The Hunger Games

It’s been a little while I know.  Maybe having six kids is finally getting to me. Truth be told, I was about to post something right before Hurricane Sandy hit complaining about dieting and weight loss, about how hungry I am, and how skinny everyone is in this city, and how no one actually eats. “The Hunger Games”—cute, right?

But then in some ways—not to sound too dramatic-- the world changed.  A major disaster hit, and I did what everyone does at a moment like that, I remembered what’s really important. Health, my family, safety, survival. How could I think about something as trivial as weight loss and body image when people were without homes, power, and clean water?

And yet, as always happens with these national or international disasters, before we know it, we pick up right where we left off—worrying about all those things that we had just sworn off as completely frivolous.  This is how life works. And so, I am back to where I was wondering how everyone around me can possibly be so thin and what I need to do to look like that too.

The truth is, many New Yorkers found their exercise routines and eating regiments really thrown off by the hurricane. I mean, even Soul Cycle was closed for a half day, and many friends of mine told me they put on a few pounds during Sandy—nervously eating and munching on all the carb-heavy non-perishables they haven’t indulged in since college.

But that alternative universe we were in is over—at least in these parts. Thank God everyone is back on non-eating, heavy exercising, looking perfect track. I’ve been doing the South Beach diet, a diet that is a blast from the past, and might be laughed at by today’s Dukanites and those who swear by private practice nutritionists, but worked for me the four previous times I’ve had to lose baby weight. Although lately I’ve been f’ing it up a little—you know, adding some pieces of the F factor diet to it because there’s only so many days I can go with only eggs for breakfast; I need cereal, even if it’s Fiber 1.    

Anyway, here I am working on my own weight loss program and thinking I will now be a party pooper, the one who’s on a diet, the one who’s not really drinking, the one who does not even pretend to eat dessert, not even a “sliver,” the one who shoos away the busboy with the bread basket in horror, the one who’s doing sashimi only, quinoa no rice, light meat chicken no skin, turkey burgers without buns, lots of green tea, you know the type. But for better or worse, I am not the party pooper, I am actually not standing out at all in my food restrictions, I am fitting right in—I’m just not fitting into what anyone’s wearing.

Stay focused, no carbs. . .no fries. . .no sugar

When did everyone stop eating? When did everyone discover spicy tuna hand rolls without rice? It wasn’t always like this.  When I turned 30, my husband threw me a surprise party at Bowlmore Lanes and he ordered food from Dougie’s, kind of like a kosher version of KFC—wings, poppers, French fries, one of those places where everything more or less tastes the same. And everyone seemed to eat it. But those days are long gone. We wouldn’t make a dent in a spread like that today. In fact, people in my circle might actually be offended by it. Something has changed dramatically in those 6 years—I guess it’s age, which is depressing. As we get older, waistlines are examined more closely because they are tougher to maintain, cholesterol levels are watched, sugar levels, blood pressure, and the like. Men, women, makes no difference. Eating is out.

You know things are bad when friends of mine want to come over and catch the stomach virus that has spread through my house this week. Though, I must admit, it’s a good one, 24 hours, quick and to the point—I lost three pounds from it.

It’s sad what’s happened in these six years. I recently went to my 30 year old cousins’ karaoke party and the food spread included candy and pizzas. No, it wasn’t a typo, pizza. There was no crudité in sight. It was actually disorienting to see young adults eating pizza. In my age cohort, no one eats pizza. At children’s birthday parties, when the host walks around offering leftover slices to the chaperoning adults, it is social suicide to take it. You even get funny looks from the kids.

And this is a part of the food story—what are our children thinking about all of our dieting and exercising?

In school last year for my first grader’s mother’s day program, they played a cute game testing how well the children know their mothers. Each child asked his or her mother a question, the mother answered, and then the child read what they had predicted the mother would say. Kind of like the Newlywed Game but for mothers and children. “What is your favorite food?” every mother was asked and nearly every mother responded with something like “pizza” “ice cream” French fries,” or some other food they might have eaten recently--in a dream that is. The children looked confused by the answers, and when it came time for the child to read what they thought their mother would say, one child after another said “salad.”  Except for one boy who thought his mother’s favorite food was falafel. Yikes.

It’s a tough place the Upper East Side. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but those of us who live here have to admit, it’s hard not to care, and hard not to compare. There’s a bit of a playbook here—you’ve got to be thin, you’ve got to spin, you’ve got to have your hair perfectly blown, it’s not easy.

Just Sunday, I was jogging in the park, as a light rain was falling, and two young women were jogging alongside me. “I’ve got to stop,” one of them said, ”and tuck my hair inside my hood, I don’t want to have to wash my hair.” And in a hair salon this past Friday, one woman booked an appointment for 2 pm every day that week. “What can I do?” she asked with a giggle. “I’ve gotta exercise.”

Indeed it’s hard to juggle it all.

Truth is, I had my own dilemma this week. It was my 4 year-old’s Chanukah-themed mother’s visiting day in school. And in a true Upper East Side moment, she—my four year old-- asked me if I was going to have my hair blown for the big day. I had actually been thinking about whether I could sneak in a run at 8 am and arrive in time for the 9 am start of the program. What to do? Exercise or hair? And so I set my alarm for 6 am so I could run before any of my six kids were awake, and at 8 am I would have time to blow my hair. Myself by the way.  

“You’re going to be the fanciest mom there,” my seven year old said to me on her way out to school,” as she saw me in a non-sweat pants, non-ponytail get-up.

Yeah, right. That’s a good one.

The Curse of the Nurse

I’m sure you didn’t really think I was managing my six kids without a baby nurse. I mean come on--I’m human. And I live in the city where for almost every new mother a baby nurse is a duh. Although, when I first found out I was pregnant I decided I wouldn’t need a nurse this time around. I figured I have a good babysitter who would surely be able to help me with the baby and my other four girls are in school all day. Piece of cake.

But that was when I thought I was having one baby. With the news that two were on the way, the circumstances changed. “You must get a baby nurse,” everyone said to me in panic. You see I had to be convinced because I never really was a baby nurse person. I’m a little bit of a control freak, especially with training a baby to sleep, and since as I told you before I was always a breastfeeder, determined to nurse through the night and not skip any feeds, there really was never a compelling reason to have a nurse for very long. If you don’t use them at night, what’s the point? 

I also had never really had much luck with baby nurses. For Gabby, I had a nurse who was very sweet, weighed over 300 pounds, and had a bad hip that rendered her borderline immobile. She went back to sleep in the morning till about noon, snoring like a rhino on the living room couch (we had a one bedroom then), and liked to eat dinner with me and Rob every night. Still, she introduced me to the Johnson and Johnson lavender scented bedtime bath, my favorite baby smell in the world, and for that I’ll always be thankful. After eight days I told her I thought I was ok on my own, and we parted quite amicably. She even took the recipe for my mother’s cholent as well as the Kosher Palette cookbook, whose dishes she had loved so much during her time with us.

My next baby nurse never showed and sent another 300 pound, gold-toothed replacement instead. My third baby nurse I caught smoking in the bathroom. And my fourth baby nurse, I really liked but had a job two weeks after me, and so there was no opportunity to extend her stay.

Still, I knew twins were a different story, and anyone I knew who had twins had used a baby nurse, often for very long periods of time and so I decided I should not try to be a hero.  I found someone who said she “loved doing twins,” told me she’s “very easy,” “happy to eat anything” I have in the house, and I booked her for three months.

What an interesting three months it has been. And by interesting I mean maddening. Nearly every day I cried to my husband about something she was doing or not doing. She made no attempt to get the babies on any schedule. Any time they woke up, she immediately rocked them back to sleep, shouting at them to “shush, shush shush.” And when they were sleeping she woke them to eat. (My twins were not preemies who needed to be wakened.) She’d lower the shades to begin their “night” at 5:30 pm. From her very first night in the house, she insisted both babies needed a “top off”—and remember I was the dairy queen. Nearly every night that I walked into her room—their room—one or both babies was sleeping on a boppy pillow on her bed, while even in the darkness I could see the words printed in bold letters “No Para Dormir” (not for sleeping). Most nights when she brought one or more into my room to breastfeed, I was handed a baby with wet clothes. “I think he’s wet,” I told her. “It’s just sweat,” she told me. Sweat? That’s a first, a newborn sweating in my 67-degree air-conditioned house. When I asked her when she would expect my babies to start sleeping through the night—my other kids slept 12 hour-nights by two or three months--she responded with a philosophical question, “does anyone really sleep through the night? Even adults get up to get some water or go to the bathroom.”

And as for being easy? Yes I suppose she was, so long as we loaned her our ipad, made sure she had full selection of cable channels on her TV, gave her small advances of pay, and didn’t ask her to go for any walks. (Though from the Caribbean, she did not like the sun.). And as for eating anything? Yes, I suppose she did that too—so long as it was freshly sliced nova, baked salmon salad, baby lamp chops, or the sunny-side up eggs she’d ask me to make for her every morning.

I knew pretty quickly I was in big trouble and I made a bunch of calls to other nurses, who either wanted more money per day than Lebron, or they weren’t available, or they needed every Sunday off, or they asked me to describe the room they’d be sleeping in, and so I never made the switch. And unfortunately, as much as I wanted to send her on her way and do it on my own, with twins I knew I couldn’t be down a man. I needed her so I could leave my babies freely during the day and help my older girls get back to school. I needed her so I could pull off meals and synagogue attendance over the Jewish holidays.  I needed her so I could try and get a five or six hour stretch each night to make it through the next day.

In the end, with two weeks left in her term, right before a long Jewish holiday weekend where I was having a lot of company, she left for her day off, saying she felt a little “sick” and never returned. Like a boyfriend I knew I should have broken up with first, I felt stung, but the truth is, my babies have never seemed better. Over the past week, one twin is sleeping the 12 hour night a baby should, and my other one is getting close. They are cleaner, they take naps, in cribs, they have not slept on pillows, and the whole tempo in my house is actually a lot calmer.  I am surely more tired, but at least I feel my babies are being well cared for.

What a weird thing the whole baby nurse phenomenon is.  The majority are not nurses. They have no nursing degree, they are just willing to give up a lot of sleep so we don’t have to. And the strangest part is that those of us lucky enough to afford a baby nurse are normally so critical and micromanaging of every other aspect of our children’s lives—we search for the perfect babysitters, the perfect doctors, the perfect speech, physical and occupational therapists, the perfect teachers, tutors, what have you, and yet along comes some woman wearing scrubs with teddy bears on them, and we hand over our newborn child to them, at his or her most vulnerable, precious and important time. 

The whole three months I felt like a character in “The Help,” leaving my little ones out of earshot, down the hall in someone else’s quarters, only in my real-life scenario that someone has no nursing degree, or knowledge of babies for that matter. She didn’t even know the words to classic lullabyes. From down the hall I’d hear her singing “the itsy bitsy spider climbing up the wall.” And as for simple tasks like preparing a formula bottle, she believed that the instructions printed on the back of the powder box to “add 1 unpacked scoop to each 2 fl oz of water was actually mistaken, and that you have to put less water in since the liquid rises once the powder is added. Hmm. Go figure, the makers of Similac and Enfamil have a lot to learn.

But it’s over. The babies are all mine, and I’m crying a lot less. When the twins are older I’ll enjoy telling them funny stories about the “nurse” who took care of them for nearly three months, and with whom they watched nearly every moment of the 2012 Summer Olympics and the US Open on HD TV. But in the more immediate future, I’ll make sure they know that the itsy bitsy spider actually went up the water spout. 

The Booby Trap

To nurse or not to nurse? That is the question we mothers are faced with each time we have a baby, and a dilemma I am struggling with right now.

As you might imagine nursing twins is a totally different experience from nursing one baby. As my pregnancy drew to a close, I gathered advice from other mothers of twins who had breastfed, and they all said the same thing. If you want to nurse twins, you need to nurse them together, at the same time.

Ok, I said to myself overconfidently, that sounds straightforward enough—two breasts, two hands, two babies. Easy.

You see I was a very cocky nurser. “The Dairy Queen” my mother-in-law used to call me with my other babies. With my firstborn Gabby I had initially been very skeptical about the idea of breastfeeding, squeamish about the idea of a baby sucking on my breasts and self–conscious to reveal any part of my body. I’m not one of those women who parades around topless in an all-women spa changing room. I’m the one who does all the tricks so no one sees anything. But from the moment Gabby was handed to me on the hospital gurney she latched on perfectly, and I was able to maneuver it all very modestly. In fact, that first night in the hospital, about 10 of Rob’s childhood and college friends came to visit us (they did not have kids yet) and asked if it was ok to come in while I was nursing. “Of course,” Rob said effusively, beckoning them all to sit down on the hospital bed with me. “Come right in.” (We all know how in-tuned husbands are with our post-partum state.) And from that moment on I knew I could be a very discreet breastfeeder. I could do it anywhere, in front of anyone, without showing anything, and thank God I had a good milk supply. I breastfed Gabby for 6 months.

Ditto for my daughter Caroline—only difference was I nursed her 8 months. Vanity had been the deciding factor. While with Gabby I had retained about 25 pounds of baby weight while nursing, with Caroline, something started happening around month 6 that we women only dream of—the nursing started sucking every ounce of fat off my body. I could eat as much as I wanted, whatever I wanted, and I couldn’t stop losing weight. God bless Caroline’s suction.

Sophie, I would have held onto similarly until the same weight vanishing phenomenon took place but unfortunately she was discovered to have a severe milk and egg allergy, and I was advised to eliminate those foods completely from my diet. I decided instead, to stop nursing, and eliminate all foods from my diet so I could look like myself again.

And with Lily I held on for about five months when the demands on my time from my older three girls became too hard to juggle with a nursing schedule.

Ha! I say now, to think that was tough to juggle.  What was that arrogant nonsense I said going into it--Two hands, two breasts, two babies? Yeah right. Next time you’re nursing a baby, imagine trying to take one hand, only one hand, and pick up another baby and get him or her to latch on as well? It’s hard. I bought this enormous pillow called My Brest Friend Twins Plus Deluxe Nursing Pillow, which made it a little easier.

Yes it looks like a brown flying saucer descending on planet Earth. And remember that part about my being a discreet nurser? Well that doesn’t work when you’re “doublefisting” as I like to call it. To nurse two babies together I can’t simply lift up one side of my shirt. No, my whole shirt needs to be raised, making the nursing experience with twins essentially a time to get undressed.

I gave My Brest Friend a shot for about six weeks, during which time my twin daughter refused to ever latch on to me. So it went something like this: I’d position them both on the pillow, nurse him, while struggling with her while she flailed her arms, wailed, and often elbowed him, then I’d finish nursing and go pump for her. She liked it bottled not on tap. Oh and then I’d have to supplement him because he was always still starving. Sounds fun right?

Those days are behind me. Now I am just a fulltime pumper. I figured once I was pumping and didn’t have enough for both babies anyway why not pump out as much as I could and let the wonders of Similac take care of the rest? And so this is where I am right now, dethroned as the Dairy Queen, forced for the first time in my life to “supplement,” but still a persistent pumper, and every day I weigh the reasons to stop versus the reasons to continue.

The reasons to stop are kind of obvious. But here are my top 10:

1) I have four other kids who need my time and attention.

2) So I can drink heavily, not just alcohol but caffeine too. OK mostly alcohol.

3) So I can take Xanax when I feel like I’m going to lose it.

4) So I can take Klonipin too—I figure I could probably benefit from alternating the two during the day regularly, kind of the way Children’s Tylenol and Motrin are recommended together for a really bad fever.

5) So I can lessen my appetite (read: diet. Actually read: starve), eating whatever I want — even cauliflower, broccoli, artichokes, too much dairy—or as little as I want.

6) So I can finally stop drinking this poisonous Yogi Nursing Mother’s Tea used to promote lactation.

7) So I don’t have to sleep in a bra.

8) So I don’t have to worry that any crying baby I see at school pickup will start to make my breasts leak.

9) So I can free myself of any hormonal residue remaining from the pregnancy

10) So my body does not need to spend the little energy it has producing milk

Reasons to continue:

1) Guilt

My breastmilk is the only thing right now I feel I can offer these babies. I rarely even give them the bottles of expressed milk, I hand them over to a babysitter for that, so I can help my others with homework or take them to an afterschool activity. Those nice nights I recall of nursing my four singleton babies before they would go to sleep, when they’d fall asleep peacefully at the breast, or better yet stop sucking momentarily to look up at me and smile, unfortunately none of that exists. It is the pump I spend the quiet time with, not the babies.

“Something’s Gotta Give.” This is what everyone says to me right now, encouraging me to stop. Ten to one doesn’t sound like much of a decision, but guilt can go a long way for a mother.