Webinar addiction, or research-based parenting, part one

The moment I even began considering having a child, I took on a second job. Monitoring my monthly hormone cycles, modifying my exercise routine, and generally thinking about what I needed to do to bring a healthy baby into the world gradually became a significant part of how I spent my time. Since that life stage began some two years ago, I have read countless articles on the internet, tens of books written by former RNs and ‘sleep consultants’, and become the kind of person who actually reads Internet forums. (What to Expect When You’re Expecting’s forums were my favourite pregnancy guilty pleasure). An entirely new energy outlet entered my life post-COVID and post-parenthood, though, and that is the educational webinar. 

Since Khalil was born, I have attended webinars on breastfeeding, breastfeeding in a pandemic, breastfeeding a baby less than twelve weeks old, and on breastfeeding a baby more than twelve weeks old. I have attended a webinar on how to play with a newborn (which, I will tell you, is definitely something you need to attend a webinar on, because newborns can barely focus  their eyes on objects). I have attended a webinar on swaddling (we swaddled my son for about a week). I have attended a webinar on how to introduce a bottle. (My son has never successfully drank milk from a bottle). I have attended a webinar on how to let a six month old feed themselves. This list does not include any of the webinars I attended on sleep. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think that I spent more time in the infant stage learning about sleep than I spent sleeping. Thankfully, this is hyperbole.

 I would say that I deserve a prize for webinar attendance, but, judging from the wealth of webinars that are advertised on my Instagram feed, there are women out there whose webinar attendance would put me to shame. The only prize I would get for webinar attendance is a participation trophy.

Somewhere in my mind, I believed that this was a phase. I believed that after my maternity leave I would have figured it out and that I would just have undergone the necessary mom-compatibility upgrade that takes place during a baby’s first few months of life. As my son’s nine month birthday approached, I mentally prepared to graduate from my webinar-attendee status. My devices must have sensed a decline in activity, because they were activated.

‘Did you take Feeding Littles’ Toddler Course?’ A new mom friend asked in a text message. I had not. Wasn’t toddler-hood light years in the future? ‘They recommend you take it between ten and twelve months.’ (Translation for people who do not intuitively use their child’s age as a unit for measuring the passage of time: they recommend you take this course when your child is between ten and twelve months old). Ah. Toddler-hood was around the corner, and I had not taken a single webinar yet to prepare.

Within minutes, an email arrived in my inbox reminding me to renew my subscription to a learning platform. They would be with me through toddler-hood, they promised. I worried. Was I behind on toddler-hood? My not-yet-nine month old was getting close to toddling. I fretted. How was I going to find time for all these webinars? I chafed. How much money did I need to spend on correcting my seemingly bottomless ignorance about parenting? And yet. When I went to write this blog entry, I renewed my subscription. And while I wrote, I took short breaks to watch a video on developmental milestones for nine month olds.

Let me be clear: these webinars have been life-saving for me. Feeding Littles taught me how to do baby-led weaning, which has been one of the most enjoyable experiences of parenting so far. There are few things in the world that bring me as much happiness as watching my son stuff a baked potato into his face with both hands, and I would not know how to back off and let him do that without the guidance of the delightful Megan and Judy. Taking Cara Babies is my starting point for sleep questions, and sleep questions are easily my most urgent questions. And I honestly credit Emily and Jamie of Boston NAPS with making me into a confident mother. Without these women and their library of common-sense, real-talk webinars, I would have spent a lot more of the past year lost and in tears. Before everything went online, lactation consultant extraordinaire Nadiya Dragan, hypnobirthing instructor Duna Abu Jaoude, and Joanna Nawfal of Sophia Maternity in Beirut, as well as the midwives at Rizk Hospital, helped me get ready for my delivery and everything new-mom-stage. It shouldn’t be surprising that someone who elected into as much education as I did sought out education as a way to be ready for this life transition! What was pleasantly surprising is how wonderful and caring the women (it was all women, without exceptions) who did this educational work were and how much they addressed my explicit and unspoken needs.

Parenting webinars have been a godsend for me. They soothed my anxiety, armed me with tools to use when I saw basic parenting challenges looming scarily large and complicated, and made me feel connected to a universe of other mothers who were going through the same things. 

Now that I am going back to work soon, though, and considering how much of my life I spent watching these sorts of videos, I am … well, I am amazed. I am amazed at how little other support I had, first. My friends who are moms were wonderful and supportive, and shared their experience and feelings in deeply helpful ways. But when there was something serious to be addressed, their pro tip was to refer me to a book or a webinar. Now, when I see someone who really needs a fix, I do the same! I just don’t know as much as these pros do. 

In my life, more ‘traditional’ sources of support simply were not that knowledgeable. My mother and my mother-in-law were far enough away from their parenting experiences to be unreliable, even by their own assessments. They have also been ocean-and-continent distances away for most of my son’s little life. Of my three sisters-in-law and one sister, three did not have children when I delivered, and the one who did have a kid made the essential contribution of referring me to Boston NAPS! Arguably that sister-in-law was my guardian angel. And, since I delivered at the height of COVID19, I had limited access to in-person help.

The truth, though, is that I craved (and crave) expert, correct, reliable opinions about parenting. I do not feel reassured by grandparents’ saying, we did this, and you all turned out fine. I wanted (and want) guidance that has some kind of facts behind it. Research-based methods gave me confidence. Which is both predictable (I am a researcher, after all) and surprising, since I previously fancied myself so liberated from these discourses. A critical perspective on the medicalisation of birth, for example, or on the professionalisation of literally everything, made me think that I was going into parenthood armed with neutrality and objectivity. This was not my experience at all.

There’s so much more to say on this — it will be continued in another post.

Protecting patterns

The worst thing about quarantine for me is the fear of other people. With the baby, it’s so acute, it’s sometimes physically painful. I was walking down the street alone with the baby on a rainy day once, carrying an umbrella, and a beggar approached me trying to sell me something. I actually spun the umbrella out in front of me, between my body and his, and said please, stay away from me. I was a little surprised to see this reaction emerge from my body, but it didn’t feel bad, it felt like the right thing. I was not about to let this stranger near my child. 

This has been the thing about being a new mom in a pandemic: it has brought me in touch with this feral protective impulse. The only thing uglier than following this impulse (as demonstrated above, when I put a physical barrier between my baby and a person in poverty) is what happens when I suppress it. That’s really unpleasant, the feeling of being impotent in the face of a threat to the little one in my arms.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I wanted my delivery to go, how I wanted my space to feel when I came home from the hospital with a newborn, when I embarked on this new life stage, the thing I kept coming up with was a bear. I wanted to be like a mama bear in her cave, deep underground, fed for the winter, and safe in the darkness. I spoke about this with a friend, and she said, well, you know what to do about boundaries. Everyone knows what happens if you piss off a bear. She was right about bears. Bears have courage, and I wanted to summon courage.

Sleep, sleep, sleep

In the daytime, baby usually sleeps on me, or on my husband. He sometimes sleeps in the baby wrap (Solly Baby, I love you), or while we take our evening walk with him. Other times of the day he sleeps on my chest or while one of us holds him. He sleeps in his bed at night, but during daylight hours he is usually attached to another body while he sleeps.

I think I am meant to be concerned about this and anxious about my child developing bad habits. But I am not! I am not one tiny bit concerned. I love cuddling my baby while he sleeps.

There are downsides, of course. He is getting big (5.6 kilos at his last pediatrician’s appointment) and carrying him all day makes my arms hurt a little. And, while I am grateful for baby carriers in all their variety, they don’t free up my hands as much as NOT carrying a small person would. It’s a handicap in the getting-stuff-done race to carry a baby. 

I don’t care, though. I feel happy that my son is spending a lot of his first weeks on the planet being cuddled within kissing distance of his parents. Coming out of the womb into the cold harsh world where he will spend the rest of his life is difficult enough. I can offer him a few short weeks of warmth and affection before he starts cultivating the skills of self-sufficiency. I don’t mind being less productive during that time, don’t mind spending a lot of my time looking for a place to sit down or being stuck in place with a baby immobilizing one or both of my arms. The new-baby smell alone makes me forget about other stuff.

Minutiae

Today I am deeply preoccupied with my son’s nose. It seems to be full of boogers. Every morning I put a bit of physiomer, a saline solution, into his nose to clear out anything blocking his airways. My pediatrician recommended it. He also warned against overuse of the NoseFrida, on grounds that it probably didn’t feel good. It was hard to argue with this logic.

This morning in the nursery, I put in the solution, like normal, and he sneezed out a big booger. Success.

I carried him into the sitting room and handed him to my husband. ‘Wow,’ he said, peering up the baby’s nose. ‘He’s got a very big booger in his nose. How are we going to get that out?’ 

I peered up his nostrils. It was big. ‘Give me a Kleenex,’ I said. I wiped his little nose from the side and out came a substantial chunk of snot. ‘Look at that,’ I said to my husband.

‘Bravo, Mama,’ he said. I considered it a win, keeping my baby’s nose clean.

 But as the day went on, little specks of dried snot continued to accumulate on the rim of his nostrils. Determined not to stick my fingers into his nose, I resorted to blowing on them, pinching his nostrils together, or rubbing my fingertip over his top lip over and over. I annoyed him profoundly and the specks would not go away. Clearly they were doing nothing to the baby, he could breathe fine despite his nose looking a little dirty. But the look of it bothered me. He looked so unkempt with snot in his nose. People who visited would think I did not keep my child clean.

Of course, no one is visiting these days, except my mother-in-law. 

My fight against the boogers continued. Eventually they disappeared on their own.

Mom guilt ... I see you.

One thing that has been terrifying about parenting — now, almost exactly eight weeks in — is how much it has amplified my screen time. I’m not even retreating to the safety of my phone, as I have done during other stressful times. I don’t feel I need a retreat. I love hanging out with my baby. But having him in my life has made me paradoxically closer to my phone as well as to him and to my husband. 

Part of it is breastfeeding. A new baby breastfeeds basically all the time. In our first few days at home, my brain was a sieve, so tracking things like how long it had been since the baby had last eaten was impossible without my phone. This meant I had my phone with me constantly. I couldn’t nurse or change the baby without it, since I needed to record how often he ate and filled his diaper to know if he was getting adequately nourished. My phone, specifically the BabyFeedingLog app, was a lifeline. Once he regained his birthweight and the urgency was gone, there was a new urgency, that of staying awake during night feedings. Again, the bright light of my iPhone was my support system while my husband snored beside me. In the early days of motherhood, I have relied heavily on my phone.

All this makes me feel guilty. Why am I not engaging more with my child while he nurses? Why am I not spending more time admiring the soft fuzzy hair on his head or counting his precious fingers, one through ten, over and over again? 

 Although I do plenty of this stuff, sometimes I want to browse what is on the Zara app or Google ‘baby heat rash’ or read about what Boris Johnson’s government is up to. And now, part of my emerging mom identity is feeling a bit guilty about looking at my phone to do that instead of looking at my baby. The guilt sneaks up on me. I think I am just having a break and before I know it I am thinking, shit, my baby is not being stimulated enough, he is going to be feeling bored or neglected or disconnected from me. It’s funny, because the baby looks content, or at least vacant. But I see the specter of the guilt, how he lurks everywhere, waiting to chime in.