hard for me. Some of that was that my bond with my older one was so strong that it was hard for me to readjust the relationship between the three of us. Also, there was some pretty awful emotional stuff going on with me at the time that cast a pall over that entire time period. I felt truly isolated from my friends because of that emotional stuff, and also because it was just much harder to get out and to participate with the two kids.

It got easier for me, personally, when the kids started to really interact with each other, which was around 10-11 months or so. Strangely, that was the age at which they started to fight a little over toys. But I think that genuine interaction (instead of just the older brother cooing at the baby thing) was when the corner turned.

If you have two or more children, what was your experience of the first however many months with the second child? Mention the age spread of your kids, any circumstances of the birth that would affect the postpartum phase, and anything else you think is relevant.

Q&A: Baby food sensitivities

Sarah has a question that's beyond me, so I hope there's someone out there who can unravel it for her:

"I just wanted to ask you about my son's sleep problems. He's now nearly 11 months old, and he's suffered from gas pains since he was born. I hoped when he was first born that he would start to grow out of it at 6 weeks, as everyone told me he would, but he didn't. If anything, it intensified. He exhibited the classic signs of colic - drawing his knees up and crying. This would happen exactly two hours after he ate (he is formula fed - I tried breastfeeding but after three bouts of mastitis, flat nipples and chronic thrush I gave it up for a bad job), then he would sleep until his next feed. He would then be happy for two hours, then the colicky symptoms then sleep etc etc. As he grew older, at around 6-8 months, he started crying in his sleep at night then waking up screaming and impossible to console. I did think that perhaps he was having nightmares, but my mother in law assured me that he was too young for nightmares, and on the nights he stayed with her he would do this and then burp or pass wind then go back to sleep, so she assumed it was a gas pain problem. Over time, I see now that she is correct in this - when he does it now, I pick him up and generally he burps and then is calm for a couple of hours.

We discovered over the course of time that elevating his legs seems to alleviate the pain. As a result of his frequent wakings and the need to elevate his legs, we've ended up co-sleeping rather than pogoing out of bed every couple of hours to sort him out. I did think that he would grow out of this at 8 months when his digestive system matured, but it still persists. Even eating solids hasn't solved the problem. I suspect the problem may be yeast related - he had problems with this from the breastfeeding days, and he had the last white patches in his mouth at about 7 months. He also has a persistent diaper rash that doesn't clear up with zinc oxide. I haven't tried thrush creams on it yet, but that will be my next port of call. He's eating half a pot of probiotic yogurt a day to try to combat this, but it doesn't seem to be having any effect. As yet, the health professionals seem unconcerned (however, we do live in the UK where extensive testing for digestive abnormalities doesn't happen due to the constraints on the national health system), but since it seems to have not abated at all, I'm starting to get quite concerned about him. He also has a slight wheeze which intensifies when he eats a new food. In case you were thinking it may be milk related, I've tried him on hydrolised protein formulas and lactase drops and these had no effect either. I recently switched him to iron fortified follow on milk and the wind seemed to get a bit worse.

Do you have any ideas on this? I'm at my wits end, having not slept for more than three hours at a stretch for nearly a year...

My gut reaction is that it's definitely dairy related and that she needs to take him off dairy completely, make sure there's no wheat in his diet, and be aggressive about treating the yeast. But I don't really know where to start on that if he's taking probiotics already.

Is there anyone with more experience with food sensitivities, dairy intolerance, celiac, or yeast issues who could offer some thoughts?

Talk about the 9-month sleep regression

I had a request to put up a post where you guys could talk about how you're dealing with or not dealing well with the 9-month sleep regression.

To recap, this is the period encompassing the developmental leap at week 37 and the one at week 46. Very very often there's also some teething mixed in there, and learning to crawl and/or pull up and/or cruise and/or walk.

Which means you've got a brain working on developmental stuff that won't let the kid sleep, a brain and body working on movement that won't let the kid sleep, and maybe some random shooting or throbbing gum and jaw pain in there, too.

In other words, you're going to have to accept that the kid just can't sleep straight through until some of this is over with.

(We haven't even mentioned how this sleep regression can affect other stuff, too, like naps and mood and clinginess and what they'll eat and won't eat. Some kids who keep sleeping at night just wig out during the day--that's their particular reaction to the developmental spurts.)

Which means your plan shifts from Get Kid To Stay Asleep to Maximize Sleep For Everyone Else. This is not the time to pretend you know what's going on or that you have it all under control. This is not the time to say "your job is this and mine is that." It's the time to divide up the schedule so everyone gets 5 hours at a stretch if possible. If one of you has to go to sleep at 8 pm and take the 8-1 shift so the other has the 1-6 shift, do it.

Here are the important things to remember: Lots of us have been through it. You will get through it. There is nothing inherently wrong with your child--this is normal. Hideous and demoralizing, but normal. You're doing a good job.

Now, commiserators?

Q&A: smoking grandmother

Jessica writes:

"Since my daughter was born 9 months ago, I've dreaded dealing with this particular issue. My mother-in-law is a chain-smoker (one is lit at all times) and fills her house with cigarette smoke and scented candles, thinking that the candles mitigate the smell of the smoke. It does not in any way. I've dutifully visited her with my husband before I was pregnant and even during my pregnancy for short visits, but now that my baby is born, I feel so strongly that I do not want to expose my child to the secondhand smoke. My MIL would not smoke in the baby's presence, but the second-hand smoke is in the air regardless. It hangs in the air and is unavoidable.

There are many problems here. My husband thinks we should just bring the baby and visit her "to keep the peace."  He is afraid of rocking the boat, of confronting her on this issue. (She is also an alcoholic and her family enables her bad habits. No one wants to confront her because she is irrational and makes her family members feel guilty for not taking care of her).  My husband understands that secondhand smoke is terrible to be exposed to, but he sees little harm in short visits. It is causing lots of tension between us. I just want him to advocate for our child, and he says that by doing so, he would effectively end the relationship between us and his mother.  He is so torn and I feel terribly for him because he feels he has to choose between his mother or me and our baby.

Part of me dies when I think of exposing my daughter's little body to a known carcinogen just to "keep the peace." I even talked with her pediatrician at her 6-month visit who said that my MIL should just visit us at our house and that we should not expose our baby to second-hand smoke. My MIL only lives one hour away but acts like we live across the country and does not want to make the drive to our house.
We have gotten away with not visiting her thus far because our baby vehemently hated car rides as a small infant and we just said we weren't traveling with her anywhere. But my MIL knows that the baby is getting better in the car and is pressuring us to bring her out for a visit.

The other key issue is that my MIL and I do not have a good relationship and never have, and I am afraid that this is going to set us back even farther. For the sake of my husband and my daughter, I want to have a functional relationship with my MIL.

Am I being too over-protective?  Is my mother bear instinct getting in the way of what's right in terms of family? Do I just suck it up and bring my baby over there?  Or can I stand my ground and say that it is not right to expose our daughter to the second-hand smoke, even at her grandmother's expense? I truly want to foster a relationship between my daughter and her grandmother, but my daughter's health is (and should be!) my priority.

Please help."

This is definitely a rock and a hard place. If your daughter was 10, you could deal with the smoke for a very brief visit. But so many of her body systems are still developing. OTOH, this could be the final rift between your family and your husband's mother, and it sounds like your husband just isn't willing to stand up to his mother.

First off, when the dust settles on this, you might try to get your husband in to see a counselor with you about some of the issues with his mom. Or at the very least try to get him to go to an Al-Anon meeting or two. Growing up with an alcoholic is serious business, and is going to affect his instincts and parenting in so many ways that it'll be the best investment he could ever make in his daughter's well-being to get some clarity on how he's been hurt by his mom's addictions and how he can recover from that.

Now. There's got to be a weaselly way around this so you don't have to put the hammer down without support. Could you go see them but meet someplace else? "We really want to take you out for a special brunch because of everything you do for us." Or could you stall for a few more months until the weather is warm and then go but stay outside the entire time? "Our pediatrician says the fresh air is the best thing for her at this age."

You really can't go and put your daughter into the smokehouse. Your pediatrician advises against it. And, frankly, anything that makes you feel like part of you dies just thinking about it is something you shouldn't do, even if no one else backs you up.

Readers, any way around this one? She needs to keep the peace (at least at this point), but not expose her daughter to the house.

(Is anyone else thinking that this question is more difficult even than the one about the pot-smoking grandparents? What is it with flaming sticks and in-laws?)

Q&A: apartment living with a baby

Laura writes:

"I love your site and check it daily; you are a guru to me, as you are to many!

I wonder if you have advice to offer about living in small spaces with a baby. Ours is four months old; we live in San Francisco. Our apartment is tiny, and his crib is in our room. We're about to start sleep-training,
and wonder if it's possible to do in a small apartment, with neighbors close by, but we're desperate for more sleep.

I'm also suffering a lot of guilt over not being able to provide a separate room for my child (the apartment is so small that we can't even partition a room with screens, or move our bed into a living room). We
can't afford to move, and Bay Area home prices are so high that we'll never be able to purchase a home. Yet most of my friends have nurseries for their babies, and almost every book I read assumes that the reader has a separate room for the baby. I feel very guilty as a result: will he resent us someday? will he be okay if he doesn't have his own room? Any words of wisdom?"

Thanks. I actually prefer charismatic leader, but guru will do just fine*.

First off, do not sleep train until your son is past the four-month-sleep regression. That regression sucks so much anyway that adding sleep training into it (which is going to suck 40 times more than it normally would if you do it in the middle of a sleep regression) will make you all long for the sweet release of hospitalization. So hold on 'til he's past the 19-week spurt to train, at which point you may not need to train anyway. (The irony--it's the regression that makes you want to train him, but the regression that makes training largely futile. Then once it's no longer futile, he'll sleep better on his own.)

Did we mention that four months sucks in general?

But on to the space question. I think you have two choices: Stay where you are, or move someplace where you can have more room. Either way you gain something, and either way you give something up.

Honestly, I don't think there's any way to know whether he'll resent you for it until he's grown up. I suspect that how he feels about how he grew up will have more to do with his relationship to you and your husband than to the specifics of how much space you had.

I know adults who adored growing up in NYC. (FWIW, the NYC one-bedroom long-term solution seems to be to move the kid into the bedroom and have the parents sleep on a Murphy bed or pullout in the living room.) They feel like having all the of the cool stuff in the city was the best way to grow up, and feel sorry for kids who grew up with more space but less stimulation. The two women I know who grew up in NYC and hated it also had major family issues, so it doesn't surprise me that they have bad feeling about their growing-up years.

I know adults who adored growing up in the suburbs, or small towns, and the country. Big yards and forts and running around the neighborhood. But you know what they talk about when they talk about the way they grew up? What they did with their families and friends. It's the relationships that made their childhoods happy, and those relationships made the settings good for them.

So I think your decision to stay or go is going to have to be informed by other things, like what makes you feel comfortable (Would living in a crowded space stress you out? Would living outside a city enervate you?), whether you want to live closer or farther from your families, and whether you want to have more children or not. (From my observation, being an only is much more "normal" in cities than in other areas where most families have 2+ kids.)

If you're happy with yourselves and your marriage and your family and your son, he'll be fine growing up wherever you land.

Data points, people?

* I'm kidding, obviously. I'm so boringly normal. I have the same problems you guys do, and many others I hope you never experience. At this point writing the blog is just what I do, and I wish I had time to do more for you guys.

Sleep posts

You know what I think is funny about the comments on sleep posts here?

That different posts totally bring out commenters with different situations. Some posts draw tons of "try co-sleeping!" comments. Some draw "read Pantley!" comments. Some draw "read Ferber!" comments. Some draw "do CIO!" comments.

Which just goes to show you (or me, at least), that there is no one right answer for everyone. I've been fumbling toward trying to find some classification system so that we could make some kind of checklist and you could observe different aspects of your kid and then know which "method" (can you really call anything that makes you cry at 3 am a method?). Wouldn't that be awesome? Observe and answer these 50 questions about your kid, and then you'll know exactly how to proceed. (The "tension increaser" vs. "tension decreaser" observation was the first step in my plan for a taxonomy of sleep personalities and issues.)

Unfortunately, all we have to go on now is trying to figure out exactly what the problem is (going to sleep initially? staying asleep? nursing at night? waking early? all of the above?) and then trying different things to fix it until you either find something that works or pack the kid off to boarding school.

Remember that there are tons of things to try before you resort to doing something that isn't in your comfort zone (I'd put co-sleeping and true CIO--letting the child cry alone until s/he falls asleep no matter how long it takes--in those category of things that people might not be comfortable with). The Ferber method (not that he made it up, of course, but no one's great-great-great-great-great-great grandma wrote a book about it) of allowing the baby to cry for short chunks of time and then going in to check and make contact is one of them. In fact, the surefire way to tell if your baby is a tension decreaser who needs to cry some to fall asleep is to walk out and let the baby cry for 5-10 minutes and see what happens. That sounds a lot like Ferber to me. (If the baby starts to lose steam and quiet down, you've got a tension decreaser.)

If you've got the baby in the same room with one of you, try switching who the baby's with. A baby who nurses all night on mom might sleep the whole night through with dad. If the baby's in the same room, try switching the baby to a different room. Or vice versa.

In other words, if the pattern is bad, figure out exactly what part is bad, and try changing the structure of it. Sometimes just small changes will break the pattern.

The other thing that's really important to know is that no matter what you do, it's not going to stick. If you sleep train, you'll have to do it again, after sleep regressions and big teething spurts. If you co-sleep, you'll have to re-evaluate every time your kid goes through some developmental spurt and starts kicking you in the kidneys all night. So don't feel too smug or too desperate, because there's always someone better off and worse off than you are right now.

Anyone want to post something that either helped or hurt your kid's sleep that surprised you?

I'll go first.

Son #1: Went through a phase around the age of 2 in which he'd go to sleep just fine, but would then wake up screaming an hour later. It took a few weeks, but eventually we figured out that he was having heartburn/indigestion from eating tomato products at dinner! We put the kibosh on all tomatoes after 3 pm, and he stopped waking that first night.

Son #2: Wanted to nurse all night long with me. I went to sleep out on the couch and left him sleeping with his dad and he slept the whole night through. Occam's Razor in action: if I was there, he'd nurse; if I was gone, he wouldn't.

Now you go.

The right way

I've been getting a lot of emails lately in which the writer says some version of "I just want to do this the right way" (meaning parenting).

The right way.

The right way is what works for you and your child and your family.

The right way for you is not the exact same right way as the right way for your neighbor, your sister, your best friend.

The right way with your first child is not the right way with your second child or third child or thirteenth child.

The right way is what allows you to be true to yourself and honor your child at the same time, as much as you can, in the middle of situations that should be against the Geneva Convention.

The right way doesn't have anything to do with pacifiers, or putting a baby down asleep or awake, or when your baby is out of diapers, or whether your baby watches TV or not.

The right way is about learning more about yourself and using that knowledge to learn about your child. And then taking that knowledge of your child and using it to learn more about yourself.

The right way is having a long conversation with this amazing little person you've been entrusted with. Sometimes the conversation gets rough and you get tired and angry at each other, but you keep talking. And the conversation just gets more and more interesting as you go along.

For me, the right way is that my mom learned how to text as soon as she figured out that that's easier for me at work than talking.

I don't know if I'm doing it the right way at any given time with my kids, but the conversation seems to be going well, so I'm trusting that I'm doing fine.

Do you want to share your experience of the right way?

Reader call: Car seat rage

The other day I schlepped my cats and both boys almost a mile in the snow to the vet (uphill both ways), and wondered "Why don't I live someplace where I can just have a car??" But then I got this email, and felt like a jerk for my car-free self-pity:

"Please help....my child hates being in a car seat and facing backwards. She's only 7 month old, so turning the seat around is a long wait. She can manage if someone sits in the back with her, but if no one there she throws tantrums. I've tried toys, singing, holding her hand while driving, but nothing seems to work. this winter is extremely cold, and its impossible to walk outside for long periods of time, so the idea is to go to the mall. But with this problem its even harder to drive to the mall than slippery roads and cold wind blowing in our faces. Please suggest something that I can do to make her more content with not having someone next to her for 15min drive."

I can remember a 6-hour drive with a 6-week-old screaming almost the whole time. But that seems to have wiped my car seat rage memory. In previous posts on this topic people have suggested that the baby might be carsick facing backwards, and that that may be contributing a lot to her anger. I'm not sure what the solution would be. You could try the Sea Band wristlets. I'd walk into the health food store and ask if they had anything homeopathic (not herbal) to alleviate motion sickness and try that. You could try a remedy like dramamine, but some kids react badly to it.

Readers? Any other suggestions, either of ways to deal with the screaming or to stop motion sickness if that's contributing to it?

Q&A: fussy baby while nursing

N writes:

"My four month old and I got past the initial difficulty beginning nursing (pain, latch problems, mastitis, the usual suspects) and we were off to a really good start with the whole breastfeeding thing.  She is gaining well and healthy.  But she often does this thing at the breast that drives me crazy.  She kicks, screams and thrashes while nursing.  If I hold her where her feet can hit the back of the chair, she'll kick against it, moving her whole body away from the breast while she's latched on (not pleasant).   If I position her where her feet can't kick against the chair, she'll instead scream and whip her head back and forth while latched on (also not pleasant).  Taking this as a sign she's not really hungry, I'll take her off the breast, which is met with shrieks of protest.  Put her back on the breast, we get a repeat showing of Wrestlemania: Baby Edition.  It doesn't seem to be a low supply issue as it's always easy to express milk when she's doing this, but I don't really believe it's that the let down is too strong for her either. Her older sister did this too when she was nursing, but this one is much worse about it.  I can't quite figure out what's going on here.  Any suggestions?  I've been stretched about as far as I can be - literally!"

Yeah, I remember this. I think it may be some kind of gastrointestinal growth spurt of some sort, but it was perplexing because there were no other symptoms of other gastric distress--no excess farting or crying 20 minutes after a feed (the classic symptom of a lactose intolerance) or anything like that. It sounds like you don't ahve any of this other stuff either, just the donnybrook on the breast. I never did figure out what caused it, and it went away in about a month or so on its own.

In the meantime, what I did was try to put as much pressure on my son's tummy as possible while he was nursing, and for whatever reason that seemed to work enough that he could finish an actual feed without going all Goodfellas on me.

The way I did it was by doing all my nursing (except for the middle-of-the-night nursing, which didn't seem to bug him) reclining on the couch. I'd have him facing down on top of me, stretched across the length of my body, perpendicular to me. So we were a lowercase t, and I was the vertical line, and he was the horizontal line across me.

That meant that he was nursing face down, but he also had all his own body weight on his tummy on top of me.

I have no idea if this will work for your daughter, but it's worth a try. Readers, can you offer up anything else that she can try if my tummy-pressure thing doesn't do the trick?