The Improved Psychosis of Parenting
And of course more oversharing about bodily fluids
Hello, friends and potential baby fans
Did I mention I have a baby? Has my whole personality been absorbed into the act of baby care? Also yes. Is it fine to accept an identity as a basic parent? Why not.
Story!
Back when I read books…I keep wanting to say it was Peace Child, but it was surely another book from a missionary living on a language-rich, beautiful tropical place, surely published by InterVarsity Press. So this book I was reading did a planting-and-payoff that almost seemed like an oversight. As this missionary guy went around doing his Bible translating, he would mention the names of his local friends, and some of them had two-word names like [something] Ali. At one point, his friends are praying for him and use their name for him.
“Protect Heto Ali.” — or something like that. Of course I did what any confused reader would do and flipped to the front cover to remind myself of this man’s name. I was also trying to guess what loan-word substitution rules were kicking in to change the man’s name this way. Or maybe it was a title, like translator man. Or why is this strange man here and not selling products?
Soon enough, the naming convention was explained. It was not a transliteration of his original name. “In this culture, when someone has a child, they change their name to [first child’s name] Ali,” explained the author. “So my name was Heto Ali, meaning Heather’s Dad.”
Awwwwwwwwwwww
So I did get some sound substitution. Assuming it wasn’t a “Heto’s a common name here, and that’s kinda like Heather. We’ll call her Heto.” situation, Ambisyllablic theta -> t, final r-colored-schwa -> o. There’s a whole chart of phoneme traits that a proper, practicing linguist would be able to do and talk about. It’s very exciting to us and I learned it from my very kind phonology professor. I was remembering him recently because his wife died last month.
But, the other point was, what an honest naming convention, and so relatable. They make official what a lot of us do unofficially. There are people whose names I still don’t know because they are “so-and-so’s Mom.” Another way I was warned about the realities of parenting. Probably one of the reasons I didn’t want to have kids. I didn’t want to be another of those people that everyone else finds so annoying.
Do I even need to take pictures of my own child? These stock photos are pretty darn close. If only my baby could safely dangle from my hair and free up both hands to try and clean up more than one filthy thing every two days. The bottles and the pumps are easy to keep clean, but the floor. Oh, goodness gracious, the floor needs several scrubbings.
How it’s going — and using the PS-word
Warning, I’m going to mention going off meds. And that ps word. And weight.
As everyone could guess, once we discovered the stowaway, doctors agreed it wouldn’t be very nice to expose it to the drugs I was taking. As far a I know, none of my meds were so-called antipsychotics. But is parenting a psychosis? Some people say yes. Often, I would say yes, too.
Back when my very good friend and inspiration first told me, “mental illness is hereditary, you get it from your kids,” I thought it meant that children are so stressful and often annoying that it drives everyone quirky. Super duper quirky. When my sister had her first baby, she claimed the hormones released when she was caring for her baby were the same as drugs.
“She’s making drugs.”
I take meds deemed safe by my doctors. Anxiety things that allow me to sleep, but also anti-constipation pills because side-effects. If I take zero anxiety pills, I can go a whole night without sleeping. If I take a whole pill, I can sleep through a minor earthquake, wake up around 10 a.m. and be sluggish until around 6 p.m. Back when I weighed more than two of my mother-in-law, talking half a pill was a fun game where maybe I would wake up on time, or maybe I would wake up at 3 a.m. and be unable to go back to sleep until I needed to be somewhere. Some would say that’s how everyone sleeps these days. I believe them.
“breastfeeding can burn up to 500 calories per day,” or something, a nurse told my sister, 15 years ago.
I understood I could potentially lose weight quickly. I reasoned, at a lower weight — and without the passenger also absorbing anything — the same amount of meds would go further. I put the half-pills into the pill-splitter to get somewhat-less-than-a-quarter pills. Lots of pill crumbs tumbled into the little compartment in the pill splitter. A large crumb remained. It seemed to be just the right amount. I slept just enough.
I forgot to reduce the dosage for the anti-constipation meds in the same way.
I also had to effectively live-tweet this to my ob-gyn. That very nice, smart lady who already spent an hour or two watching me poop in a bucket, and was such a good and kind doctor for the whole time I had known her. Her responsibilities included making sure I got a postpartum poop.
I had some restraint. I didn’t tell her, “I think this is what those colon cleanse deals are trying to do. I no longer look pregnant.”
Human bodies are disgusting. All of them. Menstruation is gross and painful, even outside the fact that my constipation waxes and wanes in step with my endometrium, from the same hormones.
The Patreon Stuff
I thought it would be really funny to take all of the data from the baby log and apply all of my accounting learning to it. It’s going amusingly wrong and that will go up some time next month, if I make miraculous improvements in time management.
Writing.
